Tutorial [III]

THUD!

A deep hollow thump rolled through the iron bones of the Wanderer-7 as the chemical thrusters fired down on the mezzanine, everyone braced.

Harper clutched her station and Camila squeezed her eyes shut.

Elena watched out of the corner of her eye with bitter spiteful expectation, waiting for the violent jerk of an amateur stalling an attitude thruster.

…It never came.

The moment the thrusters fired, that familiar pull bloomed in the small of Leo's back.

He didn't fight it.

His fingers didn't white-knuckle the cradles. They rested there lightly, his palms making tiny millimeter-wide adjustments that looked almost lazy.

'Easy… Easy…'

And the battered twenty-thousand-ton civilian hauler began to dance.

PSHHT!

A burst from the starboard nozzles and the Wanderer-7 dipped its wing and rolled forty-five degrees.

WHOOSH!

Its scarred belly slid two meters over a spinning asteroid the size of a two-story house!

"Whoa—!" Harper gasped as the pitted cratered rock flashed past the canopy, so close she felt like she could reach out and scrape the frozen dust off it.

'Two meters,' Leo thought. 'Could've done one.'

PSHHT! PSHHT!

Two micro-bursts from the ventral fins and the bow tipped up as a cluster of hull fragments whipped past underneath them like a school of steel fish.

CLANG!

Something small pinged off the outer plating.

[Micro-debris impact detected. Damage: Negligible.]

[This unit flinched anyway.]

"That counts as a collision?!" Harper yelped.

[Negative… That counts as rude.]

Then, from station one, a sharp ragged gasp.

"Hah—!"

Chloe's eyes snapped open.

For one second, there was nothing but chaos.

Stars wheeling across the glass, rocks screaming past close enough to touch, a tight harness crushing her chest, a deep thrumming roar in the deck beneath her, and a blue glow everywhere.

Her pupils flared crimson for a heartbeat as her new senses flooded in all at once… every heartbeat on the bridge, the hot iron smell of the reactor, the thick sour fear in the air.

"W-What's happening?!" Chloe shrieked, thrashing against the straps. "Where are we?! Why are we moving?! Are we crashing?!"

"Chloe! Hey, hey, hey!" Harper twisted in her harness and grabbed the smaller girl's wrist. "You're okay! You're safe! Leo's driving!"

"Leo...?"

Chloe froze as the memory came back all at once.

Her fangs, his warm skin, the taste of copper and a body pinned underneath hers on the cold floor… All the color drained out of her face.

"Leo… Is he… Did I… Is he alive?!" Her voice cracked into a squeak. "Did I kill him?!"

Up on the dais, without taking his eyes off the debris, Leo raised his voice.

"Still got most of my blood, Chloe! Hold onto something!"

"Most of—?!" Chloe let out a strangled whimper and clamped both hands over her face.

"Atta girl," Harper laughed, squeezing her wrist. "Breathe… Freak out later, We'll all freak out together!"

"Leo! Obstacle, dead center!" Ms. Tachibana suddenly called out, her knuckles whitening against her console.

A crumpled titanium solar array came tumbling across their bow in a chaotic unpredictable spin.

It was fifteen meters long and bristling with broken razor-sharp masts while spinning straight at the canopy.

"Oh my god, oh my god—" Camila whimpered.

Leo didn't blink.

…His pulse stayed at seventy beats per minute. The pull in his lower back tugged hard to the left, and his left fingers answered with a soft rhythmic pulse against the crystal.

'Not over it… Not under it… We need to go through it.'

PSHHT!

The forward port thruster fired a micro-burst, killing their forward momentum.

PSHHT! PSHHT!

The ventral nozzles kicked the stern upward as the Wanderer-7 pirouetted on its central axis with liquid impossible grace…

And threaded the needle straight through the hollow center of the array's support frame.

SCREEEE!

The twisted girders screamed past within centimeters of the blast glass but not one of them touched the hull.

"Dios mío..." Camila breathed.

Her hands slid away from her face as she stared upward in pure awe.

"He's... he's not even braking."

