Bob watched as Jake clawed and bit, digging deep wounds in the horrific amalgation of alligator and brown bear. The monster wasn't just taking the abuse, it had a firm grip on one of the UtahRaptor's legs, and was using it's powerful body to try and rip it off.

Despite both a shield and a healing spell worked into the summons, the fight was a lot closer than he would have liked.

Jake was level sixty-four, and an absolute unit. The problem was that the monster had Jake beat out in attributes and thresholds, as Jake was technically considered to be tier seven.

"I'm glad we're not fighting those," Eddi said quietly.

"Too right," Jessica agreed.

"I won't be fighting these," Bob added.

The fight had been going for just over two minutes when the monster finally started to weaken, and twenty seconds later, it was finished.

Jake dragged the body back, and Bob reached out as it began to disapate.

Congratulations! You have dispersed your first manifestation, and completed the Quest "My First Kill."

The manifestation will now disperse, leaving your well earned reward!

Future kills will have a very small chance to coalesce the energy they contained into the form of an energy crystal.

New Quest!

"I bet you can't kill just one."

Disperse ten manifestations of equal or greater level than yourself.

Reward : One energy crystal.

Bob minimized the window with a thought, and his hands closed around a large affinity crystal. He quickly stepped back into the safety of the gateway entrance, and held it up for the rest of the group to see.

"Endurance Affinity Crystal," Bob grinned.

"This is just wrong," Bailli grumbled as they sat at the table, stabbing her fork into a baked potato angrily.

"I used to be able to drop them in one barrage," she continued, shredding the unfortunate potato, which had asked for none of this.

Bob knew that Bailli had a temper, and knew from experience it was best just let her take her frustrations out on her meal.

"Stupid System," she snarled, turning her attention from the now thoroughly mashed potato towards her steak.

Bob called up his barrage skill.

System Help, Skill, Barrage.

A user may utilize this skill to modify another. The skill divides the total value of the effect by two, and delivers it three times. This skill increases the cost of the original skill by one mana.

This skill may be applied multiple times, each instance beyond the first adding a single delivery of the effect. Each instance beyond the first multiplies the mana required by the number of times the skill is being applied.

"The System nerfed everything," Amanda commiserated.

"My Lightning Blast used to hit for well over ten thousand!" Bailli threw her fork down in frustration and gestured, showing a System window to the table.

Lightning Blast Skill for user 'Bailli Everdeen', User identification code 1621G1394N3210ISS4PF87463716811IO.

User spellcasting value : 408

Spellcasting modifiers

Magical School of Conjuration : 12%

Lightning Blast spell level : 60%

User level threshold bonuses : 30%

Spell threshold bonuses : 60%

Lightning elemental bonuses : 72%

Total spell casting multipliers = 234%

Total spellcasting value = 1,362

Casting this spell causes a blast of Lightning to travel from the user to a target with 1,362 feet. Upon striking the target, this spell does 1,362 points of Lightning Damage, and an additional 109 points of vicious damage.

This spell requires twelve mana to cast.

"Woah," Bob muttered. Bailli was rocking some significant bonuses from her path.

"I had to cast that spell sixteen times to bring down the monster. I used to kill three of them every six seconds!" Bailli picked up her fork and stabbed a piece of steak, biting into it savagely.

Bob chewed his own steak as he worked through the numbers. After reviewing his own schools and skills the change had been immediately obvious. The multipliers for each level of the school and of the spell had gone from ten percent, to one percent. While this vastly reduced the strength of their skills, from what Bob had been able to see, the exact same effect applied to monsters as well. The System had weakened everything equally, which increased the time required to kill monsters, which acted as a multiplier for the already higher mana costs. The end result was a lot more mana being circulated.

"You dropped it in a tenth of the time it took me," Bob said consolingly.

"Only because Erick was working as my Beacon," Bailli shook her head. "There's no way I can fight those alone now, which means we'll have to fight them as a group, which will take longer and I really want a third Attribute Crystal," she finished.

