Chapter 77: Sea Battle
It was about what he had expected, if not that Aethe would get the boon this time. That was a new aspect of his skill, as far as he knew. There were other windows popping up that might explain it, but he had no time for them. The few remaining crews on the island outside of his own were recovering, and he had no idea what to expect from them.
They also collapsed. Not in death, this time, but in despair and exhaustion.
“Boy.” An older, stronger-looking man who would have normally intimidated Marco just by looking how he did was sitting on the ground, weeping. “You freed us from this?”
“He did, really.” Marco pointed at Riv, who was just beginning to have the strength to sit. “How did you get here?”
“Just got too close. Got sucked in. We couldn’t sail away, and eventually we had to land or else sink. Our ship is still out there, somewhere.”
Elisa nodded in grim satisfaction as her theory that they couldn’t escape was confirmed.
“What I don’t understand is how you could have done it. You didn’t go insane,” the man said. “How is that possible? No offense to you, you saved us. But…”
“But we aren’t as strong. No, we aren’t. We just have some talents that made it possible.”
—
It took Riv the better part of a few hours to heal up, and the other crews were about the same. Freed of the influence of the island’s insanity field, their color was coming back pretty quickly. As soon as they were able, Marco’s crew led them down to the boat, where they fed them as best they could from their still ample stocks.
The food did everyone involved a lot of good. For the not-them crews, it was the first real meal any of them had had in days, weeks, or possibly even months. Presumably they had been able to scavenge something over the time they had spent out of their minds, but Marco was too reasonable and fearful to even begin to talk about what that might have been. As they ate real, wholesome, nourishing food, their classes and body stats converted the food into health at a speed that was actually visible.
Meanwhile, the crew of The Foolish Endeavor got a different kind of thing. Theirs had been a raw, panicked rush into danger. Just being on the deck of their ship took some of the edge off the tension and stress left over from that, and the food did even more. Even the chickens helped, directly comforting Riv by climbing all over him while clucking and cooing. Indirectly, everyone else who watched that happen got a little boost.
Once everyone was somewhat recovered, they went right back to dealing with terrible things. The island was well-stocked with unfortunate non-survivors who needed to be put into the ground, and nobody felt they had a right to avoid that work. Riv and a few of the other labor types from the other crews dug holes while other people did the unpleasant work of dragging and depositing bodies. It would have been much quicker to dig one long trench for all of them, but Marco didn’t feel good about it somehow, and the others seemed to agree.
Eventually, after hours and hours, all of the bodies were in the dirt, topped with simple grave markers. They hadn’t been able to get names for most of them, and the graves went otherwise unmarked.
“Elisa,” Marco said, when it was all over. “I have a favor to ask you.”
“Anything.” She wasn’t in much better shape than Marco was, but she was still willing. “Anything at all.”
“Put a description of all of us into your notebook, along with our names and where we are from. Can you do that? I mean all of them that can be marked from now on.”
Elisa was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. Her eyes filled with shrewd comprehension.
“Of course. Say no more.”
The group had had enough of the island by then. There was no use staying there any longer for any of them, either. Since the battle had ended and the initial recovery had been made, various scouts had made a circle of the island. Everyone there had a ship still, though some of them were in worse repair than others. The sheer oversupply of vacant ships meant none of them would have a hard time repairing their ships, either.
As the crew put the last touches on preparing to leave, Aethe spotted something in the distance. Marco could always tell when she did, these days. She had a certain tension when she had something potentially dangerous in her eyeline that she just didn’t have other times.
“A ship,” Aethe said. “It’s hanging just at the edge of things. Where is the spyglass?”
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The glass was quickly found and handed to her. She looked through it, closing one eye and holding perfectly still as she took in the blip on the horizon.
“Some sort of surveillance. Waiting out there to see what happens, or what happened,” she explained.
“Quill?”
“It must be. Whatever we accomplished here, we have to assume they saw it. And that Quill had an unhealthy interest in that.”
Riv sighed and stood up.
“I don’t think we can let them report back. Any chance we have at keeping things civil with Quill as we get stronger evaporates when he’s sure these just aren’t flukes. Double that if he knows we are getting stronger against the way he fights every time we take one of these down.”
“I think we might be coming to the end of that period of time anyway,” Marco said. “He can only feel things out so long.”
“Either way.” Aethe jumped on the boat and unmoored it from the shore. “We need to hurry. They want to watch? Fine. Let’s give them something to see.”
“We can’t help.” The captain, who had been talking the most, looked legitimately sorry. “We aren’t in any shape yet. Our ships aren’t, either.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Marco said. “Just, if you could, try to stay some place we can maybe find you. I have the feeling things with Quill won’t be all that peaceful in the end.”
“We’ll try.” The captain flung him a coin. “Here. I had these enchanted a long time ago. Pump magic into it, and it will give you a vague direction to go to look for me. Don’t let this Quill get ahold of it, if you can help it.”
“We’ll try,” Marco said. “Good luck out there.”
“Same to you.”
The outboat got them back to their ship quicker than they could have imagined. It was like the small boat felt the urgency and caught every bit of outgoing tide it could. Once they were on the deck, it dematerialized to wherever it went when it wasn’t at the ready, and Marco pulled the ship around into alignment with their quarry.
“Yup. They are leaving.” Aethe had the spyglass out again. “Fast. Do you think we can catch them?”
“We can try,” Marco said. “We can try pretty hard.”
As much as he hated to, it was time to read the notifications he had been ignoring after the fight.
| Conquest Complete! Several hostile captains have fallen due to actions taken by you or your crew. As they were weakened before the onset of combat, the individual reward from each is diminished. As a group, several captains were defeated at once, and their various gear has integrated with your own. Some of the diminished value of the gains is offset by the fact that your gear is new to you and your skill and a higher tier than your previous baseline gear. It is, for lack of a better word, hungry. You will experience a large gain in efficiency for how your skills interact with your ship. Your own personal durability, rate of attack, and attack power have risen substantially.
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