Chương 484: Limitless Path Chapter Five Hundred Six

The bear-like creature snarled when the growl failed to produce the intended result and started stalking toward them. Bjorn began to unlimber his hammer, but Jaq stepped forward, holding up a hand to stop him. The Ascended calmly walked toward the bear, which read as level three hundred fifty, not even bothering to draw a weapon. Beth crossed her arms, curious to see what Jaq was going to do, but also knowing the crochety shopkeeper was likely going to show off a bit with his next move.

She wasn't disappointed, as the bear charged Jaq and he just walked forward calmly, waiting until the beast was swiping at him before he moved. And when Beth said he moved, he really moved, disappearing from their senses for a moment with his speed. He reappeared again behind the bear, flourishing a knife that only had a thin line of blood on the edge before stowing it.

The bear tried to turn but tore itself apart as it did so, the cuts Jaq made so fast and clean that the beast hadn't even processed it was cut at first, finishing Jaq's work when it tried to turn to bite him.

"Show off," Beth said, getting a sour grunt from the man.

"You could at least pretend to be impressed," he said with a sigh before leading the way deeper into the structure. They moved through hallways of endless ubiquity, everything made of the same materials and in the same shapes, set at the same distances. Even the wear and scuff marks were uniform; not like they had been engineered that way, just a ship that had been so standard, so regular in its operations, even the metal floors had worn in parallel ways.

They encountered plenty of beasts along the way, all of which were very easily dealt with. The team could kill anything they encountered with relative ease, not even mentioning Jaq, who didn't even require effort to kill things. It was also watching him in action that Beth realized that Jaq was a prodigy himself; she supposed she had known that to an extent, but, as the old saying went, seeing really was believing.

Despite, as far as she knew, Jaq still being an early Ascended, not even at twenty-five rebirths yet, he fought more like she would expect someone around Selene's rebirths and skills to fight. The commissar had multiple weapons skills at or above Grandmaster, including not just Daggers but also Swords and Spears. Those were just the ones Beth knew about or he demonstrated over the next hour, during which their group explored barely a tiny fraction of the ship.

He also demonstrated an uncanny ability to not only sense danger, but detect the weaknesses of enemies, even enemies that had stealth or various ways to hide. Beyond that, he was just… really damn strong. Beth had a pretty good idea of what the strength of most Awoken, Empowered, Enlightened, and even early Ascended was, and Jaq was well beyond those standards.

She wasn't exactly sure he could really go toe-to-toe with someone like Selene, and very likely not someone like Baelvyr, an Exalted who was far more warrior and brute than other Exalted she had witnessed, but she doubted there were all that many below, hell, forty rebirths that could match Jaq. It was even crazier to think that he was likely not showing his full strength, nor performing a role that he was particularly suited for.

Every time Beth had observed him in real action before now, he had taken on the role of a sniper, tracker, and ranged combatant. There was something almost eerie about watching him easily slice apart fairly powerful beasts with the casual ease of somebody out for a walk around the block. Beth was quite sure at least one of the weapon skills he was using was at Sage level, and she also had a high suspicion that many of Jaq's skills were at Diamond, and perhaps he even had one at Mithril.

The level of power he displayed was incredible, but it was the absolute ease with which he moved, and killed, while not being challenged, and appearing to be extremely bored and unconcerned, that told the bigger story. Once they had gone through a few fights and gotten their bearings, Jaq unleashed them on the rest of the ship, or, more like he didn't want them trailing after him as he did his own thing.

He disappeared down a hallway and the rest of the group split up, all going separate directions while relaying their discoveries, especially their mapping data, back to each other. They were all putting down relays for the communicators, so there was no issue with them maintaining connection, including back to the ship, which had a powerful enough relay to hit the CRA satellites scattered around Sol System and keep them fully connected to the network.

