“Sooooo-ou-ou-ou,” Sealy started barking like his animal side as he nervously stretched that word. “Wh-what do you want?”

Now John felt immensely guilty. It had already been pretty dickish behaviour when he had teased the captain, but on its own he could have gotten away with it. Now, after throwing his weight around to also get a yacht as his ransom for what was basically no work at all and also ensuring that Senior and his crew were treated way better than they deserved, he felt like he had bitten the hand that fed him.

‘I really just wanted to offer my help with the mana situation… but I guess I should do some more than that,’ John thought and scratched himself behind the ear in a humble motion. “Several things. For a start, sorry for all the things that I put you through. I guess dealing with me isn’t always easy,” he sounded as genuine as he could, being alone with the captain and his crew on the bridge.

“Huh,” Sealy blinked repeatedly. “Thanks.”

An awkward silence ensued, the captain seemingly unsure what to say. John decided to take the next step, “I assume you make regular reports to Amalia, right?” He got a suspicious nod. “When was the last time you sent her one?”

“Well, because this is the maiden voyage, she wants detailed reports through voice com,” Sealy answered, “and just before the fight. I wanted to make the next one before you came in here, why?”

“You mind if I do explain what I did to her myself?” he asked in a tone that really made it sound more like an offer. The seal man’s neck stood at attention, as if he suddenly lost the fear of it getting cut-off. There was no way he would deny that offer. Who wouldn’t want to dodge having to make explanations for why they let go of a bunch of criminals and gave the extremely valuable ship away to the VIPs?

So a few minutes later, John was sitting on a slightly isolated console on the bridge, looking at Amalia on the other side of the monitor. “Hello,” he greeted her.

“Mr. Newman,” the elector of the Netherlands answered in respectful, impersonal form. Their departing encounter must have left a bit too strong of an impression. “Why are you the one giving me a report right now?”

That impersonal problem was something John needed to remedy first. “Well, some things happened. Let me start with an apology though. I don’t think my policy to Observe everyone who could heavily damage me is an unwise one, but I also know that I did it in an overly intimidating and rude way. For that, I am sorry.” At the back of his head, he felt Aclysia and Gnome approve of these words. The former of those two presences left with a panicked ping. Not the kind he needed to be worried about, but he had to wonder what spurred that feeling. That was a question for later.

“I see,” was all Amalia responded. If she felt relieved in any way, or thought he was just lying for his own gain, she didn’t show it. Now that she actually looked at John as someone capable rather than an easily fooled 18-year-old with godlike potential, her guard was up. The older woman had been in this game for too long to let anything slip she didn’t want to at that stage. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Right, so here is the gist of it,” John quickly broke down what had happened.

“I have to say that, if you want to ask for approval of taking the boat now, that is out of order,” Amalia told him.

“Oh no, I am keeping the boat,” he was straightforward with that. “I am just being that little bit respectful enough to not take it without ever explaining myself. The way I see it, I saved you a whole lot of money by taking care of this entire situation, not to mention me just being here effectively saved the ship. I would say giving me a yacht you didn’t even own is a small loss.”

“And you let those criminals run,” Amalia pointed out.

“I am 95% sure you are just going to hire them yourself one day, come on, they aren’t that bad. They attempted to take over the ship with paralyzing bullets. If anything, they saved you the embarrassment of losing this ship to actual pirates whenever someone else figures out how easy it is to hack into the teleportation panel,” John now found himself defending the people he had said had no rights complaining earlier. One might call that hypocritical, and they may have had a point there, but he preferred to think of it as representing reality accurately.

Amalia sighed, “Truth be told, I don’t particularly care about the yacht. However, your behaviour in this has not been that of a good business partner.”

“Could be because I don’t really see myself as your partner,” he told her. “Our agreement only covered me protecting the ship around the Atlantic Fuse and helping out in emergencies in the energy department. Technically, everything I did was outside that agreement. Do you really want to argue over a harmless crew stranded in America and a ship you didn’t own?”

