The System Seas

“Patchworking?” Marco asked.

“Oh, right, sorry. Just my name for a bad habit. Say you find a hole in the boat, and you should fix it correctly but you don’t want to do the work. So instead of carving out a nice, clean hole and fixing it right, you just shove the wood back in as best you can and slather it with tar, hoping it will hold. Then that hole fails a bit, so you patch it again, and again when it fails even more. Every time, it gets a little bit worse. Rot creeps in. Then one day, it fails hard enough to cause a real problem and you’re in trouble.”

“That’s what that message sounded like to you?”

“I don’t know. But saying someone tried to slow this down instead of saying someone tried to fix it feels that way.” Riv lifted his hands and then moved them apart rapidly, like he was pantomiming the kind of hull failure he had just described. “And now the whole boat is sinking.”

Marco was thankful the pit didn’t seem to be moving and didn’t suck them in, but he had no desire to stay around it any longer than he had to. He silently wished any other ships that encountered it luck as he maneuvered away from it, then set a course firmly back towards the region his and Riv’s islands sat in.

The next few days were calm. The kinds of beasts that attacked them weren’t much trouble to deal with and were so small and weak in comparison to Marco and the crew that they didn’t offer any upgrades or powers at all. They made good time, and by Elisa’s rough calculations, the end of the second day had them within just one additional day’s travel of their target.

They were all sitting under the light of a bright, full moon before bed when that calm broke. This time, for once, Marco saw the potential for danger first. Not far from the ship, sailing almost directly at them, was a huge ship. Even with all of their adventures at sea, it was still one of the bigger things they had ever seen, a multi-story warship with more cannons, crew, and ornaments than any one craft really needed.

“Frisk,” Marco said. “That’s Frisk’s ship, and it’s coming right at us.”

Aethe was up and looking through the spyglass in a blink, furrowing her brow as she looked first at Frisk’s ship, then the waters behind it.

“Something else is going on. He’s being followed. I can’t get an exact count, but there are sails behind them. Lots of them.”

“He has an armada?” Riv pulled his new hammer from his back and swung it. “Doesn’t seem his style. He always struck me as someone who was proud of being an armada all by himself.”

“No, I don’t think so. He’s not coming directly towards us, see? He’s staying with the wind. I don’t think he’s leading those ships. I think he’s running from them,” Marco said.

Some lazy, thin clouds moved out of the way of the moon then, bathing the scene in a brighter light that revealed more of Frisk’s ship than they had been able to see so far. It wasn’t pretty. The big warship was pocked and dented all over, burned in some places, and splintered in others. The size of the ship meant that damage was spread out, but it was enough to cripple three or four lesser craft. Even considering the size and strength of Frisk’s ship, it was a considerable amount of hurt for any craft to have absorbed. The ship was moving, but Marco felt a few more good shots would take it out.

It wasn’t entirely surprising, then, when a bright light from Frisk’s deck shot towards theirs, glowing in the night and eliminating any chance at all that Marco hadn’t been seen.

“A government ship requests aid.” Frisk’s form materialized on the deck, courtesy of whatever messenger mage controlled his ship’s communications. “If you can fight, we need you. If you can’t, you need to run. This is…”

Frisk stopped midsentence and looked, for once, honestly and fully stripped of his usual professional poise. He turned to Marco and gawked.

“You? It’s you, of all people? What happened to the little rowboat you used to paddle around in?”

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“It was never a rowboat, Frisk. We had sails. And this is it.” Marco waved around his much larger, much more impressive ship. It was small in relation to Frisk’s own ship, but at his new level, size didn’t mean nearly as much as it had back when things were simpler. “We’ve been through a few upgrades.”

“I’ll say.” Frisk looked around the desk, taking in the dual masts, the paper blocks of magical runes, and the chicken coops in one long, swinging look. “You must have been through some things.”

“No kidding.” Marco swung his ship around as Frisk’s battleship began to pass him. The messaging spell likely had a maximum range, and keeping up with the other captain’s ship would make sure it wasn’t exceeded. “Although you look like you are going through your own kind of thing. I’m assuming you are too busy to be worried about me right now?”