For low-priority communications, light-speed was fine, and they weren't on a high-priority mission right now, but the option for instant comms back to Earth or to another planet was there. Using it in a non-emergency would be a big no-no, however, and they were keeping their talk and data transfer local anyway, so it wasn't a big worry at the moment. Beth had opted to go exploring the other hangers, not all of which were as neatly laid out, and all four of which would need to be thoroughly searched.

There was not just a high possibility of dangers being present in the spaces, but there was a good chance that there was old equipment, ship parts, and maybe even the hull of a ship of some kind laying around. Well, the last one was pretty unlikely, as whatever brought this dreadnought here and had it abandoned in Jupiter's atmosphere didn't look like it had happened instantly; the occupants of the ship had had at least some warning.

Certainly, they had had enough time to get to whatever ships were in the hangers and take them, so the chance of Beth's team stumbling on an intact or mostly intact starship was pretty low. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility, considering the size of the dreadnought, and the fact that the crew did leave in some haste, that they could stumble on ship parts. Hell, if they could find even pieces of a small, or, even better, medium stardrive, they would hit the jackpot, and in more ways than one.

The stardrive was almost always the most valuable part of the ship, usually far and away beyond anything else, and sometimes more valuable than everything else that made up the ship combined. Therefore, finding a piece of a drive could be a massive windfall, in terms of if they decided to make use of their growing network of connections and sell it off.

Part of, or the entire, working drive could also let them get a great deal on a starship of their own; building such a ship was expensive, and the materials of the frame and hull had to be quite strong to withstand interstellar travel, and interstellar beasts and monsters, but it was still cheap compared to the drive. If they had even a partially working drive, they could save dozens of orichalcum coins, even multiple adamantine coins, on a starship.

That could put the purchase of one within their reach, especially if they spent more time exploring, or just had more big finds on the derelict. Beth was hopeful, but she wasn't counting her eggs before they hatched, as even in a rush, leaving a partial or full stardrive would be a big stretch. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

One of the first things she did find was a turret; not a complete one, of course, but it was the base and one of the three barrels of a maser? Or laser? Well, Beth wasn't a ship expert, but it was a fairly large turret system that had one-third of the barrel installed and, upon sticking her head in the base, at least some of the circuits and whatever runes and mana patterns were used in such things.

It wasn't complete by a long shot, but they could have somebody toss it in their storage item or space and sell it at a shipyard for at least a handful of mithril, if not a couple orichalcum, though she was guessing based on very little knowledge. Starship construction and upgrades weren't really in her wheelhouse, so she would have to leave it to people more knowledgeable for final prices.

She did have a very basic knowledge of a lot of things, as Selene and Alex had suggested she and her team get familiar with things to get better deals and know what was worth grabbing in the wild, but starship stuff was mostly a question mark for her still. There was also the issue of how they were going to split things; Beth wasn't really worried about her team, but having Jaq there, leading the expedition, and the one who had found the derelict, did complicate things.

She was going to have to talk to Jaq about splits and what they were going to sell and keep, but that could be done later. For now, they were just exploring, and that would likely take days, possibly weeks, considering the size of the ship. It was dozens of cubic miles of space to go through, hundreds of decks and bays and spaces they had to search, and there were plenty of beasts throughout all of it.

Even with their crazy stats and skills, exploring the place would take a lot of time if the whole thing were empty, and with the beasts factored in, they would definitely be in there weeks. The only good thing was that the derelict hadn't become a dungeon or special zone, and Jaq confirmed that after a few hours. He had scouted through a large section of the center of the ship, basically just running ahead and branching off from time to time while using a powerful scanning ability.

He was able to assure them there weren't any places that were instanced on the ship, meaning if they cleared the whole thing, they would only have to worry about a few spawns from mana density unless they got the ship's systems working. The reason they weren't going to claim the derelict as their ship, apart from the unimaginable cost of both repairs and then upkeep, was because it really was a derelict. There were several large sections open to space, with great rents torn in the hull from… something.

