Chapter 24 - Status Report

"You know," Emily said after everyone else cleared out, leaning against the mess hall table with her hip brushing his, "if Alpha Centauri really does break the cap, I need to rethink my whole build."

Luca looked up from the empty mug in his hand. "Only your build?" he asked. "That seems optimistic."

That got the smile he wanted, small and crooked and doing real damage to his ability to think straight.

"How bad is yours?" she asked.

"Oh, absolutely horrifying." He pushed his chair back and stretched. Everything in him popped. "Combat-effective. Questionable life choices. Very on-brand."

Emily slid into the seat beside him. "Show me."

Normally, status screens were private. But normally they weren't trapped in deep space with six people who'd already seen him bleed, panic, and nearly fry his own brain trying to keep the ship alive. He flicked the interface open and grabbed Emily's notebook, copying the numbers down as he read them.

[Status]
Name: Luca Rossi
Combat Path: Operative (+2 PER, +1 INT per level)
Profession Path: Starship Commander (+1 DEX, +2 INT, +1 MEM per level)
Level: 60
Experience Points: 5,589,719/5,589,720

"Still one point off the cap," he muttered. "Which is rude, honestly."

Emily ignored that. "Attributes?"

He opened the tab and wrote those down too.

[Attributes]
STR: 15
PER: 104
DEX: 67
MEM: 42
INT: 78
CHA: 12

Emily looked at the notebook and laughed.

He frowned at her. "What?"

"Luca, this is the most you build I've ever seen."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means you put points into the exact things you'd need to sprint into a portal with a blaster and zero plan." She tapped the notebook. "Perception is obscene. Dexterity's ridiculous. Intelligence is way higher than I expected, which means the command path has been feeding it for a while. Memory's solid. Strength is fifteen." She looked up. "Same as it was when you were sixteen, probably."

"It gets the job done."

"For now. But you're pushing Dexterity higher every level and your body has to actually execute what your reflexes are telling it to do. At some point those two numbers need to stay in the same conversation." She moved on before he could argue. "Charisma..." She tilted her head. "About as bad as advertised."

"Wow. Brutal."

"Accurate."

He leaned back, eyeing the spread. She wasn't wrong. It looked like the build of someone who'd spent four years expecting the next problem to have claws. Which, to be fair, had been a safe bet.

"I was focused on combat," he said. "That's not exactly a shocking revelation."

"No, but it's useful to say out loud." Emily folded one leg under herself in the chair. "You built for surviving delves, not commanding a ship."

"And yet, somehow, here I am. Extremely qualified."

She gave him a flat look.

"Okay, moderately qualified."

That got a snort out of her.

He stared at the numbers a second longer. The more he looked at them, the more obvious the shape became. Perception had eaten his build alive. Scout first, then Operative taking over at thirty-two and pushing twice as hard. Each class replacing the last, not stacking on top. The System didn't let you double-dip.

Pilot had dragged Dexterity up behind it, and when Starship Commander came online at fifty-two, it started quietly pouring into Intelligence and Memory whether he'd asked for it or not. The manual points were still written into the spread too. The stupid teenage Strength investment before he knew better. The later Memory obsession once he figured out shorter cooldowns meant more options. The Intelligence he'd started feeding once he learned that duration mattered almost as much as the ability itself.

"The annoying part," he said, "is that the System kept pushing me this way before I was ready for it."

Emily's expression sharpened. "And you resist."

"I try not to."

Luca opened the ability list and started writing again. It took a while.

- [Combat Path Abilities]

Weapon Logic
- Overlays firearms knowledge, safety discipline, and ballistic intuition. At Level 8: guided field strip with part inspection and wear-highlight overlay. +24% Accuracy.

Stealth Cycler
- Lowers cloak power output, extending active camouflage duration during slow movement. At Level 6: movement tolerance up to moderate speed; Silent Step efficiency increased by 25%.

Hard Lock
- Locks vision on a single target, maintaining focus through fast movement and user shake. At Level 6: dynamic motion-stabilizer for mid-movement firing. +15% Critical Precision.

Threat Radar
- Projects a 360-degree awareness ping, flagging hostile movement within range. At Level 6: predictive movement modeling updates enemy path vectors in 0.3-second increments. +15% Ambush Effectiveness.

