POV: Remi
Usually, when I was designing sothing, I liked to do it physically, but I was capable of designing using my AR augnts that ca with my cybernetics. There was an argunt to be made to use it for multitasking, especially when my hands were tied up.
Every once in a while, pain shot through my tallic parts, which shouldn’t be possible, but each rank up integrated my artificial parts even more into my body, making them feel completely a part of . With mana rebirth and a few rank-ups, cyberpsychosis should never be a problem again for anyone.
My hand twitched more violently. “I think I found a good spot. How well is this helping your skill?” Lola asked imdiately.
“I’m currently not focusing on the skill fully. I’m doing other things.”
“You know I need the data to continue to help you improve your resistance skills as they rank up. It’s getting tougher and tougher to actually do damage while not destroying parts of you completely.”
“Well, I’m currently working on designing the torture box you want.” She slapped my shoulder for that.
“Don’t call it that.”
“It’s literally what it’s going to be.” She still didn’t like that I was calling it that, but she also knew I was right.
“Resistance training device. That has a better na, and it’s necessary if we want to keep ranking those skills up. But can you really make it so that even entropy could be manipulated? That seems kind of impossible.”
“With normal technology, yes, it’s impossible, but magic tech is called that for a reason. This will, of course, not be the final version. I barely know what I’m doing with a lot of these things.”
“Well, we’ll take it slow, make sure nothing bad happens. Now, speaking of our upcoming quest. I have been doing research on space monsters and how they find food.” She changed the topic, barely looking at while she spoke, as she was carving into my hand with a laser.
“To tell?” I answered back after a mont, when my hand relaxed again.
“The crystal I grew to get rid of the wreck roaches gave the idea. I questioned how space monsters find food. Turns out it’s one of the reasons they don’t leave mana-dense areas. They have so sensory organs that use mana to find the food they need to survive.”
I blinked my eyes and closed the current designs for the torture box. Why had I never heard of this capability of space monsters, and could I build a device similar to that for FH to use? One of the biggest advantages magic had compared to regular technology was that it wasn’t bound by lightspeed.
“The range isn’t the best, but it depends on the space monster.”
“Lola, wait a mont. Send all the data you have on this and how these sensory organs look inside space monsters.” I really should get close enough to a space monster to properly understand them with my innate ability, so I can comprehend how every part of them works.
That made realise another thing I had overlooked. An aspect of my innate ability. While most of the information I claid at the mont before I needed to turn them into currency was lost, I had been getting better at retaining so of that knowledge.
That could really help understand how so of their organs work and possibly help make technological devices that replicate those processes.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
A huge amount of data was sent by Lola, which I imdiately started to categorise by its relevancy.
“Captain, I hope you can help . With this data, I’m pretty sure we could devise lures for space monsters so that we could get them to co to us instead of chasing them around.”
She hit with another curveball I didn’t even think of, too focused on the sensory organ of space monsters. A mont to look over so of the data, and I had to agree with her assessnt.
“You are right. It should work and make our upcoming quest a lot easier. Focus on this for the mont. Currently, it’s more important than the seed project.”
“Got it,” she answered back while now healing the damage she had done.
So ti later, Bob contacted . “Captain, we are fully resupplied, and so of the tals we picked up are sold off.”
We decided to use the opportunity while waiting for the Baron to finish buying up the system to sell off so of the materials we had that we didn’t need that much, and to make it look like we needed to refill so of our supplies.
“Good, now start clearing that cargo bay area. Do you need any help making new storage drones?”
“No, Captain, I can handle it.”
I saw FH continuing to monitor how the Baron was buying up everything. He was doing a pretty good job at keeping things down low, but near the tail end of it, it seed others were catching wind of what he was doing, and the prices were rising. Fortunately, that wouldn’t affect our bottom line.
After the session with Lola, I went to ditate to focus on so of my more ntal skills. During the break from that, FH contacted .
“Captain, the Baron is basically done. He will soon issue the quest.”
“Good. Get everything ready for departure and accept the quest as soon as it’s issued.”
“As you say, Captain. Also, I found sothing that might be useful for us.”
A mont later, a short burst of data was sent to . It was basically just a few sentences with a bit of research added onto it, but nothing seed conclusive. That was curious, FH usually didn’t tell about things she couldn’t verify.
“Is this enough to go with?” she asked. I needed to ponder on that for a bit.
Basically, she had found on the quantum net an entry talking about how soone was able, thanks to a bond they shared with others, to hear the call of skill stones she personally couldn’t absorb, but her bond mates could.
Now I understand why FH would bring this up without being able to verify it beforehand. It’s because we should be able to verify this by ourselves. It was not a long trip to get to the deep storage where we were keeping our skills and other valuables.
Picking up a couple of skills I knew would work for my crew mbers but not , I went back to the ditation room and sat down, starting to focus on them.
In the next 30 minutes, I barely felt anything, but then I got a hint of sothing. It was so distant and so low that I thought I imagined it, but then it happened again in the next 15 minutes. Then the departure klaxons started.
“FH, there might actually be sothing to it, but it will most likely take a lot of practise. Still, this is excellent news and sothing that’s worth putting the ti into learning. It would help so much with auctions in the future.”
FH didn’t answer back directly, but I could feel the happiness and satisfaction radiating from her. It was good that she was learning to understand the difference between presenting absolute facts and presenting sothing that might or might not be true but was still worth trying out.
Back in my command chair, I watched as FH accepted the quest the Baron gave us. A couple of minutes later, we had given our exit route to the system authorities and were starting to accelerate out of this place.
“Let’s kick in the main engines as well so we can get out of here faster.” My words had an imdiate effect as we pushed our acceleration near 20G. We had about a week’s trip in FTL, which should be enough ti for us to prepare for the battle to co.
Ti passed by fast as both Lola and I worked hard on trying to figure out this luring thod for space monsters. While I also directed maintenance for all our turrets. There were so things that needed to be changed.
We figured out soon enough that after examining each space monster’s biology, it would be easy enough to make a magic-tech device that would emit the right signals for them to easily be drawn in.
There was one huge problem in that approach. We would first need to catch an example of that species to figure out the correct paraters. While this should be a good enough strategy with our current quest, sothing more long term would be nice.
That’s why we were working on a device where we could modify the paraters so we could just cycle through different permutations while observing the space monsters from a distance to see what works and what doesn’t.
This should allow us to safely build up a database that would make hunting in the future easier, especially for more rare space monsters.
It should also be possible to make a drone that would be able to carry one of these lure devices, which should give us a lot of tactical advantages, especially if we found particularly appetising settings.
We had a prototype ready a day before we dropped out of FTL. All that was left to do was test it out.
When we dropped out of FTL, we were near the edge of the solar system, where it was unlikely for any of these space monsters to be.
The mont we were in this solar system, more and more data started coming in about it. It was one of the most common solar systems out there, with no habitable worlds, but a few rocky planets nearer to the sun and a couple of gas giants. Plenty of asteroid belts as well.
No abnormalities were detected because of the high mana density, but it didn’t take long for our sensor AIs to find the space monsters. As I suspected, they were concentrated around the stations and moons that were used to grow food.
The number of space monsters was constantly growing, and soon the number had reached over 500, which was a lot more than we were expecting. Each one would have needed nearly a dozen railgun spaceships to overwhelm their defences. I could see why it would be way too expensive to clear this system out.
“Try to find so small clusters or individuals. While our hard-light weapon should easily kill them, we should still test it out before fully committing.”
Imdiately, the tactical screen changed to start displaying possible targets. Ti to get to work.
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