chapter 128
POV: Remi
We lost many. Some can be replaced easily enough, but others had unique personalities that could never be replicated to be exactly like they were. I need to accept that this is going to happen in the future as well, but I will still try to do my best so something like this won’t happen again.
It seems a moment of silence will become our way of honouring the ones that didn't survive, and I was more than fine with that. In the end, I am a pragmatic person, so everything will be turned back into materials so we could use those materials to make something new once again.
It was strange to feel FH quiet down, with the traffic of the constant communication noticeably slowing down. I am guessing that she is currently absorbing one of the skills.
That was a good thing, because right now it was so easy to tell that this ship wasn't just a ship. Both my Sense Aura and Mana Sense easily identified that this ship was alive. The way mana moved throughout the ship was quite fascinating.
My own breakthrough was also quite impactful. I was now in D rank. But that wasn’t the only thing that improved during that fight. I had to pull on everything I had to make it through that, which surprisingly meant that I managed to also increase my Basic and Mind affinity to F rank. Not only that, but also my Minor Repair got the journeyman rank.
Some of my skills were still lagging behind, but I just haven’t had time to focus on them like I should. Also, some skills are harder to rank up than others, but that's to be expected as each one of them is different.
Looking around, the cavern really looked like it had survived a terrible battle, but afterwards everything was patched up as fast as possible, which was exactly what had happened.
The ground was littered with coins, with the pathway literally having a couple of feet of coins at its thickest. There was a lot of wealth out there and we were eventually going to be collecting it. In fact, we should change our tactic a bit.
A couple of quick commands had dozens of drones flying out of the ship to start moving a large portion of what was left inside the cavern, but not inside the ship, and not all of it, some of it needed to stay outside.
I found my broken-down hard light gun. Damn, this thing really is melted. As I was heading inside, I also went to the second floor near the front, as this was where all the skill stones we got from this battle were being stored.
There were about 200 of them, which was a crazy number. A pretty decent number of them were calling to me. Most would not be that good to me, and there wasn’t really any for my mechanist affinity. For that, we will need to find portals that had very unique monsters or monsters that were once people. Those, however, started appearing at B rank, so it would be a bit until we reached that point.
There was one skill that I reached for. It was called Strength Through Willpower. Opening up our database, it was easy enough to find a skill of that name and a description of what it did. Of course, how it worked somewhat changed depending on your affinity, but currently it was accepting my mind affinity.
This seemed like a good addition, so that was exactly what I did. Everyone else was still going through a breakthrough, so I decided to absorb a new skill. Of course, in this pile there was also the inventory skill, which was ridiculously hard to resist absorbing.
An interesting fact was that I could use any of my affinities to absorb that skill. FH really has been working diligently to expand our database, as there were many descriptions of what a specific affinity did to the inventory skill.
It made sense why this information would be so readily available, as it would raise the price quite a lot, and of course, almost everyone was fascinated by it. I mean, how could they not be? It's one of the most desired skills out there for a reason.
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What this skill does is make a subspace connected to you. Everything that goes inside is not physically stored, but it's more like data. Each thing has a certain size to it, depending on its composition and physical size, and that determines how much you can store.
With my mind affinity, I would be able to store things without touching them; I would only have to see or sense them. My basic affinity would allow me to store a lot more, and it seems like every affinity would have a different storage capacity.
Your affinity could also limit what you can store. My mind and basic affinity didn’t have that problem. I could store anything I wanted except living things, as those had a natural resistance nothing you did could overcome.
Now, what would my mechanist affinity do? I have no idea, as this wasn't listed in the data we had. There were similar affinities to that listed; they seemed to have quite excellent storage capacity, but they were limited to mostly technological items.
Sam and Dean, for example, if they used their guns or sword affinity, would only be able to store guns or swords in their inventory. Some affinities also didn't fit this type of inventory skill, like Lola’s precision and healing affinity.
We also didn't know what FH’s affinity would do. It was even lucky that we had the data to know that she had the spaceship affinity. What I didn’t know was how she knew what her innate ability was. So I left her a message for after she finishes absorbing that skill, so we could talk before she started with the next one.
