chapter 157
With my legs I pushed away from the table, the rolling chair bringing me away from it. My eyes never left those black metal ingots we got from that wreck. Like this, I just sat and stared at them for a long while.
“Captain, something wrong?” I heard FH ask me.
“Yes, something is wrong. That metal is beyond me.”
“The data is showing that it is extremely durable, nearly impossible to change from its current form, but it’s not impervious. I do not understand why you say it is beyond you, Captain?”
I could feel the confusion FH was feeling. My eyes went to the one damaged spot. I needed to build a specific laser with an extremely narrow focus so I could cut off a piece. The effort required was stupid; manipulating this metal seems to be impossible without skills.
“Because I have no idea how this metal was made. I cannot find out what was needed to make it, what components were used, and how they melted it together. Even if I spent a hundred years on this, without further information, it would be impossible for me to replicate this.”
Silence greeted me, but throughout the bond, I felt as though FH placed a hand on my shoulder. This type of support was truly appreciated at this moment, because no matter what I tackled, I always felt confident that with time, I could figure it out.
“It seems that I really dislike not being able to figure something out.”
My mind ran constant simulations of ways of manipulating materials to try to even come close to what I was currently seeing, but it just didn’t make sense. The metal also weighed way too much to be used in normal armour, even if I could figure out a better way of manipulating it.
These things weighed like they were made of gold, even with my enhanced strength thanks to my rank-ups. It seemed to weigh too much for any practical use, but then I could easily see the signs of this metal being manipulated by skills, as there was literally finger marks left behind from when it was made into this ingot shape.
Accessing our skill database, it was easy to find information about skills that help reduce the mass of things. While we didn’t have any of these skills on board, over time, we had collected quite a long list of known skills.
I could see people specifically making builds around making this metal, different people then making other builds to shape this metal, and then finally fighting builds to actually wield whatever was made of this metal.
“Lola, how goes your experiment?”
“The piece you gave me is truly remarkable. My current seeds can barely make a mark on it, but they are doing it. It will definitely help me refine and make the root systems be able to process materials way stronger than we originally expected.”
“Good. Keep up the excellent work.”
While these five small metal ingots weren’t going to be that useful in boosting our combat capabilities, they were sure going to help us figure out a lot of things, and more importantly, they opened my eyes to what was and is possible.
With a few quick inputs, I updated our skill acquisition list. While mass manipulation sounded powerful, I would not be a priority if we ever found such a skill. First on the list was of course, FH. Being able to make the ship lighter or heavier when necessary would give us quite a lot of flexibility.
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The second on the list would be Bob, as he would best be able to make use of skills that would help him wear even more armour that he could enhance better than any of us.
Just imagining him wearing super-heavy armour, crashing into opponents as we followed in his wake, was incredibly satisfying. We unfortunately didn’t have the capital to make that happen just yet.
“FH, any idea on the market value of these ingots? I am guessing that they fall quite close to the upper limit of what materials are capable of being?”
“I have tried to figure it out, but I have no idea. There might not be a way to put value on them in terms of regular currency. Already the materials that are two steps below this one can only be exchanged for services or bartered for.”
“That makes sense. The higher-end markets are basically empty, as the demand is so high. Try to figure out the name of that wreck and see if we could get any records of where it has been.”
“Already on it, captain.”
Standing up, I left the ingots where they were. It was time to continue refining the hard-light turrets.
It took me another week to finish the new design. I needed another week to build and test another point-defence turret. Its reliability was a bit lower than the previous design, but the data we were getting back would help me fix that.
We were getting closer to our saved time slot, so we turned around and started to move back towards The Last Hope Station. The rest of the time I focused on building a medium turret, so we could get a proper reference point on what to expect for the large turret.
I could feel the excitement growing as we were nearing the station, as everyone seemed to want to stretch their legs. We would be staying here for a couple of months, maybe even half a year. Most of the time I would be building, which meant the others would have quite a lot of free time.
The tests with the medium turret were beyond satisfactory. While our estimates for its destructive power were lower than the model showed, it was only by about 8 to 9%. That was completely acceptable. Of course, the fire rate was down quite a lot, but we were expecting that.
This one was also capable of flak fire, with its damage radius now quite a lot larger. All the turret AIs seemed extremely excited, with basically all of them wanting to get their hands on the new turret design.
Fortunately, there were a few that still seemed to want to be projectile turrets. It was going to be necessary to redesign all of those and upgrade them to Mark 2, as we now have enough data to make them better.
It was easy enough to let FH handle the task of choosing which of the AIs would be upgraded to the new turrets and which wouldn’t. When we finished this upgrade, the ship’s damage output would increase by about eightfold, giving us significantly better penetration and the ability to deal with swarms even more effectively.
Right now, we only had enough big crystals to upgrade two large turrets, so we would be changing one of the upper and one of the lower large turrets. This will allow us to be able to handle a lot of the space monsters that appear around here.
When we got a few kills under our belt, we could then also start solo-clearing space portals. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. What it would allow us to do is purchase a claim on a portal. If we found one in the wild that didn’t have a claim, we could still enter it. That, of course, would be a lot more dangerous but could also be a lot more profitable.
No one sold a claim of a space portal to the Adventurers Guild if there was a lot of profit to be had inside it. Of course, my innate ability might change that calculus.
The space station was now close enough for visual. There was plenty of traffic around it now, as the large freight ship had long left the system. Everything seemed to have gone back to normal. With everything ready, it was finally time to upgrade Forward Horizon’s weapons.
There was one problem with that. Bob had already brought this up. Some of the materials we would need were in short supply, and some were quite high-end, so we were starting to run into finance problems.
“We can’t buy them all at once, but I’m afraid that the prices will be increased afterwards,” Bob said, and I had to agree with him.
“FH, are there any quests from the station to fulfil some manufacturing needs, or perhaps they are searching for some technology that we could offer to make up for what we’re currently missing?”
After a few minutes of waiting, FH finally answered. “Unfortunately, Captain, nothing that would make too big of a difference.”
“We could also wait a bit. I could sell off some of the skill stones I’ve been investing in. While the returns won’t be the best here, it will get us what we need.”
It would be unfortunate if we couldn’t reap the profits we were wanting from the skill stones Bob had been buying.
“Let’s do it all. Bob, you be extremely conservative at the start, only sell the skills that are truly desired and would fetch a high price. We will see what we have after a day. If we sold all the good skills immediately for a lower price, we might not even be able to finish upgrading the ship before being kicked out.”
We could have gone on a space monster hunt. That would have guaranteed us enough profit to upgrade everything, but I just didn’t want to take the chance. Space monsters were dangerous, and I wanted overwhelming strength when we needed to face one.
My crew was capable enough that I knew getting enough currency wasn’t going to be that big of a problem. I guess it was my own fault for upgrading the designs so much from the original, making their costs skyrocket.
In my opinion, the increase in cost was well worth it. Looking at the data from the old designs compared to the new ones was like looking at a bow made by a child using a branch compared to a master-crafted war bow.
These weapons I made were meant for war, and they were meant to survive it as well. I would like to see the faces of our enemies when they realised what we are now capable of.
“Captain, please stop making that scary face,” Lola said to me, which made me snap out of whatever state that was.
“FH, please bring us in.”
“Acknowledged.”