It was still dark when Heath made it outside the following morning, making him second guess the clock on his HUD, until Jenny Mae showed him the rotational data of the planet. He shrugged and set off. The darkness didn’t keep the guild from being just as lively as when they arrived, large lights flooding most of the major walkways as they got on with life.

  Shouting started up at the end of the street, and Heath had to duck to the side as a group sped past, carrying an unconscious body between them. Or Heath hoped they were unconscious. He shivered at the reminder that this wasn’t a vacation. The world outside the guild walls was nowhere close to settled.

  No one was in the workshop when he arrived to pick up his new outfit, so he took a moment to poke around. Most of the materials were leathers of one kind or another. From the softest suede he had ever touched to some pieces boiled hard enough to stop Copperfield’s saber. Plenty of the usual browns, but there were a few in the same lavender shade he had noticed from orbit. Evolved to camouflage in the grasses, presumably. There were a few finished works, the seaming so tight and even Heath knew he could attack it with a knife and still not remove any of the stitches.

  “See anything interesting?”

  He jumped a foot in the air as he whirled to see the Tailor behind him. Even with his Processing score higher than ever, he hadn’t heard her enter.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No worries. You seem smart enough not to mess with anything. Here,” she tossed him a bundle that had been sitting on a side table. “Put it on, let’s see.”

  He followed instructions, dipping behind a screen to change into the new outfit. This wasn’t another pair of coveralls for everyday on the ship. This was dungeon gear. Leather pants fitted almost uncomfortably tight, and a jacket that covered his whole upper body, a high collar set up to protect his neck. They thrummed with mana, resizing slightly to perfect the fit, and ready to turn a tooth or claw away from his ‘fleshy’ body. It was armor, and it was perfect.

  “This is great!” He walked back out giddy with the feeling he could take on anything.

  “Of course it is, I made it.” She still walked around, poking and prodding, but there was nothing left to fix. Eventually she nodded her approval. “Not bad work, that.”

  “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Just don’t die, kid. You’re one of us now.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He turned to leave but the Tailor called him back. “Hey, take this.” She tossed him one of the purple hides, rolled tightly and strapped for traveling. “For your mom. I know how hard it is to level when you don’t get anything new to play with.”

  Heath thanked her again before he left. It was more than he deserved, frankly, but he wasn’t about to turn it down.

  Unfortunately, he had to change out of his new outfit when he returned to the ship. It was time to work and for that, his old coveralls were best. He pulled out a pair of mag boots and the toolkit, and set to work. A few minutes later, Copperfield joined him where he was standing on top of the hull.

  “You know I still can’t believe we survived that,” he said.

  Heath grunted in agreement. He stood next to the mismatched metal sheets of their shoddy fix, recalling the damage underneath. If it had been the bridge instead of the crew quarters hit like that, none of them would have survived the decompression.

  Like a bandage hiding a terrible wound, their hasty patch job on the hull had to come off first. It had done its job, but it wouldn’t get them where they needed to go. Part of the hull was missing, sharp edges of torn metal lining the gouged hole. Heath shuddered at the remembered pain, it was more than just metal that had been damaged. The spatial expansion ships relied on struggled to exist when hull integrity was compromised. The Loon was lucky all of the crew quarters were still present. If they had spent argo expanding them for more luxury on their flights, the fight with the kaiju would have wasted the precious crystal.

  The next part was tricky. Heath and the Loon had let the others in on the new revelation about the ship’s status and they were hoping the ship might be able to cover for inexperienced repair.

  Conventional wisdom said enough mana could fix a ship from almost anything, at least enough to be serviceable, if not ideal. If Heath tried that now, it would be at least a year before they would be going anywhere. The process was so wasteful that you were always better off going to a yard, where someone with the right Skill could make the repairs seamless. They were aiming for a bastardized version somewhere in between Classed repair and pure mana.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  First, they layered on some of the plates every ship carried, with a mana-conductive substrate in between that added strength and just the slightest flexibility to a ship’s hull. It was expensive stuff, and dangerous. If any flaked off and ended up in their lungs they would be relying on the base Doctor to keep them alive. The two of them wore masks and worked in a tense harmony until the electric blue layer was complete and set. Then another layer of the hull plates. Repeat twice more to match the rest of the hull.

  Then came the sealant, and the reason they needed to be in atmosphere for the full repair. It wasn’t always considered a necessary step, but Heath was taking no chances with the Loon. An ounce of the reactive material was worth more than the rest of the supplies in the repair combined, Heath painting it on with a hand that only shook slightly. When it combined with the oxygen in the air around them, the liquid had a partial phase change that let it soak into each layer of the hull, anchoring and forming a bridge for the argo circuits in the rest of the ship to regrow across the patch.

  Heath took as deep a breath as he could manage through the mask and settled in for the final step. He had a full mana pool, and he expected it would take the entire thing and then some, every day for the next two weeks before the repair was fully set.

  He activated [Hull Strength].

  The dual-purpose skill was meant to both reinforce during combat, and repair when necessary. Heath leaned into the latter application. Keeping the mana from rushing out like it wanted, he forced it into a trickle, saturating layer by layer, pushing it throughout the entire patch.