I’ve just about managed to salvage all I could from the hard light gun when FH finally contacted me.
“Captain, I am not sure why, but I could just feel my innate ability. I remember you talking about how you could now feel what your innate ability truly was without the help of any external tools, so I just focused on that, and the realisation came to me.”
“Seems like you might be quite talented then. That’s some excellent news, but then you should also know what your innate ability Staffed Station does?”
“I have a sense, but I’m not entirely sure what it means.”
She seemed hesitant to continue. “You don't have to know everything, just talk me through it.”
“It's like I could extend a part of my function, like my defences, into a control station. If someone operates that control station, I do not know exactly what would happen, but I know that there should be some type of connection. What that is, I don’t exactly know.”
“Every skill, no matter what, requires learning, understanding, and practise. We aren’t in a hurry to leave this place, so we will take our time to figure out your innate ability and what it exactly does, but right now I will let you focus back on absorbing the rest of the skills.”
“Thank you, Captain,” she said, and once again faded a bit away.
Not long after that, one by one, the rest of the crew members came out of their breakthroughs. All of them were complaining of soreness and pain radiating all over their bodies.
“I’m pretty sure it’s because we have advanced too fast. We hadn’t even had the chance to get used to our last breakthrough. Captain, I think we need to take it slow for a bit,” Sam explained what he thought was happening. The rest of us agreed.
“Go and see if any of you find some skills that you can absorb. Although don't absorb them yet, let your bodies relax a bit. We wouldn't want to stress them more.”
All of them were still quite excited to find skills that might suit them. Bob, of course, was prepared, so all of them already had a few skills that they could absorb. Bob at the same time also categorised every skill as we used our testing crystal to find out what each one was.
All of this took a couple of hours, and while some of the better skills we had gotten, none of us could use as our bodies’ features didn’t match what the skills wanted, they would still fetch quite a higher price.
Altogether, we could sell the leftover skill stones for nearly 800 million credits, which while not as good as it could have been, was still quite a lot.
Sam picked Fiery Projectile, Skip Step and Fast Motion. Dean picked Extended Cut, Skip Step, Fast Motion and Bleeding Cut. Bob didn’t pick any, but he already had his Impervious Scales skill. Lola will absorb the Minor Heal skill Bob got her, but other than that, she wanted to wait until she understood that one.
Those were pretty good skills for starting. Some of them would be difficult to use at first, as we didn’t have good beginner skills for everyone. Fortunately, getting those shouldn't be too hard, as we should just be able to pick them up before we leave the system.
FH finished absorbing the hiding skills, and already, I could barely feel her even while being inside the ship. Time continued to pass as we salvaged all we could and started rebuilding. Not long after that, we were contacted by the Adventurer Guild through the quantum computer.
They worded it nicely, but they were basically telling us that if we didn't contact them back, we would be counted as runaways. FH almost immediately messaged them back. She also found out some more information about the A-rank space portal.
While it was classified as black, if more powerful ships didn't show up, everyone would be allowed to escape, as there was no point in us small fries going in there to get killed.
We were there to protect the larger ships that would hopefully show up from the millions of small fighters that the mothership had. At the same time, those large ships would protect us from the overwhelming firepower that the mothership had. Without working together, it would be impossible to clear that portal.
That also made me wonder, was there any space portal that had a stabilisation gateway built around it? By the size of this portal, it would require a ridiculous amount of resources, but perhaps it might be worth it for some portals.
Slowly, as FH got even better with her hiding skills, the wildlife slowly started to return back to these hills, and more importantly, those monsters that could drop inventory skills started to show up again.
Every once in a while, some of the scouts that were still alive caught clips of them, and they were certainly converging on this location, but without hurry.
They might try to resist, especially those who remembered FH being here, but I was certain that monsters like these that liked shiny things would have a sense of where to find those shiny things, and currently the ground was littered with them. It must be so hard for them to resist.
“Captain, you look quite evil with that smile,” FH said, ruining my good mood.