Douglas puts the large fragments back where he recognizes they should be while filling in the gaps with finer bone fragments. A mere minute after beginning the task, he has a working arm. It’s a cobbled together mess of glowing blue cracks, but he can move again. Slowly dragging himself across the floor, he slides his spacesuit towards the still open door.
The speakers in his suit are doing their duty, and Douglas hears more sounds than he would expect. The noise down below is still rather loud, the multitude of Histaff beasts are pretty vocal about the fuss he kicked up. The loud tearing, screeching, and pounding sounds coming from the hangar is not something Douglas expects, though.
He shoves his head beyond the door’s threshold and stops. Large white blades, claws, and limbs are poking through the far wall. Douglas finds himself between both ends of the hangar, the high ceiling allowing him glimpses of both walls. To his left - the direction of the mall - he sees a single hole through which a rather familiar reworked’s limbs poke now and then. The opposite side is a collection of dented metal, ragged holes, and white instruments of murder that make the hydroponics section look like a peaceful picnic.
Douglas does more multitasking, this time piecing his spine and legs back together with his mana hand while dragging himself back to the ship. The loose and lumpy suit regains a bit of shape as he repairs his own body, bone by bone. His single arm furiously slaps the ground, pulls him forwards, and stretches out again.
The holes in the hangar wall behind him slide out of sight as Douglas makes his way across the hangar floor. Halfway back to his ship, he shoves the last handful of bone dust into the glowing outlines of his feet. Douglas tries to stand, but the horrid shape of his joints and bones makes movement difficult. Each articulating limb he just repaired feels like rubbing two rough pieces of stone together where smooth hinges used to be.
His first steps go slowly, but Douglas perseveres. His vision is hindered by red goop, so Douglas rubs at the glass with his single hand.
The red slime rubs away rather easily, but the blurriness persists. To his horror, he realizes that the many blades, sawteeth, and fangs of the Histaff reworked left permanent marks. The meaning provided him as he read the suit’s description led him to believe that the visor is a material that’s extremely hard to scratch or break, and yet those bone beasts used their rock-like blades to scratch something harder than diamond.
His hunched and careful walking posture starts shuffling forwards a bit faster, unwilling to pit the strength of his skull against the impossible sharpness of those beasts' blades. His joints creak in protest, but Douglas just hobbles faster.
A blue glow in the distance makes Douglas wish he could weep for joy. Shuffling furiously, he hurries over to the ramp of his engraved ship, the shining glow of embedded magic making him feel like coming home. He walks into the still catatonic Katare and trips, smacking into the cargo bay floor.
He stands up, kneels before the blank-faced woman, and stops for a moment.
“Fly ship.”
Katare blinks. Her unemotional face shows a few faint expressions before settling on confusion. “What?”
“Fly ship.”
“Yes, I heard you the first time. Oh, infinity take me, what did I do last night?” Her gloved hand travels halfway to her head before she catches sight of the suit she is wearing. “Brickad? What in … You … You’re a skeleton. And you …”
“Fly ship.”
“What fly ship? Do you enjoy saying those two words so much you will repeat them endlessly? Speak in complete sentences, you frikked monogo–”
Her slowly heating tirade is halted by a roaring cacophony of thundering crashes, screeching metal and other terrifying sounds. Katare blinks a couple more times, her gloved hand gingerly poking at her ears before she sits up and walks down the ramp.
“Fly ship.”
“AAAAAH! YOU FAKKED NEGG-TIK! WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THERE IS A WAVE OF MID TIER REWORKED MONSTERS COMING THIS WAY, AAAAAAH?!” Katare flips. She cast a single glance to the side with the most noise - the one opposite the mall - and comes running back up the ramp while screeching her head off.
“FLYY SHIIIIP!” Douglas screams along.
“CAN THIS THING EVEN FLY? TALK NORMALLY YOU FAKKED SPLICE-SON!” Katare jumps at the single door in the cargo area, kicks it open, and immediately gets stuck in the doorway. Her bulky armour is too wide to pass through the opening without some careful manoeuvring, something she did not pay any attention to. Noise floods from the doorway, multiple streams of inane chatter and jingles entering Douglas’ auditory senses.
