Chapter 107: Pulling An SSS-Rank Skill

Leo spun it on the bridge, with all six of them gathered around him.

The wheel hung in the air above the command dais and threw dancing tongues of gold and silver light across the dark Graventhal bulkheads.

Outside the canopy, the hollowed megalith drifted silent in the basalt dust, but nobody was looking at the stars... They’d crowded onto the dais around the throne, close enough that he could feel the warmth of them at his shoulders.

At the bottom of the projection, his balance glowed clean and whole.

[Wheel of Fate: 1 Spin Available]

[Cost: 1,000 SP]

[Confirm spin?]

"One thousand points," Harper whispered, leaning over the back of the gunnery console with graphite smudged across her nose and her fingers white on the padded rim. "You’re really pulling it right here, Cap? In the middle of a drift?"

"No point hoarding it," Leo said, though his pulse was hammering. "The Federation’s asking questions on Driftmark, and we’ve got three systems to cross before Nexus-Prime... If the system’s offering an edge, I’m taking it now."

Aoi stood at his left with her glasses pushed up and her face pale.

Her cracked helmet was sitting in the armory, and without it she looked tired and bruised and very determined.

"The last time you touched this wheel, Leo, you were dying in the vacuum... Don’t rush it."

"A Sterling never advises against a calculated speculation," Elena murmured from the secondary console with her arms folded, the gold light shimmering in her eyes. "Particularly when the house has already paid out at SSS-Rank once... Pull it, Captain, Let’s see what the cosmos thinks you deserve."

Jin-Ah held her slate ready to record everything.

Camila hovered at his right elbow with her hands clasped tight over her apron and her lips moving in a silent prayer, and behind them all Chloe stood perfectly still with her hands lost in her sweater sleeves with her green eyes fixed on his profile.

Leo looked around at them before he did it.

’Whatever this is,’ he thought, ’It should be pretty good and OP... at least so I can protect them better.’

He took a slow breath, lifted his right hand out of the cradle and tapped the rune.

CLICK!

[Current Balance: 1,000 ? 0 / 1,000 SP]

HUMMMMMMM!

A deep harmonic vibration ran up through the deck plates as it came from the space around them.

The wheel spun up into a blinding blur of white and emerald and sapphire and crimson, and the runes along its rim began to sing in a high crystalline drone that made Leo’s teeth ache.

Ten long seconds passed, and it showed no sign of slowing at all... Dull grey common bands, vivid blue rares and dazzling violet S-Rank segments whipped past faster than the eye could follow.

Harper stopped breathing.

Camila’s knuckles went bone-white, and even Elena leaned forward a centimeter with her poise cracking under the suffocating suspense.

"Come on," Harper rasped. "Come on, give him something good..."

THUD!

The wheel hit its first internal brake.

The blur resolved into separate segments clicking past one by one... It passed an A-rank defensive barrier, dragged across an S-rank capacitor and coasted toward a wide shimmering band of polished gold.

CLICK! CLICK! TICK!

It crept forward a millimeter at a time, with a grinding resistance like an anchor dragged over granite. It cleared the gold, scraped across a platinum wedge and slowed even further, until it was barely turning.

At the very top of the wheel, there was a hairline sliver of pure blinding silver cutting through the dial.

CLANK!

The needle stopped dead on it and the bridge went utterly silent, as if someone had opened a valve and let all the air out.

SHING!

A pillar of silver-white light erupted from the center of the wheel, drowned out the gold completely and threw long hard shadows across the bulkheads from every one of them.

[SSS-Rank Reward: Starfall Sever!]

[Effect: The host traces a line with his will, and space along that line is cut... Matter, armor and shields along it are severed cleanly.]

[Channel: The host’s hand, or any vessel he’s neurally linked to.]

[Cost: Burns the host’s stamina and body heat... Frost forms on his skin after each use and a second use within one hour risks internal rupture.]

[Cooldown: 1 hour]

Nobody breathed, and nobody moved.

Harper’s eyes went over the silver script once, twice, three times, and then stopped on the line about the cost.

...Frost forms on his skin after each use.

The word landed on the bridge like a bucket of liquid nitrogen, and nobody said it out loud.

Elena’s breath caught in a sharp fragile gasp, and her eyes widened with unmistakable dread.

Camila took a half-step back with her hands flying to her mouth and her eyes filling with tears.

Aoi’s jaw locked, and her gaze dropped to Leo’s throat, to the gold sun-stone she’d polished for him in the quiet of the night.

’What the fuck...’

The system was handing him a weapon that could cut reality itself, and the price was written in the exact same cold that had nearly killed him.

Leo sat very still in the throne and looked at the silver runes.

He could feel their eyes on him and the sudden heavy fear and protectiveness pouring off every one of them.

He let his thumb rest on the silver ring of the panel for a moment, feeling the shape of the skill settle into his mind like a blade sliding into a sheath, and then he closed it with one calm gesture.

SHING!

The silver light faded, and the bridge was left in the soft amber glow of the ordinary flight indicators.

It was Chloe who moved first.

She stepped up beside the throne, took his bare right hand in both of her sleeves and held it against her cheek.

"If you get cold," she said, "I’ll bite you warm again... I’m good at it now."

It was such a Chloe thing to say that a startled laugh broke out of Harper, and then Camila was laughing wetly too as some of the terrible stillness went out of the room.

CHIME!

[SSS-Rank skill registered... This unit observes that the Master Captain can now cut space and this unit would prefer he not cut the ship.]

Harper let out a half-strangled laugh and wiped her eye with the back of a dirty sleeve.

