Chapter 10
Preparations
The dealer snapped her fingers, and the table and tiles reversed mid-flight as if time had been rewound. Then, the door to the table opened for new challengers, but no one wanted to play. I shrugged and cashed out. I didn't care to grind to ten million just in case I lost the final match; I had no plans of losing. So, with that, I left and went to register for the final match.
There was a week before the final match, and in that time, I found out a few key facts. The final match wasn't always an arena battle. The type of game changed each time and the past several had been quite different. The last one was an arena-style battle. However, the one before that was a castle defense where the contestants had five days to build defenses for their castle to withstand an endless siege of monsters. Only the castle defenses could participate in the battle without personal skills or attacks. But that didn't mean you couldn't use skills at all. You had all the tools available to you during the preparation phase.
I spent the week gathering information, drinking, gossiping, and training. It seemed like a lot to do, but when you didn't need to sleep, occupying one's time with task after task kept people sane. I even trained in the testing dummy area to raise my skills and traits. I was already S+ when I ended up here, dead, but raising my Astra past three thousand wasn't easy, but it was doable. Especially now that my Blessings were all at the Soul 1 rank. Steadily over the week, I rose my Astra levels to 3,875.
"Okay, I admit, you're not half bad now," Harry said mentally.
"Not half bad? I'm likely the strongest person on the first layer."
"You used to refer it to the first world."
"Well, others in the tavern pointed out to me that the first world is flat. All new worlds are flat as well. Hence why everyone calls them layers now, so I figured I should just get my lingo up to date."
"Makes sense. Too bad you'll likely lose and never see them again."
"You're such a downer, Harry. Turn that frown upside down."
"Blech… Oh god, I think I threw up in my mouth a little."
"You don't have a… never mind. Let's check-in for the final match. I'm just eager to see what match style it will be."
Stepping up to the entrance, I removed my token, placed it on the scanner, and watched a hundred thousand points be deducted before a green light on the gate lit up. The door slid open, and when I walked into the darkness, I was struck by intense light a moment later. I was so taken aback by the magnitude of the race track that I hadn't even noticed I was back in my flesh and blood body. Harry whistled aloud and then sprung out of my prosthetic arm using his little floating body.
"I'm back, baby!" he shouted and then did a few loop-de-loops. The track had brown dirt, potholes, obstacles, traps, and even turrets of differing types of guns. It was also easily half a football field wide and spanned outward as far as the eye could see. I looked to my right and left and found more than a few dozen people staring at the same course.
"I guess we're racing."
"That's good for us," Harry replied.
"Depends. If we can use skills and such, things could get nasty."
Suddenly a screen popped up in front of all of us individually. The screen was similar to the ones I see with my Cyberlord Blessing but with different colors. As I read over the rules several times, it became clear that this would not be easy. We're being given a garage full of parts. We have seven days to build our vehicle, and then we race. 1st place prize gets their wish, and the rest get a percentage of the total tokens waged in order of rank and who actually crosses the finish line. All uses of powers were allowed. After clicking the accept button, Harry and I were teleported to our garage.
"What is all this junk?" Harry was exasperated.
"At least the garage is well equipped with tools and space to work. Ooh, a fridge and a kitchen, too." Then, I noticed a door that led to a room. "And a bed and bathroom. Huh… this looks built for a human."
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Likely all accommodations are tailored to the species that will be using it."
"That's nice, at least. Well, I don't need food or sleep for a long while, so let's catalog our supplies and draw up some plans." So, we got to work and after several hours of separating the large amount of parts thrown into a large pile, I suddenly heard Harry squeal like a little girl. "What is it?" I asked him.
"Loooook! This is a podracer Titan 2150 rocket engine!"
"No way; why would there be parts for a podracer?"
"Well, take a look around. There are many parts here, but everything is recognizable as being from Earth or Earth's science fiction. These parts are likely taken from your memory. You know what that means, right?"
"Other species will have other parts, and we may not be standing on equal grounds?"
"Bingo! Although, Earth does have a lot of science fiction things, and if I'm not mistaken, that looks like a shield generator from Star Trek, and that looks like a mini rail gun!"
"Cool, cool. Hey, look, a slingshot," I replied while pulling the sling back to test its pull.
