Chapter 1089: Intervention II
There was a certain degree of catharsis in violence. The movement, the expression of power, the harm done to those who’d provoked such anger… Leon didn’t revel in the death, but he relished bringing ruin to the pirates who’d attacked Artorion unprovoked.
The pirates had been so busy sacking Alhamachim that he’d been able to approach completely undetected. Granted, his stealth enchantments did a lot of heavy lifting, but when he and his small band of followers came down through the clouds, the pirates couldn’t have been less aware of their presence.
Until it started raining. Until lightning struck their arks. Until their arks and mages came falling from the sky.
He, Red, Eva, Cassandra, Maia, and Anastasios rampaged throughout the city, felling arks and cleaving through the pirates. There were a couple remaining tenth-tier mages among their number, but none of them fought together, leaving all to die separately. Blood ran freely through the narrow streets of Alhamachim, and as Leon struck another pirate frigate from the sky, the Hamachoi survivors began to push back against the pirates who’d invaded their city.
Thankfully, the Hamachoi were easier to distinguish from the pirates. Both wore armor, but the pirates had no unifying design, with all members of their marauding fleet apparently coming from distinct cultural backgrounds—not too dissimilar to their arks, Leon noted. The Hamachoi, on the other hand, generally wore similar clothing and armor, notably featuring the same garish colors that Asa had worn during his introduction mere days prior.
With Leon and his small group obliterating the pirates at every turn, the Hamachoi found it easy to push back throughout the city, liberating the prisoners taken by the pirates and killing those few Leon’s group hadn’t yet seen to.
Leon, meanwhile, after killing the last tenth-tier pirate in the city that he could sense, moved on to eliminating the pirate arks that had landed within its walls. One managed to take off, and Leon used his darkness magic to order Anastasios to intercept it. None of the others managed the same feat before Leon reached them and slaughtered their crews.
As he’d expected, each of these arks had been loaded with Hamachoi prisoners, mostly women and children. He broke chains where he could, but other than that, didn’t stop to help anyone. Doing so would be pointless before completely securing the city, and the freed citizens seemed more than capable and willing to run when he released them anyway.
He noticed as he was securing the arks that they were quite heavily damaged. It was gratifying enough to see, though it put quite the damper on his desire to ask for them in exchange for rescuing the city. A couple of the arks in particular looked like they weren’t even going to be lifting off the ground, though the pirates apparently weren’t of the same opinion since Leon found many prisoners aboard those arks, too.