  He felt like he was floating when he finished, swaying alarmingly until Copperfield caught him by the shoulder. The Swashbuckler sent his own [Ship Maintenance] Skill to the task. Not as directly useful but the Loon grabbed the energy and cycled it through her systems, working to flush the argo circuits and start on their regrowth.

  “Not a bad day's work,” Heath said.

  “Aye, Captain.”

  **********

  “And then, we blasted that fucker right in the face.” Copperfield helpfully mimed the battle as he recounted the story of their first delve. “Bear was tough to take down, but we did. Used everything we had.”

  He sat back down to general sounds of approval from the locals. Heath had been perplexed by the existence of a job hall in a guild base, but the imperial regulators cast a long shadow. The building functioned less as a labor market and more as a bar and meeting area for any off-duty explorers. A roster lit up one wall, displaying every active mission and who was off-planet or out hunting.

  “That’s how it should be,” one of the guilders said. He gave a hearty slap on the back to Copperfield and refilled everyone’s cup. One of the local berries fermented into a shine that fell just the wrong side of the drinkable versus poisonous divide. A fact one of the Chefs had taken as a personal challenge as they tweaked their process and recipe.

  Things got a little fuzzy after that, but Heath went to bed with a smile. He woke up with a frown, cursing the tiny berries and their deliciousness, but that was how life worked sometimes.

  Day by day, the Loon improved. With the hull healing, Heath sent a full mana pool into it each day, recharged, and then worked on the rest of the smaller problems. Jenny Mae and Copperfield did the same, providing as much healing energy as they could spare. Heath even caught Emerald using their Skills a few times, before convincing the older spacer to take a break. It was touching in a way he would never say out loud that their resident grump was willing to suffer the backlash of a crippled skill to help get the Loon back in shape.

  In between forcing them all into combat training, Ekaterina helped as well. Mostly cleaning up manually since there was no mana to spare on the least important application of [Ship Maintenance].

  For the first time since they left Nurim’s Rest, Heath felt like he could breathe.

  Until Jenny Mae and Ekaterina walked up to their usual dinner table in tandem. A beaming smile and neutral glare were the first hint. Jenny Mae holding her pad in one hand while balancing her food in the other was the next.

  The Administrator dropped her tray at her seat but stayed standing, practically bouncing up and down with excitement.

  “Team, I’ve got news.” She turned her pad around to display a picture of a lichen-covered rock face. “One of the squads working planet-side just found this. It’s a mid rank-one dungeon. They ran it and said there were no big surprises. Just a perfect, straightforward monster fight. Eight hour cycling time.”

  She swiped her finger across the pad, bringing up a new image. This one was a map, showing where the dungeon was situated, a couple of continents away from their current location. Not the poisonous one, but Heath wasn’t sure about the rest.

  “I already asked Jeremiah. He says we’re welcome to delve it, since there isn’t anyone that low level on the expedition. Great, right?”

  Wrong. Heath felt dread pool in his gut as he envisioned going into a dungeon. They had only barely recovered from their last foray into what should have been something they could handle.

  “I don’t know.” He ignored the way Jenny Mae’s face fell. “It’s too soon.”

  “That is why we should do it,” Ekaterina said, pointing at his face. “That reluctance will only get worse, the longer we let it sit. We need to do it. Many would-be warriors fall prey to the same trap, letting their fear become an obstacle in and of itself.”

  “Back in the saddle,” Emerald grunted. “Noble brat is right.”

  He turned to Copperfield, his last bastion of sanity. The Swashbuckler rubbed the back of his neck and looked to the side. “Seems like we should at least check it out. The Loon can handle a little flight in atmo right?”

  Outnumbered and outargued, Heath acquiesced. “We can check it out. But first sign of trouble and we bail.”

  That night he tossed and turned and envisioned every terrible thing that could happen to him and his team. Only the fact that the Loon didn’t have to enter let him suit up in his new armor the next morning.

  An opinion that was not shared. “For surely I am the one who most needs to conquer their fears by returning to action. And I, the only one of our number unable to do so.”

  “Sorry Loon. The entrance is too small. And the inside is like a standard biome, I think.”

  “No, do not apologize for my tantrum Heath. I understand. Perhaps one day my growth will allow me to accompany you into such places. Or perhaps we shall find more large dungeons to delve as we grow in power.”

  “Maybe both,” Heath joked. “Okay, wish me luck.”

  “Good luck. Though I do not think you need it.”

  With that, Heath went out to meet the others, all ready for the dungeon. Heath wasn’t the only one with something new, either. He recognized some of the rib bones on Copperfield’s mech armor had been replaced with some of the more aggressive beasts in a neighboring system, which some of the higher-leveled guild members were clearing out to allow them a better foothold to see what else was lurking near the unusual orange star.

  Jenny Mae’s scope had been upgraded as well, and Emerald was sporting their own set of new armor, somehow having found a way to create a matte green so dark it was almost black.

  “We’re ready,” Heath said, willing it to be true.

  “We are.” Ekaterina nodded, the sole member without any sort of new gear from the base. Though her stuff had been top of the line already, where the rest of them had scrounged and spent their savings to get to this point.

  “Let’s do it. Formation alpha.”

  The crew flowed around him in perfect sync, long months of practice paying off as they entered the dungeon.