"He isn't calculating trajectory," Jin-Ah muttered, her fingers frozen over her keys.

Her analytical mind was struggling to reconcile the speed of what she was seeing with the ship's sluggish processor.

"His reaction latency is zero point zero two seconds. He's feeling the hull's inertia directly through his nervous system… That isn't textbook piloting at all, he's moving on pure intuition."

Up on the dais, Leo was completely lost in the zone.

The hum of the ship… The cold vacuum… The spinning rocks and the dead metal…

It all made sense.

Every time an asteroid threatened their path, his spine told him where the open space was.

A soft roll here.

PSHHT!

A sharp diagonal burn there.

PSHHT! PSHHT!

A tumbling fuel tank and he slid under it, a cluster of rocks came and he corkscrewed between them.

VWOOM!

He cut through the debris belt like a scalpel through flesh, pushing the rattling old hauler right up to the edge of its structural limits without overstressing a single weld.

'More,' he thought, and a grin crept onto his face without his permission. 'Come on, old girl. Give me more.'

[Hull stress: 71%... 78%... 84%...]

[Master Captain, this vessel is held together by rust and optimism.]

[Please be gentle with it.]

"I am being gentle!"

[You are not.]

Harper burst out laughing even as her knuckles went white. "Oh my god, it's sassing him mid-flight!"

Down at station six, Elena had gone completely still.

Her muffled protests had stopped. 

Her jaw was still clamped behind the black band, but her icy blue eyes were wide, tracking the flawless impossible chain of burns with a shock that rattled her pride down to the foundations.

'How...?' she thought as a cold bitter chill settled into her chest. 'How is he doing that?! That maneuver needed a three-axis stabilization calculation that takes our lab supercomputers five seconds to model but he did it in a heartbeat!'

She watched the broad steady line of Leo's back framed against the glowing displays.

He didn't look like an uneducated mechanic scraping grease in some back alley…

He looked like a pilot who'd spent decades running blockades through hostile planetary rings.

'It's good...' The thought surfaced against her will, bitter as ash on her tongue. 'It's disgustingly good... But why him?! If manual flight can be mastered like this, why did a stray like Leo get the Captain's clearance?!'

'Why wasn't it me?!'

Up ahead, the last ring of debris loomed… a dense wall of tumbling rock with one gap that was opening and closing like a mouth.

Leo watched it.

… Open… Close… Open…

'Now.'

PSHHT… VWOOOM!

It only needed one final half-roll.

The Wanderer-7 slipped through the gap a heartbeat before it slammed shut behind them, and shot out of the debris field into the calm velvet expanse of open space, leveling out smooth as glass.

FLASH!

The blue corridor vanished from the viewport, leaving only the cold quiet sea of distant stars.

[Waypoint Alpha-1: Cleared!]

[Course Time: 112 seconds (Target: 180)]

[Collision Count: 0]

[Evaluation Grade: S-RANK (Flawless)]

[This unit had calculated a 71% chance of crashing and this unit is pleasantly inconvenienced.]

For one second, nobody said anything then the mezzanine exploded.

"HELL YEAH, LEO!" Harper roared, punching both fists as high as her harness would let her. "That was insane! You turned this floating pile of scrap into a fighter jet!"

"Woooo!" Camila was laughing and crying at the same time. "I thought we were dead like five times!"

"Six," Jin-Ah corrected, though she was smiling. "I counted."

"Magnificent, Leo," Ms. Tachibana said, a warm proud smile on her lips as she clapped lightly from her seat. "A truly remarkable display of spatial awareness."

Even Chloe peeked through her fingers with her wide green eyes shining. 

"...You're really amazing, Leo," she whispered.

Leo blew out a long breath and peeled his sweaty palms off the cradles.

The electric prickle faded from his arms, leaving a dull satisfying ache in his muscles. 

He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and a slow grin spread across his mouth.

'Okay,' he thought. 'Okay, that was sick.'

Then a crisp golden chime rang in his head.

[Ding!]

[Tutorial Milestone Achieved: Flawless Flight Execution!]

