Before leaving the ruined city, I decided to test out some of the power that came with this new form, which I decided to call the Elemental Titan. In my tests, I found that I could not only move the different elements as I wished, I could even completely swap them. For instance, after I created a large metal greatsword in my hands, I was able to change its composition to shadow mana. In exchange, the cape on my back stiffened slightly, becoming similar to a metal cloth.

Once I was done, I took a deep breath and focused. “Now, separate.” I commanded, carefully severing the connections that had been established between myself and the fifty soldiers. This was the part I had been most worried about, honestly, aside from the initial merger. There was the distinct chance that the elemental soldiers would rip through my body or crush me as they were leaving.

To prevent this, I exerted some control of my own elemental abilities to create a ‘safety bubble’ around my body. This way, they should not be able to so easily push through. And indeed, although some pressed against the bubble, they ended up taking the path of least resistance to seperate.

From the outside, it looked almost as if the elemental titan had exploded, pieces of it flying everywhere to reform into fifty different humanoids. Where the titan had once stood, my body slowly descended to the ground, accompanied by the wind elemental soldiers that were the last to depart. The transition of seeing through the elements and seeing through my own body was fast, but also disorienting.

It took me several long moments after landing on the ground to gain my bearings again, after which I opened my status window again. As I had expected, it only took a few seconds to refill the little mana that I had spent in the titan form. If I continued to level up, or increased my affinities even more to hasten my mana recovery, I might even be able to sustain the form indefinitely in battle.

“Lex, put them all back in the grove.” I said as I looked down to my finger, seeing the ring that rested there. I felt a pulse of mana sweeping out, an order to the soldiers to return to the ring. Like when they came out, they turned into streams of energy that rushed around my body, pushing themselves back into Lex’s grove.

So, totally great idea, right? RIGHT?

Yes, yes Malthan. It was a very good idea. You can stop pouting now. I thought back to how Malthan had suddenly stopped speaking up after suggesting the titan idea. The only reason I could think of for him to suddenly go silent was the thoughts I had after he presented the idea. Why a god would pout over the thoughts of a mortal, I had no idea. I could only chalk it up to his madness.

I wasn’t pouting! I wasn’t! I was… uh… distracted! The Goddess of Breasts walked by, so it took me a bit to get back to you, that’s all.

Uh huh… sure. While I sincerely didn’t believe him, I also didn’t want to push the issue too much. Annoyance or not, Malthan was still a full fledged god. If he wanted to destroy me, there was probably any number of ways he could go about it.

“Celeste.” I called out, trusting that the more helpful of my mental hitchhikers was still listening in. I felt a small nudge in the corner of my mind, showing me that she was still there. Though, she was likely distracted and unable to offer her full attention. “I’m ready to come back up. Also, do you have an estimate on the upgrades yet?”

“Working on it.” She replied, her voice seeming to come from far away. “Hold for teleport.” Rather than an immediate response like I was expecting, the teleport only came several long moments later. When it finished, I was standing in the medbay in front of my true body. Celeste was standing, motionless, off to the side, her eyes looking unfocused.

It was only when I began moving that she reacted, blinking a couple times and looking at me. “Sorry, there is a lot of work going into these repairs. We’re basically remaking the entire ship, aside from the hull itself and some key systems.”

I nodded my head in understanding, switching out of my clone and back to my true body. “Would it help to use the automatic upgrade system?” I asked as I grabbed the ring from my clone, turning around to see Celeste’s eyes shining.

“That would probably be able to take care of one of the upgrades at a time, and would lessen the workload. See if you can apply any of the upgrades to the ship, since all of the blueprints are already saved in the computers.”

Smiling slightly, I opened the ship management window and did just that, looking at what options were available. “Looks like I can select them.” I wasn’t really too surprised there. Even when Celeste had been creating the blueprints for more advanced systems using technology from the future, the only time when the system rejected an upgrade was if it was too far of a leap. Each of the systems here were only slight upgrades, or additional features to how a component functioned.

“Alright, then. You’ll probably only be able to do one at a time. The best one to start with would be… the nerve wiring. Initially, we were going to have to completely pull out over half of the panels on the interior of the ship to upgrade the wiring, which would take longer than the upgrade itself.”

That did make sense, and the wiring was the most important aspect. With it upgraded, the other upgrades should be able to run more smoothly. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. After the upgrade had been selected, I was given a message saying that it would take roughly five days for it to finish, which seemed to catch Celeste by surprise.

“Really? That’s faster than I expected.” She said after seeing the window through my eyes. “That should speed the process up by a couple weeks, I think.” As she spoke, Celeste seemed to be doing a few calculations in her head, nodding to herself every once in a while.

“So, how long should the entire process take?” I asked curiously. While we didn’t have too much of a choice but to get these upgrades, I didn’t want to give the New Human Empire too much time to build up whatever plans they had prepared.

