chapter 106
It was great to be flying again. My shoulder was still a bit stiff, and when I looked towards Lola, she didn’t meet my eyes. When I finally had all the resistance skills properly absorbed, she, of course, needed to test everything. Some of the tests were more painful than others.
My status screen was now quite crowded. Pulling it up, the skill list was quite long.
Name: Remi Graves
Age: 34
Species: Human variant (bio-cybernetic) Male
Bonds:
AI: Lola, Bob, Dean, Sam (700+)
Ship: Forward Horizon
Items: FH-02, Revolver, +
Enhancements: Bio-cybernetics, Bio-nano machines
Body: rank F
Mind: rank F
Core: rank F
Innate ability: Looting variant
Affinity:
Basic: rank G 1/3 20/22
Mind: rank G 1/3 3/7
Mechanist: rank G 1/3 3/12
Skills:
Apprentice Mana Sense
Apprentice Mind Guard
Apprentice Telekinesis
Novice Command
Apprentice 6th Sense
Novice Sense Aura
Journeyman Hardened Connections
Apprentice Impact Dampening
Novice Pierce Dampening
Novice Heat Dampening
Novice Minor Repair
Novice Cut Mitigation
Novice Pressure Mitigation
Novice Shockwave Dampening
Novice Cold Compensation
Novice Electric Insulation
Novice Radiation Mitigation
Novice Light dampening
Novice Corrosion Mitigation
Novice High-Shear Ward
Novice Magnetic Insulation
Novice Entropy Ward
Novice Plasma Insulation
Novice Mana Ward
Novice Temporal In-Placement
Novice Psychic Resilience
In fact, it was way too large. Fortunately, there was an easy solution for that.
I created a new category, called it Resistances, and put all the resistance skills into it. As for the rank of those skills, I would just be displaying the average of all combined, so right now, it was Novice even though one of them was at Apprentice rank.
One thing that I’m still confused about is that my age hasn’t gone up. Lola suspects that it’s because I’m actually not ageing. The nano machines are keeping my current self perfectly in line with what I am supposed to be, solving the degradation that comes from the constant copying of a copy biological bodies usually have to deal with.
That’s also why the leading cause of death for adventurers isn’t old age. Usually, adventurers are wealthy enough to keep themselves young through various methods—mine is the nano machines, some others were probably using healing skills.
We are still in search of someone who we could take into our crew who would have healing skills, as that would help accelerate my resistance skill gains and overall make it a lot safer for me to fight.
The turbulence hit as we passed through the city barrier, but all the AIs controlling the ship have gotten even better at their job, so we barely felt it. During the gang wars, they were basically constantly running simulations; otherwise, they would be too bored.
It was nice to be out here again. Being cooped up and dealing with the war was getting a bit annoying. Everything was now stable, with the gangs having their own fights as some of them changed their operational philosophy to one similar to ours.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
It was just so much nicer to do things legally. There was also some talk about perhaps purchasing some of the businesses so we could make even more passive income, but we decided not to get too attached to this place as we will eventually be moving on.
This time, the plan was to move towards a large cluster of portals. We didn't have a set time frame or a set number of portals we were going to run. The limit of our stay out here would be determined by the cargo space we had. When that was full, we were going to move back, have a small break, and then come straight out again.
It was time to do some proper grinding. As I used the mana detection device, the moon came alive. It was always fascinating to see how many portals there actually were out here and how many groups were delving.
The fact that these were just the noobs and that the real delving happened on the planet was something I couldn’t really imagine as of yet. There are reports and even videos of higher-ranked portals, but they just don’t convey it well enough.
This time we also looked at another map. There were official maps provided by the Adventurer Guild located in the city. New portals spawned every day, but some were left unattended for long enough for breaks to happen.
Usually, the monsters were smart enough to learn that there was no surviving on the moon, so they retreated back. The clearest example of this were the portals that were water-themed.
They were well marked on all the maps, as reporting them got you a small reward, but clearing it would give you quite a good one. That’s why we were heading towards a location that has close by, quite a few of them.
We will be doing a couple of normal portals before we tackle a water one. I really hope that the drones and the weaponry I made will be good enough to clear them.
***
We were approaching our 7th portal. During the last two, I had to sit things out and just focus on dealing with all the mana I was getting. Turns out you can’t infinitely gather mana outside your core, it will simply start leaking out of you, going to waste.
My looting ability worked further away from me than my ability to get experience from my bonded kills. Because of this, I’ve had to stay close but far enough away to keep clear of any fighting so I could meditate on absorbing all that I had gained, increasing my mind aspect tremendously.
