Jake yelled back to them, “30 seconds!”
He lit up the area, blasting as many bugs as he could before swooping in and hovering in front of the hangar door.
“Go, go, goanna!” Jake yelled.
Three individuals rose to their feet. Erica was the first one to exit, with Jess right behind her. Next, it was Matt’s turn, but before he departed, he placed a timed explosive in the doorway and made his escape. In just half a minute, Jake was at altitude when the bomb exploded, causing shrapnel to rip off the back of the shuttle.
On the ground, seconds earlier, Erica was blasting apart bugs when she felt a sense of wrongness overwhelm her. She couldn’t place it. Then she saw it - the wicked smile on Matt’s face. She looked up at the shuttle amidst the flying bugs, and then there was an almighty explosion. The shuttle disintegrated, with debris scattering in the air. Matt looked over at Erica and started laughing. Erica went to swing her weapon towards him, only to feel a thud ring out from the back of her head. She crumpled to the ground, Jess standing over her. “I’m sorry, but once we knew he was a demon, he had to die. And there was no way you would let us kill him, so we had to do it this way. I’m sorry, but we can’t take you with us.” Jess pointed her rifle at Erica’s head.
“Goodbye, Erica.”
Bang!
A round flew into the hangar and hit Jess in the shoulder. Her rifle flew from her grasp as she stumbled back, and she quickly dashed for the nearest fighter. She jumped into the cockpit and closed the canopy, activating the flight system and launching out of the hangar. Behind her was another light fighter, piloted by none other than Matt. Once the two fighters left, Jake walked out of the smoke, not a scratch on him. Erica looked at him with astonishment. The Jake she knew, the human, was gone, and what was walking towards her was a demon - with black scaled skin and two small horns protruding out of his forehead.
“Okay, let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot of clearing to do before we can use this place for what’s to come.” As he said this, his demon form vanished, returning him to his human form. Jake bent down beside Erica and held out a hand.
“Come on, get up, Erica. That’s an order.” “How did you do that?” “Do what, the demon thing? Well, it turns out I’m not human, so I have a few new tricks.” Erica got to her feet and walked over to Jess’s rifle. “She was going to kill me. That bitch tried to kill me.” Erica got angrier as she looked at the rifle. Then she picked it up and fired it over and over, blowing bugs away. She kept this up until the rifle’s action stopped working and the barrel bowed. In an act of aggression towards those bugs, she removed the scope and threw the rest into a bug’s face, then proceeded to go ham with her axe. She pictured every bug’s face as if it was that bitch and pummeled them to dust before she knew it. There were no bugs attacking her anymore. She looked over at Jake as he just pointed at something outside. What shocked her to the core was what it was. It was the rhinoceros beetle, heading toward the hangar. In the hangar, there was what looked to be a door leading deeper into the facility. Erica ran for the door, and the two of them ran deeper into the facility until they got to a big red double door. Jake kicked the doors open, and with a gasp, Jake looked up at what looked to be a spaceship, not like a shuttle, but a real spaceship.
“What type of spaceship do you reckon it is?” Jake said as he looked over at Erica.
“It’s… it’s the lost class of Corvette that was just about to go into production before the evacuation. It’s the Erica class. They named it after one of my ancestors. They, unlike me, were great at space battles. She was the commander in the great battle of the twin planets of Garox. She lost her life in that battle, detonating a bomb that took out the enemy’s flagship, which allowed our fleet to regroup and take on the enemy’s scattered fleet. That battle was the last battle we fought until the system integration happened 150 years later.”
“Well, I guess this should belong to you. Let’s see if we can get it to fly, as my shuttle is going to be out of commission for a while.”
Looking over the ship, Jake would describe it as blocky. But luckily for him, Identify helped with the details a little.
Item: Erica class corvette A ship designed for escorting civilian cargo ships from pirates Can be equipped with 12 weapons pods and two shield emitters Requires a crew of 16 mana-based users to function at full power Can run on minimum power with one user if soul bound Has a low-grade FTL drive. Note: This is the largest soul-bound ship a person can have.
Description: blocky shape with no rounded edges. One blocky primary hull with two decks and a short neck extending out with a control bridge with antennas jutting out. There are two engine nasals that start skinny at the top and larger at the bottom; they are on each side of the primary hull. They start ⅓ of the way down the ship and extend beyond the rear of the ship. The rear of the ship has a small landing bay for two fighters and one shuttle.
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“Well, doesn’t that suck? They took the two fighters, and my shuttle’s pretty much fucked until I can find a way to fix it, that is.” Jake said.
“It looks like I should be able to operate it going by the details Identify gave,” Erica said as they entered the ship’s primary hull through the landing bay.
