by King, Dante
“Did I ever tell you how sexy you are when you’re all worked up and go into captain mode?” Janet said as she dashed off to throw herself into the gunner’s seat of one of the mana-cannons.
“You know, I don’t think you did,” I cried after her, “but you can certainly tell me later, once we’ve sent these pricks packing.”
Enwyn, Cecilia, Alura, and I took our places in various gunner seats arrayed on the ship.
After taking those savage couple of broadsides, Captain Nutlee had gotten over her little tantrum and was now fighting back. While Barry yelled our crew to fire at anything that wasn’t a pirate ship, the Tainted Waif headed out into the bay and began shooting red manaballs at the enemy ships from her rusted—but still quite lethal—cannons.
It appeared that, for the time being, Chopsticks was happy to forget the grudge she held against Barry and the Pirate Queen and focus on smoking as many of the Arcane Council vessels as she could.
Cannon mist floated above the water of the bay, and the thunderous crackle of a hundred mana-muskets bounced from headland to headland, as a dozen ships traded magical blows. I sat in the gunner’s seat of a cannon on board the terribly named Flying Dutch Rudder and took my time with each and every shot. Accuracy was going to count for a lot more in this fight than straight firepower. Better to take the time to hit one of the foes than panic, miss, and have to wait while a fresh manaball manifested itself in the barrel.
“What’s the plan, Barry?” I cried as Barry stumped past, guiding our ship away from The Hellbringer so that we would present two smaller targets instead of one huge one.
“Plan, sir?” Barry asked. “Since when did you start believing in plans?”
The poltergeist pirate looked like he was in his element, despite the Avalonian armada’s clear advantage.
“Good point, Barry,” I said.
I turned back to take aim at an enemy galleon and squeezed the firing handle. I jerked in my seat as the shot blasted away. My manaball blasted apart the top beams of one of the Council ships closing in on Nutlee’s vessel. Wood rained down onto the deck of the enemy ship. One great piece of wrecked spar tumbled down and crushed one of the enemy gunners and knocked the cannon he was sitting in from its mount.
It was complete bedlam. After the sea battle that I had already experienced that day, that was fucking saying something.
The noise was indescribable and never-ending. The stink of burning magic emanating from the cannons was choking and visibility quickly became a thing of the past. All my four women and I could do, as gunners, was hope that Barry knew where the hell to steer us and take any shot we got as soon as it presented itself.
There were five ships fighting on the side of the pirates. There was our schooner, Chopstick Nutlee’s ship, Isobel’s gigantic galleon, and the two vessels she had brought along as a security detail. We were, technically, all under the overall command of the Pirate Queen, Isobel Galeflint. That overall command boiled down to nothing in the heat of battle, though, as there was no real way to communicate. Each ship was, to all intents and purposes, fighting for its life on its own. If a chance presented itself to help out an allied vessel, then we’d take it, but, when all was said and done, the main question on everyone’s mind was: how do I make sure the other guys die without getting dead myself?
I had no idea how long our ship’s magical defenses would last, but there must be a limit to the damage they could sustain before they started to weaken and let shots through. This thought seemed to have been shared by Mallory, who swung over onto our ship via a handily placed rope.
“We’re not going to have the time or manpower to sink all their ships without jeopardizing our shield integrity, Justin,” Mallory called as she strode over to me.
“Is that the dressed-up way of telling me that we’re totally fucked?” I asked.
The two of us ducked as a stream of mana musket rounds peppered the mainmast nearby, chewing splinters from the thick wood.
“Well…” Mallory said.
The Holy Mage’s hair was all over her face, which was already smeared with pale blue mana smuts. She had a mana musket of her own slung over one shoulder.
“We have to come up with something, and fast,” Mallory said.
“We need to throw them into uncertainty, to capitalize on the surprise they would have got sailing out and seeing us,” I said. “Sprinkle enough uncertainty around men like these bureaucrats, and chaos will bloom.”