“Before, we wouldn’t have been ready for a couple months, almost until your grove was completed. But now, we should be able to shave about half of a month off of that. The most important systems are the warp core, the weapons, and the shields. Everything else is secondary, but we can’t work on it while we’re on the move. To get caught in a fight while our medbay is out for upgrades would ruin us.”

“So… about six weeks, then.” I said with a small groan. I could somewhat overlook the time spent in the upgrades due to the addition of the warp core, which would allow us to almost instantly arrive at any location. That alone would make up the time lost after just a few trips, given that it tended to take quite a while to travel between systems.

The question was, what should I do with these six weeks? With the elemental titan, I had a trump card that should be able to give me confidence to fight just about anything. Well, as long as I didn’t try to take on an entire battleship by myself, because that would be an almost guaranteed suicide no matter how well equipped I was.

Work on new skills? I might be able to do that, but the question then becomes what kind of skill I wanted to work on. My only real idea for that had been the elemental soldiers, and I had already taken that as far as I could.

While it seemed a bit wrong, it just didn’t feel alright to leisurely spend the six weeks with my wives and Tokemi, knowing that the war was still waiting in the background. It felt strange to be thinking that now, but I had the need to do something.

Celeste apparently either heard my inner turmoil or saw it on my face, because she smiled slightly to me. “Just take the time to relax, John. By my calculations, it would have taken us three weeks normally to arrive at the next base we have mapped out. Assuming that they haven’t finished their own warp core project, then we don’t have to worry too much about them attacking us in this time.”

I nodded my head at that, agreeing with her words. “Speaking of, what are the chances of them doing something like attaching the warp core to a weapon? Would they be able to send things through like that to directly attack?”

As I asked that, Celeste knit her brows together. “I… don’t think so? It’s hard to say for sure. I mean, theoretically it is possible. But, they would have to have the exact spatial coordinates in relation to their current position. Even I would need a good five minutes or so to calculate the exact coordinates from here to a specific location on this world’s moon, let alone a world in a completely different star system.”

“If they were going to use it like that, the more likely choice would be to create a large power source, and attach the warp core to a planetoid or a large asteroid. If there was sufficient energy, it might be able to move an entire celestial body.” As she spoke, her words became more uncertain. “If that was the case, then they could potentially move their headquarters to an area of remote space, beyond what we are capable of reaching with normal subspace methods. With the warp cores, they could easily bring their ships back from that remote region to launch repeated hit-and-run attacks.”

I raised my eyebrows at Celeste as I listened to her ramble on, which drew an embarrassed smile from her when she looked up. “It’s what I would do, anyways. Whoever gave them this technology must know its full potential. If they are going to do something like that, we really do need to find their base before they are able to finish the warp cores. Thankfully, their progress in the base we found before suggested they were still a long ways away from fully creating one.”

“There’s not the chance that they had multiple bases working on the same project?” I asked dubiously, afraid that they might be further along than we thought.

However, Celeste shook her head. “Not logically. I mean, if you have ten research teams focusing on one subject, but they aren’t allowed to communicate with each other, then it is no different from just having one team working on it. From the information we recovered so far, it is likely that each research base has one or two specific objects that they are trying to engineer. For that one, it was the warp core and the AI implants.”

“I see.” I said, sighing slightly. “Well, I’m going to go figure out how to relax. Maybe invite Tokemi and the others over for another board game or something.” I said with a slight smile. As much as it surprised me, Tokemi seemed to enjoy playing board games far more than she enjoyed watching shows that Celeste had downloaded before leaving earth, or playing the Qu’Lopti’s video games.

Celeste giggled slightly at that, nodding. “Alright then. I’ll take care of managing the upgrades. You focus on taking care of the family.” She said, smiling gently at me as I left the room.

Okay… Now to find the others. I thought to myself, bringing one hand up to my ear to call for Sharon. “Where are you guys at?” I asked simply, connecting to her comm.

“Hmm?” A reply came back after a short while. “Ah, sorry. Yin wanted to take Yang and I out for a bit. The upgrade work was starting to bother Yang, so we’re down on Gerin right now.” I raised my eyebrows slightly at that, finding it rather sudden. “We’re visiting Talia right now. Why, is anything the matter?”

Well, if they’re with Talia, everything should be okay. I thought to myself, before shaking my head. “No, it’s nothing. Celeste said that we’re stuck here for a month and a half, so I was just calling to see who was free.”

“Ohh, really?” Sharon asked in surprise. “Huh, didn’t think it’d take that long. Don’t worry, we’ll be back up soon. Tokemi wanted us all to be back in the ship for dinner tonight, since this is her first time ‘growing up’.” She said in a light tone. “She’s treating this almost like a birthday.”

That thought made me smile a bit, nodding my head subconsciously. “Not surprised. Well, I’ll see you guys when you get up here.” I said, moving to head towards my quarters. Six weeks...