Over haul
Author: Arch Angel
last update Last Updated: 2024-10-29 19:42:56

I had to remove my armor before I could shove myself into the tight crawl space behind the bulkhead and wall. Thankfully I fit. Otherwise, I would have to remove an entire wall section to get at the damaged areas. It wasn’t the worst outcome but it would take far longer to remove those than it would to simply slide behind it. I suppose if I was in dire straights, I could just rip the panel off with brute strength but purposefully damaging my ship felt wrong.

The power conduit wasn’t like a normal electrical cable or even like the distribution lines I laid down on previous designs. Those worked to carry magical power in a similar way to my power conduit but were thin and easily torn. So when I designed the Retribution, I created the conduit as an upgrade. It was a series of finger-thick mithril bars that were square. The bars were mounted to rubber grommets that allowed them to flex and twist as needed. The runes carved into them did the rest.

And they worked great, except with the fle
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  • Mana System In The Apocalypse   Island retreat

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    A Valuable Lesson

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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

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  • Mana System In The Apocalypse   

    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