“No,” Amalia still didn’t sound all that convinced, but she dropped the topic. “I don’t like not finding out who hired them, if anyone even did, but as you are already set in this without consulting me, this matter is not worth bickering over.”

“Well, at least on the consulting part I can agree, definitely pulled the trigger too early there,” John said, following it up with what he hoped sounded like a joke. “I just REALLY wanted that boat, it’s a really nice boat.” Nobody laughed.

“Is that all you wanted to do? Inform me about your hastened decision?” Amalia asked.

“Pretty much, but I am going to help in the whole fixing and mana problems now, going to save you the repair costs,” he told her.

“I see, you go about doing that then,” Amalia said and suddenly ended the call.

‘That didn’t go quite as well as I hoped,’ John thought, staring at the now black monitor. His mind went over the conversation in retrospect immediately, trying to find how he could have made this a bit nicer of a conversation. ‘For a start, it really was a mistake to be so blatantly greedy,’ he reprimanded himself, ‘didn’t even think about that until now, I just wanted that ship. Shouldn’t let that become a habit. If I had consulted her first on this, I am pretty sure I could have convinced her on giving me everything I wanted anyway. Best get some more experience in negotiating.’

The deals he had made up to this day had always been pretty cut and dry. Two people wanted something the other was willing to give. He wanted money, Lydia wanted a fighter. He wanted an elemental, the mother of shadows wanted her daughter in freedom. He wanted some time to think about a decision, they wanted an insurance in the form of Aclysia - not knowing she could teleport.

He was good at getting an equal deal where not a lot of bartering went into the process, but it was hard being bad at something were everyone went in with already fulfilled expectations. That was like being bad at holding a basketball. ‘I best learn the rules and how to best score a point,’ John finished the metaphor as he resigned himself to a break in his vacation. “So, captain,” he turned to Sealy, “tell me where you need me the most.”

__________________________________________________________________

“Okay, Gnome, I need you to bend that back into shape. Undine, have you found the shards? Great. Salamander, help Gnome by heating this metal up would you? Sylph...” he looked at the tiny wind elemental sitting on the edge of a broken table, “…keep nibbling on that cookie.” She saluted with one hand while holding the sweet with the other. It was the size of her torso.

“Why do you even have them do all of that?” Siena asked as she was just as useless but way less cute, standing there with her arms crossed. John could have made her work, either through pressure or a rule. However, as the nightmare elemental saw this as beneath her, he would have paid for it later in the form of her being incredibly grumpy. As she wouldn’t be a great help anyway, he just didn’t bother.

For what they were doing: they were fixing the glass ceiling of the restaurant. “It costs less mana to repair things that at least approach the original form, even if I don’t use Craft to do it,” John told her, “and Craft doesn’t create new materials, so I need those shards. I don’t need to fully fix it in the first place, just enough that the Slimes have an easy enough time getting to the rest of it.”

Gnome stepped aside after having bent a metal framing piece back into the correct angle. With Undine holding all the glass shards she kept inside her body, or rather a water bubble that was attached to her, John used Craft. It was important that all components of the wanted whole were connected in some way, the more direct the better. That single frame cost him 750 mana, not a terrible price all things considered. He could fix one of those roughly every eight minutes.

_____________________________________________________________________

Next up John went to the hole in the side of the ship. The temporarily vacated apartments that were hit by Tilgun’s claws took a bit longer to fix. The hull of the Rising Tide was a lot sturdier than the glass and Craft couldn’t do much where materials had been pulled into the ocean. Wherever the walls had just been punctured inwards, the group could fix most of the damage by bending the metal back into shape and then giving some mana to the ever-helpful Slimes.

That was actually most of the work for everything they fixed on the ship. Fixing some bent structures, then giving the Construction Slimes a power boost for them to fix everything up a lot faster.

______________________________________________________________________

“I have to say that I am impressed,” John said when he stood in front of the mana reactor. It was a several metre tall barrel of a bronze metal, Observe said Baelementium, with an open mid-section. At the sides, opposite from each other, were two golden disks that slowly circled through that centrepiece. Each of the disks was holding ten mana batteries of cylindrical shape, which touched and unloaded their energy into the reactor as they passed through the opening. Empty ones were changed by an automatic procedure involving a mechanical arm.

