chapter 129
It seems that I was right. These creatures couldn't stay away from the piles of precious metals. Currently, I was set up behind some barriers we had developed in front of the ramp. Purposely, I made myself a comfortable spot where I could sit while aiming Lola’s sniper rifle.
This thing was powerful enough to take care of these monsters. Also, I was constantly using my minor repair to slowly fix this thing up. This, like almost every other weapon, was either quite damaged or needed to be scrapped.
We lost quite a lot of good equipment in that fight, and a lot of our material reserves were used up. All of which needed replacing. Bob was currently handling that, but he was complaining quite a lot about all the missing materials if we wanted to replenish everything.
Another shot fired, another one of those mole monsters killed. Damn, this weapon really had a kick to it, but I guess it makes sense for a railgun-type sniper rifle. Although technically the bullet was also the rail—anyways, I didn’t really care about the name classifications. It was a powerful weapon, which was the important thing.
Not only had I lost a decent number of bonds in this fight, because of my rank up, I could now even have more, a lot more, which was another kind of problem.
Another shot, and another one killed. Once again, what I only cared about keeping was the core of the monster in hopes of getting the skill we want. Not every monster had that reaction of its mana and soul moving towards other parts left behind.
That puzzled me for a bit until I realized that this reinforcing must only happen with portal monsters. If they stayed outside of a portal long enough, they seem to become truly real. Now it made sense why skills could not be farmed more traditionally.
As I was killing them, I also noticed that barely any mana was being used to advance my core. At first, I thought that was because I outrank these monsters, but some of them I was pretty sure were D rank.
It also became pretty clear that during the last and the air battle was that our bonds did have one disadvantage now that everyone had a core of their own. We were sharing that essence that allowed our core to advance.
That wasn’t actually that bad, but now that FH was a part of that group, well, she was taking the majority of each kill, leaving only a small trickle to the rest of us. That was something unexpected and would mean that our advancement through normal means would be incredibly slow.
We will need to start killing big things or get far enough away from our ship, which I didn’t want to do. I guess everything couldn’t just be an upside, and I was willing to live with this downside as the benefits were too great.
The perimeter alerts started to go off. For a moment, I was afraid that we had another swarm, but it seems like it's just these mole creatures. Up to this point, I had killed about 30 of these monsters in about four hours, but now there seemed to be twice that rushing this way.
“You two, get ready,” I said to the heavy droids, both of whom had their large laser weapons back in full operational condition after I tinkered with them a bit.
With a few mental commands, a couple of drones started to bring me more ammunition, and I also put some of the remaining security forces on high alert just in case. We should be able to handle them quickly enough, but you never know.
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For a moment, I wondered why they became so agitated; they were a lot more cautious before. I looked at the new cores, although most weren’t visible behind the piles of currency. There was a chance that we might have gotten a second inventory skill. I dared not hope, so I just got ready to fight.
The sniper rifle acted like a bolt action as I needed to load in a bullet manually each time. Slamming the chamber closed once again as fast as I could, I aimed, shot, and then started to reload again.
The bullet moved fast enough that it hit the target before I could do anything else. Inside the thick atmosphere, the speed of the bullets was actually a bit of a problem. Because of that, they weren't as accurate as they could have been, but that didn't matter much at this close range.
One by one, they died either by my fire or by the two lasers that never stopped cutting through anything they hit.
“Be a bit careful, don't hit any of the cores.” I had to remind both of the heavy droids. As sometimes their aim got a bit too close to the ground.
Near the end, one showed up that was a lot bigger than the rest. It seemed to be able to absorb the laser damage quite well and even survive a shot from my sniper rifle, although it did stagger it a bit. That, however, was enough as we continued to pile damage on this one monster.
Its end wasn't dignified as it had too much vitality. When it finally died, all the rest had been killed as well who came after it. Standing up, I let myself focus a bit more on this particular instance of my looting ability triggering.
It was fascinating how much I knew for that brief moment about this being. Most of that knowledge would disappear after this moment was over, although I had learned to keep at least some of this understanding.
The scars it had from previous battles, the chunks of crystal and valuable materials it had stored. Not everything it held inside its inventory space, and unfortunately, whenever a creature died with an inventory skill, what was inside disappeared with them. Still, some things remained as it held them inside its skin pouches.
The moment was over just like that, with me being barely able to remember what I understood just a moment ago. That was truly a weird sensation. There were a few decently large crystal chunks that were obviously more special than the regular stuff found on regular planets.
The core itself also seemed to have turned it into a skill. It was calling to me, and I was glad to see that it was indeed an inventory skill.
Briefly I went over all the long-range scouts we had sent, but none of them reported any more movements of these mole-like creatures. Other wildlife was slowly returning, battling with each other for dominance. No need to mess with them.
“Let's start clearing all of this up.” was the command I sent, with many drones immediately flying out of the ship and not too long after that Bob following.
“The currency weighs quite a lot, it will also take up too much space. If we want to go back to Paradise City with a full load of cargo from one of the outposts we can't bring everything.”
That was quite unfortunate, but we should have a solution quite readily available to us. As I was walking around listening to Bob, I also came close enough to another skill stone that was calling to me. As I went to pick it up another skill stone called.
That last one was a bit curious. After picking up the second inventory skill we got, meaning that we now had three of them, I approached the last skill stone that was calling for me.
I remembered that this particular monster, its claws were glowing red and so were its teeth. It was easy enough to see what path it took even on this metal ground, as its claws easily carved through them.
The skill’s name was Crimson Empowerment. The curious thing was that neither my basic nor my mind affinity fitted this skill. But for some reason my mechanist affinity seemed to fit, which was quite curious.
Bob seemingly talking to himself, trying to figure out how to fit everything on board. As I walked close to him, I threw him one of the inventory skill stones.
“Here, this one’s yours.”
He looked at me dumbfounded.
“Wait, no, shouldn’t others get the chance to get this?”
“For the others, there are simpler inventory skills to buy that would be good enough, available, and compared to these ones, cheap. I would quite like to see what your supply affinity does to this skill.”
“No, wait, FH would still be a better choice?”
For an answer, I held between my two fingers another skill stone, which made his eyes go wide. That was quite nice to see some recognisable human facial features, as his body wasn’t really capable of that kind of expression before.
It will be quite easy to deceive others that I have a proper biological crew, although if we revealed them now it would be too easy to connect the dots. In the future, however, this should be quite beneficial.
FH had been slowly disappearing from my senses, once again resembling just a regular spaceship. She had been working hard, but it will take still awhile for her to get to the next ranks of her skills. Learning new skills would also slow her down, but these would be quite necessary.
“FH, I think we should start by you absorbing the Expansive Swarm. If I understand correctly, people should be able to have multiple storage skills if they're different enough, but this one should allow you to store even more drones than this inventory skill, so let’s start with that one, just in case.”
“Understood, captain.”
A moment later she once again faded away from my presence like the rest did when they were going through a breakthrough or absorbing a skill.
As I waited, I went through all our current supplies and realised that we were going to need a lot more bullets for the upcoming A-rank portal fight. I really hope that we can use these inventory skills to stock up on a lot more ammunition; otherwise things might not end that well.