"Let go of me already!" He shouted. "I don't know what kind of shit deal you made with him and quite frankly I don't fucking care about it! The moment his hands were laid on my sister should've been the moment all negotiations were off!" Sung replied by putting a tighter grip on him. "Ay ay ay AY I SAID LET GO OF ME YOU- !" With a backhand stab, Rin lodged his dagger right into Sung's eye.
Realizing what he's done, Rin's anger was quickly replaced with remorse. He tried to apologize to Sung, who instead freed up his other hand, yanked Rin's hand and dagger from his eye, and promptly threw Rin out of the tent, before quickly jamming a Noxiblock and Nanorep into his arm.
"Look, we really need all the help we can. Like it or not, it's our first time here, and we probably haven't even scratched the surface of the mechanics of this experiment, and everything else in here." Sung grunted. "Maybe his team's killed two of us, but now's not the time to be chasing after meaningless revenge, Rin. Think about the greater good he can bring if we let him live for a while longer." Rin stared. "But still-" "I'll let you stab him dead if he ever betrays us, alright?" Rin reluctantly agreed.
Miguel was still sleeping.
Crecket took some gauze to cover over his wounds from his fight with Rin, then opened a map on his interface. The map showed colored highlighted lines detailing borders of different factions, with icons on the map corresponding to their current location. "That's weird." Crecket wondered out loud. "Your starting area hasn't been claimed yet." "How else would we be camping here then?" Sung asked. "You don't really need to claim an area to camp in it, camps and campfires count as null-sec deployables." Crecket could see that neither of them understood a word he said. "Just go back into your spawn temple and activate your territorial claim." Confusion was still all over their faces.
"What spawn temple?" Rin asked, bewildered. "Wh- The spawn temple? The rock structure you walked out of the first day? It's right over there." Crecket pointed at the stone temple. "We didn't see anything quite like an interface terminal when we walked out of the temple though..." Sung pondered. "Really? It's a protruding octagonal cylinder right smack in the middle of the temple, it's honestly pretty hard to miss once you've seen it once."
The three of them walked back into the temple to search for the territorial claim device, it was simply sitting in the middle of the room where they spawned in, they had accidentally mistaken it for a short table back then. "So this is the one?" Sung asked. "Yeah, Sung flipped out the handle that laid flush with the top, and gave it a good twist. The handle swiveled around, locked itself with a loud click, and the territorial claim device slid back into the floor. The orb in the middle proceeded to light up, projecting a bright holographic map out into the dimly lit room.
The map showed several bands encircling the temple, the innermost layer shaded with a bright green, the outermost in orange, and the layer sandwiched in between in yellow. Horizontal bars were displayed below the map, indicating the available power and resources available within the territory. Everything outside the map was covered in a deep crimson, except for a tiny island of green left at the far right corner of the map. "That's my territory, though most of it's shrunk because I'm the last one left in the team and we didn't really bother building out the base." Crecket pointed at the tiny spot of green.
"Alliances usually open up the orange and yellow parts to alliance members, though you can't really see mine because it's shrunken by so much." He explained. "That's the Perimeter and the Outskirts, respectively. The green area's called the Core of your territory, where you have full permission to build anything within. Anything outside the perimeter's just neutral territories."
"Is that why the defensive structures've been grayed out to me when I was putting down the tents? Never thought we actually have to claim sovereignty." Sung asked while opening up the building interface on his own HUD. "Well, duh, you don't want the enemy plopping down mortars and whatnot right outside your door, right? That'd be broken." Crecket replied while flicking through resource heatmap tabs on the map. "As expected, there's not much resources around spawn... though there a moderate oil deposit just outside the Core zone... But oil extractors can only be built in Core zones."
"Then we just need to increase our area by a bit, is that what this "Control" number is for?" Rin pointed at the side of the screen, with the number 10 shown in bold under. "Guess so, the structures all increase power by a bit." Sung said. "I guess it's time we build a small base. Let's make a list of facilities we want first." "Or just use the blueprint mode to simulate a base before building it." Crecket suggested. He went ahead and selected a simple wall, and placed it randomly on the field, a translucent blue hologram appeared instead. "You can even store sets of items and paste them wherever you want... given of course you have enough power to support it and you're in the correct zones."
The three of them walked back out of the temple, only to find out that Miguel was miraculously still sleeping like a log. Rin went in and tried to shove him over and over, but still he couldn't wake him up. Defeated, he climbed out of Miguel's tent and shrugged. "Oh well." Sung said. "He'll probably be fine with whatever we build."
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"So, where do we start?" asked Sung. "Well we just start with the baseplate, and then we build stuff on top of it." Crecket said, gesturing at the ground with his hands. "Alrighty then... One baseplate... 100,000 nanites?!" Sung exclaimed, he checked his inventory - only 40,000 were left from the original 60,000. "Can we skip this baseplate?" He asked. "Well if you want to be limited to basic wooden walls and tents you could, but even the most minute services will require a baseplate to achieve." Crecket replied. Sung could feel the exhaustion by just thinking of the amount of logs they had to fell for the nanites. "We'll grind some more afterwards then." Sung said with a loud sigh.
