Reaching Mars was as simple as taking a shuttle down to the surface from the main orbital station.

  From there, Ye-in burned one of her fast travel uses to return to Seoul, while Mimi had headed to the Mars branch of Akashik Academy to see what resources she could get to experiment with, and Derek had decided to join her in going there, though he headed towards the summoning chamber instead, to see if he could finally start to earn some Aspects … starting with one that was a legendary pain in the ass to get.

  And no, it wasn’t legendary in power, just in acquisition difficulty. The one belonging to a Lesser Space Elemental.

  The power wielded by them could be significantly mitigated by removing all the things it could make you walk into, and by not moving all that much yourself, but neither would help him actually hit the darn thing, and it only had a single weakpoint, a base-ball sized core that it would be spending all its considerable power protecting, turning the world around it into a twisted mess of shattered reality, or so it supposedly felt.

  Granted, there were easy ways to deal with them, such as throwing out one’s soulbound weapon, putting the core between oneself and it, and pulling the weapon clean through the core to kill it in an instant, depending on the unbreakable nature of the bond between oneself and the weapon to make it fly true.

  But Derek didn’t have a soulbound weapon, or any of the prerequisites for the other techniques, for that matter. Which meant he’d have to do this the hard way.

  He quickly pulled up the summoning table to make sure he had everything right.

  Just like he’d remembered. Simple.

  Incidentally, that was also why the [System’s] arrival had nearly destroyed the world. Too easy to summon monsters, which had names that were too awesome, too enticing, with powers that would be wonderful if only you could grab the corresponding monster’s Aspect.

  The room he was in had been set up with the circles already carved into the ground from the start, to make this easier, all he had to do was find the right one, drop in a piece of measuring tape drawn from the academy’s stores, and pour in some mana, then wait for his pool to refill before triggering the summoning.

  But when the creature did appear, it wasn’t the Space Elemental itself that Derek saw, the room around him seeming to splinter, as though he’d been staring at its reflection in a mirror, one someone had subsequently taken a sledgehammer to.

  He froze, knowing that at any moment, the walls, floor, or ceiling could suddenly be right next to his head, in the direction he was moving, or the floor could bulge up and trip him up while the place he fell towards turned into a massive pit. Or a jump could take him into … well, actually, there wasn’t anything pointy in the room, he’d made sure of that, but it would have been a threat otherwise.

  So he stood there, glaring around, trying to locate the monster’s core, because while it couldn’t move, it also didn’t appear over the circle the way every other goddamn monster did.

  Parts of the room flashed towards him, seeming to fly towards him even though that was an illusion, yet knowing that “all that was happening” was the space between him and the thing in question collapsing away to near nothing …

  Fucking. Hell.

  Internally continuing to curse, Derek tried to search for the creature, but found himself staring at the same patch of wall in five different places, while large chunks of the room were outright hidden from his sight.

  Hellfire flashed out as his temper snapped, black flames racing outwards, turning into thin strands as spatial magic funneled it down certain paths, guiding it in directions that were completely unremarkable in all factors save one, Derek realized. Whatever else might be true … the monster wouldn’t be calling the fire down on its own head. No, it would be directing it away from itself.

  He raised his right hand up in front of his chest, feeling it scrape past a patch of floor that should have been, well, on the floor, its imperfections stretched and warped to be more like a cheesegrater than normal concrete.

  Derek winced, feeling the first drop of blood well up on the back of his hand, slowly, as though his body was only just starting to realize it had lost an entire layer of skin … but that wouldn’t stop him, even with him chosing to save his regeneration until either the end of the fight or him actually needing it for an actually dangerous injury.

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  Above his palm, a bright blue cylinder of light manifested, slowly spinning in place.

  [Magic Missile], the second spell he’d learned, a guidable projectile with limited range and low damage, but nevertheless the workhorse attack spell for unspecialized magic users for a good reason, the fact that it formed the basis for many more complicated works of magic only being one small part of that.

  More hellfire flashed away from him, once again directed down a handful of paths that doubtlessly avoided the monster’s core, yet in doing that, it revealed the core’s location and how space was being folded.

  A single thought sent the spell off … and it missed. Probably quite badly, but Derek had lost sight of it a bare few seconds after launch.

  So he fired again, then followed it up with a third wave of hellfire, finding himself wishing he had a cheaper way to do this; his mana pool was already half-empty.

  But half-empty was a far cry from completely empty, and he kept launching missiles … until the room snapped back to normal in an instant.

  How much mana left? Seventeen.

  Crap.

  But he’d won, and that was what mattered, for now. If every fight wound up that expensive, he’d be at this for a while …

  ***

  Twelve hours later, Derek found himself having gained the last dregs of XP needed to buy a new Aspect slot, but the actual Aspect itself had clearly decided against blessing him with its presence.

  Though perhaps he should see how Mimi was doing before turning in for the night, so he quickly found a map of the building and located the lab she’d said she’d be at.

  Yet when he reached it, the door was hanging off its hinges, revealing that it was looking even worse inside …

  “What the hell?” he asked, hoping, praying he’d found the wrong place, because if that what his ship’s engineer did to a reinforced laboratory, what kind of mess would she make of a spaceship?

  And then Mimi popped up in the doorway, waving for him to enter.

  “Oh, hey Derek, come on, I’ve got something to show you!”

  Goddamnit …

  “So, what exactly happened to this place?” Derek asked as he entered, glancing around at the wreckage of the lab, a bomb or some kind of explosive powerful enough that it might as well have been a bomb, had gone off in the far corner, while Mimi was leading him to the opposite side of the room, where she’d set something up on the only remaining intact table.

  “Oh, that happened yesterday. I told them I didn’t mind a damaged lab, and now I have it all to myself,” she happily informed him.

  Wait, they hadn’t even been here yesterda- … ah, that had happened before they’d even arrived here.

  “Look at this,” she announced as she flicked her hand at the empty space above the table, something there twisting, and beginning to unravel immediately, the very instant she took her hand away, yet that stopped the moment she began to scratch runes into the metal sheet atop the table. “[Order of Operations] is supposed to stabilize stuff I can’t get to while I’m working on other stuff. It’s supposed to be for damage control and stuff like that, but if I make something fragile that I should have to maintain and activate it, I have the time to stabilize it myself.”

  Derek nodded along. It certainly sounded like it’d be helpful, but he wasn’t quite sure how big a difference it would really make. And it must have shown on his face, as he found himself treated to a lengthy list of what she could now do with the ship, starting with the fact that she would now be able to fix literally every part of the ship without assistance, even the ones that would normally require another member of the crew to provide support, even if said support was most likely just consisting of standing there, holding something in place.

  “Sound great,” he finally said. “Let me know if you need anything you can’t get here. I’m pretty sure I can source some of the rarer materials.”

  “Thanks,” Mimi grinned back at him. “But they’re pretty generous with me here. Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’ll keep at it.

  ***

  Five days later

  Derek grinned as he slotted it and selected [Lesser Warp Space].

  Why was it so damn sho- … oh, right, he’d axed the flavor text in Aspect [Skills]. He’d get so many variations of those as he replaced them, and he really didn’t need to read the same damn thing four times in a row. Besides, they were normally quite a bit simpler, not really requiring a full flavor text to be properly understood.

  Anyway, what about his overall status sheet?

  Looking good, especially considering that he was still at Level 10. But he was still just Level 10.