The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

Gram in hand, Thea quietly pushed into the room on her left, while Isabella took the one on the right.

Scanning the area quickly and attentively listening for any potential enemies, Thea signalled the all-clear to the rest of the squad. As Isabella stepped out of her side room and signalled the all-clear as well, Thea felt the day's tensions crash down on her shoulders all at once.

“Haaa… Finally,” she sighed heavily, leaning against the wall of the apartment they were in.

Lucas, Desmond, and Corvus had already walked past her, moving further into the apartment to claim their rest spots for the night. Karania gave Thea a gentle pat on the shoulder.

“You’ve done good, Thea. High time to relax a bit now, huh? Tomorrow’s going to be even more exhausting, I think.” With those words, she also went further down the hallway towards the other rooms in the apartment they had cleared out earlier, leaving Thea and Isabella behind.

“Ungrateful pricks,” Isabella complained with a clear hint of amusement in her voice. “Can’t believe they’d just leave us here to claim the best spots. Unbelievable… Let’s go, Thea, before we’re forced to sleep on the stairs or something.”

Giving the offensive heavy a quick nod, the two of them hurried down the hallway to catch up with Karania and the rest of the squad.

It had been a thoroughly exhausting week for Sovereign Alpha.

Thea and Isabella especially had felt the strain, as they had finally breached the Wall and entered the city of Nova Tertius proper. Their urban expertise—Thea focusing on navigation while Isabella handled most of the combat preparations and battle planning—had been invaluable for the rest of the squad to get through as smoothly as they had until now.

The apartment they had found themselves in was dimly lit, the only light coming from the occasional flickering bulb or the faint glow of distant fires outside.

The silence was broken only by the extremely distant sounds of combat within the megacity and the quiet rustling of the squad settling in.

The rooms were small but offered enough space for everyone to find a spot to rest.

Lucas had claimed a corner near a window, his grenade launcher within arm’s reach. Desmond was already tinkering with one of his drones, checking its systems before turning in. Corvus sat against the far wall, methodically cleaning his weapons.

By now, they were part of a six-squad strong advance team tasked with clearing out one of the initial staging grounds for the assault on the SADD—their final mission for this assessment and one that nobody in the squad wanted to fail.

Having already failed their first mission of destroying or disabling the Control Stations in the lead-up to the main assault on the Wall, they all felt it was paramount to ensure this mission would be completed successfully.

No self-respecting Marine, much less an Alpha Squad member, would be content with a mission success rate of 0%.

While they had accumulated a significant amount of Credits, CP, and Merit, and completed numerous minor Faction Missions, Objectives, and a host of combat-related milestones, they hadn't made significant progress on the assessment-specific Mission Objectives.

This realisation had dawned on them after the gruelling and downright mind-boggling main assault on the Wall just five days ago. Seeing the sheer scale of the battlefield in such visceral clarity had jolted even the most stoic and individualistic among them into realising they were just small cogs in an unfathomably large machine.

It was time to start spinning properly.

For Thea, the past week had also been one of thorough experimentation.

With her four Active Abilities, barring [Sensory Overdrive], having reached their Minor Alteration milestones, she had spent considerable time testing each of them to ensure she fully understood what each Ability offered and which alteration would be the most beneficial for her at the moment.

One thing had also become quite clear during this experimentation period: She would definitely swap out at least one or two of them once the assessment was over.

She had a couple of Gold-rank Accomplishments and quite a number of Silver-rank ones as well, that she could crack open in order to replace the Abilities she currently had.

It was definitely something on her to-do list, but doing so in the middle of the assessment always struck her as exceedingly awkward. It was always better to learn how to use the options at your disposal to greater effect than to try and cram new options in at the last minute—this was something that had been true all her life when it came to gaming, so it only made sense that it would be true in real life as well.

When she had prepared for some of the galactic tournaments of AoC, she’d always go over her most-used moves and her mix-ups for her warmups, rather than try to learn one super high-damage but difficult combo she had never used. Similarly, she would avoid learning how to use a particular Ability of her character she had never touched.

That said, after spending around a week forcing herself to use the other Abilities at her disposal, she was certain that there were better ones out there.

‘[Inspect Target] is definitely going to go,’ she thought to herself as she prepared the sofa she had managed to claim in one of the rooms of the apartment. ‘I’ll recommend it to Desmond, though. It would be a lot more useful on him than on me if he could use it through his drones…’

She had come to this conclusion a few days earlier, after trying her best to use it on what seemed to be high-priority targets, only to realise that there really was no point in the Ability in her arsenal. If somebody was eligible for the Ability to work on them, they were, by the very nature of the restrictions on the Ability, in the line of sight of her gun.

As a sniper, she could just take out the target immediately, rather than try to figure out what their Abilities did, what Level they were, or anything of the sort.

While undoubtedly great for infiltration and information-gathering missions, this wasn’t really what Thea was moving towards with her current build. She was good at stealth, and infiltration was definitely something she didn’t mind at all, especially considering that it had been the majority of what she had done in this assessment so far.

However, [Inspect Target] had proven useful exactly zero times in the entire, almost month-long assessment.

As for her other Abilities, she was quite happy with where they were at, but both [Sky Step] and [Improved Sprint] were potential candidates for replacement. While they both served an infinitely more useful purpose than [Inspect Target], that wasn’t exactly a high bar to clear.

[Improved Sprint], in particular, was something she wasn’t particularly keen on.

It simply allowed her to run faster and keep pace with the rest of her squad, but more often than not, she was the one leading it. The stamina costs were too high for the Ability to be active all the time, so it really only helped her in those very rare situations where she needed to dash from one cover to the next.

‘Viladia’s [Shadow Step] should do the job a lot better,’ she mused, thinking about the Gold-rank Ability Shard that her friend had promised her in exchange for intel on her Psyker journey. ‘[Improved Sprint] will definitely be replaced by it, if not earlier.’

[Sky Step], on the other hand, was undoubtedly cool and had its uses.

Thea had used it quite a number of times in recent days to scale obstacles or get thoroughly unexpected shooting angles at unsuspecting targets, but she wasn’t too attached to it overall.

If something better came up, she wouldn’t be too sad to see it go.

This was in stark contrast to [Penetrative Shot], which had proven its worth many times over and had become a major staple of her arsenal. The main issue with it was that it didn’t work with Gram—an oversight Thea intended to rectify after the assessment, if possible.

Her remaining, and first, Active Ability required no second thoughts whatsoever.

[Sensory Overdrive] was, had always been, and would likely always be, her main signature Ability. She had long lost count of how many times it had saved her life or those of her squad members.

The incredible scaling of raw stats it provided, further enhancing other Abilities, made it the perfect foundational Ability to base her build on—something she had especially realised in the past week after her conversation with Zach.

But for now, before she could finally crash and pass out for the rest of the night—the rest of her squad having agreed to let her and Isabella get a full night’s sleep—she had to lock in those Minor Alterations she had finally decided on.

With a few simple mental commands, she rapidly locked them all in before arraying them to take a proper look at their descriptions again.