Nina – First Class Mage – Quicksilver

  Why was I the one that had to go in after this creature? I knew protocol but clearly it didn’t want to come with us. The way it had been acting suggested that it didn’t even know protocol. That should be impossible as every system user was required to agree to the conditions the system imposed.

  Those conditions lined out the limits of what a user could and could not do. It also laid out all the protocols we were required to abide by. All of these had been the basis for every civilization in the galactic community. Preventing massive wars. Not all wars, just those that could lead to the loss of whole sectors.

  In return, every user got access to the power flowing through the galaxy. Power that came from a system so old, no one knew its origins. The same power that this ship seemed to be using, if only barely. Almost as if they had just figured out how to do so and were still learning ways to harness said power.

  It was why a small team had been dispatched to this sector in the first place. The Galactic net had found an unregistered drain in the area. It wasn’t big enough for it to be a swarm, but one could never know. Their colonies popped up randomly. Eating everything in a region as they attempted to grow enough to attack a connected system.

  The debris around the planet and remnants on the local network was enough information for everyone to figure out the fate of the team. This race had wiped them out. The call for help had not originated from one of them like we had thought. It had come from someone else. From this creature.

  To get answers, I had been tasked with retrieving them. My six tails flared out as I pulled on the network. Pulling power through me as I called up a spell from my spell book. The lines of magic flared on my suit as I touched the limp body. Line after line traveled from my suit and onto theirs.

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  Based on how slowly the magic progressed, the technology they were using was relatively high. Nearly on par with ours. My magic switched tactics, subsuming the other suit and taking it over rather than covering it. The progress instantly sped up, covering it within seconds. With that, I twisted the body around and cradling it to my chest.

  My body twisted around as I manipulated the spell and flew us down the hall and out the hole in the ship. Flying across the gap between ships. As I reached the Quicksilver, a door opened for me. Once I was inside, it closed. I stopped pulling power through my tails and canceled the flight spell and dropped the creature on the ground.

  Gravity took hold of it, and they made a nice thump sound. I didn’t care what happened to the creature now, I had already done my job and just wanted to get back to my meditation. A pair of prompts flared in front of me:

  Retrieval missions didn’t tend to pay much, but they were typically easy and fast. The swarm was where the danger was. Luckily, this had been a small swarm with only one queen. The reward was just enough to cover the cost of all the materials I had used in the fight as well as pay for the upgrade I had been saving to buy. Now I just needed to get to a core world. Maybe I could convince the captain to go there instead of the nearest civilized world.