[Survival Points +5]

[Current Balance: 5 / 1,000 SP]

Leo stared at the gold ledger hovering in front of his eyes.

'...Five?'

He kept staring at the number, caught somewhere between pride and pure exasperation.

'Five points out of a thousand?! For an S-Rank zero-collision manual flight through a death maze that almost gave six people a heart attack?! How the hell am I supposed to hit a thousand at this rate? Am I supposed to run two hundred obstacle courses just to spin the wheel once?!'

"Five?!" he said out loud. "AI, that was flawless and you're giving me five points?!"

[Survival Points reward survival, not showing off.]

"I survived!"

[You survived a tutorial… Congratulations… Kittens survive tutorials…]

Harper wheezed so hard her harness creaked and before Leo could argue with a ceiling, the AI moved on.

[Tutorial Module Two: Salvage & Resource Deconstruction]

[Vessel Class: Wanderer-7 — Tier-1 Derelict Civilian Hauler]

[Current Restrictions:]

[• Fuel capacity locked at 32%]

[• Life support capped at 24 hours of continuous cycling]

[• External hull reinforcement unavailable]

[To remove these restrictions, the vessel must evolve to Tier-2.]

[Unlocking extraction equipment: Tier-0 Pneumatic Salvage Grapple]

CLANK!

Beneath the forward observation glass, on the ventral hull, a heavy bay door slid open with a grinding screech of unlubricated metal.

SKREEEEK!

A long telescoping magnetic boom extended into the vacuum, tipped with a three-pronged claw that hissed as its seals pressurized against the cold. 

A faint translucent green cone of light flickered on, projecting out toward the nearest cluster of drifting junk.

[Objective: Target floating wreckage and fire the Salvage Grapple.]

[The Foundry Core will automatically break down retrieved matter into base materials.]

"Finally," Leo muttered, narrowing his eyes. "Let's see what this scrap's actually worth."

He reached for the auxiliary targeting console on his right.

A crumpled metal plate, probably part of an old satellite chassis, was tumbling lazily through the vacuum about eighty meters away. 

He lined the green cone up over it and hit the trigger.

PSSH-CHUNK!

The grapple shot out on a steel-braided tether as the claw slammed into the satellite plate and clamped tight around its edges.

[Target secured… Reeling in…]

The high-torque winch groaned as it dragged the twisted metal toward the ship's ventral intake chute.

CRUNCH!

The plate disappeared into the deconstruction furnace below.

Deep in the belly of the ship, the Foundry roared to life. 

A vibrating rumble ran through the deck plates, and the sharp smell of superheated metal drifted through the vents.

Two seconds later, a prompt flashed across Leo's console.

[Deconstruction Complete!]

[Acquired: Low-Grade Structural Alloy x3]

[Acquired: Trace Silicon Residue x1]

Leo pulled up the turret's installation tracker.

[High-Grade Alloy: 0 / 50]

[Conductive Copper Conduit: 0 / 20]

He blinked.

"...Zero?"

He tried two more… A severed structural beam and an old comms antenna housing.

PSSH-CHUNK! PSSH-CHUNK!

The grapple fired, dragged, and fed the scrap into the furnace. 

The ship groaned under the effort, its tiny winches straining against the floating iron.

[Acquired: Low-Grade Structural Alloy x4]

[Acquired: Low-Grade Structural Alloy x2]

[Acquired: Frayed Copper Wiring x1]

[High-Grade Alloy: 0 / 50]

[Conductive Copper Conduit: 0 / 20]

Leo stared at that pathetic line.

0 / 50.

A heavy cold weight settled in the pit of his stomach.

"AI," he said slowly. "Why is the turret still at zero?"

[Clarification: Civilian satellite scrap produces low-grade material… S-Rank military fabrication requires high-grade alloy and pure conductive copper.]

[You are attempting to build a rifle out of soda cans.]

"Then why'd you let me grab three of them?!"

[It is a tutorial, you had to learn somehow… The low-grade alloy is not wasted. It can be used for basic hull patching.]

