“Fall in here, I’ll summon the defensive barriers," Uxrab ordered. We had jogged through the ship for a few minutes before stopping in a passageway that was double the width of any of the other ones we’d seen. At the end of the passageway, a huge, armored door sealed us off from whatever might be lurking on the other side.

Uxrab conjured up a small holographic tablet that he tapped away on. One by one, large metal plates rose from the floor, providing small fighting positions for each of us. They looked thick, about three inches of alloy that would protect us from whatever was coming our way. A small, clear section was placed near the top of the barricades, allowing us to look out without exposing ourselves.

“Go to where I assign and stay under cover. When the enemy boards, you’ll use what cover you can and engage them. Stay out of melee if you can help it. The enemy drones are deadly up close. They’re deadly at range too, but there, you’ll at least have a fighting chance,” Uxrab told us as he began to position the defenders. There were nine other defenders, not counting me and my summoned minions.

The others were a mix of humans, elves, and a single gnome that was too short to fire his magic missile rifle over the barricade, requiring Uxrab to lower it a foot and a half. He spent some time repositioning the others, sometimes even lowering a barricade back into the floor before raising one in a slightly different position. I just watched and waited alongside my minions since Uxrab hadn’t decided where to place me yet. Once the rest were positioned where he wanted them, Uxrab turned to my little force.

“You and your team follow me,” Uxrab ordered. He touched the side of the passageway, just in front of the last defender, a large, elderly man with greenish skin indicating that he had at least some orc blood in him.

A doorway opened where Uxrab touched, and I was led into an empty room that was about thirty feet in length and fifteen wide. He raised a longer defensive barricade at the back of the room, allowing me to fight alongside my two humanoid minions. Right inside the doorway, a smaller barricade was raised, one that my hound could hide behind, out of line of sight from the door.

“Your group will fight here, creating a crossfire before the enemy breaks through the final defenders. If they try to ignore you and pass you by, head out of here and engage the enemy wherever you find them. Any questions?” Uxrab asked.

“Yes, sir. Who, or what exactly are we fighting?” I asked. Normally I couldn’t speak to a summoner, but Uxrab had left that option open with his question.

“We don’t know what their true name is, we simply call them the Mana Slayers. They seek out any who possess magical ability and destroy them. Unfeeling and uncaring, the mana slayers have never responded to any attempts at communication,” Uxrab said.

“You’re on a starship in the middle of space. How did they track you down?” I asked, wondering if these mana slayers ever happened to pass by Earth. If they did, would they decide to make a pitstop and eradicate me and the other summoned beings?

“Our world was destroyed, and Serapis is one of the few vessels remaining to us. Since the other ships contained huge numbers of refugees, we volunteered to lure away the mana slayers and attempt to battle them. If we can buy enough time, Serapis and the more powerful mages aboard can open a teleportation link to another ship and evacuate us to safety,” Uxrab said.

“I’ll do everything I can to stop them, Uxrab,” I told the strange lizard man.

“I thank you, and I can see you are no mana creation. You are one of the few true summoned beings and it is an honor to have you fight at our side. Should we fall, take the knowledge of what happened here and use it to defend your world if this threat should ever show itself. I must leave now, more defenders have been summoned and they need to be placed before the enemy is upon us,” Uxrab told me before he turned and hustled back the way we had come.

After that, I was left on my own, unable to communicate with the other summoned beings, but I found that I did have some leeway in my positioning based on Uxrab’s orders to pursue the enemy if they pass by. I took up position in the doorway, looking down the passageway where the armored door stood between us and whatever threat might be heading our way.

Having a peek at the exterior of Serapis and the enemy ships would have been interesting, but I doubted the ship and its crew had time to teach Magic Ships 101 to me. Minutes passed, and a few times, I could feel Serapis shake as whatever attacks the enemy was unleashing on it overcame the magic it used to keep the passengers safe while maneuvering. After another series of jolts, Uxrab returned with four more summoned defenders. All four of these were human, and equipped about the same as the rest of us were.

“Warning, enemy ships are approaching boarding range. Mana shields are down over most of our vessel and the major mana conduits are severed. Automated defenses are operating on batteries only. All personnel are to report to teleportation bays one and two for immediate evacuation. All summoned beings are to defend and hold the enemy,” Serapis announced across the ship through some unseen speaker system.

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I felt another thud through the hull, and a metallic clank just outside the armored door. The door began to glow a dull orange color, as if it had been dropped into a forge, but I couldn’t feel any heat coming off it. Glowing red, then white, the door finally exploded into a cloud of metallic dust particles. I was expecting a blast from an explosive, but whatever the enemy used to breach it merely turned the door into powder.

Holding up my magic missile rifle and using the hatchway as cover, I leaned into the main passage, watching for signs of the enemy. Instead of a horde of crazed marauders, we were met with silence. The only sign that there was trouble was when the two defenders closest to the breach suddenly had their heads severed from their bodies. Without a target to spot, I couldn’t fire my rifle. The weapon I held was essentially an extended range magic missile wand that eliminated the delay between firing off the stored charges. Unfortunately, a magic missile needed a visible target to lock onto.

