Accidental Duelist
Page 21
"Come on, let's take them!"
She ran toward the stern, hoping the others followed behind her. If they weren’t, this was going to be a short fight.
Reaching the steps up to the quarterdeck at the stern of the raider ship, Cari raced upward, taking them two at a time. She swept the legs out from under a raider trying to defend his position at the top of the steep stairs with a slash of her sword. As he fell to the wooden decking, a sweep of her dagger laid open his throat as she leapt up over him to the quarterdeck.
* * *
1,200 experience awarded
* * *
A shot rang out to her right and she was knocked sideways into the rail, almost tumbling over into the sea.
* * *
Health damage - health -22
* * *
Cari pressed her forearm to her side. She'd been shot. Every breath was like inhaling fire. She must have broken ribs at the very least.
Another crack.
Something whizzed past her face buzzing like a bumble bee.
A raider officer raised the pistol like a club over his head and ran at her.
She sheathed her dagger and drew one of her own pistols using the side of the hand holding her sword to lever back the hammer.
Leveling the pistol at her attacker, Cari fired point blank into the raider's face. The bullet took the top of his head off after passing through his left eye.
* * *
1,500 experience awarded
Level Up!
* * *
A surge of the remaining raiders stopped the rest of the Bonnie Beth's crew following her on the main deck. They fought to put down the raiders in front of them, trying to reach Cari on the quarterdeck. More of her shipmates crossed over from their burning vessel across the narrow gap between them and the raider ship.
Cari realized she was cut off from aid and stood alone on the quarterdeck. She felt the blood seeping from the bullet wound in her side. She had no idea how serious the internal injuries might be.
The raider captain sneered at the wounded girl who dared to stand against him on his ship. He raised his sword overhead as he charged at her.
Cari drew the second pistol, planning to dispatch the lead raider the same way she killed the previous one.
He moved too fast for her and chopped down at her with his cutlass blade. She had no choice but to try to parry his sword with the pistol.
She managed to bring the pistol over in time but the jarring hit of the cutlass on the pistol barrel knocked it from her hand to fall spinning across the deck's planking.
The raider danced backwards, avoiding a return attack from Cari's rapier blade.
Her sword cut nothing but air and swung wide as she fought to pull the wild swing back under control.
Pain lanced through her from the wound in her side. It was difficult to move the way she wanted to in this fight. She'd have difficulty scoring any kind of killing blow.
Her only chance was to make enough light hits to power up her burst of speed and take him down that way.
Cari assumed a defensive posture, taking a cue from competitive fencing. She only needed a light touch to score a hit.
All she had to do was draw a little blood each time. Oh, yeah, that and avoid getting killed in the process.
The captain laughed and charged forward again seeking a quick kill.
Cari used her blade's defensive bonus and inherent quickness to deflect the incoming attacks until she saw her opening.
There!
A lunge and a flick of her wrist left a deep gash in the raider's cheek.
Blood streamed down the side of his face.
The power up bar on one side of her vision filled a little.
"You'll pay for that, girl!"
"Worried you'll be too ugly for your raider hags to sleep with you, pig?"
* * *
Taunt engaged
* * *
The raider captain snarled something incoherent and charged back in at her.
Her taunt worked just the way she wanted it to.
The raider’s attacks, uncoordinated by his blinding anger at her words, missed again and again. It only made him growl and get angrier.
Once again, an opening in his defenses appeared.
Cari used an unconventional attack, hoping it would anger him more.
She feinted with her blade and then spun in place, leveling a roundhouse kick at his chest.
Cari felt the foot connect, knocking the raider back onto his butt. The progress bar filled some more.
The exertion of the kick and the contact with the raider jarred her and sent spasms of pain through her whole body.
* * *
Health damage - health -8
* * *
Cari’s broken ribs must have gotten worse from the effort of the attack. She coughed once, spat on the ground, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
It came away covered with blood.
Cari looked down and realized she was bleeding internally.
A quick check of her health status showed significant damage.
* * *
Health: 30/80
* * *
Cari had to work fast. If her lungs filled with blood, she'd never last long enough to finish the captain.
