GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Read online

  Then Ungud decided to poke around a bit. Some functions of the basic but functional computer systems are only accessible from inside the original ship. Ungud had never gotten access to this place until he inherited the title of Overseer. One of these functions not even visible from the outside had turned out to be a stasis field. He had initiated the startup procedure to get a look at the software functions it would start running, knowing that he could have stopped it at any time. He had been reading through the thing’s documentation when his old friend suddenly decided which gender it was.

  This has caused Ungud to forget the ticking timer. Running over to the egg his friend is morphing into, Ungud touches the hardening shell. The moment his slimy fingers make contact, they are both frozen in time. Starting at the original core, an electronic freeze field is expanded over the entire base. This field does not just block all electronics, but instead targets the actual electrons themselves. Electrons need to spin, after all. It does not matter whether one looks at these spinning particles through the lens of rotating orbs or from a field of superpositions. Freezing them freezes the entire atom. This freezes the entire molecule, and thus every single bit of solid matter.

  The base has expanded much over the centuries, the entire thing covered in a dense web of cables, tubes and field generators. The electronic freezing field travels through and across every single iota of infrastructure, halting the entire base in its molecular steps.

  Ungud and his gender-changing friend are frozen first. Then the original ship stops moving in time, the only exception being the fusion core and the field generator. Then the rest of the base is frozen, thousands of sapient refugees stopping all motion as their elemental particles are arrested in space and time.

  Shortly, not a single mote of dust moves in the base. The ancient fusion core hums quietly, generating the needed power to keep everything still. The tide of Histaff up above continues scratching at the massive doors closing off their access to the tasty-smelling beings inside.

  Weeks later, many large white bone shells scattered all across the planet start cracking. The areas that used to have the population density are suddenly covered in a tide of horrific beasts. The newly born army of larger Histaff Reworked all use their various senses to make their way to the place with the freshest scents, namely the frozen GalaxSec base. They start clawing at the door as one, managing to make deep scratches with relative ease. A few centimeters into the metal, their process halts. The freezing field protects half the door, only letting the level two Histaff Reworked shave off a part of the bulwark.

  Years later, the first Histaff Behemoths emerge from large amalgamation pools. They too make their way over to the GalaxSec base, sensing the large number of Reworked still working at the doors. None of the massive Behemoths has any success with this last bastion of resistance, however.

  Decades later, the dense crowd of white and red beings loses interest as the last traces of scent fades from the area. They start roaming the landscape, either collecting into heaps and forming even bigger Reworked, or just wandering aimlessly.

  Below the earth, the GalaxSec’s fusion core winds back down, the constant assault at the freezing field costing it a lot of power. On the terminal Ungud initiated the field from, the last page of the generator’s manual is still displayed, frozen in time. Ungud did not have time to properly process the contents of this page, else he would probably have shown a bit more caution with the field generator.

  The warning that the use of the field should only be a last-ditch measure is unread by all. It further tells of the need to have massive amounts of specialized medical equipment at the ready when unfreezing, or death of all within the field is a guarantee.

  Time goes by as the planet continues to spin. Its previous blue and green colour scheme is slowly transformed into a palette a good deal less filled with life. The oxygen is stripped from the atmosphere slowly, turning the blue sky red. Water is drained from the planet as large pools of Histaff amalgamations strip the planet of all usable resources. Small Histaff infection beings are elevated into the atmosphere by complex semi-biological mechanisms, only for them all to be shot down by a certain patrolling ship.

  Then, far above, a metal skull plunges into the atmosphere, a small metal horn following shortly after.

  Chapter Two – Friends in High Places

  Douglas sees stars.

  Instead of the luscious carpet of twinkling lights he has seen before, this sprawl of stars is made out of a grand total of two sparkling dots. His previous experiences - teleporting into outer space, smashing into a wrecked spaceship, docking at a Histaff infected space station, and all the other hijinks - have taught the armored skull some much-needed context. It thus takes the skeleton a mere hour of contemplating what only seeing two stars means: either the universe has partially disintegrated, or something is blocking his vision.