“FLY SHIP.” Douglas has also stood up by now and is patiently waiting behind her large form while happily adjusting his talking volume to match hers while trying to overpower the noise coming from the living room. The increasing ruckus coming from beyond the open cargo bay isn’t helping either.
“No, take a deep breath, Kat. I trained for this in the sims a million times, no need to freak out. Just step back …” The woman’s volume dims as she regains her faculties. Alloy creaks as she steps backward, bumping into Douglas and sending him to the ground with grinding joints. She quickly turns and steps through the door–
“FLY SHIP!”
–only to jolt when Douglas continues bellowing his request.
Then the entire ship rocks. Douglas is thrown into a collection of storage webbing while Katare crashes through an oddly shaped couch.
“FLY SHIP!” Douglas’ shouting gains a hint of urgency as he stands back up. He quickly hobbles towards the door, only to be slammed against the doorway as the ship makes another sudden and powerful sideways lurch. His loosely held together spine breaks as the jamb smashes into his midsection. Everything below the break - his pelvis and legs - returns to loose pieces of bone as he flops inside.
Katare is standing up again, her boots glowing with strips of blue. She looks around with a frowning sneer of disgust on her face, obviously not appreciating the dirty mess the room’s previous occupants left behind. “Where is the bridge?”
“FLY SHIP!”
“Shut the irrambo up, you frig warped calcium chew toy. Did you see a couple of chairs in a black room?”
“Fly ship.” Douglas points towards the room with hesitation. Katare throws him over her shoulder none too gently and strides over to the indicated room. The ship takes another few massive hits, the blue light on Katare’s boots flashing brightly each time as she keeps standing. The trash and furniture in the room do not remain still, thoroughly coating both Katare and Douglas in a layer of filth and dust as they are pelted by the rotting projectiles.
Entering the dark room, Katare throws Douglas on one of the three stools, sitting herself down in the elevated one at the back. The skeleton’s white suit attaches to the shallow stool, fainter blue strips lighting up. The next lurch only causes him to rattle around inside his suit while staying glued to the seat. He starts piecing himself back together again in the meantime, picking pieces of bones from where they settled in his boots and building up his spine once more. Then he stops. For some reason, Douglas gets the feeling he should not be wasting any mana right now.
Katare is also busy. She has seated herself in the captain’s chair and is busily taking inventory. Panels of holographic information have sprung up around her, red symbols indicating restricted access or locked sections of data disappearing just as fast as they appear. The frown on her face keeps deepening with each diagnostic screen she calls up. Then she hits a button, and the walls change.
“SHIP FLY FLY SHIP SHIP SHIP!” Douglas nearly loses it. The wall - which was a lovely, peaceful, and soothing black just moments before - shows him the outside world. Bone beasts larger than any he has seen previously are now swarming mere metres from where he is stuck in the chair. A perfect representation of what’s happening outside the vessel is projected around the duo. Massive scythes, telescoping clubs, and jagged, teeth-filled maws are biting, savaging, and tearing into the vessel.
The rune
s on the ship’s outside are also visible, the holographic camera obviously being placed on top of the vessel. The white hull is looking unmarked so far, something that seems rather odd to the skeleton now that he panickily thinks about it. Unmarked apart from the engraved runes, of course. Then it clicks. Each swipe and bash leaves the shining runes a little dimmer. Each attack by their monstrous claws and fangs saps some of the mana Douglas feels around him.
The scratched visor he is peering through is enough proof that non-magical materials stand no long-term chance against the white, biological weapons. Looking at his suit, Douglas sees that several long gashes and slices are already present in the otherwise perfect white and black material of his apparel.
His skull might not even survive, its non-magical and enchanted nature probably leaving it vulnerable. His bones rattle around in his rigid suit as each attack shakes the ship. From his high vantage point, Douglas sees more beasts barrelling towards them, crashing into the horde surrounding them.
