Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) by Jez Cajiao (beach books .txt) 📗

feeling of sudden weight as Jian fed more power into the engines and sent us up, frantically avoiding a blast of lightning from a ship’s cannon fired from the rear.

“Does that happen often?” I asked him dully, my voice raspy and weak.

“Every so often,” he admitted. “As long as I know they’re going to fire, I can dodge, probably, but it’s a guess which way to go, and I can’t keep this up forever…” He watched over his controls, hissing under his breath. “Reserves are at seventeen percent…” he said calmly.

“What?” I asked, then coughed and summoned a fountain of water, washing the knife clean and dunking my face into it to refresh me. Feeling a little better, I began studying the cloudy magical displays that covered the walls. We were closing on our fleet, that much was clear, but they were still far ahead, and those that were chasing us were much closer.

“Seventeen percent,” Jian repeated. “The reserves. If we use it all, we will crash. We have better engines than them, faster too, but they have more power, and we can’t seem to get above fifty percent cruising speed. The engines just can’t do it, but they’ll take the power, so there must be leakages everywhere. They’re catching us slowly. If I push more power to the engines, we can outrun them for a time, but we’re using power at about one percent an hour currently. The engines, and the ship in general, are leaking like a sieve. Every time I feed more power in, it costs us. A boost like that…” He said, gesturing back toward the ships that were falling behind steadily now. “… it costs us two to three percent. If I keep doing it, we can outrun them… until we crash and all die. Or I don’t, and they shoot us down. Their ships are being pushed to their limit and draining their stones as well, aren’t they?” he said, looking to the wisp.

“They are,” she replied smoothly. “The chasing ships are poorly built. While this ship leaks mana due to damage, they are wasteful due to poor construction. They can apparently afford to run us down, though. Our maximum current cruising speed is slightly less than theirs, while our boosted speed is considerably higher, but they can boost more often. This is a race of attrition, with no way to know which side will win.”

“We can help…” Frederikk said slowly, moving into view from where he’d been seated examining a relay. “…I think.”

“Explain,” I said tiredly, rubbing my eyes and contemplating the second to last mana potion I had. I desperately needed more, and I needed to keep Tang going, as well as trying to keep myself sane. If I could stabilize him again, maybe heal some of the deeper wounds enough that the internal bleeding would slow further, could I make some more potions? The simple ones only took a few minutes to an hour, after all…

“We worked this ship once; we can fix it again…but there’s only three of us that were trained for it, and taught. The rest would be following their instincts…”

“Go on…” I prompted, giving him my full attention.

“I must explain… Gnomes are the greatest artifabricants in all of reality, because we are the chosen people of the god Svetu,” he said, rubbing his temple. “When the god left us, we… changed. Some grew angry and refused to invent new things, instead taking inspiration from the world around us, improving old designs, adjusting things, but swearing to never create new. Others believed that the disappearance of the gods and the Cataclysm wasn’t an abandonment, and that if we served them truly, if we were what we should have been, then they would return, and they concentrated on only creating new things…”

“We’ve got no time for this…” I sighed, and he held up his hands, begging for patience.

“The final group, well, they believed that the gods had abandoned us because they were never gods in truth anyway, and they set off to find out the secrets of the realms, making the manaengines and more. This ship and others were built by all three working together, but all we have left here is the second and first group. We as a race spent hundreds of years growing more and more focused, and now, we are all we can be. I can rebuild something a thousand ways, using the designs I know but to create from new? It is against all I am, much like I cannot spread my arms and grow wings to fly away. Our people will ‘fix’ the ship, but it will not be what it was. It may be better, but it may not survive it, either,” Frederikk said solemnly.

“What?” I asked in shock. “No. No, you literally built a fucking train a few hours ago!” I pointed behind the ship in the direction where we’d come from.

“We made attachments for the Badunkas to join together, as we have done before,” he corrected, and I shook my head.

“Fine, whatever. Do it,” I snapped, thinking that the gnomes were a massive pain in the ass to deal with at the best of times, and that was before hearing this bullshit excuse.

“You accept the risk?” he asked, and I waved my hand at him.

“Yeah, yeah, fine!” I turned back to Tang, the gnome already forgotten. Maybe if I…

“We could also use some of the stash…” he suggested in a wheedling voice, and I turned to glare at him. The residual anger over everything that had happened flared in my chest as I clumsily tugged a solid stick of their drug out and tossed it at him.

“You pick now to try to get your itch scratched?” I growled at him. “Fine, but you fuck this up, and I’ll throw you over the side personally!” I hissed threateningly at him, shoving him out of the way as I started dragging my alchemy gear out and spreading it out on a counter