"Ugh… Why do I even bother…"
~~~
When the floating city started to fall out of the sky, Dave and Hiroshem had to retreat due to their injuries. Hiroshem, however, got the minimum amount of healing to rush back out and back up to the slowly drifting downward Monster City. He had to get Zeke's body; it was the least he could do. He used every ounce of his strength and aura manipulation to leap nearly two hundred feet into the air to grab onto a flying monster and then yanked on the beast to get it to fly where he wanted it to while nearly dodging incoming shots from both the failing city and the fleet of Lykaians behind him.
Hiroshem shoved a blade into the back of the monster before leaping off and onto the bleeding and crumbling wall that was angled downward. Using the Bokorai's first condition, Fortification, Soul Art, he anchored himself for each footstep and carefully made his way to where he'd last seen Zeke's body. If he hadn't seen it for himself, he would've been frantically searching for where the body might've slid off too or even wondered if a beast had eaten it, but Zeke's body was there one moment and then gone the next in a flash of light. "What the bloody hell?"
Another explosion beneath them signaled that the final engine struggling to keep the city from falling out of the sky had failed, and then the rate of descent greatly sped up. "Time to get off this thing and hope to clear the destruction radius," Hiroshem said to himself as he took off running before leaping as far as he could off the city's wall.
Moments later, the ground met the city in a not-so-friendly way, and a wave of fire, earth, and debris rocketed outward in all directions. The Lykaians would spend much time in the near future searching for survivors, killing any remaining enemies, and putting out fires. However, the fight wasn't over. The remaining Tokeki were numbers 1, 2, and 4, and while retreat was an option since they could open gates or even fly themselves, Sol, the number 1 who had killed the Monster King and would soon crown himself the successor, had ordered them to finish off their enemies first.
Sol had fought the Lykaian King and suffered many injuries but eventually won by knocking him out. He would take him back as a hostage to be experimented on. The battle with the remaining Lykaian S rankers and several hundred A rankers was being played out amidst the remains of both cities. Sol grinned at the destruction. Defeating the Taurens was laughably easy compared to this, and while he was sad that they wouldn't be able to continue the tour of destruction just yet, they would be back soon enough. After all, a second floating city was already built in the forest's heart. For now, he would take pleasure in a hard-fought victory.
"I sense about nine powerful opponents left," Breythen, the number 2, stated as he sided up next to Sol.
Rizen also approached and responded. "There is one that will be difficult to defeat."
"Yes, the one I fought to a standstill, the old ratkin. His Soul Arts were growing stronger the longer we fought. I think he's gaining complete mastery over them," Breythen responded.
"Then you will be the one to finish him this time. Rizen, you finish the others."
~~~
Four days into building our podracer gunship, things were going rather smoothly. Between the cybernetic tools built into my arm and the tools in the garage, plus Harry's expertise and nano capabilities, we were handling the tough things rather well, considering we were building things that technically didn't exist in my world.
"…grrrr," Harry groaned. "We are not naming the ship USS Colonoscopy."
"Why not? That rail gun will be going up somewhere dark and nasty."
"I propose we call it The Devastator."
"Ugh, that's cheezy. How about, 'USS I'm not as think as you drunk I am.'"
Harry made a facepalm sound. "First of all, we're not using anything with USS in the name…"
~~~
"Hand me that spanner, please," I said while lying on my back to tighten a bolt from under the craft. It was currently running and hovering, so progress was being made in the right direction. Soon, we'd be doing test runs and tuning. The vehicle was slightly larger than a typical podracer due to the armor, weapons, and shield generator. However, it wasn't the size of an actual spaceship either. Essentially, it was about the size of a tank with podracer engines powered by a fusion arc reactor.
I painted it black and installed red lighting for aesthetics. On the side, the name Lycan Mobile was painted in glowing red. For weapons, we had the rail gun up top on a rotating turret. There were two flamethrowers, one on each side, and two .50cal machine guns on the back, wired in to be fired from the cockpit. I also rigged up several liquid sprays to potentially ignite other vehicles more easily. And finally, I installed a smoke machine to help decrease visibility for those behind me. Then most of the rest of the ship was to increase defense with armor plating and the shield generator. There were a few other pieces of technology, like a radar system and different camera modes for countermeasures.
"Alright, Harry, let's take her for a test drive!"