Chapter 52: Upgrades
Derek couldn’t wait until the entire ship could hold air again. Even if every member of the crew had a [Skill] that let them operate perfectly well in a vacuum.
Unfortunately, opening a door to enter that area would vent the rest of the ship, and while the people could deal with that fairly well, the computers, and quite a few other pieces of tech, would absolutely hate it.
As such, they’d all relocated to the local habitable planet’s moon, which had happened to be nearby, and set up a portable shelter, complete with gravity runes, for eating, drinking, and other things that they might not need air for, but were definitely made much more bearable by its presence.
Not quite the “Robinson Crusoe fantasy” he’d imagined himself getting to live out at least once when first heading into outer space, but still cool, especially since it would only take a couple of days for the ship to be repaired, and much of that was only because Mimi, their engineer, wanted to train her [Skills] on the task.
But what were two days compared to the almost endless life any human had waiting for them if they were willing to keep walking the path to power … oh, and he also had quite a few productive things he could do with those days.
Like killing monsters, studying the records of the engagement that had resulted in their ship winding up in the state it had, to see where he could improve, learning magic, and so on.
It wasn’t quite the same as what Mimi was getting, after all, she had the help of an S-Rank magitech engineer who’d been brought out to check out the alien ship they’d managed to, for the most part, disable … sort of.
They’d shot out the engines and a sizable portion of its weapons, but then wound up having to resort to a ramming attack which Ye-in’s [Skill] had turned into a simple momentum transfer that left both ships undamaged (from the impact, at least) and seen the alien vessel spiraling off into the void between stars for the reinforcements they’d known to be coming to mop up.
All in all, it was a lot more than most people had expected them to achieve, but also nowhere near the total victory the press back home was claiming … mostly because “underdog victory” likely sold better than “underdog narrowly averts catastrophe, alien warship gets swatted like a fly by reinforcements.”