Leo pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

It had taken them almost fifteen minutes to find, aim, fire, drag, and process three pieces of floating junk and the turret hadn't moved an inch.

He looked up at the crimson timer pulsing in the center of the canopy.

[CRITICAL WARNING!]

[Total Life Support Failure In: 13:18:42]

'Thirteen hours,' he thought. 'And we're fishing for soda cans.'

[Additional Information: Material Grades]

[Low-density civilian debris → Low-grade materials]

[Military wreckage, research installations, and heavy orbital infrastructure → High-grade alloy and pure copper conduit]

[Note: In inhabited sectors, refined high-grade alloy is used as universal currency between trade stations and mercenary guilds and in uninhabited sectors, all resources should be prioritized for vessel evolution.]

The bridge went quiet.

"Hold on," Camila said slowly, her eyes widening. "Inhabited sectors? Trade stations? Mercenary guilds?" 

She looked around at the others. "There are... people out here? Other than us?"

"Not people," Jin-Ah murmured, her face pale as she reread the panel. "It says inhabited but it doesn't say human."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

'Aliens,' Leo thought, and goosebumps crawled up his arms. 'There's already a whole civilization out here… and we just got dumped in their backyard naked.'

"So we're stuck in a cycle," Ms. Tachibana said, her voice tight as she leaned forward and dragged them back to the problem at hand. "To get better air and fuel capacity, we need to upgrade the ship to Tier-2 but to upgrade the ship, we need high-grade materials that simply don't exist in these little broken satellites."

"And we've got thirteen hours to do it," Harper added, all the cheer gone from her face as she clenched her jaw. "We can't just fish for soda cans in the dark, Leo… We need a motherlode."

Ms. Tachibana suddenly went still.

Her eyes unfocused, and the silver aura around her wrists flared bright.

"Sensei?" Leo asked.

"There's something out there," she whispered. "Behind the moon's dust cloud... a gravity well. It's too regular to be rock and too... symmetrical as well."

Her fingers flew across her console.

"The irradiated dust from the shattered moon scatters every sensor return that passes through it... We were sitting right in its shadow back in the debris field, so nothing could see past it but now that Leo's pulled us out into open space, the angle's changed—"

PING!

A sharp rhythmic ping went off on Jin-Ah's console.

PING! PING!

Her eyes went wide as she expanded a long-range scan across the main screen.

"She's right… Leo! Quadrant four. Something massive just came through the edge of the dust."

Leo leaned forward and linked his display to her feed.

Roughly forty-eight kilometers out, half-hidden in the swirling irradiated haze of the shattered moon, a colossal jagged silhouette drifted silently through the void.

It wasn't a satellite and it wasn't an asteroid either.

It was an enormous multi-tiered structure built from heavy dark-grey armor plates, with angles that didn't look like anything human hands would design. 

Long skeletal sensor spines reached out into the black like the ribs of a dead whale, and dying amber lights flickered along its docking ring.

"AI," Leo said sharply. "Identify that structure."

A golden-bordered objective tab bloomed across the panoramic canopy, visible to the entire crew.

[New Objective Detected!]

[Derelict Relay Station "Kestrel-9"]

[Classification: Tier-2 Communications & Logistics Outpost (Decommissioned)]

[Origin: Non-human]

[Builder: Unknown]

[Age: Pre-fracture]

[Estimated Salvage:]

[• High-Grade Structural Alloy… Abundant (150+ units)]

[• Conductive Copper Conduit… Abundant (60+ units)]

[• Heavy Scrubber Filter Cores… Life support overhaul viable]

[• Refined Deuterium Fuel Cells]

[Evolution Potential: Kestrel-9's core components will fulfill all requirements for Wanderer-7 to evolve to Tier-2.]

[Tier-2 Benefits: Life support extended to roughly two weeks and expanded fuel capacity.]

[Threat Level: UNKNOWN]

[Warning: Decommissioned installations frequently harbor dormant Void Parasites, rogue defense drones, or radiation hazards… This unit would like to stress the word "UNKNOWN."]