chapter 79
POV: Pirate Commander of the 87 Combined Pillager Fleet
My bond to my ship was barely there. From what I could tell, at least half of it was open to vacuum. A lot of the non-central areas had already been depressurized, but not every part of the ship could, so that probably caused more damage.
None of this mattered. The ship was going to die soon enough. There was barely any power left; everything was running on emergency reserves.
I snaked through the corridors with many dead strewn about. It didn’t take me long to reach the survivor I had heard yell, but it seemed that I was out for longer than I thought, as I could sense more enemies on board than just the new ones that were breaching through.
Before I could reach them, the enemies rushed in. A group of five against the surviving seven of my crew. I pushed myself as fast as I could, yet it didn’t help them. There were too many damaged sections; I couldn’t get there as fast as I wanted.
As I finally saw the room, only three of my crew members were still alive. Coiling myself up, I shot across the room at incredible speed, making the front of me like a spear and piercing through one of the enemies.
It was still alive after we hit the back of the room near where they had breached. The rest of me caught up. Now that all of me was there, I focused on the inside of their body to recombine myself into a humanoid shape, ripping him in half.
Now I was covered in gore, but only for a moment, as I absorbed it using my Heal from Absorption skill. While blood wasn’t the best stuff for healing, it was good enough for my head to clear up and the concussion damage I had received to be fixed.
All the people in the room stopped fighting as they saw this happen to their detriment. Roots shot out from all parts of my body. Two of the enemies managed to block, one of them I managed to pierce, while all the others received at least some damage.
I pulled myself toward the pierced enemy, doing the same thing I had done to the last one. Attacks now started to land on me. One of them was a fire user. My defensive skills were already active, so I focused on the fire user, blocking incoming attacks while closing in.
He had some decent defensive capabilities, so I ended up choking him until I finally crushed his neck. My roots then pierced him, drinking up his blood as I continued to fight the others.
My crew members helped, two of them were still alive. It didn’t take long for us to equal our opponents. One of the crew had a freezing skill that momentarily stopped our opponents from moving, which allowed me to envelop them in my roots and crush them to death, as they could no longer resist me.
“I have failed you. You can try and hide somewhere. There’s a chance they will just leave when they get what they want, but I will make sure they bleed at least a little bit. That should take the focus off you guys. I do not think anyone else has survived.”
They didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. We all knew, as soon as we stepped into our line of work, that we were probably going to end up in a broken-down ship, hoping we would die before starving.
From the faint echoes I could still feel from my bond to my ship, I knew they had already reached where the skill stones were held. They were trying to escape the ship as fast as possible, probably because I had just killed one of the other boarding teams.
My roots vibrated with excitement as I knew where they were going to try to exit from, and I could cut them off. Without saying anything, I jumped and turned myself into a root snake, as that was the fastest way to get to the target location. I didn’t have a moment to spare, otherwise, I might miss them.
The ship was broken, but my roots could sneak through a lot of tight places. It annoyed me when I had to go slower where electrical wiring was exposed, as touching it would mean possible death, as I didn’t know exactly how much current was flowing through those specific wires.
As I was closing in on my target location, I could finally sense and hear the team that had the skill stones rushing down the hallways.
All of us were shocked when a railgun fired. It seemed my crew didn’t want to go down without doing any damage. They had probably transferred power from other railgun capacitors into one railgun and managed to get it operational enough to fire.
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It seemed that more crew members were alive than I expected. That must have done some damage to the enemy ship, but it also guaranteed our foes were going to destroy the ship completely. So be it, I didn’t plan on surviving anyway, and most likely any crew would have died as well. It would have just taken longer.
The disruption did allow me to comfortably make it to the ambush spot. I didn’t have the best stealth capabilities, but I was quite certain they weren’t paying attention to this.
It was easy enough to coil myself up as much as possible and just stay in the dark air vent. A group of five entered the room and rushed straight toward the other hallway that would lead them to their breacher craft.
As soon as I had a clear path toward the one carrying the skills, I used a significant chunk of my mana. My spears almost instantly tore through that person, but instead of going into my humanoid form, I triggered my innate ability, which allowed me to spread out, quadrupling my mass and size, turning the entire room into a root trap.
All of the enemies were now entangled. One of them seemed to possess fire, another lightning—those were the troublesome ones. The others were already dying.
They were burning my very essence, but I had plenty of body to spare. It took me nearly a minute, but even their bodies finally extinguished as both lightning and fire went out. At last, I managed to kill all of them.
Part of me turned into a humanoid form as I opened the box containing the five skill stones, the very things that had been the cause of my downfall.
One of the dead person’s radios crackled to life. It was quite damaged, but I was pretty sure they were trying to figure out what had happened. They were probably in denial, they should already know they were dead.
