Chapter 240 - Oil Rig

The task of finding Frost Orcs came as a surprise to the team, it was absolutely out of their radar of expectations. They didn't want to leave the reef, and furthermore, they had been eager to experiment with what the ghost world had to offer, but duty called, so they had to go against their own wishes in order to keep the project across the reef safe, and going!

Timothy knew how inconvenient this trip was, so he tried his best to make it easier for himself, and for his friends. This was why he convinced everyone to turn into Sailfish to begin with, and with some luck, this task may not take more than a month to complete!

They were off to a good start, and the grand speed they were practicing hinted so! A Sailfish could swim up to 110 km/h at most, over short periods of time, and such speed was grand for sure, but they couldn't keep up this max speed for long, no.

It was best to swim at 50 km/h, to avoid over exertion, but that wasn’t fast enough if they were to make good distance, every day, so they had to get creative. They had to alternate between their magical abilities, and their muscle-power, in order to make good distance across the deep seas, while avoiding overexertion all together!

Timothy's friends swam an average of 100 km/h, and this cost them about seven-thousand mana points every hour, which wasn’t expensive at all to them, and it was cheap specifically because they avoided over-using their new, Flameless Fins ability, they didn't crank it up to the max. They avoided using this ability constantly, by speeding up as much as they could, even up to 220 km/h just for a few seconds, and then letting momentum do its thing, keeping their overall speed high for quite some time!

With the latter trick, they managed to save thousands of mana points! As for the points they did spend, the team was perfectly capable of regenerating them naturally. At the end of the day, they may be twenty or thirty thousand mana points short depending on how responsible they were with their mana, but with full mana pools to their disposal, they had plenty of it to spare! Each of them could generate three-to-four thousand mana points an hour, so they were good, they had enough mana to travel with for weeks!

For Timothy, however, this was a more expensive journey overall. His abilities, although more powerful, were also more expensive when used, which wasn’t fun at all. He knew that it was going to be expensive the moment he planned this trip, so he spent most of his system points densifying his Flaming Fins ability before he set off.

Timothy densified it twice, by thirty percent, and this cost him forty-eight thousand system points all together, so it depleted most of his system points. Thirteen-hundred points remained in his sum afterwards, but at least he managed to bring his traveling expenses down as best as he could before he set off!

The Flaming Fins ability used to cost thirty-two hundred mana points a second to use, at most, and now it cost half of that. It may sound expensive still, but in certain combinations of the use of his powers, he managed to keep up with his friends one way or the other, without severely damaging his mana quantities.

For example, Dual Casting this ability with the Blood Freezing ability, helped him swim up to 340 km/h! He was absolutely piercing through the water, he was faster than ever before, and using this method, he only had to over-exert his mana for a few seconds, and then he barely used his abilities for a couple of minutes, because the momentum he gathered did most of the heavy work!

It was a tedious journey, but throughout multiple combinations of using his powers, he progressed. Thankfully nowadays he was better at math too, so at the end of the day, he was just fifty-thousand mana points short in comparison to everyone else, which was actually a good result for a fish who at times, was halfway there to breaking the barrier of the speed of sound!

With the various combinations they did just to keep their average speed at 100 km/h, the team managed to travel a thousand kilometers in the first day! Of course, this meant that they had to swim ten hours a day before they could hunker down and relax, but that was a term that they had to live with. They were making great distance, and at this pace, they could make it to the North Pole in just two weeks, which made this task a little bit less tedious!

After they made it to the one-thousand kilometer mark, they stopped, and tried to find the best spot to rest for the night. It wasn’t easy to rest in the open waters, however, so despite how tired they were, they headed towards the surface of the sea, and were hoping to find a piece of dry land to rest on. They sought out other options, and even considered shapeshifting into smaller fish.

Once at the surface, although they didn’t find any land to crawl on, they did eventually spot something that was nothing short of intriguing! They saw an oil rig, the kind that would be considered out-dated back on earth!

Being as curious as he was, Timothy dragged his friends towards the oil rig, and they stalked it for about half an hour, from below the water, to see who worked on it! He expected to find a bunch of humans here, but that was not the case, this place was abandoned, so they shapeshifted into goblins and climbed on to the oil rig.

If humans worked here before, he figured that there would be a bunch of beds lying around. After traveling for a thousand kilometers today alone, he very much liked the idea of resting on a bed tonight!

Timothy didn’t bother making armor for himself or his friends, because they would get back in the water tomorrow morning, and they've gotten very used to seeing each other naked. They didn't mind it, as it was part of their frantic shapeshifting tendencies.

Just as he suspected, there was a set of beds here, along with a lot of other things. Everything one would need to keep an oil rig running was here, even though the tools were old, and rusty. The beds were dirty, but considering the fact that they hadn't disintegrated yet, the oil rig may have been abandoned just a few years ago, and Timothy found this very interesting!

“Ortana did say that there are many types of human civilizations across the planet. Some may be more advanced than others, but still… It's fascinating to run into what could be a man-made structure, myself! It reminds me of home, god damn it! I miss Earth.” He thought to himself.