Those empty mana batteries were John’s new job. He had lost the whole day at this point, bar the morning and that little sex break. ‘How late is it anyway?’ John thought and checked his phone with a yawn. ‘Two in the morning?!’

He had been spending that time just wandering from one repetitive task to the other, so he had barely noticed time flying by. Didn’t help that it was this dark for a long span of time in the winter. Curses upon the early setting sun.

“So, I am going to charge a mana battery and call it a day there,” John said to Sealy.

“That is completely fine, yes, I am very happy with that.” The captain had indeed been impressed with most of John’s help. “Although I don’t think you can charge one of them in one go.”

“Mhm,” he hummed as they reached one of the two storerooms, if it even deserved that name. In the undecorated reactor room, the areas where the batteries were stored were basically just three metre tall walls that were open at the top to allow the mechanical arms to reach inside. A heavily locked door opened only upon Sealy putting in a 16-number code.

Inside John found three things. To his left were the empty mana batteries, about half a metre high and 25 centimetres wide. They somewhat reminded John of just regular batteries, simply upscaled. However, they were made from a thick tube of a translucent material, sealed off at the top with a light and at the bottom with a dark bronze metal plate, engraved with white lines.

John crunched the numbers, just because that was a thing he did. The engine consumed about 60’000 Maybel an hour, that was 1’440’000 per day, 10’080’000 for the entire week they were going. Therefore, they had to have 100,8 batteries to keep the engine running. The engine did include the mobile barrier, that’s what research on the matter had told him.

What he found around himself didn’t seem to be just 50 of these batteries though, and this was just half of it. Neatly stacked from his left, where they stood empty, to his right, where their insides were filled with a mass of mana that was… well, it reminded John of that video of a chemical at the triple point. Which was to say, it was rapidly changing, or simultaneously all three of them, between being solid, liquid and gas.

“How many do you have on board?” John asked.

“318,” Sealy reported, he was becoming a bit overly trusting by now.

That left 217,2 batteries for other consumption. Now John would have liked to say that there was no way that such an amount of energy could be consumed, but there were on a luxurious cruise with lots and lots of people wanting only the most perfect of things. Also they were literally heating the air around them.

“Well, you were right that I won’t be able to charge one fully, but about 2% I can give instantly,” John said and headed for the apparatus in the middle of the storeroom. It was a chair, to give it a generous description, and a giant metal box with some comfortable leather put onto it, to give it a less generous one. John sat down in it and put his hands into some attached cases, gripping the handle inside.

It felt like he was the water going down the suddenly opened drain in a sink filled to the rim. Over the course of just a little over 20 seconds, he was sucked dry. He was mindful enough to let go before he was completely empty, lest he found out that the Mana Drain was taking his mana before his skills did and suddenly Aclysia would stop getting paid for and die.

At least now he knew.

He got back out of the chair with no intention of getting back in for the little mana he had left at that point. “There we go, I am going to come back tomorrow. I will charge like one of these bad boys per day, would that be enough?”

“As far as I am concerned, we already weathered most of the energy crisis by having no more real need for keeping the slimes active,” a very happy Sealy said, clapping his hands together, “so there is no reason for you to waste your whole day sitting there.”

John cleared his throat as he thought about a way to say this without sounding like he was trying to brag. “You assume I would need the whole day… I need three hours… just need to strain myself, but that’s what the rest of the vacation day is for, right?”

Of course, that straining thing was a lie, he just didn’t want to make it too obvious that his powers were stupendously reliable. At his current rate of 10,66 MP per second (after reductions), he regenerated 38’376 mana an hour. Therefore, for 100’000 he would need about 2 hours and 36 minutes.

“That is… uuuuuuh,” Sealy stood there dumbfounded as John pat him on the shoulder in passing.

“It’s…” he yawned again, “…it’s bullshit, you can say it."