I didn’t have much time. Unfortunately, destroying skill stones is easier said than done.
Gathering as much mass as I could into one location, I created a sort of pocket around a skill stone and then hardened one of the ends of my roots as much as possible, using many of my skills to make this possible.
One of my first skills, Pierce, which I was so close to getting to master proficiency, did its job, cracking the stone and destroying it. There was a cost to using this much power, as not only was the skill stone destroyed, but plenty of my roots as well.
It hurt so much doing this, but the satisfaction of them finding out that their precious skill stones were broken was beyond satisfying. Another one destroyed, but as I was preparing for the third, I heard fast movement.
Through the hallway where the breach was, multiple people were approaching at high speed. They were truly strong, like me, so my end was approaching.
It was unfortunate that I didn’t manage to destroy the third one, as I had to dodge a lightning strike that would most definitely have stunned me long enough for that person to dismantle my very being.
“You bastard, you played this beautifully. I like someone as daring as you. Unfortunately, you need to die, even if I would’ve liked to have you as my plaything for a while longer.”
A moment later, two more people appeared behind her, but she held out one of her hands, stopping them from rushing in.
“Stay back. He’s mine.”
In amazement, I watched as her bodyguards stepped back. Were they really going to let us fight one-on-one? Then she pulled out a handle of a sword. That confused me for a moment, yet then I felt it, the momentary surge of magic as she activated the handle.
A brilliant red sword emerged, double-edged with a wicked point.
“Magic tech. I’ve never actually seen a hard plasma weapon before. Or is it a solid-light one, or a combination?” I commented without thinking, as it was one of the most beautiful and deadliest weapons I’d ever seen.
“How do you know it’s not artifact tech?”
“Do you think I was born yesterday? I can obviously sense how your affinities are keeping that thing functioning. Your question was as stupid as you trying to claim that that’s mana tech. Speaking of which…”
I activated my own internal mana tech that I got a long while ago. Back then, I was so worried about my natural weaknesses that I spent quite a while and a lot of credits fixing them to the best of my capabilities. They had gotten less and less use as the years went by, but who would have known they might prove useful in the end.
“You think something like that is going to help you?” she said as she rushed toward me, her weapon swinging in a way that could cut me in half.
I punched up some of my roots, with the mana techs cooling flowing through me. It boosted my natural defense against anything that would set me on fire, and all my skills boosted my defensiveness even further. Her sword only managed to cut halfway through my block.
She barely had time to understand that her sword hadn’t cut me in half when my own attack was already heading toward her center.
She used her other hand to push herself against something so that I wouldn’t hit her vitals, and then a weak barrier formed just before I struck. But I had so much mass that I powered through it.
She flew back to where she had come from, hitting the wall hard. I tried to rush toward her, but her bodyguards unleashed lightning, making me scream. They were doing little damage, but the disruption to my control over my roots was still there and the pain was hard to deal with.
The lightning stopped, and she rushed back in, this time in a proper stance. Slowly, she got through my defenses, but I managed to land some decent hits, even making her nose and mouth bleed. She probably had some internal damage.
I would have liked the fight to continue longer, but that weapon, it was glorious. To be able to die at the hands of something like that was a better way of going than I expected. She finally managed to cut me in half. I fell to the ground that was covered in my dead roots.
She held her weapon toward me, but I could no longer resist anything. I was already dead, though it would take a while for my consciousness to completely fade.
“Good fight,” she said in a manic tone as she tasted her own blood. I was pretty sure normal flesh bags didn’t usually do stuff like that. She might be one of those crazy ones, as she truly fought like one. Her blade moved so fast I barely remember her movements even now.
The three skill stones that survived, she held them reverently. I guess those skills meant more to them than just monetary value. Another person rushed in, seeming quite panicked.
“What is it?” she asked, seemingly annoyed.
“It’s your father. He wants to talk.”
“Fine,” she answered, like this was something annoying, but needed to be done.
For the first time, I looked at her properly. I believed she was an elf of some sort, which would make sense, as the other pirate lord we were fighting was also an elf. It had always been hard for me to tell if species like hers were beautiful to their own kind, but I believed this one actually was.
My sight was gone now, but my hearing still managed to pick up some things.
“We recovered three intact. That makes twenty-four recovered, with five lost. We have a few more leads. Should I follow them?”
“No. Get back. We need the Crimson Falcon. We are reaching the end of this war, and we need as much firepower here as possible. You can pick up the leads later, for now, you have done a good enough job. Now return, my daughter.”
“Yes, Pirate Lord Ythrel Veylith. We shall return.”
Now I could no longer hear. The final blackness has arrived.