Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

The ship was sturdy but there was no way the internal walls would survive such a crash.

      Without even trying his primal power further served to heighten his reflexes and his extreme structural reformation was working to heal and enhance his body even as he tore it down. All of these skills were being guided by his evolved adaptive speed which was maxed to give him this crazy acceleration but was also serving to help his body adapt faster.

      That was gonna be the key. Training his body to adapt more quickly. He needed to gain tens of thousands of skill levels spread across some twenty-six skills and he needed to do it all as quickly as possible. Strength and speed were gonna be easy if somewhat monotonous. He just needed to find better ways to use them. The other skills were gonna be hard. His mind raced while his body responded instinctively to the extreme struggle that he pushed on it.

      Then he had an idea. He came to a stop, well he did but it required him to use a kinetic burst in front of himself pushed against a PSI construct in the shape of a wall. Once all that momentum was gone, he set to work building a series of PSI construct walls in a floating circle around him. The constructs were created by his energy and weren’t required to be supported by the walls or floors.

      That was the breakthrough that he had. He could now assert a greater amount of strain on himself so long as he was just bouncing between walls that were hanging in the air. No kinetic force should be transferred into the ship so that was a good thing. He had already worn the floor of his designated training area out. There were indentations from his feet and his most frequent paths were clearly worn down an inch lower than the rest of the room.

      Now though there were six floating walls hanging in the middle of the room. Each time he impacted one of them he bounced immediately across to another wall. It was virtually like flying since he was moving at a staggering speed. Perhaps not as fast as when he was running but each landing no matter that it only lasted a fraction of a second required his legs to absorb all of the impact of stopping and redirecting forty tons moving faster than any human rocket ship.

      With each impact he felt not only the physical strain in the form of a jarring sensation that ran up his body and micro tears in numerous muscles but all the strain on his PSI construct. The drain to his PSI energy was palpable and he was quickly exhausting his massive energy supply faster than it was refilling. It still took him seven minutes to do it but at that point he actually had to stop as his abilities failed him.

      It would only take five minutes for him to be fully recharged now but for a few minutes he could operate with only the ability of his base stats. So once again he took up running and leaping in as wild a manner as possible, trying to push his body to its limits. For the first time in hours, he had managed to drench his shirt with sweat.

      Lying there on his back upon the hard metal floor, he looked out one of the view portals and saw the stars around them. The fact that he could see them at all indicated the ship was between spatial jumps, otherwise nothing would have been visible outside. The spatial jump drive didn’t move them through space. There were no Star Wars-esque lights that suddenly streaked to indicate that the ship was moving faster than light. No, the jump drive simply caused the ship to be in a different location, although there did seem to be a minute passage of time from one end of the jump to the other.

      Jay found that within a couple of minutes all of his exhaustion was so completely gone as to make him question if he had even felt it in the first place. Pushing himself was going to be a challenge. The next idea that he had was to make the walls that he was jumping off of progressively smaller. This would force him to hit a target, while draining less PSI and allowing him to push harder physically.

      In the end Jay pushed himself harder than he had ever pushed. He realized that he needed to do the entire five hours of training on his own. Not because he didn’t miss his wives, children, and the rest, but because he did. If they were worth missing, then they were worth training for. For all of them only five hours would have passed even if essentially an entire year had passed for him.

      When it was done the results were impressive. He had been right. Pushing his Evolved Adaptive Speed had been critical to improvement. But on the negative side his skill increases had started coming much slower towards the end. He took one last glance at his skill sheet. He was content with the progress. He still had six days of this training which meant six years and six days of training with the others.

      All of his skills were now over one thousand and even if the skill increases were coming slower, he was still making progress. Well at least all the skills that didn’t require someone else to be there. Even his Iron Will had leapt, which was probably the only reason that he had managed a year of solitary confinement. He even managed to gain two levels, or maybe he should say that he only managed to gain two levels in an entire year. If that didn’t confirm that fusion was the true way for him to move