Back aboard the station, the mood was jubilant. They had just finished a battle with the highest individual kill rates and lowest casualties in the history of the conflict, and the Arisen Fleet had retreated in record time.
Even better, while the weapons were new to them, they were not entirely new, as the technology was familiar to the Arisen, so there was no reason for them to adopt new defensive measures to counteract the Ion Cannons.
It was a win without a real downside, and they had learned a lot in their first battle after training.
All that the new Pilots could talk about was the things that they wanted to try next time. Techniques that worked well but were only mastered later in the battle, and ones that they had seen others use but hadn't had time to try themselves.
It was the happiest that Commander Yuri had seen his people since the war started, and it was only one day after the advancement in their training.
Though they were celebrating, the station's alert status was still set to maximum, waiting for the Arisen to adjust their tactics and come again. They had seen that the ships could vanish and immediately reappear nearby, and that had made everyone more cautious about making sure that the threat was really gone.
Without a time limit on when they could return, the disappearance of the ships meant very little, only that they couldn't be attacked for the moment.
While the station celebrated, Max took the time to fully examine the more recent upgrades to his body.
The increased durability of his skin was obvious, but from what he could tell, the bones had been hardened as well. He would have to check in the training room to see just how much since the System didn't quantify actual changes to your body, only the stat difference versus baseline.
For most Pilots, that would barely matter, but for Max, who was quickly reaching a level that might be called bullet resistant, he needed more details than just a simple string of numbers.
So, he headed to the gym aboard Santa Maria to crank up the gravity adjustment and see where he started feeling the creak of his bones and taking damage to his skin. It wasn't the safest way, but there were safety measures designed into the facility's programming, so it should stop before he broke any bones.
He was almost to the door when Max realized that there was, in fact, an easier way to do this. Nico and the System had an understanding. She could likely tell him what the limits of his bone and other augmentations were.
So he turned right and headed down the short hallway to where Nico was working in one of the spare rooms that had been converted into a lab.
"What a rare honour. What brings you to my lab today? Lewd things across the desk?" Nico asked hopefully.
"Maybe after. I was hoping to know what the extent of my latest upgrade is without destructive testing." Max explained.
"Well, that's easy enough. Let me get out the scanners, and we can take a good long look at you." She agreed.
Nico set up a full array of scanners all around a stasis pod that she had been using to hold parts in place while she worked and then gestured Max toward the vertical tube.
"Just stand there, and we can get a proper reading on everything that changed to make you more durable and anything that you might not have noticed changing as well," Nico instructed, ushering Max to his spot while she hummed a happy tune.
Max stood in the small circle, and the sensors came to life, bringing up walls of data on the holographic screens all around the room. The first thing Max did was to activate Nico's skill so that he could read all that data directly instead of watching it flash by on screens that he could barely see due to the angle.
Again, Max ran into the issue of his technical knowledge falling short of the task. Though he could read all the data, most of it was very nearly gibberish to him. He had focused all his studies on Mecha as a child, and he hadn't had time to expand out into other fields, while Nico had simply taken in everything that she could get her hands on, relevant or not, and stored it away for later use.
"Alright, I will give you the basic overview of what we're working with here. Your bones are made of the same alloy and nanotube construction that mine are but with additional passageways for the bone marrow and blood flow.
Here are the cross sections in comparison."
Max took a long look at the two, comparing the relative strengths and construction. While Nico's maintained the same structure all the way through, Max's were more like regular bone, much thicker on the outside than in the middle, with a complex structure to allow for the biological functions of his body.
"Now that you understand the bones let's move on to the muscles and ligaments that are attached to them."
Nico brought up dozens of examples of unaugmented human muscles and tendons compared to Max's, and it was hard to tell that they were even the same species. The shape was right, but that was about all that they had in common at this point.
It wasn't clear how much of that was due to previous system optimizations and how much was new, but the difference was staggering. Forget the fact that everyone accepted that Nico wasn't human. It would be a stretch to call Max human at this point, even though the basic DNA was still the same, or at least very close to the same.
"Hey, are you familiar with genome coding? I got very good at it in my past life, and there is something wonky about what I see here in the data for my blood sample." Max explained.
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