The System Seas

Marco steadied his will and looked directly into the light, probing out with his feelings and trying to understand anything more about it that he could. His Charisma was the best chance they had of getting a sense of what was going on. After a few moments, he found the effect wasn’t nearly as hard to understand as it was unpleasant to look at. The man in white, he knew now, was a system priest. He would have had to have been doing what he was doing, sapping the system’s assistance from Marco and Elisa and ruining their strength. It was almost the opposite feeling he got when the system made him stronger, a kind of ill depression to counterbalance the euphoria of getting stronger.

Thankfully, the rest of Marco’s crew came in time to help him deal with the feeling.

“Ugh, gross,” Riv said. “Jane, what is that? What’s he doing?”

If Riv and Elisa noticed the problem, Aethe seemed almost unbothered by the unnatural feeling. Marco felt that much worse, and he could tell by how quickly the others recovered from the effect that they couldn’t truly feel it. But even he felt bad for Jane, who immediately went wobbly in the knees.

“He’s screwing with our classes,” Jane said. “And I hate it. Hold on. I’m going to try something, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough to pull it off.”

“I’ll help,” Marco said. “I haven’t had a reason to use this one in a while.”

Marco let loose with Captain’s Cry. It wasn’t a skill he always remembered to use. Usually, it was something Elisa told him to hold in reserve for momentary emergencies. He had used it plenty in the fight against Quill, but not since, and now he felt the power of it as it bolstered his crew just that much. Jane seemed to approve of it, taking a deep steadying breath and looking just a touch better before she sat down, closed her eyes, and pulsed with energy for just a moment.

Elisa had been loading a bolt with energy and had just enough time to get rid of it in the general direction of the enemy ship as Marco and her power came back in a sudden, almost intoxicating rush. The bolt slammed hard into the nose of the ship, forcing the priest into a terrified retreat as the chaotic power cracked the keel. The next two shots hit in the same spot, breaking apart a vital mounting point for the heavy boards that made up the hull. One side of the ship began to sag as the enemy craft lost a great deal of speed.

“Should I keep shooting?” Elisa said. “They could hit us with cannon now, if they tried.”

“They won’t,” Marco said. “They’ll all be bailing now. They won’t bother.”

For the next ten minutes, they watched the ship battle against the water as it tried desperately to get to shallow water. It made landfall, if just barely, aiming for the closest ridge of high rocks under the water, running aground with only the deck and rail of the ship above water.

“What now?”

“I don’t think it’s our move, honestly,” Marco said. “Soon enough they’ll figure out they can’t swim towards us without getting blasted out of the water by Elisa. We could destroy the ship at any time. That only leaves one option.”

“Surrender,” Aethe said. “I like it. Should I send for drinks? I saw a stand with fresh fruit juice on the way back. Is it any good?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t here back when I lived here.” Marco considered his stomach for a moment, and found it to be mostly normal now. “But sure. Send for juice. I’m guessing this will take a while.”

After everyone had enjoyed their drinks, there was finally a bit of activity, not from the ship but instead from the path leading down to the docks. The island’s system priest walked towards them cautiously and doing his level best to look as non-threatening as possible. He held his hands out in front of him, palms down. It looked horrible, but Marco appreciated that he was trying to show as little aggression as possible.

“Marco, I see you’ve disabled the ship,” the priest said. “My superior has not yet sought to parlay with you?”

“Not yet,” Marco said. “But it’s not like we don’t have time.”

“If you like, I believe I can speed up that process a bit. I can go and speak with him and see what it is he wanted to demand, and take a list of your demands with me. I’d guess that he’ll agree to almost anything you’d like.”

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“Sure. Are you sure you’ll be safe, though? I’d hate to send you over there if he’s going to gut you for failure or something.” Riv squinted at the man. “Do you ever gut people for failure?”

“I certainly don’t. And he’ll certainly scream at me for a while. He is a yeller. It is a known truth of him.” The priest still had his arms out, and Elisa had mercy on him, reaching out and lowering them. He nodded at her thankfully. “But the sooner he comes to terms with having been defeated, the better. If you can break a priest’s system-scorch, he doesn’t have any real chance at facing you.”

“The… what? His what?” Marco held his hand to his forehead. “System-scorch?”