This was most definitely power-levelling. My own fighting skills were going to suffer, but with training I could make up those deficiencies, and of course, we were never going to run out of portals to train in.
The next portal we were going to go for was a water portal. The sequence of claiming a portal was now quite well practised.
We once again landed as we usually did, with the front facing the portal. The shield drone deployed, creating a sealed-off area so we could open up our ramp, letting the rest of the drones build a reinforced dome that would hide our activity and allow us to easily move gathered materials back to the ship.
The first scout drone that went in didn’t return. Instead, a couple of flat-looking fish monsters came through the portal. Basically, all the water portals would be like this, as almost everything inside could come outside.
The monsters that came out were fired upon and were killed before they could do any damage to the dome structure. My looting ability triggered, and of course, a flood of mana entered the area around my core.
We didn’t send in another scout drone, as that would probably be pointless. Instead, the drones that were built for this type of combat started shooting their main weapon. The projectiles that flew into the portal were about halfway between bullets and harpoons.
They used compressed air to fire, and the reason why they needed to be bigger than bullets was because bullets were simply too light to properly move through water, while the harpoons would have taken too much material.
This was the perfect middle ground, with enough space left inside to pack in quite a lot of explosives. Currently, they were set to a timed explosion, but they could be triggered in different ways or not depending on the situation.
A few fish-type monsters came out of the portal, some of them quite damaged. This type of exchange continued for quite a few rounds until no one came out of the portal. We shot another few volleys inside before a scout drone entered.
We got an image of an underwater world that was quite brightly lit, as the sunlight seemed to penetrate quite deep. The surrounding water was quite murky, but cleared up fast as my looting ability took care of almost everything that could contaminate the water.
There were a lot of dark figures moving further away from the portal in almost a perfect semicircle. Obviously, they had moved back to get out of range of the explosions.
This seemed like a typical water portal that appeared on the surface of the planet and here on the moon. The water was quite shallow, only about 20 metres deep, and so was the entire depth of the dungeon. There was no getting out of the water here, as the dungeon ended at the water surface.
It was fairly long and wide, quite typical for this rank of a dungeon. That meant that I would need to move inside to get all the killing experience, as it was too long otherwise. Although that might not be a problem, as it seemed all the monsters would be moving towards the portal.
“Water squads one through four, move inside.”
Immediately, the 48 drones moved inside. We were only getting video every so often as the scout drones moved in and out of the portal, but it seemed like as soon as the large number of drones went inside the fish monsters attacked.
The drones started firing immediately, so we were witnessing constant explosions as the bolts hit their targets or got near them. Explosions were a lot more devastating underwater, so each one either killed their target or stunned the monsters near them enough to take them out of commission.
My mana supply was getting ravaged. We would once again need to take a break in between for me to recover enough when we moved on to the next portal.
The fight raged on; we needed to send in resupply drones to keep up with the volume of fire. A few bigger fish-type monsters showed up that took a few bolts to finish off and even the boss showed up, but we brought overwhelming firepower.
The last monster was killed only 20 minutes after the first scout drone entered. It was definitely a record.
“It really is a lot quicker when all the monsters can just charge at us,” Sam commented.
While it was faster, it was also more nerve-wracking as a few times some of the monsters got real close, and one of the drones was even destroyed.
Some of them with skills had some ranged combat capabilities. Fortunately, only one drone was destroyed, but quite a few were damaged, this meant we would need to tackle a few normal portals so we would have the time to fix up our water units.
Then the portal started to destabilise.
“Shit, now that all of them are killed, the portal will collapse,” Dean said, and I cannot believe none of us realised this before now.
“Gatherers, move in and collect all the monster loot, then get out.”
The combat drones retreated, and the gatherers moved in, getting all the close-by monster loot. This time they would also be bring out pieces of flesh and bone and basically everything else that, if combined, would make up a completed version of the monsters inside the portal.
While not something that would make us credits, it was something Lola requested so she could thoroughly test every part of a monster. She realised that we might want to know every part of the monsters and their properties for our own needs.
It was going to take a lot of work but we all agreed that it was necessary. Some of the monsters were quite regular for the portals around here, so it was good to know if there was something useful we could get that would help us with our material needs.
“Lesson learned: I’m going to need to build a net gun or a few so we can keep some of the monsters alive. That way we can properly harvest water portals.”
“Sounds good, are we heading towards the next portal?” Dean asked, quite excited about another opportunity to fight.
“We will take a standard mana break. I am down to less than 15%.”
“Understood.” Sam, Dean and FH said in unison. Lola was already up in her workshop testing all the new monster parts.
It was time to figure out how to make a net gun that could actually work against monsters as strong as these ones.