"We know we can't fight higher level monsters with any near the degree of efficiently we once did," Bob said. "We need to see how quickly we can kill monsters one higher than we are. We have enough crystals to fly the Freedom for three months. If this planet is viable we'll be fine, but if it isn't we'll need to find another quite quickly, or accept that we're going to have return to Thayland to set the ship down."

Bailli grudgingly nodded.

The final verdict wasn't promising. Mike and Jack had both leveled their Melee, Armor, and Parry skills, and despite the lack of Affinity Crystals for those skills, they were able to act as Beacons without a problem, keeping the attention of multiple monsters while parrying their attacks. Erick and Jessica were both able to keep them healed up without any trouble, often able to toss a few damage spells between heals.

The problem wasn't the damage either. With three people focusing down a monster, the level thirty-seven creatures dropped quickly, one every few seconds. Each group was able to monopolize two spawn points. When compared to their capabilities pre-patch, the kill rate was dismal, as the members of either group would have racked up a combined kill count five times that of what they were seeing.

Ultimately it was the reduction in the number of monsters they could kill per hour, and the drastic reduction in the coalesence ratio for mana crystals. They'd gone from each person pulling eighty to a hundred crystals per hour, to pulling three to five. Eight hours of delving had netted them a mere three hundred and eighty six mana crystals.

It was a quiet group that gathered in the Garden afterward.

"Well, things are worse than I'd thought they'd be," Bob began. "I knew we'd see a massive reduction in the coalsence rate of mana cystals, but somehow I had thought that going from level sixty monsters to level thirty-seven monsters would allow us to maintain the speed with which we killed the monsters." He shook his head before continuing. "The fact that we can't finish our quests in a man-made Dungeon isn't completely surprising, although it is disappointing. I don't know how the Quests are going to progress, but small rewards are better than, especially for something we'd be doing anyway."

"I actually enjoyed it," Dave said. "Working together as a team is a lot more fun, at least for me, than just standing in one place and killing monsters by myself, over and over and over and over and over again."

"I definitely like being on the front lines," Mike nodded. "It's satisfying."

"There is a reason that people tend to delve in groups," Harv added. "While your Dungeons are very efficient," he gestured toward Bob, "they were designed with the idea of each person being powerful enough to keep one or more spawn points cleared. Which, with the paths you'd found and the Affinity Crystals, wasn't a terrible idea. I never really felt comfortable delving without Elli."

"I'll have to take your word for it," Bob sighed. He was level thirty-seven, while the rest of them were level thirty-six. That meant that while they were delving together, he'd been a floor deeper, grinding it out with Jake.

While it did take Jake significantly longer to kill the monsters, the conjunction of the Eldritch Shield and Anima Blast spells turned the UtahRaptor, who had always been a bit of an assassin, into an absolute tank. Against a single monster, the Anima Blast didn't do anything, because the Eldritch Shield and Jake's natural armor mitigated the blows entirely. He'd found that Jake could tank, and eventually kill, three monsters at once.

"We might be able to jump down to the thirty-eigtht floor," Eddi offered. "I don't really think that we'll lose much speed."

"That's not a bad idea," Amanda mused. "We had a couple seconds between respawns where both groups could have focus fired down a few extra monsters if we had them."

"How long does it take you to kill a monster?" Eddi asked curiously.

"About seven seconds," Bob replied.

"That's actually not that bad," Dave said. "I think that's only a little bit slower than we're averaging individually."

Bob nodded. "That's with a lot of advantages that I won't be able to replicate when I reincarnate. Under the new and improved System, soloing might be possible, but working together is definitely going to be faster."

"Everyone knows that I'm not a fan of extended delves," Bailli said. "I know that Bob's first reaction to seeing how few mana crystals we're pulling in is going to be to immediately start delving for sixteen hours a day. I'd like to suggest that we don't do that. We have enough crystals for the moment, and if we have to, we can jump back to the cove and delve for a while without having to pay the upkeep of having the ship in space."

