General Karl said that we would arrive at the Nidorch System in approximately 36 hours. Why it would take so long was related to the Tower mandated use of Cores to build ships travelling into the void. Even the highest quality ship cores only generated so much power. So a passenger ship that didn’t have anything like weapon systems could allocate nearly all that energy into the engines, and so could fit a powerful warp drive that could traverse almost the radius of the Area in a single day.

Military ships like this, which had weapon systems and powerful shields, could not have warp engines that were nearly so powerful. So, just to make it to a system not too far from the Federation’s inner circle took 36 hours.

I made the most of it, in the virtual realm. I couldn’t grind my spell levels, and Chef proficiencies were slow to grind, but I made sure to keep from losing the slightest amount of my edge for battle.

I also made sure to keep in contact with the other team members, especially Mewi. We all had similar itineraries. Bruzigan said he was going to basically trust us to keep honing our skills on our own from this point on, which meant I’d have a lot more time to relax, at last.

More time, mind you. I still tried to push myself, but on a schedule more approaching sane. I decided on alternating periods of 12 in-pod hours of training and resting.

Quite a lot of the rest time was spent with Mewi, of course. We weren’t really together, but this definitely beat text or video chat.

And then there was Grosstin’s item database. For the last hour of each training session, I studied up on as many items as I could. As I had suspected, there seemed to be no end to the possible items the Tower could grant as Floor rewards, let alone that could be crafted by challengers.

I focused on rare consumable items. There was something in particular that I was trying to find, something I only suspected existed. But by the time we were soon to arrive in the Nidorch System, I hadn’t caught even a hint of it.

Nidorch was a small system, only containing 9 planets when most systems in Area 1 held 12-15, on average. Larger systems had up to 20 planets.

And every single one of those planets held at least millions of people. There wasn’t a single world in Area 1’s space that didn’t support life.

Man. Sometimes I could almost forget that the Tower’s environment was ultimately artificial, but then I was reminded of stuff like this.

The first planet to liberate, Nidorch-9, had only 5 Kinetice ships orbiting it. According to scans from the fleet, the system had between 5 and 8 ships invading each planet. If they all came together to expel us at once, it’d be trouble, but that wasn’t going to happen.

This was because that, until their ship was under attack, Kinetice Drones all focused on killing as many people on the surface as they could. Usually, Kinetice leaders wouldn’t bother ordering their drones to use those kinds of tactics anyway, either. The Kinetice drones were hard-wired as a species to prioritize killing the Tower’s challengers over their own lives, and their leaders usually didn’t care if they were threatened.

The one exception was if a leader was killed. If that happened, all remaining drones that had been connected to that leader went absolutely berserk and would stop at nothing to kill those responsible. They usually commanded from a Kinetice Hive World, but some took to the field. Standard doctrine in such cases was never to attack the leader directly—they always retreated when they lost enough Drones.

The upshot was that the entire Nidorch System basically amounted to a warm-up. Real Kinetice were trickier to deal with than in the simulation, but at my current stats I had the edge over most drones physically, let alone with my magic.

Over the course first mission on the itinerary, both from our own data and information from the other fleets, we got a better idea of how the new AP gain worked, too. Every 10 individual Kinetice someone killed would result in +1 AP. This included when a ship was destroyed, but with a cap of +10—if there were at least 100 Kinetice alive when the core was destroyed, the one who damaged the core would get the points. However, if more than one person damaged the core, they would all get up to 10 points depending on how many Kinetice were still alive.

It was actually Mewi who’d found that one out. He hadn’t gotten a full 10 points for his first core, so he decided to experiment with the second, having only himself and one of his squad members damage the core, after determining there were just over 160 Kinetice left alive. They both got +8 for that one.

In the course of a week, we liberated the entire Nidorch System, taking very few casualties. The rest of my fleet were no slouches—they'd ensured I’d only needed to solo one enemy ship per world. Even so, combined with the 20+ AP I’d already had, I’d gained more than enough to reach Bruzigan’s Intuition goal for me of 105. Once I hit 100, I discovered that each point after that required 2 AP instead of 1 to advance, so I was glad I only needed to add 5 more.