Mallory nodded, raised her hand, and pointed at the ship nearest to us. For a moment, nothing happened, but perspiration sprung suddenly across the beautiful woman’s forehead and a vein pulsed in her temple.
A beam of celestial light shot down through the clouds like the golden finger of one of the more virile gods. It reminded me of the concentrated beam of a magnifying glass when it is focused at an ant or some other creepy crawly. There was an intense purity to it.
The topsail of the boat that Mallory had been pointing at burst into flame. Strips of canvas and burning splinters of wood rained down.
“That’s the stuff to give the troops,” I said with approval.
The fighting, as if on cue, turned slightly more magical after that. Spells were suddenly being flung from ship to ship. Frost, Fire, Wind, Storm, and Earth Magic were all in evidence.
A flurry of razor-sharp ice crystals sprayed ruthlessly across the hull of our schooner as we passed by an enemy ship intent on Isobel’s galleon.
One of our rebel crew, standing near the bow with a mana musket pressed to his shoulder, was caught by the tail end of the spume of Ice Magic. He screamed as his legs were covered in a beautiful crystalline frost and glued him in place. The next instant, a bolt of mana was fired down from the crow’s nest of the enemy ship and shattered the rebel’s legs like glass. His scream rose an octave or three as he toppled forward and into the sea.
“Reminds me of a joke I once heard,” Barry said, appearing at my elbow and barely flinching as a stray mana round reduced the ostentatious feather in his hat to ash.
“Now, is really not the time for jokes is it, Barry?” Mallory said, unslinging her mana musket from her shoulder.
“Yeah, haven’t you got some captaining to do or something?” Janet said from nearby, jolting in her gunner’s seat as she fired a manaball at one of the enemy vessels and blew a chunk out of its rudder.
Barry looked around at the unfolding sea battle and smiled happily. “Aye, there is that, I suppose,” he conceded and went off to bellow orders at a cluster of rebels struggling with a cannon that had run dry of mana.
Rather than waiting for her cannon to recharge itself, Enwyn leapt to her feet and used her new Conflagration spell, targeting the ship that she had just crippled. I saw that her idea was to put off any mages on the other ship firing any retaliatory spells our way by distracting them until we were out of range. A pillar of roiling flame appeared and started to move with purpose toward the enemy ship. The vessel’s defenses prevented the spell from immediately incinerating it, but it left scorch marks on the ship’s deck and set more than a few enemy sailors aflame. They howled and tossed themselves overboard in desperate attempts to put out their burning bodies.
Barry steered our schooner into the lee cast by the Pirate Queen’s ginormous galleon, in the hope that Isobel might help us take out an enemy craft hot on our tail and peppering us with mana shot from its bow chasers.
The gunners of The Hellbringer helped us out all right, and then some.
The broadside that they unleashed at the Arcane Council’s ship defied belief. The mana-cannon fire whistled over our heads and engulfed us in an acrid fog of mana smoke. One of the manaballs actually left a hole in one of our sails, they passed that close to us.
The front of the ship tailing us and firing at our stern with its bow chasers disintegrated under the onslaught. We had been popping away at our pursuer with our own stern chasers, but the sheer concentrated power and number of manaballs fired from The Hellbringer shattered
whatever shield had been deflecting our schooner’s shots and reduced the bow of the foe’s ship to matchwood. Water rushed into the breached hull as the ship’s own momentum pushed it onward.
Thinking that I could speed up the demise of the doomed ship, I summoned a powerful Flame Barrier spell and conjured a simple, but quite large, block barricade just in front of the enemy vessel.
The weakened timbers shattered as they made contact with the Fire spell. The entire bow folded in on itself like an accordion. Sailors cried out as the ship stopped dead in the water and began to sink in earnest, twisting sideways as the waves claimed it.
Standing at the back rail of our schooner, I watched the ship go down. One of the mages on the top deck hopped into the gunner’s seat of one of the mana-cannons and attempted to get one last shot off at us.
The manaball was aimed with hate and fear and flew directly toward the stern, heading for the captain’s cabin.
