Sofia tentatively selected yes and saw the new skill appear on her skill list, but other than that, nothing seemed to change.

  On Austin's end, however, things just grew more confusing. As soon as Sophia had accepted the skill, he was pinged with the request to convert the current call from audio to hollo. How the heck that girl managed to somehow gain access to holographic capabilities was beyond him, and he really really wished he could use one of his bots to see what the heck was going on. But regardless, the call was probably his best bet to finally figure out what the heck was going on with that village. So, he accepted the call and got an error notice.

  He hadn't forgotten about it, he had just, honestly, he had been purposely ignoring it. His old avatar file, along with most of his original database, had been corrupted after his first loss. And of what hadn't been corrupted, he had to be very cautious of what he kept of it, as his memory system had been badly damaged at the time. After he had repaired himself and had started setting up needed infrastructure, he had made backup copies of his onboard database just in case something important was ever damaged again. Thankfully, his archive was still intact, though offline due to the lack of both processing power and literal power. He had only booted it up once shortly after coming back online when he was getting the first reactor up and running to make sure it was still intact. The diagnostic showed very little data corruption in it, and he was pretty sure he could restore the data. If not, he had backups elsewhere.

  He idly wondered if any of his old fail safes had activated, but since he had purposely deleted that data from his memory banks, he had no clue what they were, only that they existed. He received a secondary ping request and realized he had wasted almost 3 seconds in idle thought. So, he decided to try and just use the corrupted avatar.

  With a sputtering start, his avatar came to life in the middle of the village before stabilizing and reforming. Simultaneously, something in one of the locked files kicked in, filling in and repairing the damaged sections of code for his avatar.

  Once upon a time, this avatar had simply been that of a tall, thin human male with a mix of Australian and Asian features, black hair, black eyes, and no other real distinguishing features of note other than a pair of glasses. In a standard issue Navy uniform. Which was a Gray two piece outfit, a skintight black suit with a simple short sleeve jacket to cover the hookups for life support on the upper shoulders and lower back. It had a belt, but that was more to secure the jacket to keep it from flopping around in 0G. The outfit itself was designed to be quickly and efficiently unzipped and folded down the jacket, forming a semi skirt allowing access to the life support connections on the back. With the vacuum suit having a connection point on the collar for any standard helmet, allowing ease of use and safety in emergency situations. All anyone would have to do in an emergency would be to put on a helmet and find a safety harness to sit down in. Most harnesses even had built in helmets in case the user didn't have one.

  The Insignia patch on the left shoulder, where rank was usually denoted, had been replaced with a digital hazard sign. Which was his one and only attempt at a little bit of humor with his avatar. His new form, however, was well, it was far different from what he was used to. The left leg from the knee down was just a digital frame of the skeleton's most animations, or holographic rigs used. The foot was completely gone instead, the small shaft of the left leg rounded down into a point to where the foot should have connected to the ground. His right leg was still perfectly intact, though there were several sections of the design missing, making it look like the vac suit had been torn or even punctured in several places. Upon his chest, the jacket was almost completely gone, only its left side hanging on by a single shoulder, the belt torn off at the bottom. The old digital hazard logo was still pressed on his left shoulder. His upper torsos right side looked like something from a trauma ward there was no meat or blood, but the entire right side looked as if it had been blasted away, revealing a metal skeleton.

  Underneath that where the heart would be was a glowing blue orb, faintly giving off some form of a ethereal pixelated vapor. The right arm looked like a mix of the framework and the skeleton, ending in five sharp, metallic needle like fingertips. Cables and hoses ran from his back and seemingly disappeared behind him as if just out of frame. His face was mostly intact except for the right eye in the lower right part of the jaw. Where the right eye once was had been replaced by a synthinoid visual sensor. The lower right side of his jaw looked like something had tried to melt his face off, revealing the jawbone and teeth within. Austin looked around, surprised that he could somehow see through the projection, or was it some form of artificially generated space? He wasn't sure. His diagnostic programs weren't even detected, whatever this was other than the incoming source of data.