Cover Spotting
- Highlights safe zones and maps positions where line of sight breaks. At Level 3: concealment score meter (0-100%) based on light, cover shape, and stance.

Battle Heuristic
- Scans a target, returning weapon type, armor class, and probable combat behavior. At Level 5: adds species/variant name and threat subtype at 200 m.

Reflex Shot
- Bypasses nervous system delay, syncing trigger pull to target acquisition. At Level 5: prioritizes nearest threat trajectory and predicts immediate hostile movement. +35% Reaction Speed.

CQC Driver
- Corrects melee form in real time, tightening knife strikes and accelerating parry response. At Level 2: micro-grip optimization for faster guard transitions. +6% Precision/Countering.

Port Scanner
- Highlights digital access points and security vulnerabilities. At Level 2: expands scan to identify low-grade vulnerabilities in door panels, cameras, and terminals.

Arc Assist
- Projects a holographic trajectory arc showing where a thrown object will land. At Level 10: full trajectory suite with target motion prediction, stable rotation, and environmental compensation. +30% Accuracy/Speed/Range.

- [Professional Path Abilities]

Flight Controls
- Layers foundational piloting knowledge into the neural mesh: control logic, throttle discipline, coordinated turns, descent timing, and emergency handling. Level 1.

Vector Precision
- Grants embodied 3D spatial intuition for thrust balancing, docking alignment, drift control, and micro-adjustment timing in zero-G. Level 1.

Atmospheric Protocol
- Imparts procedural knowledge for atmospheric handling: re-entry behavior, turbulence response, glide correction, and landing flare timing. Level 1.

Adaptive Burn
- Provides burn timing, delta-v budgeting, fuel discipline, and thrust-curve intuition under pressure. Level 1.

Systems Analysis Burst
- Grants layered knowledge of subsystem dependencies, ship architecture, and failure-chain interpretation, allowing the user to pinpoint cascading failures in a fraction of normal time. Level 1.

Trajectory Lock
- Imparts command-level navigation knowledge: transfer windows, orbital geometry, hazard prediction, and route prioritization. Level 1.

Operational Command
- Grants a working command model of ship operations, allowing the user to coordinate multiple ship functions as a unified system under pressure. Level 1.

Combat Drift
- Imparts battle-piloting instincts: inertia forecasting, evasive timing, combat-turn geometry, and positional tradeoff judgment. Level 1.

Command Uplink
- Merges helm, sensor, tactical, engineering, and comms feeds into one coherent decision overlay, reducing information overload. Level 1.

Crisis Routing
- Imparts emergency-triage knowledge: what to vent, isolate, reroute, or sacrifice to preserve ship survival. Level 1.

Emily read through the notebook in silence. Her finger stopped at Arc Assist. "Regional ability."

"It's for my Energy Tomahawk. I like throwing it."

She gave him a look that said she had absolutely no idea what to do with that and moved on. "That's a lot of abilities."

"Yeah."

"And most of the Starship Commander ones are command-side, not specialist-side."

"Exactly." He pointed at the last six entries. "That's the problem. The second something goes wrong, I can feel those lighting up in the back of my head like they're offended I'm not using them."

He remembered the launch all over again. The bridge had been screaming. Ryan was swearing at the reactor while Zoe tried to fly a ship that had barely decided to be a ship. Chris was halfway inside the docking clamps, and Emily was running power sequencing off station hookups and prayer.

"Back on launch day," he said, "I kept wanting to trigger them. [Operational Command]. [Crisis Routing]. Stuff like that. Every bad call on the ship suddenly looked like a nail and I was holding the System hammer."

Emily nodded. She'd probably seen more than he'd realized.

"But Ryan's the engineer," Luca said. "Zoe's navigation. Danny's science. If I start firing command abilities every time the ship makes a weird noise, I'm not leading. I'm just doing everybody else's job faster."

"Which you absolutely would do."

"I know." He rubbed a hand over his face. "That's the problem."

The mess hall hummed around them. FTL vibration ran through the deck plates. Air recyclers worked steadily behind the walls. The ship's constant reminder that if one thing failed in the wrong order, all seven of them died in a tube between stars.

Emily reached over and tapped one line in the notebook.

"Systems Analysis Burst," she said quietly. "And then the fire happened."