Quickly altering my Flame Barrier spell, I crafted a razor-sharp flaming axe blade in the air, just behind our ship. The manaball hit the supernatural blade and sheared cleanly in two, its magic dissipating as it hit the water.
And so the battle went on.
Barry guided our ship around in sweeping figures of eight, constantly moving, constantly scanning the waters for targets while the rest of us, the crew, did everything we could to protect our weakening shield and cause as much damage as possible to any of the opposing forces we encountered.
Guns, surprisingly, were the order for the day for just about everyone. This surprised me at first, but then I realized that a mage could deplete their own mana reserves in less time than it took to say ‘Abra kadabra alakazam’ unless they were careful. Not only were they then out of the fight offensively, but they were usually physically done too.
It was my first real lesson in how a War Mage had to think of the long game when they were involved in a prolonged battle. Unless they had some incantation like my Leech spell up their sleeve, which enabled them to steal mana from other sources or mages, then they had to bide their time and use their spells when they thought they would produce maximum damage.
Having access to quite a large arsenal of spells, and not being limited to a single branch of magic like every other mage involved in that sea battle, I was at a distinct advantage. I could act opportunistically, different spells as chance and circumstance allowed.
As we passed close to another enemy ship, which happened to be heading in the opposite direction to us, I unleashed that tasty little hex of mine that brought five undead wolverines into being. I deployed the creatures with a wave of my hand and saw to my amazement, as they landed on the deck of the enemy frigate and started to do their hellish work, that in the Spectral Realm there was nothing undead-looking about the wolverines. Here, in this realm, the magically conjured creatures were sleek, well-muscled, brutish animals with claws like polished ivory switch blades, teeth that dripped saliva, and eyes of lambent yellow.
They fell upon the stunned crew like the hounds of C. Montgomery Burns, rending and tearing their way around the deck as the hands tried to deal with them.
While they were thus distracted, a good score of our rebel crewmates raked the deck with musket fire, while Alura summoned her Crystal Hound. The creature, now upgraded from its Crystal Pup form, was impervious to basic ranged weapons like crossbows and throwing knives and fell upon the enemy crew with gusto, adding to the confusion.
It was only a matter of time before one of the larger enemy ships attempted to use grapnels to reel us in and engage in a little hand-to hand-combat. I had assumed that this would happen sooner or later. The Arcane Council would want to take at least a few prisoners so that they could interrogate them about the defenses of Cupido Island and whatever else they were interested in. Barry’s schooner, being the smallest vessel in the thrown together pirate fleet, was naturally the favorite option.
The first magical grapnel hooks landed and skittered over the deck, shooting out tendrils that fastened them onto the first thing they came in contact with.
I wished that I could summon my Amber Dragon, Kazrith. There were few things more distracting to a bunch of professional sailors and soldiers than a dragon appearing. I had seen that all too recently and been both on the receiving and giving side of things. A dragon shook things up like a burlesque dancer at a funeral; the appearance of one was unexpected and threw most people off their stride, even if they had been born and raised in a place like Avalonia. I could state that one categorically.
But summoning my dragon seemed pointless now that I knew it would also bring with it an enemy dragon to balance the scales. Besides, I doubted Kazrith would have enough mana to exist outside of his summoning orb for very long.
Men and women in the employ of the Arcane Council, of all shapes, races, and levels of angriness, swarmed over the side of their ship and jumped, flew, and roped over to our schooner. The girls and I readied ourselves to repel the boarders.
“Prepare to be boarded!” we heard one overzealous dude shout, a little too late, from the deck of the enemy ship. By the time that his words had rang out, we were well and truly being boarded.
I used my Telekinesis to lift a trio of huge water casks into the air just as the first bunch of Council soldiers set foot on our deck.
I waited for a few moments, while they unconsciously gathered closer together, forming a wedge. Then, I released the hex and the barrels dropped from a height of about twenty feet.
The three gigantic barrels landed, just where hoped they might, in the middle of the cluster of sailors that had just started screaming and crying out their wordless battle challenges to the rebels around me.