A large blue platform appeared on the ground, spanning across the campsite and barely touching the tents placed roughly 10 meters from the tents. The campfire glowed bright red, indicating an overlap between the environment and the blueprint. They then surrounded the platform with simple gray concrete walls and topped it off with a roof, all steel reinforced. Sung took a step back and sized up the half-finished base. "Now we just put all sorts of equipment in there, and split a section off for the bathrooms. What do we need?"
"Ooh ooh! This uh... Sub-Atomic Disintegrator, sounds pretty useful yeah?" Rin rushed to put it in the simulated base. "Yeah but what does it do though...?" Sung asked while digging through the item menus. "Ah, here it is, it converts all materials to nanites... Can't we do that already?" "The ones built into our bodies are rather crude, they only convert with a rough 60% efficiency. These if I remember correctly get to around... 90%? 95%? I'm not sure, they never really wrote the specific numbers in its info." Crecket explained. The idea of getting more nanites per log made Sung a bit more relaxed, knowing that the extra nanites they need to build the base would at least be easier to farm.
They lingered around the
The Sub-Atomic Disintegrator, in particular, had a giant hopper at the top, feeding any sort of material through a bank of diamond-embedded pulverizers. The pulverized chips of material were then irradiated with neutrons in a high pressure environment and ionized with high-energy EUV lasers to pulverize atoms into its constituent sub-atomic particles, before separating them by chilling them to near absolute zero, condensing the quarks, now in a plasma state, into a fermionic condensate and the rest into a Bose-Einstein condensate. The fermionic condensate, or more popularly known as "nanites", was then heated up by a miniscule amount to resolidify into a cube of delocalized quarks, to be carried around and used by clones. The Bose-Einstein condensate, meanwhile, was stored in suspension in a quantum isolation container, to be used by a Sub-Molecular Asset Reconstruction Terminal and reintroduced into the fermionic condensate to form new atoms and matter.
By the time they had gone through the entire catalogue of machinery, the sun had already started to set, yet all they had placed was the Sub-Atomic Disintegrator Rin hastily threw in at the start. They were so engrossed at the catalogue that they had absolutely forgotten their original goal of planning out a base. With little time until nighttime arrives, they hurriedly included the Reconstruction Terminal, a simple storage unit, and a basic kitchentop set. Sung looked at the final tally and winced subconciously - 450,000 nanites. Even with the improved efficiency they'd get later on with the Disintegrator, Sung shuddered at the thought of the amount of work required to get such a large amount of nanites.
With no time left to explore further for other food, Sung and Rin returned to the lake to catch some more fishes, this time with a bucket of bait. They sat cross-legged right near the edge of the lake and waited for fish to take their bait. The silence of the night forest, again eerie, quickly got to Rin. "H- hey, Navis." Rin piped up, desperately trying to sound nonchalant.
"Hmm?" Sung replied lazily.
"You really sure Crecket wouldn't betray us?"
"Quite sure, yes."
"How? Why?" Rin tried to keep his voice down.
"Well, you could feel it too. His body, his entire team's, they were exceptionally weak, and their corpses when reprocessed into nanites gave more than what you two got fighting their other members."
"How did you-"
"I saw the logs." Sung interrupted. "Anything that happens within the shared inventory, gets logged on a text file."
"So that means..."
"He's got specific implants in him, which makes his entire build and playstyle rely on backstabbing, in any sort of frontal confrontation, he loses 100% of the time. In a sense, he can't fight us anymore. He's lost the advantage of surprise."
"But Miguel's still asleep at the campsite. Wouldn't he be able to launch an assassination on Miguel with us here?"
"Well, not really. Here's the other thing, I... kinda knew his sister. We were colleagues. They're not the sort of people to backstab others-" Sung hesitated for a bit, Crecket's sister did steal the clone pod technology from right under his nose. "OK, maybe not."
Rin wasn't convinced at all. "Promise me he won't do anything to us anymore."
"I promise. I'll take responsibility for the damages if he ever betray us."
"That's good enough for me." Rin still had his doubts, but seeing how much Crecket helped them while planning their base, he figured it was worth it to trust Sung's instincts.
Before long, they had caught an entire bucket's worth of fish. With his dagger, Rin hacked off a piece of ice on the lake, while Sung blew it into smithereens with the button on his knuckle dusters. "You should definitely name that ability." Rin said, astounded. "I'll think about it." Sung said dismissively while scooping up the ice into the bucket.
The fish, caught with a definitively less barbaric method, didn't have quite the fishy stench on it compared to the ones they caught last night, to the point where it could actually be considered edible food. The skin was still unbearably tough, but the meat wasn't so hard they had to gnaw on it either, instead it had a familiar flaky texture, albeit still rather dry.
While they feasted on the fish, a rustling sound suddenly came from behind Rin. With a jolt, Rin picked up his dagger immediately and pointed it right into the darkness. As the rustling grew louder and louder, his heart raced uncontrollably. A humanoid shape slowly emerged from the darkness. Rin's grip on his dagger tightened, his nails dug deep into his palm.
"Geez, drop it already." Miguel said with a yawn. "I can't believe it's night time already and ain't nobody had the bright idea to wake me up!"
The three of them looked at each other, before erupting into laughter.