Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

Chapter 409 How to fly a hovercraft

"Keep it steady, steady… steady…"

The voice of the maglev's pilot drilled deep into my brain, like a mantra a monk would repeat to fall into a state of deep meditation.

"Steady… steady… steady…"

Keeping my hands on each of the two autonomous control sticks, I continued to bring them closer and closer to the natural position.

Despite a huge panel of grass going right across the middle of the hovercraft's cockpit, not a single bit of natural light reached my eyes, fully replaced by the intricate displays of both the world outside and thousands upon thousands of all sorts of various parameters.

"Steady… steady… steady…"

I couldn't care less about how the world looked like within the camera feeds. Discover exclusive tales on empire

The images were too distracting, the perspective too falsified. And, given how much of a crash course my current lesson was, the maglev's original pilot had no other choice but to teach me by abusing all kinds of shortcuts to steering the craft he developed in the long years of his service.

"Steady… just like that… Good," finally, the pilot's words finally changed from the former, boring mantra to something more concrete. "Now, let go of the planar stick and slowly throttle the power."

Following the order, I brought my right hand up from the stick and towards a massive lever sticking out from the very middle of the vehicle's cockpit.

With my eyes ignoring all the imagery of the camera feed and focused on just three lines of slowly changing numbers, I grabbed the leaver and slowly, steadily pulled it down.

I had no idea what kind of esoteric principle of magnetism allowed this craft to fly. It was science so far removed from the degree of my understanding it could very well be magic… If not for how I actually understood quite a bit about the magic of this world, while having no clue about the principles that made this hovercraft… well, hover.

Still, as I decreased the power fed into the powerful magnets located at both the bottom and the top of the vehicle, I could feel the inertia causing my guts to revolt a little.

The primal panic of suddenly finding myself falling made me clench my ass. If not for the power of my will imposing upon the muscles of my arm, I would crash the extremely expensive vehicle right here and now.

"Now, bring it to a stall…" The pilot continued to feed me simple instructions while alternating his eyes from my hands on the controls to the very same strings of numbers and letters displayed on the massive glass panel of the craft.

I pulled my right even further down, all the way to the point where the leaver refused to move any further.

'Right, you can never turn it off without sucking every last ion of electric charge out of it first,' I recalled one of the lessons I took in the last three days.

By relying on this principle and reversing the effect, as long as there was any amount of electricity within the vehicle, a small magnetic coil at the bottom of the lever mechanism would disallow anyone from fully shutting the power supply down, only ever allowing one to bring it down to a passive gear.

"Now, give it a moment to settle…" Even with the entire craft reaching as far down as a mere centimeter above the ground, the pilot continued to keep the instructions coming.

Then, one line of numbers suddenly turned into a set of dashes. The other line of numbers fell all the way to a set of five zeros with an asterisk now pulsing in the upper right corner of the string.

"It's settled," the pilot announced with a sigh before turning over and gracing me with a happy smile. "As crude as it might be, you've just completed your first flight. Congratulations, man!"

The joy and pride in the pilot's eyes were genuine… even if we were both aware that I was roughly three years of academy worth of training away from actually gaining the right to call myself a pilot.

There was a reason why every hovercraft had to be operated by two pilots at a time in order for the vehicle to become combat-ready. Human beings were simply incapable of processing the spatial data of three-dimensional maneuvers at a rate necessary to make this vehicle actually useful during a fight rather than just a slow, immobile target for enemies to shoot at.

That's why, the very moment I stepped into the maglev for the very first time, I was met with an announcement that half of the axis of movement would be locked out for my trip.

Not because Makary didn't want me to gain the power this vehicle represented in a modern military where a pair of pilots could abuse the weird laws of physics that made it float to perform maneuvers so complex even the best pilots of the old generation would struggle to even imagine them.

Apparently, just by tilting the vehicle in relation to the average ground level, one would completely change the gradient of vectors pushing it up and off the ground. That, in turn, would not only accelerate the tilt but would also likely add a spin by pushing one side of the maglev harder than it would the other.

That was just the most basic example of what would happen if someone tried to control both the movement and the orientation of the vehicle all on their lonesome.

Hence, from the very moment, Makary agreed to sign off on my idea to make use of the flying and pretty much fully automatic vehicle, I was only ever allowed to pilot it within the horizontal plane, turning it into a car that levitated off the ground rather than the three-dimensional maneuver vehicle it was in reality.

Still, after three days of intense training and a crash course of all that I absolutely needed to know, I've finally completed the second-to-last test, where I was fully in control of the single plane of movement of the maglev from the moment I raised the power flow to the hypermagnets that allowed it to levitate all the way to the point where I rested it back perfectly within the designated landing zone.

'Now, all that's left, is a silent flight,' I thought, nodding my head to thank the pilot and my patient teacher for his words of praise.

"Already thinking about the next test, aren't you?" the pilot the name or face of which even I wasn't allowed to learn, leaned his head to the side while giving me an expression I could, at most, try to guess.

"Is it wrong?" I asked, turning my head over only to stare at my own face reflecting in the perfectly black visor of the man's futuristic-looking helmet.

"No, it is not," the pilot replied while raising up and crossing his arms over his chest. "In fact, it would be weird if you didn't want to try again. No matter if they failed the course or not, everyone that I've met during the training got addicted to the feeling of flying this bad boy from the very moment they first made it lift off the ground."

That… I could perfectly sympathize with it.

Without the usual sense of overwhelming power of abused physics going against the scale of its principles, humans were accustomed to, without powerful engines pushing the craft ahead or extremely-fast spinning rotor forcing the heavy chopper into the skies by pushing the air so far it could balance out the weight it had to lift…

The feeling was just as the pilot said - addicting. Rather than trying to bend the laws of nature to one's own will, I simply aligned and unified with it instead.

'It's like I've used a sail and drove the winds for the first time after years of only ever trying to swim by rapidly kicking the water with my legs.'

My teacher's words allowed me to finally find a proper word to describe this strange feeling that resonated throughout my soul. And for that alone, I bowed my head to him again.

"Well, it won't do you any good to try to go through with it right now," the pilot mentioned only to turn the black of his visor towards the still active camera feeds and even point out at the figure that approached quite close to the landing zone.

'She's back already?'

As great of a feeling as it was to control this pinnacle of scientific engineering, seeing Fay appear on the display was just the right thing I needed to get my priorities back in order.

"I will see you later in the evening then," I quickly said my farewells before setting my seatbelt loose and dashing out of the steering chair only to rush out of the hovercraft the very second the pilot pulled one of the levers and lowered the entry ramp down.

"How did it go?"

I ran out only to grab Fay right into my arms and look her right in the eyes while trying to stifle the sense of overwhelming worry within my heart.

Sure, out of worry I would rather have her stay behind… But at the same time, I couldn't even bear the thought of leaving for a mission without her.

After all, it would mean staying on one with Claudy for another week… Or rather, wasting a week of my life without her by my side!

"It's all okay, the kid is growing nicely…" Fay attempted to reply, only for my body to move on its own as I pushed my arms further and then brought her into a tight embrace.

"Silly… Our kid is one thing and I certainly want to know how it is, but more importantly…" Forcing myself, I pushed myself out of the hug and looked right into Fay's face again. "How is your health?"

Fay's face twitched… but ultimately, she only ended up smiling as she took the initiative and pushed herself back into my arms.

"I'm okay," she reassured me while her hands caressed my back. "And as long as I keep drinking nourishing tonics and keep eating vitamin pills on a regular basis, there's nothing wrong with me tagging along!"