"Or, and hear me out, we accept that we built a larger ship than we really needed, and we recruit some more crew," Mike suggested. "Sure, having what equates to ten rather sizable three bedroom homes is nice, but we could just as easily have split that space up into single or double rooms, each with their own shower. I mean, we spend our free time here in the Garden anyway. I'd be happy with a simple single room, and if we reconfigured that space, we'd could easily fit eight rooms. If we did that for all ten rooms, we'd be able to go from a crew of thirteen, to a crew of eighty."

Bob shook his head. "I've done the math, and we'd need a crew of about two hundred to keep up with the cost of running the ship. I suppose I could have went with single large enchantments, rather than overlapping smaller ones, but I'm still not sure what we might bump into out here," he sighed.

"Could you build a second hull?" Jessica asked. "I mean, your portals are bigger now, yeah? So if you added a secondary hull outside of the first, and slapped a single large enchantment on that, we could power that a lot more cheaply, and if we needed it, we could up power the original hull shields, right?"

"How hard would it be to move the masts to the outer hull?" Dave asked.

"Not hard at all," Jack replied, nodding toward Bob, "we designed them to be modular so that if they were damaged, we could reconfigure them to balance out."

"How many crystals would that save, in terms of daily operating costs?" Amanda asked.

"A lot," Bob admitted. "The shields account for over half of our crystal usage. Harv, you'd have to put up the repair enchantment, how large of a section could you do at once?"

"I don't know the math for that," Harv admitted.

"Call it forty-eight thousand square feet," Bob replied.

"Well, I can cover about four thousand square feet with a ritual, but that's as thin as I can go," Harv said.

"Twelve sections, an Eldritch Shield, Mana Shield, and a Repair," Bob muttered. "That'll be eight hundred and sixty four mana crystals per day, which is a lot less than the two thousand and sixteen the hull is currently costing us. Of course, there's also the three hundred thousand mana crystals it will cost to build the new hull."

"Bugger," Jessica deflated. "I hadn't thought of that."

"Still a fantastic idea," Bob shook his head, "we just have to do the math and determine if we want to go back to Thayland and build the new hull, which will take two and a half, maybe three weeks to piece together and then enchant. We're currently running at four thousand one two hundred crystals per day, although that's plus or minus sixty. The masts aren't shielded, so we're running the repair ritual every four hours, just in case. We've accelerated via thrusters to a speed that will have us arriving at the target planet in six weeks. Assuming nothing changes, we'll burn through another one hundred and seventy five thousand crystals getting to our destination. Now we started this trip with better than half a million mana crystals in reserve," he cast a glance at Eddi, who had the decency to look guilty. "Although I have no idea where they all came from. So, I'm going to ask if we want to go back to Thayland, rebuild and relaunch, or just keep going, because we have the crystals for either."

"As much as I hate the idea of delaying our arrival at our new home, the smart money is doing the rebuild," Jack said with a sigh. "Doing so will cut our costs by more than twenty-five percent."

"By more than doubling them, when you consider the costs of the rebuild, plus the reduced cost of operation," Amanda argued. "If this planet is viable, we'll have spent four hundred and twenty thousand mana crystals to get there, rather than a hundred and seventy-five thousand."

"Beyond the costs, we also need to take into account the fact that there are likely to be quite a few powerful groups of people who are looking for me," Bob said grimly. "I'd rather not encounter any of them. Assuming we can safely set the Freedom down on the planet, the cost to keep our life support active is less than a hundred crystals a day. If we have to run our suits, they'll cost us four mana crystals an hour each. We should be able to get from the Freedom to the Dungeons on the planet without it costing too much. At that point, we can stay in the freedom and delve on the planet until we've built up enough crystals to refit the ship."

"Do you really have anything to worry about?" Eddi asked. "It was really only those assholes from Parceus, the the King took care of them."

"Only if you think the King is somehow more powerful than the System," Bob shook his head. "They received the same reset as everyone else. Assuming they aren't complete idiots, they rebuilt with the seven gods of light, which means there is an awfully angry tier eleven running around Thayland. To be honest, I'm a little worried about Kellan."