  The faintly illuminated rocks he sees all around him might have something to do with this. His flaming eye sockets shine enough light on his immediate environment for him to recognise the grainy texture of natural sandstone. Douglas ponders the facts of life for a few more minutes, even contemplating why he recognises the stone’s structure for what it is. He knows that he should start taking action, but to be totally honest, he is still somewhat overwhelmed by recent events.

  Contemplating the rocks around him puts the skull into a philosophic mood. Douglas knows what he is, he realizes. He knows that he is a soul fastened to a skeleton by an intricate weave of magic. He knows that he had a proper life at one point before some random purveyor of deathly energies called him back and stapled him to his current frame. He knows that the faded images that keep slipping in and out of his grasp have a deeper meaning, even though he can’t find it inside himself to truly care.

  So Douglas reminisces for the first time in his new life. He knows not what caused this sudden impulse of higher thought. He only knows that he feels like revisiting the cozy and known universe of his past.

  He warmly recalls being a mindless drone, raised from sodden earth amidst his fellow bony brethren. Remembering the necromancer that raised him - a parchment skinned ancient fossil of a man he briefly revered like a god - now only causes a small sliver of familiar contentment to emerge in his cold core. No longer does the ultimate dread and undoubting obedience he used to feel when seeing the very controller of his soul bother him any longer. Now he remembers just a small man, trying to avenge a small plight by taking out a small wizard in a small tower.

  Then the teleportation accident happened. He happily recalls the single-minded process of elimination the previous version of himself went through. The memories of the ponderous and slow trip through the broken spaceship in microgravity, and his adventures in the scant few rooms left in the wrecked slagheap, make him feel all warm inside. Not a physical warmth; no, this feeling comes from the fact that he knows what will happen next as he remembers.

  Douglas’s one-track mind recalls the escape pod and the arduous process he went through in order to slowly don the emergency spacesuit. He feels like smiling as he recalls losing hours, days, while pondering the smallest piece of meaning. The trek through bioweapon-infected space station brings more nostalgic warmth to the armored skull. The accidental and honestly misguided revival of the woman caused all kinds of complications. Where before he traversed a logical and sound path of progress, all actions involving the woman are accompanied by an odd sort of confusion.

  The blue box system - which up until then had made a lot of sense - had started telling him random things. It was almost as if the skeleton had been overwhelmed by the sudden calculating power the system had gained when he’d introduced a true multitasker - a functioning human brain - to said system. Douglas might’ve gained a lot of intelligence and wisdom over the past few days he’s been alive, but this doesn’t mean that he has gained enough common sense to understand the female mind.

  A weird form of a shiver runs through the buried skull. For some reason, the thoug
ht he just had seems very dangerous indeed. A lot of things are clear now to the skeleton, but the way his companion acted is most definitely not. Normally, the buried skull would feel up to analysing this particular fact for a couple of years. Once again, for reasons unknown, Douglas is not enthusiastic about trying to understand the semi-undead female at all. The weirdness of that thought causes his thoughts to circle back to where he first saw the woman. That perfect image of the beauty in the slowly opening coffin had been oddly enticing. His later memories of the female causes a nearly painful disconnect, the sheer contrast between that gorgeous initial picture and her actual behavior hurting his skull.

  Finally snapping out of the weird mood he has found himself in, Douglas decides to get going. Normally, he’d just want to wander around for a bit, seeing the sights and maybe trying to find some food — but not this time. Something is calling out to him, a weird pull that comes from somewhere to his left. This, in combination with the uncomfortable feeling of being unable to regrow his neck — the rock around the base of his spine stopping his regeneration — is the trigger for him to finally act. Recalling the spell shape that seems most suitable for this situation, he keeps the complex circle in his mind’s eye while happily pouring mana into the mental construct.