“Half an hour …”
“Fly ship?”
“No weapons … No sublight thrusters except for this small, exponential grav drive. Which will take half an hour to warm up. Jump engine needs perfect spatial stillness, so we can’t FTL with matter nearby. No docking thrusters, no manoeuvring thrusters, no nothing.”
“Ship not fly?”
“Skeleton, why in all the warps did you choose this shit boat as our grave? Recovering from a dissection will not happen when our bones are re-purposed and turned into a reworked, you know.”
“Ship fly half hour?”
“Yes, you utter, utter, imbecilic moron. Ship fucking fly half fucking hour.”
“Half hour.” Douglas knows what he must do. He now understands why he felt the need to conserve mana just now. He will need every single point, after all. He raises his one hand with difficulty, pulls mana from his forehead, and guides it towards his fingers. There, he concentrates it in his fingertips in equal measures. The way this is done is not important, the feeling of bringing it together from multiple directions into a single point is.
His fingertips blazing with blue power, he moves them together slowly. The glove’s fingers touch before his bones do so. Then his bones click together, but the mana flows on. Douglas felt his mana pool expanding greatly when he killed those Histaff beings, but he hasn’t yet checked how many points it is currently at.
Douglas does not know that he just shoved four hundred points of mana into a skill that will function with just ten points. The concentration of mana collapses into a small singularity for the briefest of moments. The impossibly dense energy concentration then solidifies into a rather dull looking crystal.
[ Mana Stone Production 2 lvl 6 ]
His consciousness flickering at the edge of darkness thanks to mana starvation, Douglas barely has the will left to order the newly formed stone into action. It embeds itself into the floor and starts flooding the entire vessel with mana, slowly recharging the glowing runes in a rather inefficient manner.
[ Magical Animation 2 lvl 3 ]
The flames in his eye sockets splutter as the mana needed to keep them running is simply not there. The rest of his senses start fading too as all his regenerated mana is automatically channelled to his improvised magical animation. He fails to see Katare rubbing her face with a weary expression, her entire body stiffening as her fingers brush her forehead. The last sound Douglas hears before his senses cut out is a furious woman.
“Douglas… What the spark is THIS THING ON MY FOREHEAD? DOUGLAS, I WILL KI–”
Chapter Seventeen – Changes in Momentum
“…sorry, okay? Just what did you do? Should I grab that stone and throw it at them? No, leaving this chair will reset the startup procedure. Thrice warped hardwired procedures … Never should have pushed for that legislation. Hey, skeleton, you alive yet? I will murder you for disfiguring my face later. Let’s just try getting out of here uneaten and unprocessed first, okay?”
Douglas’ senses return to him slowly, his hearing coming back first. This allows him to listen to the fed up and tired sounding complaining of the woman sitting in the captain’s chair. This is then followed by his sight, allowing him a rather lovely view of a wall of menacing murder beasts.
“Free?” he asks when his physical struggles are met with his still rigidly locked suit.
“Ah, you’re back. What did you do? They went absolutely berserk the moment you dropped that stone. I even saw some of them bursting through the sidewalls and a stream of smaller ones bursting through the floor.”
“Release?” Douglas asks when he hears no answer to his question.
“Why bother? There are twenty minutes left, and they’re halfway through the hull already. What did you do to the hull, though? They should be tearing through that white stuff like wet paper, but they seem to be having some trouble.”
Douglas looks down and sees many chunks of missing hull in between the runes. A giant bone scythe slams down on one of the dimmest engraved symbols, causing a bright flash of blue light that shatters both hull and blade. “RELEASE FREE RELEASE ME!”
“Alright, alright. Here, and please close the door while you’re at it. I can barely hear you over that racket.”
Douglas keeps ranting to be freed even as he tumbles to the ground. His helmet bounces off the floor, making his skull rattle inside the rigid enclosure. He manages to catch a glimpse of his target, though. He starts crawling while his projected voice racial trait finishes yelling ‘release’ and ‘free’ a couple more times.