He let out a breath through his nose. "Yeah."

The memory of it still made his skull feel tight.

"That one earned itself," he said. "I held off in the bridge scramble. Held off again in the fire. By the time life support started failing, I was out of clean options and out of patience. So I fired [Systems Analysis Burst]."

Emily's eyes stayed on him. "And?"

"And it worked." He gave a humorless laugh. "Which was nice. Briefly. Then it felt like the System drove a railroad spike through my head and left it there."

She winced.

"Pressure behind the eyes first. Then nausea. Migraine after." He tapped his temple. "Neural Heat's a hell of a teaching tool."

"That's the part you keep skipping over," Emily said. "You always talk about the answer it gave you. Not the cost."

Because she was annoying and observant, which was a terrible combination to date and an excellent combination to have as chief of staff.

"Fine," he said. "The cost sucked."

"Profound."

"Thank you. I work hard."

"What are the current numbers on it?" Emily asked. "Duration and cooldown."

Luca pulled up the ability details and read them off.

[Systems Analysis Burst - Level 1]
Base Duration: 4m
Adjusted Duration: 5m 34s
Base Cooldown: 24h
Adjusted Cooldown: 19h 50m

"Right," Luca said. "Because apparently my brain got better at suffering in useful directions."

"That's actually the problem." Emily leaned forward. "Your INT is seventy-eight. That's pushing the ability to run longer and process more data than the base four minutes. But the ability itself is still Level 1. No efficiency scaling. No neural load optimization. Your brain is smart enough to keep the pipe open longer, but the pipe is still raw and uninsulated." She looked at him. "That's why it hurt so much. A lower-INT user would have gotten less data for less time and walked away with a headache. You got the full firehose for five and a half minutes through a Level 1 delivery system."

He stared at the numbers. That was a deeply annoying explanation.

"So my own stats made it worse."

"Your own stats made it worse." She flipped back to the attributes page in the notebook. "And the gap between your Intelligence and Memory isn't helping. Forty-two against seventy-eight. MEM handles cooldown recovery, but it also affects how fast your brain clears the heat after activation. With that spread, you're generating way more neural load than you can efficiently dump." She sat back. "You've got two options. Either close the gap between MEM and INT, which is a long-term stat investment, or level up the ability itself so it stops brute-forcing the delivery."

"Or both."

"Or both. But ability level is the faster fix. Even Level 2 or 3 would smooth out the worst of it."

Emily flipped back to the ability list in the notebook. Her finger stopped on the Professional section. "Which brings us back to the real issue. These are all Level 1."

"Yeah."

"Every single one."

"...Yeah."

She looked at him. "Luca. You had forty-three ability points by sixty."

"Correct."

"And you spent them on—" She flipped back a page. "Arc Assist, Weapon Logic, Hard Lock, Threat Radar—"

"Combat and regional. Where the problems lived." He said it without apology, because that had been the right call at the time and he knew it. "The first few years, the portal threats were immediate. Something trying to eat your face is a more urgent problem than long-duration command cycling."

"I'm not arguing with the logic." She set the notebook down between them like evidence. "I'm saying you have a full command toolkit at Level 1, and you've been in command for four years."

"In my defense, I didn't know I was going to end up with a ship."

"Fair." She almost smiled. "Still."

"Still," he agreed.

"Luca, the point of those abilities isn't for you to replace Ryan or Zoe or Danny. It's for you to make better command calls when their specialties collide."

He frowned at the status screen. "Meaning?"

"Meaning Ryan tells you what'll keep the reactor from exploding. Zoe tells you what'll keep us from slamming into a moon. Danny tells you what the survey data means. You don't beat them at their jobs." She tapped three lines in the notebook. Operational Command. Command Uplink. Crisis Routing. "You use these when all of that has to be merged into one decision and the clock is trying to kill us. That's what the build is actually doing. It's not turning you into Ryan. It's turning you into the guy who can understand Ryan fast enough to make the call."

He stared at the list.

That, annoyingly, made sense.

"So what's the verdict, then?" he asked. "Besides me being a disaster."

"You're not a disaster. You're just built like a field operative the System started bending toward interstellar command whether you liked it or not." She leaned closer, shoulder warm against his. "Which means your next points probably shouldn't all go into making you better at throwing yourself through windows."

