Chapter 132: Damage
Aethe took position at the bow, and somehow, for once, she was the one who fired first.
“You can’t make a shot that far,” Riv said. “Not even you.”
“Want to bet?”
“I do,” Riv said. “Wash-up duty for a week. Every dish.”
“You’ve got it,” Aethe said. “I hit before Elisa can, just this once. Deal?”
“It’s a deal.” Riv laughed. “Honestly, I win either way. I’d like to see how you manage that.”
The ships were already in a rough formation based on speed, with the bigger, slower ships in the back trailing after the faster ships up front. In a move Marco considered clever, the faster ships cut their speed to reduce the overall area the fleet covered. Only one ship refused to do this, moving forward more aggressively than the others, focusing all the magical power that had been glowing near the water into a single, absurdly massive cannon ahead of the ship’s wheel.
Cannon fire wasn’t new, but in trying to imagine the effect of a six-foot cannonball crashing into his deck, Marco found out he didn’t want it to actually happen. A cannonball that big would hit too many things he found important. He hoped that Aethe really did have something in her pocket for that, or else that Elisa could fire at a longer range than the cannon could and might stop it.
As the power continued to migrate to the cannon and to concentrate in the enemy barrel, Aethe took careful aim, pointing the tip of a gleaming, all-metal arrow much higher into the air than usual. Pulling the string back and overcharging a shot as much as she could, she launched it much further from the ship than Marco had thought possible. Even more amazing, it looked like it was on track to hit.
“No way,” Riv said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it.” Aethe’s eyes tracked the arrow as it flew. “Believe it and watch where it lands.”
“What is that, anyway?”
“Arrow of double flight. This is the first one. And it should end just about now.”
The arrow had spent several seconds in flight, but now it had pointed straight down at last. It looked for a moment like it was going to hit the captain, but at the last moment, the movement of the ship and the water pushed the point of impact just a little behind him.
“Is the second flight fun?” Riv asked, looking at the amused-looking Aethe. “You look like you expect it to be.”
“Oh, yes,” Aethe said. “Now come the bees.”
“The bees?”
“Yes. I could only get one of these arrows, but it’s made up of a couple dozen bees. Every sting is as hard as the impact of the arrow, sized down to the proportion of the total arrow the bee comprised.” Aethe recited the words like she had been rolling them in her head for weeks. Marco thought she probably had. “Riv, tell Elisa the captain will be distracted for a while. It might make a difference.”
The enemy ship didn’t change direction at all, but something unexpected did happen. The captain kept his arms to the wheel but began to jerk back and forth as the bees from Aethe’s arrow began to take aim at him. The damage wasn’t exactly visible over the great distance, but from the reaction the captain showed, however much injury each was causing, they at the very least hurt.
The ship sped up, too. Marco hadn’t thought it was possible, considering how much of a lead the captain had already gained on his friends. Still, it visibly started to increase that lead, pulling further and further ahead of the rest of the armada.
“He must have had something left to give. Using it up now is good.” Aethe smiled. “He can’t use it against us that way.”
“How much time will we have to fight this ship before his friends catch up?”
“About a minute,” Aethe said. “We need to do as much damage as we can over that time. It’s shared, remember?”
“I do. Do you think they know how much of a mistake that is?”
“Not at all. And it might not be. We’ll have to make the most of it.”
Elisa started firing then, pumping out alternating shots of fire and lightning that slammed into the enemy craft with eerie, unsettling efficiency. It looked like she was juicing the effect for coverage and lasting, and the explosions were hardly the most impressive he had seen. Still, every time the flames on the deck had just about dissipated, others were springing into existence over them, reigniting the deck in a weak sheet of fire or distracting the ship’s crew from doing anything about them.
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“Why so weak, Elisa?” Marco yelled. “Why not more?”
“Because I’m not targeting crew!” Elisa shouted. “I’m trying to do the most damage I can. That means setting things on fire. Ships are good at spread-out damage recovery. This is the fastest I can drain their stocks.”
That was the real risk here, in Marco’s book. They probably couldn’t sink this ship before the other ships got to them. From what Frisk had told them, the recovery from damage was truly substantial, like one of the ships was good at nothing but that. If he couldn’t take that ship out of commission before they sank The Foolish Endeavor, they’d be in real trouble.
