Crochea Mors is the true bandaid

The ship itself, I'd quickly realized, was fucked. I didn't have the skill to fix it and I didn't have the parts; it was beyond my ability to completely repair. Or rather, beyond my current ability to repair. Since my power boiled the issue down to my skills being too low, however, I was better off than pretty much anyone else in the world would have been. I had the blueprints in my head, a full understanding of how the ship should have worked, and I had some of the materials and a way of actually working with them.

I'd turned everything off to keep from wasting power, gathered up some of the new scrap metal, and started grinding my Crafting skill, making simple things at first, then more complicated things, building them up and melting them down with Crocea Mors, again and again. The sun rose and set several times, and the skill improved until I could ply it roughly to my purpose and started repairing some of the damaged portions of the ship. A good amount of the damage was beyond me regardless of my efforts, for I simply didn't have the materials or a way of working with them, but the metal portions which made up most of the huge hole in the ship? That I could do something about and I did.

By noon on the third day, the obvious damage—the huge hole, primarily—was gone, though parts laid exposed for later repairs. I'd accomplished the work of heavy machinery and hundreds of men with just my brain, Aura, and Crocea Mors, fixing it up. It wasn't the prettiest patch job ever, but that was fine because I wasn't trying to win a beauty contest with it.

But it still wouldn't fly. I'd mended the superficial bits but airships, like beauty, were more than skin deep. I couldn't fix all the damage on the ship by twisting metal alone, not with the damage to the wiring and various systems within it; getting the ship in the air again would have been, for anyone else, a hopeless prospect.