The interior was a mix of green and gunmetal grey. The inside was spacious in comparison to Jake’s shuttle. Although, if Jake thought about it right now, his shuttle would be more spacious. Moving through the ship towards the bridge, coming up the neck, they came to a split sliding door with a rounded top. Opening the door, Erica and Jake stepped onto the bridge. The crew had laid out the bridge with standing consoles around the wall and a half-circle rail with console screens on it. In front of the rail, there were three consoles with chairs. One of which had flight controls, one of the others had a navigation system, and the third looked to be made for the ship’s commander.
Erica walked over to the commander’s seat, rubbing her fingers on the armrests. She looked back at Jake. “Take the seat; it’s yours now.” Erica sat in the seat, and in an instant, she had begun the process of soul-binding the ship to herself. While Jake checked out the weapons systems and shields, he noticed that it was fitted with four forward-facing weapons pod slots and three on each side. The last two were on the centre-line of the ship, one on top and one on the bottom. Out of all the weapons pods, only four had weapons on them. There were two rocket launchers under the bridge, and the two on the top and bottom of the ship were point-defence six-barrel rotary cannons. To Jake’s surprise, the installation team placed only one of the shield emitters, which provides coverage for the front of the ship. That would mean this ship would not be able to re-enter an atmosphere; the heat would tear it apart. There was just no way one emitter could cover the hull, even if it were modified to stretch over only the bottom of the ship; it would just be too thin. The next thing Jake really wanted to look at was the FTL system. His hope would be to add a similar system to the shuttle when he rebuilt it. As he looked over the FTL console, he noted its connection to the impulse engines, the navigation console, and finally, the FTL energy. It seemed like a buffer slowly stored the FTL engine power over time. Then the buffer would release the power in a burst to force the space in front of the ship to compress and the space behind the ship to expand. This would help the impulse engines to move the ship forward at a speed faster than light. Jake went down to engineering to look over the FTL engine design.
“This is huge; I can’t fit this in the shuttle. Wait, maybe I don’t have to fit it all inside the shuttle. Maybe I can place the buffers on the outside of the shuttle and the engine in the cargo hold. But I’m still going to need to extend the length of the shuttle a little, and it’s going to need to have the bottom pushed out further. If I do that, landing is going to become an issue; it’s going to need landing legs. While I’m at it, I might as well make some changes to the door design, widening it and lowering it to serve as a ramp. I guess I will have to start working on this back on earth. It would also be good to have more weapons pod slots, maybe two like point defence systems like this ship. To be honest, I think if I do all this to the shuttle, I don’t think it would be right to call it a shuttle anymore; it would be more like a gunship or something.”
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Jess landed her fighter around five hundred kilometres away from the hangar. She opened the canopy and climbed out, falling to the ground, her arm red with blood. Moments later, Matt landed beside her, jumping out and landing beside Jess, who was now sitting up against the wing of her fighter.
“What the fuck? You said this would be worth it.” “It was; look, we have the fighters now.” “And I have a fucking hole in my shoulder. What did you get for your troubles?” “I got a broken jaw.” “That was your own fucking fault. Are you stupid or something to say what you said in front of Jake? You deserved what you got.” “Ha, I got the last laugh, though. That demon is definitely dead now.” “Dead? You think he’s dead? You may have blown up his shuttle. But he’s not fucking dead. How do you think I got this fucking hole in my arm?” “He’s still alive? What about his slave? Did you at least kill her?” “No, I fucking didn’t. Because some jackass didn’t provide the cover he was supposed to.”
The two of them went on like this for a while before Jess brought up the elephant in the room. “Does your fighter have any weapons on it?” “No, but I haven’t used Identify on it yet.” Matt used Identify on the fighter.
The Pickle class light fighter, Soul bound, can fit two weapons pods and one small shield emitter. Currently, there are no weapons or shield emitters installed.
Description: one small blocky one-person cockpit with three engines in a blocky engine bay. It has two downward-sloping forward-sweeping wings with room for a weapons pod on each wing; the shield emitter pod slot is located under the nose of the fighter.
“Oh, fucking hell,” Matt yelled.
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Stats at the end of the chapter
Universal constant interface
Name Jake Everval
Race Human
Grade TG Level 100 Max cap for this grade 666 unused
Class Trooper Shadow Mage Class level 1000 Max cap for this grade 2872 unused
Profession Arcane Smith Profession level 13
stats points available 169,480
Mana 23360
Arcane 23500
Stamina 23200
Health 33360
Strength 1116
Agility 1225
Intelligence 2350
Wisdom 2336
Perception 1157
Integrity 3336
All unused levels and grades will be converted to points at a 1:1 ratio at the end of the tutorial.