Marco let the ship continue on until they were in Elisa’s favored firing range, the distance at which she couldn’t miss, lost no huge amount of power, but was still outside of most ships' ability to strike back. From there, Elisa kept up the barrage, hitting the ship again and again until finally Marco watched the captain stop swatting and jerking and get back to piloting the ship in earnest.
With his wits back about him, it took the captain very little time at all to point the big cannon at The Foolish Endeavor again. The huge cannonball took to the air, imposing and deadly. Worse, it was faster than Marco had hoped it would be. He managed to pull the ship well out of its path before it hit, but as they got closer, it would get harder and harder to dodge those shots.
The enemy ship was probably built around taking one big shot with that huge gun and hoping it took out its enemy before things got to be too much of a scrap. With the durability of a whole fleet behind it, it looked like the ship acted as an assassin of sorts, sneaking out to take out enemies with massive, overwhelming power and never being in all that much danger itself.
Suddenly, it made a lot more sense how Frisk’s warship got to looking so beat up.
Marco took evasive action, watching for each cannonball as it fired while trying his best to give Elisa good firing angles. Unfortunately, the need to dodge meant the other ship could close in on them much faster than he felt comfortable with. The shots were getting closer and closer to undodgeable now, and if they were going to avoid getting hit, Marco had to change plans.
“Aethe, stop taking out crew. Harry the captain.”
Aethe nodded and readjusted her fire on the man at the wheel, slamming him with arrow after arrow. The man was the tank that his ship wasn’t and somehow weathered all the hits, but his lack of attention on the battle left Marco free to do something he hadn’t done in a long, long time. Kicking up every rune he could having to do with speed, hull integrity, and sheer malice, he rammed the other ship.
The crash was tremendous. The crew had braced, but Elisa was still thrown almost out of the arbalest as the pointed prow of the ship pierced through the enemy’s hull.
“We’re stuck!” Aethe fired a burst of arrows into the enemy crew who had thought to board them, then pointed at the melding point of the two ships. “Marco, we are stuck! What are we going to do?”
“Riv!” Marco yelled. “Now!”
For almost six months, Riv had been absorbing the skill his Tyrant’s Club had once held. During that time, he hadn’t been able to get nearly as much out of the skill. Where normally he could trade his strength stat points for one incredible hit, leaving himself weakened for hours to drive home a particularly large strike, for a long time they had used the power almost exclusively through Marco’s captaining skills, burning Riv’s strength to free the ship from nets, magic traction, and traps.
Now, though, Riv had finally finished absorbing the club’s power and had fed it to his new weapon, turning it a dark iron black and leaving him raring for the slightest excuse to try a full-powered strike. Marco hadn’t told him exactly what to do, but he hadn’t had to. Any order he gave Riv that left room for it would have always resulted in the same thing. Riv charged, planted himself on the prow next to the enemy ship, and swung with everything he had.
Magic glowed. Riv’s strike gave him something like a 500% bonus on the skills he burned for a single blow. That wasn’t just powerful. It was actively painful to look at. He glowed like a nearby sun going nova, pivoted, and struck. Where the ship had poked through the enemy’s hull, there was already significant damage. After the club hit, it was gone, as was a good quarter of the side of the enemy ship.
It was several times more damage than should have been necessary to sink a ship, and yet it started to spring back immediately. The boards started to come back, growing through the space in reaching threads that threatened to close the hole in seconds.
The Foolish Endeavor spun away from the enemy ship in the backlash of Riv’s power, and Marco let the ship ride that power until Elisa was once again lined up with her targets.
“Got it!”
She shouted before he even had a chance to tell her what he was thinking and sent firebolts one after the other, threading them into the interior of the ship where they burst one after the other, full of power. Marco saw flames begin to lick upwards on cargo, furniture, and decorations before the hole finally sealed itself.
The enemy cannon remained quiet, mostly courtesy of Aethe having killed almost everyone on board who could have fired it. In seconds, they had all burned massive amounts of resources to completely depopulate the ship. There was still time, before their enemies got there, but really just a few moments. Marco saw the enemy captain recovering from his attack and decided to take those seconds for himself. Leaving the wheel to tend to itself, Marco leapt from the deck.
The ship had gained a lot of powers over their journey, but his favorite had to be the one they had gained from the fishmen who had attacked them in an otherwise calm sea. Their contribution to his ship’s power was an assisted launch when jumping from their deck to another. With all the stats he had already, he easily cleared the distance that had opened up between their ships.