The System Seas

Chapter 133: Warship

The enemy captain saw him coming and pulled a huge scimitar from his belt, bellowing in rage. Aethe peppered the man with arrows throughout the motion, but none of them appeared to do anything at all. Marco landed on the ground just in front of him, firing his pistol at the man’s face as he stabbed downward. There wasn’t much of a chance any of those attacks would do anything, but they forced the man to defend. Once landed, he jumped back and made space, poking his sword forward on several different trajectories.The captain was up to the challenge, blocking each of them with deft movements. It was all he was up for, though. All the control of the fight was in Marco’s hands, and he used it to slowly turn the man’s back towards the ship, keeping his attention off the danger until it was too late.

It was something Marco and Aethe had talked about one late night in the captain’s cabin. If he could turn a target’s back and hold them still, she could overdrive a shot to hell and back, using what she called a big, dumb, slow arrow she had bought hundreds of from some trader on the open ocean. It would be the kind of thing anyone half decent could dodge, even with her skills behind it. But if that person was distracted, it would hit like a sledgehammer.

It did. Impressive to the last, the captain kept on his feet as the arrow speared through him, but was unable to do so much as lift his sword as Marco stabbed through his throat. It was easy not to feel bad for him, considering what he did to those settlements. He didn’t know a lot about Frisk, but the man wasn’t a liar. If he said the bad guy had done that particular bad thing, he had. As the light drained out of the man’s eyes, Marco didn’t have to stand there and consider if he deserved it. He needed to get back to his ship instead.

“Jump!” Riv said. “I got you.”

Marco leapt without a second thought, pleased to see Riv actually had brought the ship around under the rail of the now depopulated ship. There might have been a few crew members scattered in the pirate ship, but nowhere near what they’d need to put out all the fires, let alone to make the ship dangerous again. Leaving that craft to soak up the fleet’s regeneration powers, he guided the now weak Riv to the side and grabbed the wheel just as the rest of the fleet started to enter firing range.

From then on, there weren’t any well-thought-out plans. With the fleet’s heavy hitter out of commission, could give as good as it got. Better, actually. Elisa was starting to mix elements in ways Marco hadn’t seen before, and the bolts were hitting harder, as well. Aethe was killing crewmen left and right, and Marco was avoiding the vast majority of enemy fire either by dodging or by mobilizing the ship’s runes into defensive formations that blocked much of the stray fire.

had never looked worse. The deck was shattered in several parts, and the only thing holding it together was Marco’s new powers of consumption. Every bit of damage he was doing to the enemy ships was repairing his own, including the burning ship in the distance. They should have been sunk in the first thirty seconds, but now they were minutes into the battle and still afloat.

Marco was amazed by how much the skill did, really. Most enhancements he had seen in his path had been minor at first. This was a capstone skill, though, and apparently that made a difference. His ship’s endurance was incredible now, even getting blasted apart by an entire fleet firing their guns at once.

The only problem was that as well as they were doing, they needed to do better. Marco steered the ship between two other crafts that were coming nearby each other to block his way, planning on boarding him with two ships worth of troops at once. If they did, they would have been over. It was taking every bit of Marco’s endurance to buy every minute of time. They ended up getting through just in time before carving hard to the left to avoid taking blasts from both ships at once.

Riv had abandoned the deck to flee below decks and work the pumps, keeping them dry and afloat enough to maneuver. His voice boomed up the staircase from there, out of breath and upset.

“Marco! It’s not working. We’re still taking on water. What do we do?”

“Keep repairing things, Riv! We have to hold out.”

“Do we?” Elisa fired the arbalest once again, looking drained as she struggled to load up another bolt. “We could run. I can’t do damage fast enough, Marco, and it’s getting worse. I’m out of magic, or will be soon. This isn’t working, Marco. What’s going to change?”

“That.” Marco pointed. “That’s the change we need.”

While Marco and his team had bought time, Frisk had been busy. The ship still didn’t look intact by any means, but all the worst of the damage had been patched. He was now entering his ship’s own very respectable cannon range, and the first group of booms from his battery of cannons had a noticeable effect on the enemy fleet. Some of them turned to face the new threat, not so much to attack it as to get the narrow side of their boats pointed into the attack. They had tasted those cannons before and apparently learned fear from them.

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“Yeah! Get them!” Elisa yelled, pumping one last anemic bolt out of the arbalest before going limp. It hit the one ship that had looked like it might still be attacking r, leaving a scorch mark on the hull and not much more. “Marco, do you see that?”

