As soon as the briefing was over, Joon-ho opened his eyes and climbed out of his pod. Throwing his arms over his head, he leaned back and stretched as far as his 163 centimeter body would allow him to and groaned in excitement.

‘This must be what sex feels like!’ he thought as he held the stretch for as long as possible. And given that he had received genetic enhancements, that would have been a long time indeed, but the feeling soon passed as his body adjusted itself. Thanks to those same enhancements, physical feelings of relief came on fast and left faster.

“Mana,” he muttered under his breath. While the pods didn’t have any mana to draw on while the vessel they were on was inside a warp bubble, now that they were traveling at sublight speed, the pods could, and did, draw mana from their surroundings and concentrate it within the pods to provide awakeners with a higher density of mana in which to train.

And he wasn’t the only person who felt like he currently did, either. Every single awakener felt the same as they climbed out of their pods, most of them wishing they could climb right back in and enjoy the sensation for longer. It seemed like Proxima Centauri was a far more mana-rich star system than their home.

“It’s perfect....” Joon-ho continued muttering to himself as he paced back and forth in his quarters. Not only was the overall mana density higher than it was in the Sol system, but it even had a much higher than usual concentration of gravity mana for some reason!

He climbed into his form-fitting environment suit and put his uniform on over the top of it, then latched his helmet to his belt and trundled off to his duty station. Although he hated how confining the environment suits were, he had to admit that they at least slimmed him down some; now he looked like he only weighed 120 kilograms instead of his actual weight of 180 kilograms.He hummed the opening theme to One Piece as he trundled down the passageways of the Farsight toward the bridge.

……

The TFS Proxima decelerated to a halt ten AU inside the heliosphere of Proxima Centauri. It would remain in place for the foreseeable future, acting as central command for the task force as the Exploration Fleet performed their surveys, collected their samples, and did their investigations throughout the star system. Depending on what they found in Proxima Centauri, they might even continue on to Alpha Centauri and explore the binary system there as well; tiny, stealthy recon drones were already on their way to perform the initial work and mapping there.

Once the cityship came to a halt relative to the star, the lighting in the cavernous holds that contained the Exploration Fleet vessels and their Space Fleet escorts turned red. The ships, which had been held in the vacuum of the Proxima’s internal docks, were about to be released.

Huge docking clamps disengaged from each ship and they hovered in place as the stasis shielding surrounding the external docking bay doors was disengaged and the doors themselves ponderously slid back into recesses in the hull. In an emergency, the doors could be blown free, allowing the ships within to immediately sortie, but this was no emergency. And perhaps, feeling a sense of gravitas, the technician manning the docks had purposefully slowed down the doors’ opening speed.

Or maybe the crews of the ships were simply impatient and imagining things.

After ten minutes, the doors were fully open and the stasis shields were down. Vessel after vessel sped away from the Proxima like individual drops of water from a dog shaking them off after a bath. Space around the cityship was organized, choreographed, practiced, and pure chaos as the individual components of each squadron in Task Force Proxima found each other, formed up, and headed out on their assigned headings.lightsnovel

One of those groups included the Farsight, which served as the flag vessel for their squadron. Their destination was Proxima Centauri b and they would make no stops until they reached the planet. The squadron would split up and perform close scans of the surface before the first exploration crew boarded shuttles and headed down.

A moment later, the marine guarding the bridge entrance shouted, “Captain on the bridge!”

Everyone sat up straighter at their stations and any ongoing conversation screeched to a halt, but the bridge of a warship

—even the lightly armed cruisers of the Exploration Fleet, which had guns more suited to clearing navigational hazards than other enemies—was no place for people to be distracted by leaping to their feet and coming to attention when an officer, even one as exalted as the captain of the ship, entered.

lightsΝοvel “Carry on,” the captain said, then turned to Ayaka. “I have the con, Miss Takahashi.”

“Aye, Sir, you have the con,” she said and rose to her feet with a lithe grace and moved to the executive officer’s station to the left of the captain’s chair.

“Don’t you have some prep work to do for your team, Ayaka?” the captain said to her with a smile.

“Not at the moment, Sir,” she replied, her liquid contralto voice as professional as she was.

“Very well, XO.”

She nodded and turned her eyes back to her display, working on the initial exploration plan for when they reached the planet. She had chosen her team well; all of them, with the exception of the Terrible Teenager, were young and even more fit than could be accounted for merely by being enhanced on the genetic level. Genetic enhancements could only do so much. It still took effort to train a fit and trim body even after receiving them. And since Proxima Centauri b was 17% larger than Earth, it likely had 17% stronger gravity as well.

Thus, while 1.17G wasn’t all that extreme, it would still be wearying after extended periods of time on the planet’s surface, and her crew would need to be fitter than the average person to withstand those long hours on a planet that had higher gravity than Earth and none of Earth’s amenities. Presumably.

The squadron set out toward the planet at 250 gravities of acceleration, with a planned turnover at the halfway point where they would immediately switch to deceleration instead of inserting a coast phase in the middle of the trip. Thus, they would reach their destination in a little bit less than twenty hours.