  The rock encasing the skeleton tears itself apart in order to obey the foreign laws suddenly imposed upon local reality. Otherworldly energies are consumed by a mystical and illogical process as normal, boring stone is forcefully transformed into air. The metal-covered skull is quickly freed, floating in the high-density gasses kept in magical compression and stillness. Then Douglas suddenly wonders if this was a good idea. He has seen the effects of the decalcinate spell on more than one occasion, and the concussive force resulting from the process has resulted in physical devastation every time. He just cast the biggest version of this very destructive spell right around his own skull. He has time to think the beginning of a muted curse when his control slips.

  The thought that a sudden gust of wind is much less destructive than the atmospheric entry he went through a short while back isn’t present in his empty skull. Instead, his sudden doubt only causes the spell to fail in the most explosive manner possible. The air, instantly expanding in an attempt to equalize pressure, turns opaque as its moisture content condenses. A large chunk of the rock surrounding Douglas is turned to dust as the concussive force grinds the solid stone to powder. From the middle of this dust explosion, Douglas is shot directly upwards.

  His vision turns into a red and grey-green blur as his gleaming metal skull starts spinning like mad, shrieking through the atmosphere as he is blasted upwards like a cannonball. At the apex of his flight, his rapid spin has slowed enough for him to observe his surroundings. He sees flashes of barren red sand, dark jagged rocks, and endless stretches of dead wasteland. Then his skull turns another one hundred and eighty degrees, and he spots something that makes his initial glimpse look like paradise. He catches sight of a sprawling ruin, endless decaying infrastructure clearly demarcated by crumbling roads and fallow fields.

  As he starts falling back down, Douglas spots the centre point of the landscape, a wide and shallow crater spanning many kilometres just beyond the ruined urban sprawl. Or rather, cutting into the crumbling city. Another spin, and Douglas sees the place he flew away from just now. A large expanding dust cloud marks his launch side, a small avalanche of rocks rumbling down the slopes. A mountain range stretches into the horizon, jagged rocks cutting into the grey air with knife edge tops.

  Then the ground rushes towards him from below, and the metal skull smashes through one of the few remaining panes of glass in the entire town. Accompanied by a glittering rain of shards, his forehead horn jams into a decorative synthetic tabletop as he lands in the middle of a ruined living room. The glass finishes falling to the cheap synthetic wooden flooring all around Douglas as he takes in the world from his new viewpoint - eyeballs staring at a fake marble pattern printed upon plastic from a scant few centimeters away.

  Douglas studies the pattern in front of him for a while, the interplay between low-resolution printing and cheaply patterned plastic somewhat interesting. His concentration is broken a lot earlier than usual, however. This is caused by two reasons. The first one is the constant mental pull he feels — something or someone calling and pulling at his mind. The other one is the steadily increasing tremors shaking the room he is in, as well as the increasing rumble of noise coming from outside.

  Desiring to no longer be stuck inside the table with the angular horn jutting from his forehead, Douglas does what he does best. He tries to cast the decalcinate spell, expecting to be launched up and away again as the solid matter around him turns to air in an uncontrolled explosion. Absolutely nothing happens except for the fact that a single mug dissolves. Pouring more mana into the spell shape does exactly nothing. Releasing the spell only causes a small, cup-sized gust of wind, which blows dust into his face.

  Small items all around Douglas start shaking as the stomping grows louder still. The low rumbling noise that has been growing in the background turns into a steady pattering of many, many feet. Douglas is now getting somewhat worried; the ominous shaking and other growing noises have him thinking of all kinds of Histaff-related scenarios. He hasn’t had a single positive experience with the engineered bioweapon so far, and the skull just knows that he isn’t rid of the slimy and bony fuckers just yet.

  Instead of continuing onto a path that doesn’t work, Douglas reverts his course a hundred and eighty degrees as he calls up the opposite of the spell he was just now casting. The Calcinate spell does even less as he shoves mana into the shape. A calm breeze blows past his bony visage as a small arrow of stone materializes. Dropping the spell in disgust only reverts the soft wind blowing past his cranium, the stone now dissolving into air once again.