The rebels had prudently held back for as long as they could. As the first of the enemy sailors stepped forward, no doubt thinking that our ship was manned exclusively by cowards, the barrels smashed down on top of them. At least five men were flattened or maimed outright as the two tons of water and wood crashed down. A fresh chorus of screams joined the general clamor and then the fighting ramped up.
I fired out a few Blazing Bolts, just to keep our adversaries on their toes, and one of them hit a large crate nearby that contained something explosive. This set off a nice little chain reaction with some of the cargo, which, fortuitously, worked in our favor.
Crates and barrels exploded and went off like firecrackers, sending shrapnel of metal and shards of wood flying. Splinters scythed in all directions as the barrels carrying the gods knew what burst their bonds. One punched through the face of a nymph sailor with saffron yellow skin, while another took the top two inches of a dwarf’s skull off, exposing his slimy brain to the air. The poor guy reached up, poked at his exposed brain, and fell backward into one of his colleagues.
The initial shock of the falling barrel surprise passed, and it became clear that the Arcane Council’s sailors were an experienced crew. There was no standing around looking dumbstruck, no panic, no weeping and wailing at the sides of dead confederates. They hefted whatever weapons they had in their hands, and they came at us with a vengeance.
A blast of searing light ripped across the deck as Alura let fly with her Light Beam. The few sailors caught in the blast burst apart like ripe tomatoes. Blood and viscera misted the air and chunks of flesh slapped down onto the deck.
Cecilia summoned her Frozen Armor, and the icy segmented plates coated her in their protection. She looked like some end-game character on an MMO, all spikes and massive pauldrons. Her fists themselves were covered in spiked gauntlets, which she used to punch an enemy sailor, skewering him through the brain.
A rebel with whom I had shared a bottle of rum with the previous evening was stitched full of bloody holes by an elf with a mana musket. Another woman, who I had beaten me in a card game called Geese and Gods, had all her skin removed and her bones turned to fire by an awful spell unleashed by some maniac mage. Before I could take that bastard down, a ball of lightning suddenly appeared behind him and electrocuted him. His hair st
ood on end like some kind of mad scientist, and he dropped, his corpse smoking on the ship’s deck. I looked behind the orb to see Janet.
“That your new Lightning Orb spell?” I asked above the din.
“You fucking bet your ass it is!” she yelled back.
The deck of the schooner dissolved into a series of interconnected micro-skirmishes in which dwarves, nymphs, dryads, cyclops, elves, and mortals of various other kinds. Mana rounds flew in all directions. Knives and swords and axes flashed in the light of the cheerful sun.
Janet jumped over the falling body of someone she had just paralyzed with a Storm spell and rammed a dagger into the base of another enemy’s skull. She ripped the blade free and threw it overhand at a svelte, athletic dryad with dull green skin running in Barry’s direction, obviously intent on taking out the captain of the ship. The blade caught the green girl in the temple and sent her crashing into a rebel running in the opposite direction. Both of them fell overboard in a tangle of limbs.
I was confronted by a massive, bearded half-troll wielding a hammer smeared with blood. I ran him through with my Frost Shards spell, let loose at point blank range. He looked down at the magical, Frost Magic spikes sticking out from his gut and then up at me. He growled blood and stink into my face.
He was a big bastard, so I hit him with a Storm Bolt just to be sure. He shot, smoking, backward into a couple of his buddies.
It was bedlam. Hell.
And then, it was over. The enemy lay piled and dead around us. There was blood everywhere—entrails, brains, and loose limbs littered the deck.
One of the rebels, blinking rapidly in something that might have been shock, threw up over her own feet.
“Cut the ropes! Cut the lines!” Barry yelled.
I used my Flame Barrier incantation once more to produce a fiery sword out of the air. Along with a bunch of other rebels, I moved along the starboard rail and cut the magical grappling hooks tethering us to the other ship. Once we were free and clear of it, Barry, standing up on the poop deck, raised his hands and called up a phantom fire of white flame that took root in every sail of the enemy ship at once.