“Marvin Glum, get up here,” I said. Glum trotted over to the door and I ordered him to start firing his sling down the passage toward where the defenders had just been killed. After a few spins, Glum released the metal ball that the ship had provided. The first one sailed into the opening between the ships and deeper into the enemy vessel, hopefully hitting something aboard it. After the third stone was launched, the ball seemed to shatter in thin air, spraying a caustic gel across a small area.

Like something out of a movie, the enemy became visible as whatever it used to cloak itself became damaged. Standing right next to a defender, the enemy looked for all intents and purposes to be some kind of robotic drone. Its body was roughly humanoid shaped, but it had four long arms, two of which ended in impossibly sharp claws. The other two arms were more traditional, and, in each of those hands, the enemy held something that looked like a metal globe the size of a softball.

The metallic monster’s legs ended in almost cat-like paws with their own set of sharp claws. For its body, the attacker had thick, overlapping panels of metal and odd plastic-like plates that gave it some bulk. To me, the machine looked like some killer droids from a low budge science fiction movie. As I watched, the thing swung down one of its bladed arms, slicing through the defender it had been standing next to when Glum’s shot hit it.

“Enemy cloaking fields detected, activating countermeasures,” Serapis announced through our section of the ship.

Small panels in the roof of the passageway began to open every ten or so yards, and a fine spray of some orange slime began to fill the area. I was worried it was going to hurt me when I was doused with a good bit of it, but the ship and its crew had fought these monsters before and must have been prepared for its tricks. The orange spray was benign to the ship’s defenders, but it highlighted the half-dozen killer droids that had made their way onto our ship so far.

I pulled the magic missile rifle to my shoulder and began squeeze off magic missile shots every second or so, despite finding the finger-tap trigger method of the weapon a bit cumbersome to use. The other defenders joined in, and soon, the passageway was filled with glowing balls of magic that hammered into the enemy.

The droids staggered back under the onslaught, but their armor offered them good protection. It took several hits in the same armor plate to breach their defenses. With the amount of fire that we were putting out, it wasn’t long before the enemy started to take damage. We didn’t have it all going our way, though, and the metal globes the droids held in their humanoid hands began to emit beams of light that cut through just about anything they hit.

One by one, the defenders started to fall, and I barely avoided one of the beams that scorched the side of the hatch I was taking cover behind. Marvin Glum wasn’t so lucky. He had kept following my last orders and was slinging more of the corrosive shot down the passageway at the attackers when the beam struck, cleanly slicing off the top of his head and turning my summoned minion into mana vapor.

I fell back into the room I had been assigned to, joining Rupert to help defend the barricade that Uxrab had constructed for us. More beams and magic missiles flew past the hatchway, but I couldn’t tell who was winning the exchange. While I waited for the enemy to reach my defensive position, I swapped out the nearly depleted wand in my rifle for a fresh one.

Eventually the firing died down as the defenders depleted the last of their magic missile charges. For whatever reason, the ship had been stingy about giving out reloads, and once depleted, our forces were down to their melee weapons. The sounds of combat moved closer to my hatchway, and I prepared to fight and buy as much time for the crew as I could.

The elderly half-orc that was nearest to my hatch staggered into view, one of his arms sliced off. A droid moved past the hatch to finish off the orc, and I began to pepper it with magic missile shots. To his credit, the half-orc was going down fighting, and he slammed a hand axe into the attacker’s chest before he fell. The monomolecular blade of the axe bit deep into the droid’s armor, elicting an electronic squeal from the droid.

Another swipe of the droid’s clawed hands sent the half-orc back in a cloud of mana vapor to wherever it was he had been summoned from. The droid took one look at the compartment I was in, and instead of attacking, he reached into a storage panel on his side and pulled two cylinders out. The droid casually tossed the cylinders before it tried to move out of my line of sight. I had punched through a section of its armor by that time, and my magic missiles were slamming deep into the inner workings of the machine, causing it to shoot out sparks and then spin in a circle before collapsing to the deck.

I ducked behind the barricade, expecting the cylinders to be some kind of grenade. Instead of an explosion, the cylinders fired off a slew of the beams that the droids used as ranged weapons. Somehow, the weapons had targeted everyone in the compartment, even the hound. Each of us was hit by at least a dozen of the beams, which burned through the barricade with ease. Several cut through my body, but before I could even begin to feel the pain of the attack, the summoning ended.

You have been killed by repeated blasts from a disruptor beam dispenser. Your summoning is now complete.

Your performance rating is calculated as Good.

Your rewards will reflect you being summoned as Tier 1, Rank 2 and your performance rating of Good.

You have earned 8 experience points.

You have earned 6 summoning points.