Chapter 117: Captain’s Cabin
"That seems like a lot. How much is this thing worth?"
"About what an outpost is. Maybe a little less, but apparently the people here took our help pretty seriously. Now take it, Marco." Elisa jostled his arm with her wand. "Everyone is waiting."
Marco held up the crystal, took a deep breath, and let the system take over. Almost immediately, he felt a sharp pang in his chest. Having expected anything could happen, he managed to mostly keep it from showing.
"That hurts," he said. "Is it supposed to hurt?"
"Yup," Riv said. "I asked around. It's gotta get a good close look at all your current skills to build the new one. That means digging through your soul and sewing things together. That's gonna sting."
"Still." Marco shifted uncomfortably in his seat. It didn't help. If anything, the burning was getting worse. "This sort of kills. You all said this would be fun."
"Oh, shush." Aethe kissed him on the cheek, her own face red from ale and embarrassment. "It's going to get better."
It took a few more minutes of pain for that to be true. Somewhere in his core, Marco felt things start to settle into position, and with each skill that found a new, better-fitting home, the pain lessened. Something started to form in the center of all of it, finally, a bigger kind of skill started to form, a lump of new power settling into the cavity made where all his old skills had once sat.
It clicked into place, and all of Marco's powers seemed to link up at once, a prism of different elements of Gluttony Marauder that finally, after so long, had seemed to unify.
He brought his free hand up, closed it into a fist, then released it. He felt more powerful, somehow. The system made clear what he couldn't quite articulate a few moments later.
| Glutton's Combat Leeching As your sword swipes, as your gun fires, and as your ship damages other ships and beasts, you grow stronger. Each bit of damage you do strengthens you, healing wounds, restoring endurance, and even stealing from your opponents stats to temporarily augment your own. As a captain's skill, some of the absorbed power is shared among your crew, granting your entire fighting force a slow regenerative power that keeps them in top fighting strength for longer. As an extension of your own fighting power, your crew is able to contribute to this effect. Damage your crew does contributes to this effect at a low percentage of your own rate, unless that damage is in some way also inflicted by some aspect of your ship. Finally, your ship heals in proportion to the damage it does to other ships, giving you a few percentage points worth of advantage in battles of attrition.
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