[CYA] Chapter 172: Venom Station (4) (Patreon)

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/17CqLIKYusJeg3AxGElCr1sVODYxhjWDL8O6r_XRXAbI/edit?usp=sharing

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<Alex, Real - Venomous Invaders, Space Station>

Alex groaned, laying on the floor in deep discomfort, a ration bar hanging from his lips as he gnawed on it, despite an overfull stomach.

Blessings upon whoever made this coat, be they man or System. Every part of his body not shielded by the coat, shoes, or face-plate had suffered stings and lots of them.

His coat was looking a little worse for wear, and his shoes definitely needed some fixing, but overall, everything was in good working order.

His cover-all had been helpful—likely far more than it would have been without the upgrade to defense he’d gotten from the capy-were-it’s suit—but it still hadn’t prevented the stings in their literal thousands.

Blessedly, the first sting he got was, by far and away, the worst, with the little evil bugs imparting weaker venom.

He was pretty sure that’s not how things worked in mundane nature, but as these things were explicitly not natural? Yeah, it tracked.

On the positive side, he had gotten to the point that he could impart the proper, well-practiced change to the little horrors with little more than a focused glance.

That still wasn’t instantaneous, but it was a generous improvement.

The true miracle had come when he realized that he could impart it through his Spherical Sense, and that meant that he was only limited by how much he could divide his thinking.

Three.

He was limited to three concurrent actions, assuming he didn’t want to just stand there and take the stings.

So, he supposed that he was technically doing four things at once, if he put ‘controlling his body’ down as one thing.

Regardless, when being swarmed by thousands of the little biters, even three obliterated every second wasn’t quite fast enough to keep them at bay, especially when his range was still right around 6 ft in radius. I feel like it’s gotten a bit bigger…

It did allow him to remove the biggest dreadweaver drones before they could add to his suffering, but that was small comfort.

Even as he got better, there had been the occasional catastrophic failures… 

He shuddered.

Blobs of magical, insectile flesh that sucked in nearby creatures to rapidly grow and come at him with forests of stingers all at once?

Yeah… he would not miss those and suspected he’d be seeing them in his nightmares for quite a while.

That they’d been immune to his magical inspection after he’d failed in his modification had ensured they were difficult to deal with. His dissonant tonality had helped slow them down slightly, but he could only hum or whistle for so long and any break weakened the effect.

Juba locking them away only gave them time to grow bigger and more Lovecraftian. And his Shaped Force Burst didn’t really work too well on the amorphous forms. All told, the catastrophic failures had to be handled by his dadao… and by tanking a lot of little pricks.

He groaned again.

He still wasn’t in a ‘safe’ place—which caused him to almost manically keep his focus on his Spherical Sense—but he was safe enough.

The queens had actually been easy, being larger, stinger-less variants that popped like any other under his magical ministrations.

The egg sacs had been… unpleasant, all seemingly having been crew of the station, stretched out and distended with growing horrors by the thousand.

He suspected that’s where the first ones had come from: Some unlucky crewman.

Alien got it somewhat right… unfortunately…

Still, he couldn’t help but smile as he looked at the notification.

Quest Status:Survivors Recovered 0/??Venomous Stings 72,782/??Dreadweaver Variants Slain 170k/170kQueens Slain 200/200Egg Sacs 23/23

The numbers looked far more impressive than they really were, as it turned out, most were very small, and he’d killed many of those as he rolled on the ground in some of the more undignified moments of swarm combat, firing out what Shaped Force Bursts he could.

It was interesting that even the System had stopped counting individuals, at some point along the way.

There shouldn’t be any more of the terrible things. His lack of System-recognized safety for experience claiming made him suspect the survivors would be harder to sort out than he’d like, but it meant that he could probably rest for a moment.

Six… hours… He shuddered again. Past-Alex can go eat dirt… I don’t ever want to be at that guy’s mercy again.

He’d been at this for a bit more than six hours.

Even with breaks to scoop as many bodies as he could into piles for harvesting didn’t make it easy.

On the plus side, the others were using the time to work on the Innominate, continuing to improve the various components and sub-systems where they could…

Yeah… not really worth it for just that.

Still, his gains were not inconsiderable.

Attribute Level-Up:Basic Resistance - VenomLevel 1 → Level 7

Apology Tutorial Courtesy Notice:This is the second resistance you have advanced through extreme use of one qualifying substance. It is recommended to train with more diverse toxins for the best advancement of your attribute, or at the very least, to keep it from advancing into something too specific to be very useful after the tutorial.

The note was a bit irritating, but he supposed it made sense. If quality was what he wanted, he needed to pursue it over raw quantity.

On the purely positive side, he could feel that the kills he’d made by manipulating the magical language counted toward his level one Legendary class.

These things hadn’t been high leveled—heavens help him if they had been—but when leveling from one? Enemies with levels between five and ten were quite nice.

He wasn’t sure how it would shake out, given he was higher level, but since the class that he was using to make the kills was lower level he thought things would be decided in his favor.

Alex just needed to finish this mission to find out.

He’d reported the death of the last deathweaver to his companions—verified by the quest—and they’d offered to come help deal with the survivors, but he’d told them to wait while he got his head together.

Again, the fact that he couldn’t accept his experience yet made him wary that something else was wrong, and of all the Innominate crew, he was best suited to surviving unusual situations.

He continued to chew on the ration bar, feeling starving while his stomach hurt from too much food in it… He needed to think about something else.