Whatever had done it, whether it was another ship or a beast or monster, it was long, long gone. Sol System was clean, or had been clean until the mana had built up and Earth was inducted to the Path. Beth examined one of the rents in the hull, using a mask Jaq had in the supplied in his ship to be able to breathe.

She didn't really need a spacesuit at this point, being tough enough to withstand the harsh environs of space for a time, and it was minimal enough damage that she could regenerate with her healing skill very easily. She wouldn't really want to fight in just her 'regular' armor in the vacuum of space just yet, but the only thing that vacuum really meant was that she needed an oxygen source.

She still couldn't go for very long without breathing, and holding her breath for a long time to explore seemed like a pretty damn risky thing to do. Anyway, the rent that she was examining went along multiple decks, stretched into the ship dozens of feet at the deepest, and was over a hundred and fifty feet long. The more she looked at it, the more leery she became, even though they knew the surrounding area was safe, as it had definitely been caused by a massive claw or talon ripping through the ship's structure.

They hadn't really found any bodies in the ship, the beasts wandering the place taking care of that, even in the sections exposed to vacuum or Jupiter's atmosphere, but it was still pretty obvious that it hadn't been a simple malfunction, or even a surrender, that crippled the ship. It had been attacked, long and hard, and likely had barely driven off the attacker or attackers before the people who could leave, did so.

The huge tear in the hull, and the next two she examined, had all the hallmarks of something that was trying to grapple with the ship, especially as several of the rents were near each other. Something the size of a jumbo jet, or larger, had tried to latch onto the ship and tear into it. There was a ton of more minimal damage showing the long hard fight; the massive rents had clearly come near the end, the ship's shields and defenses having been overcome and the armor plating weakened.

Still, whatever thing or things had been attacking the ship, they hadn't succeeded. Sure, they had crippled the old girl, but it was still relatively intact, though the engines had sustained a lot of damage. Speaking of the engines, and thinking about stardrives earlier, Jaq did check the derelict's engines and stardrives the second day. The good news, preliminarily, was that there was a good bit of highly valuable salvage they could get out of them.

The bad news was just that; they would be salvaging the engines and stardrive. Everything that moved the ship, which, again, were some of if not the most valuable systems on such a ship, were all in various states of damage after having suffered a lot of abuse. Jaq found that the stardrive had been fully burned out, the room the core was housed in being mostly gone, with a lot of damage to surrounding rooms.

It looked like the ship's crew, as a desperation measure, had forced a jump in less-than-ideal conditions and burnt the stardrive practically down to atoms. They would be getting very little salvage from that, which was a real damned shame, as a stardrive for such a dreadnought was of incalculable value.

Such ships were rare in far wealthier galaxies and clusters; to see one here, in the Milky Way, was almost unprecedented, which only deepened the mystery of what it was, where it came from, and just how they had wound up near Earth, of all places. The lesser engines, though calling engines one could sail an oil tanker down the center of lesser was a bit crazy, had sustained some significant damage, but they were in better shape.

Better shape meant better salvage, and it also went to show why even Jaq wasn't trying to claim the ship, at least, not claim it for use. Never mind the stardrive worth thousands of Dream Gold coins, just fixing the engines and thrusters would cost an amount that made Beth's gold-loving brain shudder and want to shut down.

Pile on the repairs to hull, exterior plating, burnt out electrical and mana systems, gun turrets and weapons emplacements, and far more beside and the bill was stacking up into Black Ruby or Dream Gold realm just for repairs. For a comparison, Beth currently had a couple orichalcum coins to her name; one Dream Gold was a hundred million orichalcum.

A hundred million orichalcum; not a hundred million copper or anything like that, a hundred million of a coin Beth had three or four hundred of after saving for years, years in which she sold massive amounts of valuable resources and treasures. Suffice it to say, they were salvaging the ship, and that salvage alone would make them all much, much wealthier.