Chapter 39: Levelling?

I make my way back, Libby giving me a neon yellow display of dots, so I don’t lose my way. I feel they really spoil me, this jogs me into wondering how bones is getting on when I almost collide with a new type of beast, a boar.

It is massive, as big as one of my old lizard friends, with tusks a few meters long. It has some serious armoured bone ridges on its back, protruding up to a few feet in places, like an oversized hedgehog. Hopefully its shaggy haired flanks would be easier for stabbing. Adam barely managed to get out of its way as it bulldozed toward him, felling trees each and every way, its hooves thundering. I must smell like a gourmet feast, Adam thought.

Libby was only half paying attention to the situation outside and was letting Huba take charge of things. Tactical situations, were his area of expertise, after all not hers.

Despite the fact that they had 500 times as much time, or more now, within Adam’s spiritual sea, the time really did not seem enough. Libby had some really tricky science to grapple with and there was just too much to do. So she had delegated.

Things had changed since Bones had left, dropping a few mental bombshells. Libby and the others had been spending their time, trying as usual to puzzle out all sorts of dilemmas. Adam had tasked them with looking after the inhabitants of their little pocket dimension which wasn’t looking so little anymore, and had grown to the size of a small house.

The first dilemma was caused by the fact that this was not their prime directive but merely what Adam wanted, to protect others that they had just randomly found along the way. One of Bones' last contributions to the group before he abdicated all responsibility and left. Was to reframe the whole idea of their prime directive, for them.

Prime directive: keep Adam alive, as last remaining crew member.

Bones made the case that:

1) That a hostile force threatening Adam directly or indirectly, should be countered.

2) Adam’s emotional state needed to be protected, his mental stability was paramount for his continued survival.

They had already agreed on the first point but as to the second Bones made a strong case that despite Adam’s Acclimatization ability, his mental health was still at risk. He still became very distressed when thinking about the safety of others, they could tell this by his brainwave patterns and his adrenalin levels.

They had worried initially about how that very ability was inversely affecting his psyche. He had seemed very different since it had taken effect. And though removing it was a possibility the ability did far more than just dull Adam’s senses. It also allowed him to maintain his health far more easily, and allow for them to enhance his physiology at an amazing rate. Thus protecting him, this took them back to their prime directive again.

Out of this discussion they had decided that protecting whoever was important to Adam, was a new prime directive where it didn’t impinge on their initial directive.

This meant Libby needed to sort out their little pocket dimension (PD). It was only designed for non-living inhabitats, i.e objects and also usually in suspended time dilation. She had to change all these things.

She had done lots of things to accommodate the current inhabitants that had just been on the fly experiments: Including running water, waste disposal and air. The PD’s initial parameters hadn’t been setup for this and her knowledge was not limited, thanks to Clarissa, but her experience certainly was.

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Experimentation was limited due to the massive quantities of SP required to create a pocket dimension, in the first place. So they had been relying on Huba and Echos simulations and projections to make a best guess at remodelling their existing PD.

As they had succeeded with various things, she had become more confident. With hindsight she realised that, none of the things they had done had been the best solutions. But the infrastructure of the PD was as yet to unwieldy for them to rectify these matters. As a result the PD was quite a drain on their resources. Not they had a problem with that now thanks to having to remove Adam from the Elios system a second time after joining the faction, another problem she was sure.

Bone’s other contribution was to saddle them with another problem which came under the heading of ‘Save Adam by saving the multi-verse from the evil tyranny of the Elios system’ as Bones had put it. She inwardly sighed, hadn’t they enough problems already. Libby simply could not deal with yet another super complex problem and handed it straight over to Meca and Trey, they could consult with Echo about it. It was a technique for soul transference, from one ‘thing’ to another. Yes ‘things’ could have souls embedded in them according to the Kitsune leader, all news that made her head spin.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, mimicking Adam. Now was time to focus on expanding the PD again and working out how to change it into a self-contained eco-system instead of such a drain on their resources. Besides she had to change the time dilation for the training Adam wanted to take place their, anyway.

Meanwhile Mecca and Trey, had started creating a replica soul to transfer, by copying the parts of themselves using Nanobots. This was taking far less time than they had envisaged, the new upgraded god tier Nanobots were hellish fast, and worrying they almost seemed to be sentient at times. Mecca didn’t mention this last point to Trey, but he could tell he was thinking it too by the way he passed in communication for a few nano seconds when one of the Nanobots completed a necessary task before they had even been programmed too. Worrying but fascinating too.

They were also both happy that Libby had given this project a grade ‘A’ priority, which meant they could use all the SP they wanted.

Adam was having more mundane problems, like not getting squashed by the oversized stone tusk boar. He would give it a better name, like hellishly-fast-for-its-size boar but that’s all identify had come up with.

Stone Tusk Boar – level 61

Why were these beasts’ levels seeming to spiral up and up? Was he getting lucky or what? He didn’t know but was sure he’d find out soon enough. It had been quite a fast paced morning.

It had turned out that the shaggy hide of the beasts was dam hard too. It had passed him a second ago, going like some demented freight train. Perhaps not as dramatically as the first time, as there were no more trees to knock down, but still it was funny to watch. What was not funny was the way he had lost two swords, perfectly good ones, by trying to penetrate the beast’s side as it passed. They had just pinged off, both blades snapping.

He imagined the dark circle in his head and his circle of dark bolt destruction appeared over his head. Stony clearly could sense the mana, as its eyes went wide and it started to snort and pawing its giant hooves, as it turned, churning up the earth, and realigning itself, charged, hurtling toward him. The mana bolt did its job zipping across the space, hitting the boar dead in the eye.

Unable to halt its momentum it tumbled head over heels. Oh, no not this, this time I have an ace up my sleeve, thought Adam, not wanting to be an ore beast pancake again. Adam used his slow-mo ability by pulling out another sword from his mini PD and infusing the sword with mana, to activate his slow-mo ability. Libby hadn’t had time, or at least he had forgotten to ask her to make one that didn’t require a weapon, silly that. Still it got the job done, as he watched the boar make a hazy outline as it passed by crashing to the ground, taking out a few last trees, it had missed earlier. It was dead, and as Adam came out of slo-mo he took his prize, and his leave returning on the path to his deserted comrades.

The kids were filling them by training, although they hadn’t really got much done, they were distracted. Seria even had a copy of Ash’s parchment in front of her at a table, the others all sat in their own spaces trying to focus but there was just too much going on with Adam. Libba had succumbed to their demands when Cai, smart lad that he was, said he was worried about Adam. “Would the beasts eat him?” Libby knew Cai meant would Adam smash them to a pulp but relented anyway. Since then they had all been sat watching TV or should I say ATV, Adam TV.