Moving West
Author: Arch Angel
last update Last Updated: 2024-10-29 19:42:56

A few days passed as I checked the house for repairs that needed to be made. The time was also a good test to vet Ska's competence and willingness to follow orders. We also spent an inordinate amount of time refilling the mana heart that powered the house.

It might have gone faster if I hadn't told Martin to keep half of his mana available... just in case. Fiona didn't have mana to speak of, being a spirit and all. As for Ska, he had very little mana. Turns out as a nascent intelligent species they only got a skill every three or four levels and all of Ska's relied on his endurance.

It turned out Ska was very talkative, almost afraid to be left alone to his own thoughts. Finding out that his species only recently, in the last thousand years or so, developed sentience his curiosity wasn't all that surprising.

Ska wasn't dumb, just perhaps ignorant of the greater world. He knew about the system from traders and travelers from his old world.

The
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  • Mana System In The Apocalypse   Into the pit

    The house settled with a groaning thump as I deactivated the plates to reserve power. It had taken seven hours to arrive at the clearing, a small hill surrounded by sparse trees and wilted vegetation. The area smelled of sulfur and we had spotted a few bubbling pools in the distance.Ska was the most affected by the smell, sneezing every few minutes and growling angrily.While annoying I couldn't blame him, the smell was getting to my nose as well."Let's make this quick, I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to.""Sounds like a plan to me," Martin said, holding his nose closed."The foul beasts hide behind the smell, so we are not able to destroy them," Ska growled.It made sense. If their main enemy was the Grimalkin, why not use their highly developed sense of smell against them.The entrance to the dungeon turned out to be hidden in a tangle of fallen logs and branches. How Fiona came across it was confusing until I spotted one of the jackals run through the treeline a

  • Mana System In The Apocalypse   Old Trauma

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  • Mana System In The Apocalypse   Open For Business

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    Fight For Affection

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    Epilogue

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    A Valuable Lesson

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    Unexpected arrival

    Those two words seemed to freeze everyone in place, but it wasn’t magic that caused it, it was fear. My body was frozen along with everyone else but my eyes rose into the air, tracking two creatures as they forced the magical fog away from the entire area with some ability.It was hard to tell by their alien physiology but I got the distinct impression they were looking directly at me. The initial fear was subsiding and people were starting to move again until the larger of the two squid-like creatures cast a spell. I managed to get off an Identify before the spell hit.[Ulq | Void Hunter/Maw of the Void | 47/41][Xiph | Psy Commando/Maw of the Void | 45/42]My body shook as I realized they were here for me but not a single person or even the entire pirate armada currently assembled here would be able to kill these two creatures.I felt the spell wash over the area and everyone was frozen again but a halo of golden light burst into existence above my head, washing away the spell’s eff

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    Beachhead

    The meager fleet of ships I was now in charge of, rose from the dock and slowly spiraled into the air to get above the mist. The chaotic coloration of the mana storm was visible in the distance even through the mist. That meant the enemy was almost upon the island.The Retribution was the first ship to breach the thick covering and it was no surprise to see the enemy ships had spread out in a crescent shape to surround the island. Enemy fast attack craft zipped toward our location and I double-checked that everything was working as it should. I had also turned the mana accumulator back on.I sometimes wished I had been able to fit multiple layers of shielding on the ship. But my experiments in that regard had not gotten anywhere. Shields that close together acted like soap bubbles. Either they popped completely or merged together, but it didn’t increase the strength of the shield when they did. The only way to prevent this was to have separate bubble shields that only covered a certai

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    The Storm

    After weeks of sitting around, the Retribution finally got to fly again.Knowing we were leaving, the harbor was a beehive of activity. Cobbled together crews were drilling aboard the other captured pirate ships. The people knew it wasn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when another enemy would appear.As soon as Khikall got us away from the docks and any possible collision, I engaged the cloak. It was far more effective now that I could enable and disable the automatic recharging system. The massive disruption of mana we used to leave in our wake was now a tiny trail.I hadn’t had time to figure out a way to smooth our passing completely but this would have to do. I also had Em’ah watching for trails from a crudely assembled periscope. Now she didn’t need to be on the deck to use her Mana Sense skill.Speaking of skills… I had picked up a few from the last fight. I also managed to finally hit level twenty in my Maw of the Void class. I stuck two of my stats in Strength, one in Endura

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    Troubled water

    I watched as the workers placed the last armor panel in position and began to weld it into place. It had taken a few weeks to repair the damages from our fight but the Retribution was looking almost new.The replaced sections were clearly visible by the heat transfer in the titanium. I could easily fix that when I turned the thermal defenses on. It should make everything a uniform color. Paint would work too, I suppose, but why cover up the beauty of the metal.It was a good thing the ship was complete, over the last few days, we had been getting reports from the Guild merchant ships that were stopping to trade, and they weren’t good.Large fleets of pirate ships spotted raiding islands. The Capital of the Avulian Protectorate was sacked and all of the leadership missing. The remaining fleets of the Protectorate were attacking any ship that wasn’t theirs or the Guild's. Cities burning due to the slaves I helped free, it was madness and it was spreading.Already I could hear concerned

  • Mana System In The Apocalypse   

    Turncoat

    Captain Grulaine hissed in annoyance as his second in command handed him his “orders”. His second flinched back and hurried out of the room. If he hadn’t, Grulaine may have cut him down in a fit of pique. It galled Grulaine to be under the thumb of another. He had gotten rid of his father for that very same reason. And now thanks to a series of unfortunate events, he found himself beholden to the damn pirate king Black Gar’s lap dog.How was he to know the repair yard where he went was controlled by that snake. If he had he certainly wouldn’t have agreed to the loan to effect repairs to his cannons and ship. Repairs that had taken far longer than necessary, and left Grulaine on the sidelines as the entire protectorate seemed to be crumbling around him. An opportunity-rich environment he wasn’t able to take advantage of.But that wasn’t the most galling part. He found that his repairs were delayed on purpose so Gar could tighten his stranglehold on the local pirates. By the time Grulai