The swarm of space monsters was now heading our way. Their numbers were intimidating, and what I especially didn’t like was the speed at which they were approaching us. If it didn’t change, winning could be quite difficult.
“Calculate a route where the space monsters would need to turn around and bleed off all their speed before engaging us.”
On the tactical screen, different scenarios started to play out. It didn’t take too long for sothing viable to be found. Thankfully, space wasn’t a flat plane.
We were going to need to accelerate hard for this to work, at an angle upwards to the approaching space monsters, so that we would just escape their head-on approach, making them have to bleed off all their current forward speed to turn around to continue chasing us.
“Execute.”
My voice rang out. Warning klaxon started, and all of us were strapped down as we started to accelerate towards the limit of what we could handle. It was easier than I imagined, but when we got past 40G of acceleration, things started to get painful.
We still kept pushing, reaching nearly 48G before we finally stopped. It was incredibly hard to keep focused, and we needed to keep up this acceleration for quite a bit.
All I did for a bit was focus on breathing. The others were helped by the ship to keep their circulatory systems working, and while everything was prepared for to also get that help, I held off using the injectors. This was great training for my resistance skills.
A few warnings appeared as so of the space monsters were able to accelerate faster than expected. It seed that they had so skills to help with that. Fortunately, I didn’t have to focus on trying to speak as I could just use my mind to give commands.
“We should be able to handle those few without having to change course.”
A burst of communication between the ships’ AIs happened. “Yes captain, this is within our capabilities,” FH answered.
My mind didn’t have much room to focus on anything else but the tactical screen. I watched as the red dots started adjusting course, trying to intercept us. Most of those lines missed us by quite a bit; only four would actually be able to catch us.
The pirate fleets did us another service as they stretched out the space monsters’ groupings, which ant that we had a long trail of space monsters instead of large groups that we would have to engage at the sa ti.
The ship fired. Their accuracy was sowhat worse than normal, but that was to be expected under such heavy acceleration. Everything was more difficult like this. The turrets were not able to use fine control under conditions like this, as those chanisms couldn’t handle the G-forces we were currently experiencing.
Our volu of fire made up for that, and the fact that we only needed a couple of shots to kill or at least wound our pursuers enough that they could no longer catch us. It was a couple of minutes of proper tension as those space monsters truly were moving fast.
Each ti we had less and less of a window to fire, but each ti we managed to kill the space monsters. So of those corpses still flew quite close to us, as they don’t just stop moving when you kill them. Monts like this made kind of wish that we didn’t just have caras revealing the outside world but actual windows.
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To my surprise, one of them was close enough and had only just died when it was in range of my innate ability.
It triggering surprised , but since this space monster was almost able to catch us, it ant that it had at least one skill, so I made basically everything physical disappear into currency, leaving behind only the core, a couple of crystal clusters that made this space monster so dangerous, and a bit of their armour that was so resistant to laser damage.
Its corpse moved by so fast that I didn’t even get a chance to figure out if we succeeded or not in getting a skill stone. Most of the space monster disappeared, leaving behind a lot of high-value currency.
The trajectory was recorded, but it had beco quite difficult to focus. Fortunately, the tir was almost at zero, and when it reached it, we slowly reduced our acceleration until we were no longer doing so.
Finally, I could catch my breath, breathing in and out slowly and deeply.
“That was truly unpleasant,” I heard Bob say, and another seed to agree. I, on the other hand, was quite happy because I managed to get a couple of my resistance skills to rank up. Now, Pressure Mitigation is at journeyman rank.
We had about a 10-minute grace period that we used to actually close the distance between us and the space monsters. Already we were shooting, although the chances of hitting were quite low, and we weren't truly using a high volu of fire, at least not yet.
What followed was a line of space monsters trying to get to us while we focused fire and killed each one of them one by one. There was no suspense, no tension as to if we would win this or not. This was just sothing we needed to do.
So of the space monsters were tougher than others, most likely having so defensive skills, and so of them did make it close enough that they managed to fire spikes at us. None of them was the tracking kind.
“Even if we can dodge them, I still want to fire upon the spikes. Let’s see if we could defend against them.”
My words made us get a bit closer to so of the spikes’ trajectories. None of them would actually hit us, and like this we got to see the results of what happened if we tried to fire upon these spikes.
The first few tests showed quite simply that we could still defend against them, but the spikes seed to be more resilient than missiles or railgun shots, taking at least two or three to be fully destroyed.
One shot would still disrupt their pathway enough that they would not hit us, but it ant that so space monsters might have spikes even more resilient. Those truly were quite dangerous, and I could understand why so many space adventurer ships fell to these weapons.
“All space monsters killed,” ca the announcent from FH.
“Excellent. Send the news to the Baron. Now let’s go collect our loot, and then let’s get our drone before heading towards the space portal.”
FH inford the Baron, who was quite happy to hear what we managed to accomplish. It actually surprised how expressive he seed in that ssage.
We needed to do another hard burn so we could actually catch up to what was left of the space monster that got too close to us.
FH finally had enough for her breakthrough, but she would wait for that until we were inside the space portal, as we did not want anyone to see what was happening.
Drones flew out and started collecting everything. While most of the currency had stayed quite close to each other, it was obvious that we had lost about 15%, that was now floating in different directions.
We could have chased that down, but there really was no good reason to do so, as it would just take so much ti. Unfortunately, the core that we brought on board wasn’t the skill stone. It was still quite valuable. As expected, the materials didn’t get better, as that only happened inside portals.
“I am not getting a signal from the drone.”
FH finally said as we had gotten quite close to the last known position of the drone. The ship it had been attached to was quite torn apart. Since we were here, we decided to loot anything valuable from what was left.
There were no survivors, and the drones took a few hours to strip down everything truly useful. In the course of that, we did find the remnants of the drone. It had been destroyed, the core in pieces.
All of us had a mont of silence.
When we left the wreck, all of us were in a more somber mood. Our next destination was the space portal, but we didn’t hurry to it. We had plenty of maintenance to do, as nothing quite compared to an actual battle in how quickly everything wore down.
There was a reason why spaceships couldn’t battle for weeks at a ti. Most railguns couldn’t even fire 100 shots before they needed proper maintenance to continue or would require rebuilding. While that was less of a problem for our hard-light weapons, they still required maintenance like everything else.
During this ti, the survivors of the pirate fleet jumped out of the system. When we reached the space portal, of course, we didn’t go in imdiately. That would have been quite stupid. We sent in scout drones so that we could figure out what was inside. Even then, we wouldn’t be going in until the support fleet the Baron sent reached the system.
While we would leave scout drones outside that would periodically go into the space portal to bring us information about what was happening outside while we were inside, it would still be a good idea to have a friendly fleet inside the system.
Also, I wanted to inform them that the pirate fleet ships were our loot and not theirs, which we couldn’t really do properly if we were inside the space portal. That was the problem with our current agreent with the Baron, it only specified space monster corpses, not spaceship loot.
By right, it should be ours, as we killed them, but who knows what the fleet commander of the Baron’s fleet thinks. Greed is an ugly thing and makes people forget common sense.
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