It might take one more hit to finish filling her power up progress bar. Maybe.
She had to try to score a solid hit with enough damage to complete the power play.
Maybe it was a flicker of the captain's eyes as something else drew his attention, or perhaps the tickle of sensation raising the hair on the back of her neck. Cari realized at the last instant, via her prescience skill, someone had gotten behind her and was about to attack.
Cari dropped to her knees and twisted her body backward in a reverse lunge.
A cutlass cut through the air a scant inch above her face as she leaned back. A raider had gotten behind her.
She extended her blade out from her arched body slicing into the groin of the surprised raider.
The spurt of bright red blood showed she'd connected with one of the femoral arteries, slicing the large vessel open with the tip of her blade.
The man dropped his cutlass, clutching at his crotch, trying to stem the flow of life-giving blood as it spurted out from his body. His eyes glazed over and he fell to the side.
* * *
1,200 experience awarded
* * *
She’d avoided the sneak attack, but most important of all, her power bar filled and flashed green.
* * *
Power up active - Unleash special innate skill - Burst of speed.
* * *
Cari powered up just in time.
The captain saw his opportunity as she recovered from her most recent attack. He charged in to finish her off while she was overextended backwards.
It would have worked, too, except now she was too fast.
The familiar stopwatch tick, tick, ticked around in her head letting her know how much time she had left: 40 seconds.
Cari rolled out from beneath the slow-motion attack from the captain, groaning in pain as she pushed herself up to her feet.
The surprise showed in his eyes as she dodged his blow with impossible speed. The captain struggled against his forward momentum to turn and meet her in the new position beside him.
It was too late.
Cari lunged forward, piercing the captain's side and running her blade through his entire torso, skewering both lungs and his heart in one shot.
Withdrawing, she pulled her sword free from the raider's corpse.
* * *
2,500 experience awarded
* * *
Clamping her elbow against her side, trying to splint the broken ribs beneath her wound, Cari ignored the pain shooting through her torso and charged at super speed down the steps onto the main deck. Like a roving blur of death, she wove her way through the remaining raiders, dropping one after another before they knew what hit them.
> The visual display showed the message for experience points awarded. It flashed eight times with the same message before her power up combo timed out.
* * *
1,200 experience awarded.
* * *
The remaining raiders surrendered, no more than ten in number, dropping their weapons and falling to their knees.
The power down period hit Cari and she fell to the deck in front of Percy. The boy stood over Mr. Bowcott's wounded body, a bloody cutlass in his hand.
"Miss Dix, that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. How did you do that?"
Cari gasped, trying to catch her breath from both the exertion of her burst of speed and the injured ribs.
"Just something I learned along my travels. Who's the most senior man we have left?"
"That would be Marlin Dawkins, ma'am. He's the assistant bosun's mate."
"Tell him to gather and secure the prisoners, cut the Bonnie Beth free, so she doesn't burn this ship down with her, and find me a healing potion."
* * *
Quest completed - Capture the raider ship
4,000 experience awarded
* * *
Her orders given, Cari succumbed to the pain and fatigue, a wave of darkness closing in around her.
Percy's words filtered through to her sleepy ears just before she fell into unconsciousness.
"Aye, aye, Cap'n Dix."
Chapter 25
Distant shouts, and orders barked and repeated overhead awakened Cari. She opened her eyes and didn't recognize where she was. The cabin was large, decorated with gaudy paintings of dancing girls with gilt paneling everywhere she looked.
"You're awake, ma'am."
Her eyes tracked to find the source of the voice.
Percy sat on a stool a few feet away, next to a large table or maybe it was a desk.
"You had me worried, ma'am. Even when we found the healing potion you requested and managed to wake you enough to drink it, you fell right back to sleep."
"Where am I?"
"In the captain's cabin. Aboard the raider ship Bloodletter. Mr. Bowcott and Mr. Dawkins have her underway again, on what they think is a general heading for Tandon town."
Cari sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bunk. It was easily twice the size of the bunk in her previous cabin aboard the Bonnie Beth.
"How long have I been asleep?"
"A day and a half, ma'am. While you were asleep, we’ve made all the necessary repairs and we're underway again."
