Chapter 81 : Ambush at Sea
The captain spotted them first — two ships, not one, coming up from the port rear, black skull flags running at the mast. They fired a warning shot and the water column rose a safe distance from the hull, but the message was clear.
The sound brought the passengers up from their bunks. The sea was still grey with early light, visibility poor, but word spread fast and people crowded onto the deck to look. The two pirate ships were visibly faster than the passenger vessel — they were already closing despite the crew having raised a second sail the moment the alarm sounded. Someone on the pirate ships had a wind mage running the sails.
Evan had been awake all night. He'd tracked the suspicious light-point through Shuang's elemental sight until just before dawn, watching it approach the first-class corridor, pull back after apparently deciding the security was too tight, and blend back into the sleeping passengers. He'd memorized the signature and let the shared vision lapse when nothing further happened. Now he came up onto the deck with everyone else.
Shuang stirred on his shoulder. "Why is everyone here?" She yawned, stretched, and frowned. "I feel like I didn't sleep at all."
"Pirates. Two ships. This is going to be complicated."
The first-class passengers had come up. At the center of the group: a young man in traveling clothes rather than formal wear, gold hair, deep blue eyes, face a shade too pale to be entirely healthy. The fabric of his coat was Hespani fleece from Florenza — the kind that went almost entirely to royal households and the highest nobility, almost never reaching open markets. His bearing was correct without being announced. A dark flush of something was visible at his brow, held in check by what Evan recognized as divine technique.
The priest walked beside him — plainly dressed, unremarkable to look at, but the energy around him registered as serious. Eight bodyguards formed an outer ring, and one attendant stood close behind the young man with the stillness of someone trained for exactly this.
Also present, mixed into the crowd nearby: the light-point from last night. Still here. Moving carefully toward the young man, not quite reaching him because the bodyguards' awareness had already marked the approach and closed the gap without making it obvious.
Something rose from the nearest pirate ship. A dragon — black with fire-red across its flanks, carrying a rider. Evan's hand moved toward the bracer before he caught himself. A closer look told him what it actually was: a Wyvern. The proportions were wrong for a true dragon, the intelligence in its eyes a flat animal calculation rather than the layered awareness a real dragon carried. Cross-bred from a dragon and some variety of flying magical lizard, capable of producing acid rather than fire breath — acid that would strip through a person, or put a hole through a ship's planking given enough time. Dangerous, but a different kind of dangerous.
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The priest began chanting. Sandera Ray — pure white light poured from his hands. The rider on the Wyvern tore open a scroll, and the space around the creature shifted: not distortion, but a change in local refraction, the Epstein Refraction Scroll bending light around the Wyvern's body. The Sandera Ray skimmed past.
Twelve people appeared on the deck. Short-range transfer array — no receiver needed at under five li. They were not pirates in any ordinary sense. They moved directly for the priest's group without wasting time on the other passengers.
One traveler stumbled into the path of one of them. A blade moved and the traveler fell.
Evan's expression went cold. He understood the logic of it — professionals in this world operated in a social context where bystanders were irrelevant. He understood it and found that he couldn't apply it to himself. The other formation, the one built across eighteen years in a world that had decided certain things about the value of human life, was there underneath and wasn't going anywhere.
He pointed, spoke two syllables, and sent a fireball.
One of the twelve glanced at him. "Your funeral." Dark light flickered across the blade and cut through the fireball without the expected detonation. In his other hand, a sword came up.
Evan stepped in. The sword-cane swept in the arc of a long-handled war hammer strike, Shuang throwing a string of amplified light into the weapon as it moved. The cane head blazed pale blue, the light forming into something solid.
The man committed to taking the hit in exchange for a killing blow — a mage, he'd judged, not a real fighter. The calculation was wrong by the time he finished making it. The cane head hit his chest with the weight of a mounted strike behind it, the channeled energy discharging on contact. His protective light didn't hold it. He went over the railing. Two bubbles broke the surface and the sea swallowed him.
The other eleven had spread to engage the bodyguards. The priest kept his attention on the Wyvern overhead, not yet casting. The Wyvern was circling, waiting on the chaos below to resolve.
Shuang disappeared. Evan felt her vanish through the contract and interposed an Ice Lance between the sword-light that had been tracking toward where she'd been, the blade and the lance trading enough force to scatter ice shards across the deck.
He turned to face the man behind the strike. Smaller build, sharp eyes, someone who had spent a long time sharpening something specific. The man looked at him with professional assessment.
"Stand aside. Blood Shark Pirates have a grievance with Prince Elloran of Norma. Not with you." The tone was almost reasonable. "We don't want complications. We just want the prince."
The name landed and the picture assembled: Prince Elloran, third son of the Norma Emperor, traveling under cover with a high-ranking Church priest and a professional security detail on a passenger ship to Nabos. The Blood Shark Pirates were a private force operating under the empire's unofficial sanction, which was why they had funding for transfer arrays and Wyvern riders.
"Your dispute with the prince isn't my concern," Evan said. "Killing passengers is."
"Commoners," the man said, with the flat simplicity of someone stating a fact. "Your objection doesn't make sense."
He was right that it didn't fit the worldview common to this world. Evan smiled. "If argument won't settle it, we can use something else."