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Heavy Plasma Turret Mk.V: Often used for defense on dangerous worlds, this plasma turret is capable of dealing with most Feral threats in and out of atmosphere as it uses a vacuum tunnel to deliver the plasma through atmosphere at a range of up to five kilometers.
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I had looked back toward the city when there was a blinding flash above me. A thick bar of white-hot plasma incinerated a distant, flying Feral that had strayed too close. A thunderous crack filled the air as the vacuum tunnel collapsed. Burning pieces of Feral rained down in the distance.
"What are you doing, sightseeing? Get a move on. The First needs us," Metra said. The plasma turret rotated down to point at me, an unsubtle hint.
"Fine, I'm going!" I yelled, dashing down the mountainside toward the city below.
With a thought I ordered my scout drone up high to mark threats while the two armed drones stayed close by. More and more threat markers appeared as the upgraded passive sensors on the scout drone combined with its great vantage. Most weren't close by, thankfully. Hundreds more threat markers appeared up to ten kilometers away.
"There are a ton of threats out here," I said. "It's going to be rough getting through the city to that tower in the middle. Regar said they're halfway up it. So what, I'm going to have to fight through the city and then up the tower?"
"It's an Infested planet. What did you expect?” Metra said. "Anyway, why aren't you flying? I didn't do all that work for nothing."
I wondered if I was the first person ever given a suit of flying powered armor without the manual. It was lucky for me the Interface made things like this somewhat easier than normal. Metra was a consummate engineer—way better at it than I was—so I knew that whatever she'd done to the suit, it would be fully Interface integrated.
Pelting down the steep, rocky mountainside at a run I willed myself up.
I shot into the air, tumbling head over heels. The whole world spun around me. If it hadn't been for the magic of Transcendent Flesh I was sure I would have filled my helmet with vomit.
"What in the stars are you doing, Jake?" Metra asked, her voice annoyed. Maybe I should have gone farther away from the plasma turret's sensors before I tried this.
"Trying to fly," I yelled back. I tried to find something to stabilize my flight, but nothing was working.
"How did you even do that? I knew I should have made you that skill implant."
The ground rushed up and I hit hard. I'd commanded my armor down, trying to tell it to be nice about it, but it hadn't listened. I rolled to a stop, standing. The armor was undamaged. Nothing as soft as a mountain was going to hurt me, at least not at that speed. Everything was still attached and undamaged.
"You're not in an elevator. The grav plates are in the core, the feet and the hands. You need to visualize what you want their relative power levels to be. Remember, they're not the same as the propulsion units in the palms and on the soles of the boots. Those are for general maneuverability as well as movement in vacuum."
I looked at the palms of my hands and triggered my Component Flow Visualization. The Krigar Assault Armor was a lot more complex than it had been. There were propulsion units in the palms of my armor as she had described. They were plain circles about the size of the bottom of a beer can. I could see the power runs snaking through the armor up my arms to the new power generation unit I couldn't see but assumed was on the back.
On the back of my hands was another assembly, which the Interface labeled as a variable gravity plate. It was connected to the same power runs.
The very surface of the armor had changed. The Assault Armor had been pretty low-tech, before. It was a basic set of powered armor for a heavily armored soldier. The material it had been made out of was a tier 3 metal, but other than that the actual armor wasn't anything fancy. Now, there was a whole complex assembly just under the surface. I recognized most of the individual components, but couldn't immediately work out what they did.
Now that I knew the various propulsion and gravity plates were there, I could almost feel them in my mind. Each of them was intruding slightly on my subconscious, somehow. I had no idea if this was just my imagination helping me with visualization or not, but it did help.
I put my arms and legs in a neutral posture and tried to visualize the power levels of five different gravity plates at the same time. I was going to start with very low values and try to keep myself stable.
It was surprising just how easily this clicked, and I started rising off the uneven surface of the mountainside—slowly at first and then faster. I experimented with the power levels of the ones in my hands and feet, adjusting my position in the air. With a few minutes’ experimentation I could hover, standing, in the air using only the core grav plate with some stabilization from the boot plates. The pull of gravity against me had been completely neutralized.
Without the momentum from my run downhill, however, I was just hovering in place above the mountain. I tried to angle my boots to push at an angle, but that only altered my position in the air. The plates would either push or pull directly against the force of gravity, but not at an angle. Obviously, that was what she'd added the propulsion plates for.
"Well, here goes nothing," I muttered, and added more to my visualization.
I shot into the gradually lightening