  Austan frowned at the almost macabre nature of his damaged avatar and found it more than a bit disturbing. And judging by the shocked silence and the tightening of grips on weapons from the many nearby guards, the humans didn't appreciate it either. He closed his avatar's eyes for a second before his form flickered and distorted. He was able to repair the damage to the lower right side of the avatar's jaw easily enough, but the damage to the torso seemed a bit harder to fix. Instead, he simply restored and redesigned the old jacket, so the right sleeve was long enough to cover most of the arm. With the jacket restored, it covered most of the disturbing nature of this form, at least he hoped so.

  “Sorry for that, I knew this form was in disrepair, but I did not know it was that bad.” Austin said as he looked around, his eyes glancing over the various guards. Though he did stop on one that was helping up a woman in a set of ornate robes who had fallen to the ground upon his appearance. He felt slightly sorry for the lady as he must have startled her far worse than he had originally assumed, judging by the small pool of urine forming beneath her. However, it was the small girl who was slowly approaching him that really caught his eye.

  His avatar's appearance softened greatly at her presence. She was slightly older but only by a few months, and with a few notable changes. But still the same little girl who stumbled her way into the remains of his ship and woke him from his who knew how long of a slumber.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Well, hello again. For the third time today, it seems we have found ourselves in quite a peculiar predicament, haven't we, young Sophia?”

  Catharine’s head was throbbing. When she saw the blue transparent figure beginning to form in front of Sofia, she had tried to cast Detect Spirit. Unlike the name implied, it wasn't actually meant to just detect spirits, lesser, true, or otherwise. It was meant to detect any ethereal entity, but the spell had backlashed the moment she cast it, and it had nearly knocked her unconscious. She looked up from the ground and saw something that she could only guess it had been, at one point, human, well, at least in form anyways, standing in the middle of the village. Catherine gripped tight to her staff. Thankfully, since it still functioned properly despite the damage to it, she just had to make sure she kept pumping mana into it to keep the spell going. She shakily tried to get back to her feet, helped by Frederick, but she wasn't sure she could stand at the moment. Whatever this thing was, it was hurt and hurt bad, but it still had enough power to completely ignore her spell. No, not just ignore it, beat it by its mere presence rebounding the spell with enough force to nearly knock her unconscious. Whatever this thing was it was way, way, beyond her.

  Catherine was trying to clear the fuzziness in her head. She needed to warn the villagers about whatever this thing was, but before she could, it had shot up and looked over at one of the many stingers before it was overwhelmed by the oncoming tide of the beetle swarm.

  “Damn it.” It grunted before turning its attention back to her and Sophia.

  “I don't know how you are able to contact me, but whatever power source you're using, we need to connect it to the turrets' power supply before they run out of energy.” Sophia turned to Catherine for guidance at Austin's statement, but she had no clue what it was talking about either.

  “I'm sorry, we don't know how we contacted you in all honesty. I believe it has something to do with Sophia’s magic, but I couldn't tell you what or how it works.” Catherine said withering under the confused look of whatever this thing was.

  “Can you demonstrate?”

  Catherine gulped as he continued to stare at her and cast the easiest and first spell she learned, a simple ball of light. The thing whatever it was inspected, the light spell for a few seconds its strange red metal eye spinning and extending as it looked at it.

  “Can you use this to generate electricity? Uh, lightning might be another word for it.”

  “Yes, I can cast Spark and Thunderbolt, but I am not in the best shape at the moment. Sophia can cast spark, although I can't state to how well, and at least one of us needs to stay here to maintain the barrier.” Catherine said, gesturing to the barrier surrounding them.

  Austin nodded before turning to Sofia, and after having her demonstrate a few times. He had his construction robot bring her a cable. Between the small girl's assistants and the beetle bot’s Power cell, they were able to keep the majority of the turrets active until the improvised power line could reach them. Though Austin still lost several turrets. It was still better than his original predictions, at least.