  Douglas is thrown into a crisis of faith. His spells, the one tool he has been relying on to solve all his problems, do very little. The background noise becomes clearer still, and despite not having any ears, the metal-clad skull can swear he can hear drool dripping from the slavering maws of the undoubtedly approaching hordes. Fumbling for a solution to his immobility problem, he calls up the spell that turns air into water: the phlogistonate spell. The air around him is sucked into a point once again, this time forming transparent droplets of water that freeze in short order. The little remaining moisture in the air condenses on his cooling frame as the ice lance spins into being just between his eyes and the table. Commanding the spell to launch, it does nothing.

  Now truly starting to feel a hint of desperation, he shoves power into the last spell he reasons can help him — the turning of water into air, the dephlogistonation spell, also known as fireball. The little layer of ice is sucked up as Douglas commands the spell to form on the table beneath him, and the cheap synthetic material starts burning and bubbling the moment the gathering liquid ignites. Overjoyed that his horn will be freed soon, Douglas fails to notice the fact that a rather large white beast has just entered the same room he is in.

  Three red eyes lock onto the smoking skull, a small forest of tentacled tongues licking a rather impractical-looking array of protruding teeth. The hulking Histaff Reworked gets stuck in the doorway for exactly point two seconds before ramming its frame through the cheap concrete. Douglas doesn’t notice the cloud of dust, so fixed is he upon the small flame burning the table and covering his face in soot.

  Then teeth cover him entirely, tongues lick over his hyper-bonded carbon diamond-covered exterior, and he is unceremoniously pulled free from the table. Only to be trapped inside the gelatinous substance of the monster’s insides.

  It takes him a good few minutes to adapt to this situation. The view from inside one of the bone plate-covered beings is honestly rather interesting to the skull. Normal beings would undoubtedly be digested within seconds, yet the hyper acidic enzymes and chemicals present in the Reworked interior fail to even scratch his mana-enhanced skull. Normal beings also w
ouldn't be able to see a thing, yet the skeleton’s Darkvision skill allows him a decent view of his red surroundings.

  Light seeps in between slight gaps in the monster’s bone plates, showing Douglas a wondrous tableau of the being’s internals. Cords of muscles seem to form at random as its exterior armor plates slide across each other, and other parts of the red interior seem to be dedicated holding areas for general detritus. A shining network of lines runs through the entire being, forming connections to areas moments before they change. The monster’s five legs all seem to have dedicated strands of softly glowing nerves to them as the beast moves.

  Douglas is jostled around a bit as he studies his new resting place. He knows he should feel some form of negative emotion at the fact that he was so easily eaten, but his interesting new environment makes it hard to hold a grudge. Staring at his moving surroundings, Douglas studies the thing’s interior with a morbid kind of fascination.

  But then the jostling stops and the thing’s legs fold in on themselves, the straining cords of muscle visible in the much dissolving back into clear gel. Another hour later, Douglas is bored again. He has studied and observed all there is to study, and despite his Darkvision skill, the slowly dimming illumination around him has started preventing him from seeing a lot of the interesting details.

  Although his spells failed to do anything interesting previously, Douglas secretly hopes that that situation was but a fluke. His dephlogistonation spell did the most to the irritating plastic table, so he starts pouring mana into the spell construct. Suspecting that the previous failures might have been a result of him being too conservative, he pours in half of the mana he has instead of a small trickle. The result is immediate and extreme.

  Although the Histaff Reworked are near perfect shock troops, able to shrug off an amazing amount of firepower with only minimal damage, this is all thanks due to their liquid insides combined with hard bone plating. Their bodies can instantaneously form new muscle and internal structure formations, allowing them to take on physical and energetic hits in the most optimal way. The combination of the ability to discard compromised parts of their body and the possibility of replacing armor plating on the go means they are feared throughout the entire galaxy.