While it wasn’t quite fair to say order was restored, such was now at least possible in the system. The rest would be up to the Federation’s police force rather than its army. As for the Firebrand’s fleet, 10 more ships joined with the 20 we’d had, while another 10 stayed behind to alert the Federation if the Kinetice invaded a second time. They’d been scattered across the system, unable to escape the planets they were docked on, until we came.

Not a large increase, but it should be able to handle our next stop—where we intended to double the fleet from 30 to 60 if no Federation ships had been hunted down. We’d depart in 3 days, both to give the normal troops a chance to rest and recover, and to refuel and resupply.

Karl wanted me to interview for a humanitarian story for some major news program, though he gave me the option to decline. I did, and we told them that for the time being I wanted to stay focused on the mission and my upcoming sojourn to the 3rd Floor. I knew they wouldn't accept that kind of thing indefinitely, but Karl and I agreed that deferring such public appearances until after the liberation of Erkolls was an acceptable compromise.

Early in the second day, Edwin contacted me. Apparently, an attempt to resupply the Firebrand fleet’s personnel with restorative pills and other consumables had met with disaster. They had managed to retreat with the supplies, but not before several lives were lost. So, he wanted me to use the Dimensional Gates and bring the supplies myself.

I was about to balk, but then Edwin said that since the most reliable method by far to transport such supplies through Dimension Gates was a Spatial Storage Ring, I would be given one in exchange for cooperating with this and future resupply missions.

I instantly agreed. I’d learned some time ago that Spatial Storage Rings were a Big Deal. Even a White grade one could hold much more than my old Spatial Compression Pack. Like the Class Evolver bead, they only ever dropped from the Tutorial, but unlike the Class Evolver they could also be crafted, though it took high skill and rare materials.

Even factions like Grosstin and Shumba weren’t able to hand them out like candy to their best contractors, or even all high ranked permanent members. They were the ultimate status symbol of Area 1. And Edwin was forking over one for not just me, but Mewi too. He had finished his own first system liberation roughly six hours after mine, which was impressive considering it held one more planet than mine had. But his fleet had ran into the same supply problem mine had soon after.

Apparently the opposition thought logistics would be the weak link in the operation. Well, they were in for a rude awakening. Edwin was even footing the bill to teleport me to Satslik and back. The ambushers still tried, but retreated quickly when they realized they were up against the special team members this time. The Firebrand set out for the next system barely behind schedule.

It would take another 3 days to get there, early during which time Bruzigan called for a full meeting of the team in the virtual space. He explained that he wanted us to meet up roughly once every real-world week, even if there wasn’t much to go over, so that we don’t get too used to being separated. However, this was the earliest chance I had to let Bruzigan know that I had already reached 105 Intuition.

“As I thought, your attribute growth from fighting Kinetice is the fastest out of any of us,” said Bruzigan, “you’re the only one fighting without a support squad. Your build may be extremely well suited to unleashing incredible damage by yourself, but if you start to feel that fighting against the Kinetice alone is getting too dangerous, let me know immediately, understand?”

I nodded. “Yessir.”

“It’s too early to start briefing you and Mewi on the 3rd Floor, so for now all I’ll say is that the next time you make a supply run, Edwin will have a certain spell formula prepared for you, one that will be vital on the 3rd Floor.”

“Will Mewi be learning the same spell?”

“Probably not,” said Bruzigan, “he should be able to make do without it because of his Innate Trait. Not to mention, it would take him quite a bit more AP to learn this spell than you will.”

“A mind manipulation spell then,” I said, “one with a similar effect to the trait that makes Mewi endearing to people? Hmm...I’ll trust you for now. Because I do believe in him. If he feels he’s up to trying for Extreme on the 3rd Floor when the time comes, knowing what you’ve told me, I won’t object.”

The second system on the Firebrand’s itinerary, Kolisot, had 12 planets, but the Kinetice’s numbers on each individual planet weren’t much greater than at the last system. This time, though, they counterattacked the fleet when supplies began to run low. I accounted for ship after Kinetice ship, and the Federation crews were definitely way more competent at their own boardings than NPCs in a video game would be.

Mostly thanks to the Firebrand, few Kinetice ships came even close to being able to board one of ours. This time, I spread my AP gains in an even ratio across all stats, two AP into magical attributes for every one into physical attributes. I was getting scary strong scary fast.