"Yeah. What the box said, Cap. Don’t wave your hands around the living quarters. We just got those bulkheads welded."

"I’ll be careful," Leo said softly, and looked at each of them in turn with a faint reassuring smile. "It’s an emergency card... Same as the harpoon and same as the coils we’re going to buy. I’m not looking to freeze myself for fun... We should use our heads first, every time."

Camila nodded too fast while Aoi didn’t nod at all.

She just looked at him with her lips pressed tight, and he knew exactly what she was thinking.

’Come on... You really don’t have to look at me like that, besides, we need to get more SP... Need some SSS-Rank skills that I can spam or items to help develop Wanderer-7 at least.’

Elena cleared her throat and smoothed the front of her jacket with exaggerated care, though her fingers weren’t quite steady.

"Naturally, Captain... A Sterling expects nothing less than complete restraint. Now, if you’re finished gambling with the cosmos, there is a sixty-meter carcass at the bottom of that shaft that needs processing."

"Right," Leo said, and stood up, and the captain came back into his shoulders again. "Let’s feed the Foundry."

Hauling the Matriarch out was an industrial ballet of brute force.

The ship couldn’t fit through the fissures, so Leo used the harpoon as a recovery winch.

Elena fired the Graventhal spike straight down the shaft and buried its barbs deep in the dead monster’s shattered chest.

SCREEECH-WHIRRR!

The cable groaned under hundreds of tons of dead weight as the winches dragged the huge carcass up through the excavation shaft.

It came out onto the plateau like a dark fallen moon of violet-black stone with its ruined wings trailing across the iron dust, venting thin wisps of frozen sulfur into the void and the spike came out of its chest at the end without a single bend in it.

While the winches groaned, Camila sat Aoi down on the edge of a medbay bed and went over her ribs with gentle careful fingers and a regenerator wand.

Two were cracked, which Aoi hadn’t mentioned to anyone, and Camila went very quiet when she found them.

"You should have said so at first Sensei..." she murmured.

"There were more important things happening," Aoi said. "I don’t want to be the reason that we stop doing what we’re doing."

"No, there weren’t." Camila’s hands didn’t stop moving, and her voice stayed soft, but it had iron in it. "Not to me and not to anyone else on the ship... Your health, the health of everyone on the ship comes first."

Aoi looked at her for a long moment, and then, very slightly, she smiled and let Camila work in peace.

Leo walked down the ramp onto the rock with Elena and Harper and keyed the Foundry’s recovery protocol.

THOOM!

A sapphire tractor cone burst from the corvette’s belly and painted the cold asteroid in deep blue light.

The silicate plates that had shrugged off rail-slugs and laser fire began to come apart under the Foundry’s breakdown beams, dissolving into shimmering ribbons of energized blue particles that streamed up into the ship’s intake manifolds with a deafening continuous roar.

GURGLE-CRUNCH-CLANG!

On Deck Two, the Foundry ran white-hot.

The whole frame shuddered in slow rhythmic pulses as the ancient minerals of the predator were worked straight into the Graventhal superstructure.

...The hull plates shifted under their eyes, their density climbing and their sheen darkening from industrial gunmetal into a deep obsidian-grey that hummed with absorbed resilience.

PING!

[Foundry Integration: Void-Manta Matriarch (Level 5) absorbed!]

[Vessel Evolution: 35% ? 58%!]

[Hull Strength: +35%!]

[Kinetic Deflection: +22%!]

[The battleplates can now shed electromagnetic pulses.]

"Fifty-eight percent," Elena breathed, staring at the readout.

Her fingers flew across her diagnostic slate, and a brilliant smile of professional pride lit her face.

"Her density has gone straight past Tier-1 parameters... She now deflects kinetic fire like a heavy Tier-2 armored frigate, and her dry mass has climbed less than three percent. The architecture is... magnificent. Look at her, Bell."

"She’s getting thick, Cap," Harper said, and slapped the side of the hull with an affectionate grin. "Real thick... Next raider that tries to ram us is gonna break his own nose."

Leo looked up at the darkened obsidian-tinted plates along the flank, and something steady and confident settled into his chest.

At thirty-five percent, the Wanderer-7 had been a quick dangerous scout but at fifty-eight, she was turning into something that could survive the frontier and make the frontier regret it.

"By my count, that’s the third time the ship has outgrown the crew," Jin-Ah observed over the comm. "We should probably catch up..."

"Working on it," Leo said, and he could feel the new levels humming in his own bones as he said it.

"Secure the lances," he said. "Reel in the harpoon, clear the pads and prep the drives... We have a contract to cash."

Out on the rock, Vexa scrambled to her feet the instant the thrusters lit.

She’d seen the pillar of silver light through the canopy earlier and had pressed both gloves to the front of her helmet in pure wonder, and Leo had heard her gasp "Ohhhh, what IS that?" over the open channel before Jin-Ah muted her.

Now she sprinted for her ship with her tail streaming out behind her in its sleeve, vaulted the ladder in one bound and dropped into her cockpit.

"Don’t leave without me!" she yelled as her canopy slid shut. "I’m serious! I’m coming with you! Wait for me!"

"She’s going to follow us all the way to Driftmark from the way I can see it..." Harper said.

"She told us she would," Aoi said. "I’m beginning to think she always does what she says..."

The moment the Wanderer-7 released its arrestors and lifted off the iron shelf, a streak of purple light came up off the rock behind them and before anyone on the bridge could blink, the Violet Mirage was right there beside them, close enough to touch.