“I do,” Marco said. “Not much damage. It’s okay. We’ll figure something out.”

“No, I mean, look. It didn’t regenerate!”

It was true. The scorch mark was unchanged, which meant somewhere a regeneration ship had run out of magic. That became much more obvious as the first volley from Frisk’s ship finally made it to them, hitting two ships at once. Robbed of their magic toughness, neither ship had what it took to stand up to the shot. They broke apart and began to sink as another volley flew, then another, then another. The four members of the crew cheer, weak and exhausted, as Frisk cleared the field completely.

Conquest Complete!

You have destroyed an enemy armada. Most of the power has been held in reserve, as your course has not yet been determined. Even so, your equipment has reached its maximum strength until such time as your decision is made.

“Anything good?” Riv said. “Because Frisk is coming and I don’t think we have what it takes to run.”

“No. We don’t. But I don’t think we’ll need to.” Marco looked at Frisk’s ship, which could just as easily send over cannon fire as communication light. “I don’t think that’s his style.”

A few tense moments passed before the next shot from Frisk’s ship fired. Marco’s reflexes twinged as he saw it, just long enough for him to see it was indeed the messenger glow rather than sure death at the business end of dozens of cannons.

“You did it. I hardly believed it. I had a crew member counting how many times you got shot.” Frist laughed and tried to clap Marco on the shoulder, disrupting his own illusion for a moment. “He lost count. Well done. Well done indeed. I won’t even ask how you stayed above water.”

“We were worried we wouldn’t. It took quite a bit to not sink just now.” Marco sat down on the step leading up to the captain’s wheel. “So where does that leave us?”

“What do you mean?” Frisk looked honestly puzzled. “We had a deal. I don’t have any problems with you, and anyone who would tell me what to do is hundreds of miles away. I’ll be on my way over in a boat in the next few minutes. We can discuss things over tea.”

—

When Frisk arrived, there was indeed tea, courtesy of Aethe. As the only member of the team who couldn’t overdraw her own power reservoirs, she was the only one with the energy to do it. She was also arguably the worst cook among them, but she was capable of boiling water, and that was really all that was needed. As Frisk’s boat came close, he hopped aboard and strode up to where they had gathered.

“I forgot what it must have been like for you. I was so much stronger than you then. Seeing you nervous like this makes it clear, though. You really don’t know how strong you are,” Frisk said.

“Strong? I saw you drop two boats in one volley,” Marco countered.

“Sure. That’s what a warship does. What you didn’t see is that I didn’t last against those same people half as long as you did, and I had the drop on them. You aren’t that much weaker than me now, if you are at all.”

“I hope I don’t get the opportunity to find out.”

“Same, son. Same. Now what did you want to ask me?”

“You might need to know some things first. Can you keep them to yourself if I show you?”

Frisk laughed, a sarcastic scoffing sort of noise. “I can do whatever I want. You may not get this, Marco, but the government is big enough that I have to work with them. My power is tied up with theirs. It doesn’t mean they can truly tell me what to do if I don’t want to go along with it. Now, what is it?”

Marco shared what they knew about the temples, or at least a shortened form of it. Frisk listened with growing confusion as they talked about their power growing with each one of the stone buildings, of seizing control of them from evil people or taking them off of good people’s hands. He seemed even more mystified when they told him about the ocean anomalies, the hurricanes and endless holes where water should have been but wasn’t, and that even those were part of their current search.

“I’ve seen those buildings, you know. Lots of them, over the years. But they don’t just grant you power when you walk into them,” Frisk said.

“You don’t have a temple under your control, Frisk. That makes a difference. We got the last one that was unclaimed around here, we think. A well-hidden one. Now we interact with the whole system. To anyone else, the temples are just hunks of rock, like you said.”

“I might not believe it, except those boys we just took down were looking for temples too. Has to be something to them.”

“I just wish we had managed to keep some alive. I would have liked to ask them some questions.” Elisa looked genuinely pained at the loss of potential learning. “I guess they took whatever they know with them, to the deeps.”

“Oh, no.” Frisk slapped his own forehead lightly. “I forgot to tell you. We picked up two of them on the way in from that first boat you crippled. They almost begged to come.”

“Really? That’s great.” Marco said. “Where are they now? Tied up in your hold?”

“In my hold? Son, I own a warship.” Frisk swelled with captainly pride. “They’re in my prison, Marco.”