“It’s the primary weapon of the church of the system. A single priest can quiet an army with it. As far as I knew, it couldn’t be broken. But it’s the only offensive weapon of the church, and I imagined it to be undefeatable.”

“Well, we have Jane,” Marco said. “That helps.”

“Don’t fool yourself.” Jane shook her head. “When all of that first hit me, it was like I was getting slapped with a mountain. That little roar you did made it more like a cartload of dirt. I only broke through just the last little bit of it.”

“You seemed confident,” Marco said. “You said you could break it and I believed you.”

“I was putting on a brave face. Believe me when I say you did most of the work there.”

“Either way, it shouldn’t be possible, but that’s just one of the many impossible things I’m sure you do all the time. What I propose is that I head over to the other ship, give the other priest the barest explanation of what’s happening, and persuade him to come over here with me, alone.”

“He won’t try anything funny?” Marco asked.

“After you demonstrated your ability to neuter his power completely?” The priest scoffed. “And at point-blank range to your cannons? I don’t think so. You already know he’s beaten. I just want to make sure he knows. At the least I can make sure no more life is lost than necessary.”

“Fine, then.” Marco materialized the outboat in the water next to the ship. “Take this. It will be faster.”

The priest nodded, climbed into the boat, and began rowing. Elisa whispered to the group once he was out of earshot.

“Why the outboat, Marco? It won’t really be that much faster for him.”

“Because he can dismiss it if he wants,” Aethe said. “It’s hard to fight while you are swimming. You said there are sharks in these waters, right? With any luck they’d take care of them and we wouldn’t have to do anything at all.”

“Something like that,” Marco said. “You can’t be too careful, anyway.”

The yelling that Gulf Isle’s priest had predicted kicked off almost the moment the outboat touched the rail of the foundered ship. The sunken nature of the craft meant the priest in the rowboat was almost face-to-face with his ship-bound counterpart, and each stood on their own craft as the new and apparently more senior system priest berated the older Gulf Isle cleric.

Eventually the yelling man had to take in a breath or pause for some kind of response. The older cleric stood there biding his time until that moment came, then said a few calm words. It was an impressive effect to be able to bring into play, Marco thought. The other priest opened his mouth to yell after that, but nothing came out. His posture drooped and his head hung low as he climbed into the outboat, allowed Gulf Isle’s priest to row him over, and then disembarked onto the dock.

“Do we have to worry about you?” Aethe asked, an overdrawn arrow pointed directly at the priest’s head. “If you are planning on anything, it would be a lot quicker to tell me now. It’s going to end the same way no matter what.”

“No, I’m afraid not.” The new priest gulped and turned his gaze so he wasn’t looking directly at the obviously fatal arrow waiting for him. “My superiors won’t be happy with me, but if you can break my power, you can probably break theirs. It isn’t the kind of thing that changes much as you level.”

“Glad to hear it. Now I want you to explain everything you know. Everything. I think you know the kinds of things that are relevant to me.”

“Your father, and your class. I do know. I’ll tell you everything, so long as you assure my safety and that of the ship’s crew.”

“Sure,” Marco said. “Although you should throw in what you know about the temples, too. Everything, please. We are tired with working with bits and pieces.”

At the mention of the temples, the man went white and very nearly got himself killed. As the color drained from his face, his hand dropped towards one of his pockets. The twang of Aethe’s arrow was instant, but the other system priest had been just a little faster understanding what was going on and had immediately tackled the priest, perhaps even before he started moving.

“Don’t be a fool,” he hissed, slapping the priest across his cheeks as they laid on the ground. Marco got the impression that whatever the Gulf Isle priest was to the church after all this was over, he’d never quite be inferior to the other priest again. “It’s out of our control, now. If the other priests can stop him, they’ll never know he knows. If they can’t, telling him doesn’t matter anyway. Just do as he says, you idiot.”

The other priest seemed to not have even known how close he came to dying until he looked to see one of Tatric’s old storage buildings had a new hole in two of the walls where an arrow had gone through-and-through before imbedding up to the fletching in the stone walls of a well behind it. His hands jerked away from his pockets like they were poisoned, and he looked up in terror at Aethe.

“Are we done?” Aethe said. “I have more arrows.”

“Yes.” The priest held out his hands, wrists together. “Though I’d appreciate being tied. I suspect you’ll terrify me again before the day is done and I don’t want the option of doing the wrong thing.”