  With the power supply secure, he was able to activate his first surprise. While building a large scale shield generator was far beyond Austin's current capabilities. He had managed to find a few intact projectors on the section of hull he had found, but with a stable power supply, he was able to jury rig the five intact projectors into a crude shield array. It wasn’t too powerful, but it was more than enough to keep the monsters out, especially considering they had to tear down a wall to get the cord in.

  Austin's shield was far larger than Sophia’s and Catherine's barrier and was able to cover half the village. The surviving turrets were pulled into the barrier and continued to fire regularly. Unfortunately, most of Austin's aerial drones had been lost and with most of his Beatle bots and the majority of his robotic ants now stuck in the village Austin's production had all but come to a crawl at least the humans were safe for now. Austin tasked the remaining ants in the village with continuing the tunneling operations towards his facilities. Meanwhile, Austin began printing and assembling more ants normally, he would divide his production capabilities between the ant's equipment and general materials for various projects. He was just thankful he had a stockpile of processed resources, as the few ants he had kept behind, we're far from enough to fully restart his production capacity. But after three days of constant mass production of ants and nearly an entire supply room worth of supplies, he was nearly back to where he was before this whole mess started. He then began to redirect his robotic ants in production lines to other tasks.

  It took him nearly a full week of working on the tunnel to connect his facility and the village. During that time, he was in nearly constant contact with the village, or more precisely, the young girl Sophia. As she was the easiest to currently communicate with. Though he found the whole experience both enlightening. As he learned many things about the various races in this world, the nearby Kingdom and their roles. Cathren was a fount of knowledge about magic, which was apparently a thing here, and most importantly, they had informed him about what his current enemy was.

  Apparently, his opponent was called a dungeon of all things by the locals, as if this was some form of fantasy game. Apparently, these dungeons were massive magical constructs based around a large and complex magic crystal. Most of the time the dungeons were taken over and used by local military or adventurers as places to train soldiers. The locals had supposedly figured out various ways of teaching it to produce basic products they could harvest for resources in exchange for feeding it waste and biomass. The same way it converted biomass into monsters. This one had, apparently, as far as he and the villagers could tell, emerged somewhere in the wall of the valley. It had originally started growing outside the valley, but at some point, it had punched its way into it. But since the valley wall wasn't to particularly stable, it had, likely thought it was under some form of attack as it continued to tunnel through the wall, making it more and more unstable. Sensing a threat, it would likely try to strip as much biomass to reinforce its defenses as possible, leading to the run in with the villagers and Austin and the biological ants.

  As the most prevalent threat, it would likely assume they were the source of its perceived attacks. The situation was only made worse when the valley wall finally gave way.

  With this new information and the knowledge that they really only needed to hold out long enough for someone from the surrounding territory to take notice and send reinforcements.

  With all that said, Austin turned his attention back to eliminating or at the very least weakening the threat. The remaining turrets he had, while powerful, were too short ranged to use offensively. Even if he raised them on a platform to cut into the valley wall, they struggle to cut through the stone. They could still kill monsters or set fires, so he was building firing platforms for them anyway, as well as salvaging what he could from the damaged ones.

  The trebuchet he had built for the village had thankfully survived mostly undamaged, and he had put it to work delivering his firebomb since his Air Force was still being rebuilt, but without them, it made retrieving and disposing of the biomass of the creatures he killed far less easily.

  He had also set up tractor beam turrets that pulled creatures in and held them down while the guards killed them. Even if this task was far less efficient, it did appear to somehow help to strengthen them. After the creature was killed, it would be carted off and either stripped for its meat and materials or tossed into a pit to be burned. Using the underground tunnels as a beachhead, they began to set up multiple front lines to kill or dispose of any units. The sheer amount of scrap shell corpses Austin was processing on a daily basis was getting out of control, and he was running out of places to put their shells. On top of that he was building up more and more base material than he could make use of.

  But he knew with both sides slowly ramping up, something had to eventually give.