At last, the Firebrand’s liberation fleet arrived in the Erkolls system. By now, the amount of AP I was earning from killing Kinetice had substantially decreased. Now, their ship cores only awarded me 5 AP instead of 10, and it took 20 individual kills instead of 10 per point otherwise. On the bright side, I’d managed to fill my buckets quite nicely in spite of this. All my Magic Attributes were over 100, except for Psych which was close, and all of my Physical Attributes were above 80. I’d also spent just enough on Intuition to finally learn Lesser Rain of Fire.
The Erkolls system contained a total of 17 planets, of course including the 13th from its star, the world I’d entered the Tower on. The total number of Kinetice ships in the system was just north of 1,100. Meanwhile, the Liberation Fleet had reached a compliment of 260. We projected that with the Erkolls system liberated, that number would roughly double, which was one reason the Federation was so accommodating about my desire to personally liberate my “home planet.”
This would be trickier than the missions before it. The fleet had to be ready to either withdraw from the system temporarily if the Kinetice reinforced the planet we were liberating from the others, or go to ground if the fleet became too taxed and needed repairs or supplies.
The former happened in the middle of the liberation of the 15th planet, the Kinetice drawing ships from the entire system until their ships in the area numbered twice ours. I scrambled to complete the boarding I was in the middle of, but even taking less than a minute, we lost half a dozen ships before we pulled out. For a day and a half, the Firebrand led rotating parts of the fleet on a series of hit-and-run strikes against the Kinetice blob. It took destroying about 200 of them before the remainder fled, completing the 15th planet’s liberation and leaving the rest of the system less saturated with their presence than before. Our losses were only 1/10th of theirs, but they were felt keenly—though General Karl said that they weren’t worse than projected.
We pressed on, sustaining minimal casualties and losing no more ships through Erkolls 13 itself, but by that point far too many of the ships were in need of repair. This included the Firebrand herself, which had been pushed to the limit.
I was happy to let the maintenance crew and techs take a share of the hard work, but it was only 3 “real world” hours before General Karl issued an emergency alert.
“An enemy fleet is entering the planet’s atmosphere, practically right on top of us! And from their numbers, it looks like an entire damn faction!”
By the time I made it outside the Firebrand, several dozen of the enemy ships had already landed, but they were some distance away. “We’ve got trouble,” said Karl, once I’d caught up to them, “the ones who’ve landed so far are only setting up a perimeter. Look there.”
Most of the approaching and landed ships were more or less standard frigates. What was descending now was a proper battleship, almost as large as the Firebrand, and landing much closer. “That’s gotta be the Blitzkrieg, Dieter’s faction’s flagship. We’re in no shape to take on his faction, and Dieter himself is one of the stronger enemy faction leaders.”
“They knew we were coming,” I said, keeping my fury just on the edge of being unleashed, “either someone leaked our itinerary, or they found out that my human race is from the Erkolls system and guessed that we’d stop here from our trajectory.”
Instead of fully landing, several hundred more troops jumped from the Blitzkrieg from what must have been at least 1,000 feet up, before the battleship went skyward again. A couple dozen of them were wearing full combat bodysuits like I was, including one extremely tall and muscular looking man whose suit displayed gold epaulettes. Theirs were all colored azure blue. When they spoke, the battleship magnified the words for all to hear.
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“Prepare to die, dogs of the Federation! There will be no surrender accepted, no quarter given! As of this moment, my faction is laying claim to the Erkolls system! And for the one known as Lheticus, your death will be painful!”
I wasn’t lucid enough to later describe what happened after that in any detail, but I can tell you that while the anti-Federation troops wasted no time in charging the grounded liberation fleet after that, I wasted even less. I had no thoughts in my head but to meet this Dieter in battle and burn him to smithereens ASAP. The troops dropped from the battleship scattered like bowling pins as I launched several explosive fire spells at them. As soon as I had clear sight on Dieter and his group, I popped Explosive Overclocking and let loose my shiny new Lesser Rain of Fire spell.
It absolutely decimated them. Dieter himself evacuated the area of effect quickly, and about four of the suited combatants raised water barriers around themselves in time, but twenty members of his personal squad ended up either dead or wounded and moaning, then dead from my follow up attacks shortly after. Dieter looked shocked at the sheer damage I’d managed to do.
“Those suits supposed to give you fire resistance or something? Too bad that doesn’t work against me.” I thanked my lucky stars that I’d gotten the ability to bypass it as a special reward—although getting equipment with greater than 50% in Fire Resistance was possible, even in Area 1, and a select few races even had higher than that naturally, I didn’t see anyone like that in the force against me, and it wouldn’t surprise me if granting higher resistance to a combat suit was extremely prohibitive.
I bombarded them with more spells. Once they’d buffed their own defenses, the four Water mages had started buffing Dieter, so I focused on getting rid of them first. In the five seconds that took, the earth exploded around me several times as Dieter struck it with a massive war hammer, dealing me damage in spite of my best efforts to evade while attacking.
Once Dieter was alone on our battlefield (the anti-federation troops charging past wisely giving us an extremely wide berth) I used my helmet’s Enemy Scan function on him:
Tower Born
Floor Cleared: 6th
Class: Knight of Gaia
Race: Human
Health: 14,987/15,552
Stamina: 7,302/7,498
Energy: 6,420/6,420
Strength: 117
Speed: 89
Stamina: 105
Sturdiness: 153
Energy Pool: 71
Comprehension: 69
Energy Compression: 83
Regeneration: 99
Jesus. This guy had the HP of a freaking BOSS monster. But from what damage he’d taken from my opening AOE, at least my Magic Power was up to the job that was this faction leader.
The fight went well at first. I steadily bombarded him with fire spells, every one of which struck home while I dodged most of his own Energy techniques with superior speed.
But after a while of holding the advantage, I started to lapse into a humdrum mental state. I felt as though this was as easy as fighting Kinetice drones, even though it wasn’t.
And I paid for it. A sudden sickly green beam shot from Dieter’s war hammer, and when it hit, my feet felt glued to the spot. A notification briefly appeared, stating that I was Rooted for 48 seconds, due to the difference in Strength judgments between me and Dieter.
Dieter grinned with bloodlust as he advanced on me even as I pelted him with more fire attacks. “You have very good technique,” he said, “but you haven’t refined it for long enough, or against challenging enough opponents. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I was fighting for my life.”
What followed was the most horrible beating I’d taken since I met Otto’s team. There was only so quickly he could attack with that giant war hammer, and I made sure to give him more fireball spells even while I was getting, and mitigate damage and occasionally block using my rod, and occasionally I’d manage to catch him with my Fiery Deflection for more than love tap damage, but I was hurting.
Finally, the status ailment ended, and one last blow knocked me away from Dieter.
Health: 4,012/5,322
“Your injector reserves are shot,” said Dieter.
Health: 8,756/15,552
“So are yours.”
Dieter nodded. “Then I suppose Round 3 takes all.”