Chapter 150: Damage

The cockpit of the ship was still filling up with acrid black smoke, and to make matters worse we couldn't see out of the front because of all of the dirt that had suddenly been scraped up onto the viewscreens. 

"We need… To get out of here," I said, making a move to get up from the seat that Yr'Arl had levitated me into. 

But as I put my hand down onto the armrest to give myself some leverage I ended up crushing it right underneath my palm. It crumpled up like a can of soda underneath a heavy boot, completely flattened. 

Submersing myself in my own manna stream seemed to have made my struggles with power control even worse. 

<What did you expect was going to happen, idiot,> BB snapped, his voice was weak and wobbly. Honestly, he sounded like he had some kind of a hangover. 

<Not far off what I would imagine a hangover would feel like, to be honest. More like a Manna overdose, though. Please don't make us do something like that again. For a start, it wasn't exactly very fun, and for a second it's incredibly dangerous. I'm surprised you haven't ruptured something. Again.>

From how serious BB was being I knew that I'd come dangerously close to doing something seriously bad. But it had been necessary, and in the short term at least it had saved our lives. 

Considering the warnings had left my system display I was pretty sure that I was safe for now. 

"You are correct, Squadron Leader Jacob Lyre, the smoke is beginning to reach hazardous levels," Yr'Arl said, devolving into another coughing fit as he finished his sentence. "I do not have the strength to levitate you this time, however. You must walk. The ship is damaged enough already that I do not believe it will matter." 

I agreed with him. This ship had been utterly totalled, and even if it hadn't been there was no way I was using my manna to power it again, so it would have been as good as useless anyway. 

With my leverage broken, I simply leaned forward and stood. 

The metal under my feet cracked and groaned ominously as I let my weight settle on it. I swallowed hard, fearing the worst, but the material seemed to just about hold under the strain. 

"Yr'arl, you should leave first. Let me know when you're clear of the ship. I don't want to bring this whole thing down on the both of us if I start moving, okay?" I ordered my companion. 

It only made the most sense. Yr'Arl could move around with ease, not having to worry about the damage that his overpowered footsteps might do as he passed from one area to another. But for me? Just shifting my weight from where I was standing could do untold damage to the ship that we were still inside. 

I was fairly certain that I'd be able to survive the ship caving in on me, but with all of the energy that was being thrown around, I didn't know if the same could be said of my companion. 

Fortunately, Yr'Arl was the sort of person who listened to orders, even if he did disagree with them. 

He rose up from his chair carefully, wincing slightly as he put his weight onto one of his legs, and then hobbled out of the cockpit. 

I could only imagine that he was injured somehow in the crash, and even though this hadn't entirely been my fault I couldn't help but feel some guilt at the part in it that I had played. 

A few moments passed and then, through the echoey confines of the ship, I heard Yr'Arl's voice call out "I am now clear, Squadron Leader Jacob Lyre." 

I took a deep breath, and then I took my first step. 

The floor of the ship deformed under my shoe like play-doh deforming under the heavy pressure of a toddler's index finger. 

It was strange as if the thing that I had stepped onto wasn't even metal, but the structure of the ship seemed to hold. 

I took another step, the same effect, this time accompanied by a few unhappy groans throughout the superstructure of the vessel. 

<I would suggest running,> BB said in my mind, sounding as if he had recovered somewhat. <Running very, very quickly.>

I swallowed again, if something were going to go horribly wrong in my escape attempt this would be it, but I didn't have any choice. 

I took off at a sprint, my feet slapping the ground heavily with every stride. 

My feet punched through the ground of the ship with every step, but I was moving my legs fast enough that by the time the ground had been pulverised into atoms under my step I had already stepped away. 

I was going to make it. 

The world blurred around me as I moved faster and faster. Without using my powers, just relying on the increased physical prowess that exposing myself to the star-like properties of my own unbridled manna store had given me, my mental state wasn't being bolstered by my enhanced cognition. 

That was probably why I came screaming out of the ship's end door at incredible speeds and, for a few seconds, just kept running. 

My feet pounded through the torn up dirt and mud left in the wake of our sloop's chaotic crash landing, churning up the ground even further. By the time I'd realised what I'd done, I was already a couple of hundred meters away from the smoking wreck, big footholes in the ground from where I'd sprinted across it. 

The ground of the planet seemed to absorb my footfalls better than the ground of the spaceship, but that didn't mean I hadn't made a mess of things. 

<That'll be because we're on a whole planet instead of just a spaceship,> BB intoned sagely, <there's more landmass to absorb the energy of your steps. Easy science, really.>

That honestly made a lot of sense and made me feel a bit better about being on a world instead of a ship. 

Now we just had to figure out what world we were on.