The moment he reaches his goal - the dull stone that seems sunken into the holographically projecting floor - he touches it. It immediately starts shining blue as his power is greedily absorbed. The energy is immediately channelled towards the ship’s magical animation. The fading runes on the hull start shining with lustre once more. All progress made by the reworked’s furious assault halts as mana strengthens the ship once again.
Douglas rights himself as he looks around. The horrible feeling of his own engravings being destroyed all around him has abated with the new influx of mana, letting him take stock of his surroundings. The overlapping layers of noise coming from the living room are about as loud as the various sounds of destruction echoing through the ship. “What?”
“There’s that ‘what’ again. See for yourself. I know you don’t have eyes, but you can see, right? I’ll describe our immediate surroundings and situation just in case you’ve been using echolocation all this time. We’re warp farked fucked.”
“What?”
“We’re surrounded by biological superweapons wielding molecular bond cutting weapons while cowering inside a cheap and shitty homebrew boat that you scribbled on. I don’t know how this hull is holding still, but I don’t think we’re out of the woods just yet. The biggest reworked usually only show up after the normal monsters report that they’re stuck, and I’ve seen at least ten of these white creatures scurry off like spoiled vat-kids programmed to tattle to their feed mommies. I’m expecting larger company soo–”
As if summoned, a deafening roar causes the mob of white horrors surrounding the ship to cower. This is followed by a rather loud crashing and tearing sound, followed by the distinct metallic tinkling of a shattered bulkhead falling to the floor in pieces. Not all parts tinkle, though; Douglas sees the distinct glow of molten metal shards clattering from one side of the hangar.
The holographic suite inside the vessel’s cockpit is pretty high quality. Katare could probably have expounded upon the practise of installing prefabricated cockpits like the one the two are currently inside of, but she’s too busy with apathetically staring at her approaching doom to really bother. Instead of enlightening the uneducated skeleton on the various facts that are common knowledge across the galaxy, Katare stares with a limpid expression. She vapidly turns her gaze to Douglas, who has started standing up even as the vessel is rocked by impact upon impact.
“What are you doing?”
“Got ma
na left,” he replies and strolls out of the cockpit. He leaves the door open, allowing a steady trickle of trash and dust to enter into the otherwise spotless room. Katare sighs, not looking forward to having dust and dirt enter her suit via her missing helmet. She switches over to a part of the holographic display which immediately projects a view of the suited skeleton stumbling through the ship's interior.
Douglas haltingly makes his way over to the cargo bay door, stepping over old food wrappings and dirty laundry as he does so. He reaches the door and fumbles with the handle. He keeps fondling the locked door until Katare flips a switch from the pilot seat, her irritation at seeing his futile struggle finally overcoming her passive depression.
A bond breaking bone weapon slips through the widening opening with deceptive speed, leaving a long, new gash across Douglas’ spacesuit. He goes flying backward as his ribs shatter once again, the speed and momentum of the attack pounding his bones to shreds. Douglas gets up from the couch he smashed into, pulls a rather sticky sock from his dirty visor, and walks back to the open door.
The open door is now bristling with viciously moving, white bone weapons. He holds up a hand to the menacing collection of swords, blades, spikes, and needles and casts his dephlogistonation spell. Laws of nature and concepts foreign to the general science in this galaxy get to work on the air, ripping the burned material from the unburned, making new fuel.
Katare holds a hand to her head, the wind whipping her hair into her eyes, getting in the way of the display she is watching. Her fingers brush the dull, stumpy horn poking from her forehead, now surrounded by smooth skin. Her eyes flash with anger for just a moment before a professional sort of apathy sets back in.
Douglas’ fireball has the same effect on the reworked bone beasts it had before, sending the lot of them hogging the door screaming backward with flames trailing behind them. Douglas guides more mana into the spell shape, casting another fireball with a rather decent efficiency.
Histaff Page 22