“Thank you, once more, Juba.”

The closest drone rotated unnecessarily, and the man’s sonorous voice issued forth. “You are an insane man, Alex, but you are doing a good thing. I am glad to have been able to help, little though that help was required.”

Alex chuckled. “You gave me space to think when I needed it, and security when I needed a breath. Neither is without extreme value.”

“Your words ring true. I accept your thanks in the spirit in which they were given.”

He lifted a thumbs-up and chuckled. “Great.”

With a groan, he rolled over and pushed himself up into a kneeling position.

“Do we have any change on the survivors in the sealed off sections?”

Natasha’s voice came in, then. “Oh, so we’re speaking now?”

Alex glowered at nothing. “I wasn’t going to abandon these people when I was already here.”

“Yes, we all know you chose foolishness.”

“And as such, I had no desire to listen to y’all’s repeated attempts to call me back.”

“Your health-readings were—”

“Never to a truly dangerous level.” At least it hadn’t been dangerous when he had his dadao to pull HP from… which he had done several times, but they didn’t need to know that. The extra eight thousand health to draw upon at need was a literal lifesaver. “I’m fine, and the bad things are seemingly gone. Now, the survivors?”

The woman sighed. “No movement.”

“Literally none? They’ve stayed perfectly stationary?”

“That’s what our sensors say. There aren’t registered stasis pods in those compartments either. So. Are you going to accept our help? Or are you going to go in alone again?”

He opened his mouth to retort, but paused.

Was he being foolish yet again?

He genuinely had been the best choice to deal with the venomous horrors, but did that mean he shouldn’t accept help against the uncertain challenge ahead?

“You’re right.” Alex groaned. “I’m exhausted. My stamina’s close to bottoming out, and I can’t seem to eat enough food… I’ll connect to the flight systems and bring the Innominate into dock. We’ll face what remains together.”

There was a moment of seemingly stunned silence, and her tone was one of consummate professionalism when she finally did speak. “Understood. We await positive connection.”

Alex looked to the drones. “Cover me, Juba?”

“Of course.”

He closed his eyes and reached out mentally to his cuffs, feeling their connection to the Innominate.

The feeling wasn’t anywhere close to what he had while at his duty station, but it was enough for him to engage the automatic piloting systems and set which dock that should be used.

It was only one hallway from him, but on the far side of the station from where he’d entered.

…It had been a busy six hours.

With the commands given, he pulled back from the connection, opening his eyes to find a blessedly empty corridor before him. He sighed in relief then pushed himself to his feet.

Webs, both sticky and not, still hung in tatters throughout the station, but he had no desire to be a clean-up crew. The survivors could deal with that.

He glanced at his health and sighed.

Alex JohnsonHP: 9,155/9,155 [13545]

Living (Linage) Steel Dadao7957/7957 [8000]

He’d spent most of the last hours injured, wounded, and below max health. As such, he’d made very little progress on his Life recovery efforts.

Still, even if the survivors were perfectly peaceful, he didn’t want to greet them in ragged attire.

It took two hundred HP to repair his coat, with his left and right shoes taking fifty-three and eighty-seven respectively.

That was six seconds of healing, and as such he was a bit grumpy that he hadn’t just fixed the gear at one of his earlier pauses.

Regardless, it was done, and his backup was almost here.

He moved toward where they would arrive, taking slow, measured steps.

He had been more tired than he realized, because when the airlock whooshed open, and several of his fellow initiates came into sight—along with Bev and Juba—Alex gave a smile and little wave in greeting before feeling something within him relax at finally not being alone. His legs all but gave out, and he leaned against the wall, sliding to flop, seated in the corner against the wall. “I… I don’t think I’m getting up very soon.”

<Brian, Real - Tutorial, Tutorial College #02002>

Brian paid very close attention as some of the uses and limits of force magic were described. He was going to learn about other potential sources of cutting edges and the like before he made his choices, but he was genuinely excited.

He had no need for ‘how-to’ skills, but if he understood correctly, the right spells, properly advanced, could replace an entire woodshop.

He grinned, considering what he’d learned the day before about nature based possibilities.

I could replace the lumber yard too.

He’d been a finish cabinet maker before all this insanity, but he’d done all sorts of construction work over the years, and all he could see as he learned more and more was the potential to become a one-man build-crew.

His wife was delving into food growth and preparation, along with what passed for medicine in this new world, and despite his subtle request for her to get something a bit more defensive—just in case there were more monsters than they hoped—she’d been adamant in her choices.

She wanted to see people fed and cared for. Brian had only relented when he realized that, if she got magic for preparing food, that could be defensively at need.

Just like my own magics. His grin grew. Magic!

It was insanity, and there was a non-zero chance that he’d cracked after nearly forty years on the job, but he didn’t think so, and he wouldn’t let fear hold him back.

It was a brand new world, and he, at least, would be able to help ensure everyone had good places to live, and that had value.

Their instructors had been very clear that tradesmen and craftsmen were very valuable under the System, even if they often had a harder time on newly initiated worlds.

That was fine with Brian. Life was often hard, but that meant it had the potential to be good too.

He’d been coming close to retirement, but if this worked out? He’d be able to keep building for decades.

His pen flew across the page, noting various potential paths to what he wanted. When the class was done, he’d have so many questions for the teacher.

He might be old, but he’d long ago accepted that he was never done learning.

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