Nothing made Marco feel so much better than when Frisk barked a laugh at the question.

“No, you don’t have to worry about any trouble from me at the moment. I have a full plate. Speaking of which…” Frisk gave Marco a good hard look. “What kinds of things have you been up to out there? Good ones? Because regardless of the trouble we’ve had in the past, you don’t strike me as the kind that would side with them over me.”

Marco looked back to the line of sails Aethe had pointed out earlier. The chasers were getting closer, and while he was sure he could easily outpace them, it didn’t seem like Frisk could.

“Oh? What did they do that was so bad? Besides attacking you.”

“They didn’t attack me. I attacked them. After they reduced three good-sized settlements to smoke, looking for something. Men, women, and children. Everyone.”

“Ah.” That did change things. “Then yes, I’d be glad to help you out, under a few conditions.” Follow current novels on NoveI~Fire.net

“Name them,” Frisk said.

“First, I need information. It’s possible they are looking for something related to what I’m trying to find out. I don’t want you treating me like a criminal when I ask those questions,” Marco said.

“I can handle that. Unless you do criminal things, that is. What’s the other ask?”

“What are we dealing with here? If they put you in this state, they must be pretty strong.”

Frisk did his best to explain what had driven him to this point. It seemed he had stumbled on a wrecked settlement a few days ago, somewhere blessedly far enough from Gulf Isle that Marco’s home island hadn’t been in any real danger. Still, the sight of a burned hamlet had been enough to set Frisk on the hunt. Finding another more recently demolished town had given him a direction to follow, and when he found the next destroyed town, he also found a pirate fleet just done looting it.

The battle had started then, and Marco got the sense that Frisk had thought it would be an easy sort of thing. It wasn’t, as it turned out. He immediately confirmed they weren’t locals when the enemy fleet turned, fired, and immediately put him on the back foot with an even, dangerous fight.

Frisk wasn’t a kitten and fought back, but actually sinking any of the ships turned out to be a task that was harder than even he could have expected. His shells hit hulls hard, but the ships appeared to be taking very little damage. It took time for him to figure out exactly what was happening, and by the time he did, he was already in trouble.

“There’s some kind of fleet skill in play, something higher than I’ve seen before. One of those ships is particularly good at repair, and they are sharing that with the rest of the fleet. Maybe you would have figured it out faster, since you have been out where I’m assuming they came from. I didn’t. It took even longer to make sure the ships themselves were sharing damage.”

“And by then?”

“By then we were losing. I’m sure they still have some damage they haven’t made up for, but by then we were losing, and there was no way to claw our way back to victory. I fled.” He looked ashamed to say it. “I’ve been fleeing since. It’s been hours.”

“Oh. Well, that’s not a big deal, then.”

“No?” Frisk looked doubtful. “Seemed like a pretty big deal to me.”

“We have some advantages you can’t know about. If we kept them off your tail, how long would it take for you to get back into fighting shape?”

“We’ve been overdrafting the ship, which means my engineers had to repair new damage from that. That’s kept them busy. If we had more time… I don’t know. We might be in some kind of fighting shape in fifteen minutes. Maybe a half hour, if it took longer than I expected it to.”

“Then get on it,” Marco said. “Crew, are you ready?”

“Oh, yes,” Elisa said. “I am going to do an interesting thing here.”

“Me too, if you get me close enough to bash some hulls,” Riv chimed in. “And just look at Aethe.”

Aethe’s quiver was, by and large, usually full of conventional arrows. Today, almost every specialty arrow she had access to was making an appearance alongside them, waiting for an opportunity to splash weird damage onto decks or drill through multiple targets in one go. She was almost trembling with anticipation at the prospect of ruining somebody’s day. Marco was glad that someone wasn’t him.

“Just like that?” Frisk asked. “You are sure you’ll be all right?”

“Oh, we’re never sure,” Marco said. “Hasn’t stopped us yet. We’ll see you in a while.”

With that, he wheeled the ship around to face the oncoming fleet. Elisa found her way to the Arbalest, and Riv went to his waiting position near her to defend as needed or offer such help as he could.