"That's a weirdly specific accusation."

"Is it inaccurate?"

He considered it. "No."

"Thought so." She pointed back to the attribute spread. "Perception stays your anchor. Dexterity too. That's still your core. But Intelligence and Memory are doing real work now. INT extends how long your command abilities run. MEM cuts the cooldown. That's the difference between four base minutes and five and a half live ones. Between a full-day lockout and something that cycles back the same night. If you keep leaning into those abilities under pressure, those two stats are what's going to decide whether you get a clean window or a migraine that leaves you blind on the deck."

"So fewer heroic impulses. More boring stat discipline."

"Exactly."

"You are deeply committed to ruining my brand."

Emily laughed under her breath. "Your brand is surviving impossible situations by improvising something reckless and then acting offended when people notice."

"That's not fair."

"Luca."

"Okay, that's a little fair."

He looked back down at the screen. For the first time, it didn't feel like a pile of disconnected numbers. It looked like a map of every bad habit he'd leveled on purpose laid over everything the System had been trying to turn him into anyway. He'd built for combat first and captaincy second. That had kept him alive on Earth. It had even gotten the Triumph out of dock. But the class growth was already dragging him somewhere else, whether he liked it or not. The command abilities weren't going anywhere. The INT growth wasn't going anywhere. Arc Assist was still his favorite thing in the whole build and he refused to apologize for that.

"So," he said, "the official diagnosis is that I should stop trying to be Ryan with a better jawline."

Emily turned toward him, eyes bright. "Correct. Also stop trying to be Zoe, Danny, and Joey when the ship is on fire."

"Chris too?"

"Especially Chris. You'd be terrible at being Chris."

"That's hurtful."

"Honest."

He shut the interface down and let the dark mess hall settle back around them. His status vanished, but the shape of it stayed in his head, with Perception leading everything and Dexterity close behind. Intelligence and Memory were no longer theoretical captain stats but real parts of the build now, working on duration and cooldowns and the all-important question of how many command abilities he could run before his brain started filing formal complaints. A full command toolkit sat at Level 1, untouched and waiting.

So that was progress.

“So what do we do about it?” he asked. “Besides acknowledge that I’m a walking cautionary tale.”

Emily pulled the notebook back toward her and started writing like she’d already mapped this out in her head and was just waiting for him to catch up.

“First three points go into Systems Analysis Burst,” she said. “Get it to Level 2 at minimum. That alone smooths the neural load enough that you stop cooking your own brain every time you use it.”

“Romantic.”

“After that, we look at Operational Command and Command Uplink. Even one level in each gives you better merge speed when multiple departments are feeding you information at once.” She tapped the pen against the notebook. “Which, based on launch day, is every time something goes wrong.”

“So, always.”

“So, always.” She kept writing, then sat back and looked at what she’d put on paper. “That’s the plan. Short-term, level the command abilities so they stop punishing you for using them. Long-term, two things: get Memory chasing Intelligence, and raise Strength before the gap between what your reflexes can do and what your body can actually handle becomes a problem.”

He looked at the notebook. It was a direction. A real one, not just a list of numbers.

“So basically stop dumping everything into the flashy stats and build like someone who plans to survive past thirty.”

“Exactly.”

He opened his mouth. She got there first.

“Luca.” Her voice had dropped out of the teasing register entirely. “This is serious.”

He looked at her. She meant it. The notebook was between them, her handwriting filling half the page, and she'd spent the last hour breaking down every bad habit he'd leveled on purpose. Not because it was interesting. Because she'd wanted him to have a direction.

“I know,” he said. “I promise. I'll do a better job.”

She held his eyes for a second, then nodded, and went back to the notebook.

He watched her work. Her pen moved in quick, efficient strokes. She’d tucked her hair behind one ear at some point and he’d missed when. The page between them was half full of her handwriting: ability names, stat thresholds, notes in the margins where she’d caught something he’d missed.

A lot of work. For him.

“This is a lot of work,” he said.

She didn’t look up. “I know you can do it.”

He looked at the notebook, then at her. “Will I get a reward?”

Emily glanced at him sideways, and the corner of her mouth curved just enough.

“Depends if you’re good.”

She went back to the notebook. He stopped pretending the numbers were what he was thinking about.