She groaned as the pain in her side flared again. It wasn't as bad as she remembered it during the fighting but it still smarted quite a bit. She placed a hand on the wound. Someone had bandaged it, pulling the wrappings tight, no doubt to help hold the broken ribs in place.
Cari blushed as she realized the bandages wrapped all the way up to her breasts. She hoped it was one of the Bonnie Beth’s few female crew members who’d done it since they would have had to remove her shirt to do the work.
There was a light knock on the door.
"Come in," Cari called out.
Mr. Bowcott stuck his head around the doorframe then stepped into the cabin.
"Ah, you're awake, Cap'n. I'm glad to see it. How do you feel?"
"I'm well enough." Cari stood and winced a little at the movement. "How are the rest of the crew?"
"I'm happy to say everyone who we got over from the Bonnie Beth survived. As you ordered before you lost consciousness, we searched the ship and found a cache of healing potions. After we administered one to you, we divvied up the remainder based upon the injuries each man had. I hope that was alright? There were some who wanted to keep giving you potions until you woke up. Once I was awake, I said that wasn't what you ordered us to do."
"That makes sense, I didn't need the additional healing and you used the rest to save the other crew members. Good job."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am. Did Percy tell you we're back underway to Tandon?"
"Yes, he did. Hopefully the authorities there will know what to do with the prisoners."
"Prisoners, ma'am? There aren't no prisoners."
"What happened to the surviving raiders? I ordered them secured."
"Aye we secured them, tried them, and pitched every last mother's son overboard with a cannon ball chained to their feet."
Cari's horrified stare must've been strange juxtaposed against Mr. Bowcott's beaming smile at his pronouncement.
It took the man a few seconds to recognize the look on Cari's face.
"Did we do something wrong, ma'am? That is the customary treatment for raiders taken at sea."
Cari recovered her composure and steeled her features so she didn't show her emotions so plainly. It took a bit of work to wipe the image of men and women sinking to their deaths, drowning as they struggled to reach the surface.
"No," she finally said. "No, you did what you thought was right. I didn't make my orders clear. Were the raiders the only people aboard. They had no prisoners of their own?"
"Only a young girl we found hiding here in the captain's cabin. She couldn't have been more than four years old so she obviously wasn't a raider herself. A few of the female crew members have taken her in and are tending to her. Don't worry, they'll keep her out from under foot."
Cari was glad her crew hadn't killed the raider child, too, given their bloodthirsty moods. That might have broken her. People lived hard lives here in Fantasma and made hard decisions because of it. She had to remember that. It puzzled her why the raider captain brought his daughter aboard in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t his child but one taken in a raid on shore or during the capture of a ship.
"Good, perhaps we can figure out if the child was a prisoner or not. Maybe she has a home and a family somewhere looking for her?"
"She don't talk much, ma'am," Percy said. "She asks for her mum and dad but that is all."
"Well, we'll follow up on that later. For now, Mr. Bowcott, we need to continue to Tandon as planned."
"Yes, ma'am. About that. We know the basic direction we must travel but without a proper reckoning of our course, we're afraid we'll miss the coast and sail past the mainland out into the endless western sea."
Cari realized none of the remaining crew knew how to navigate the ship as the captain did.
"Let me come up on deck and see the crew. I think we should show them I'm alive anyway. Then I'll come back here and see what charts and navigational tools this raider captain had at his disposal."
"The crew will be happy to know you're on the mend, Cap'n." Mr. Bowcott said.
"I'll be right up after I finish dressing."
"Yes, of course. Percy, come along, lad. Let's leave the Cap'n her privacy."
Cari marveled at how she'd ended up as the captain in this whole affair. She wanted to hand off the job to Mr. Bowcott. He clearly didn't want it, though, and if he couldn't navigate the ship, he didn't have the necessary skills anyway.
Speaking of skills, Cari needed to attend to her own. She'd leveled up during the fighting and she pulled up her stats.
* * *
Name: Cari Dix
Class: Duelist
Level: 8
* * *
Attributes:
Brawn: 12 - +2
Wisdom: 8
Luck: 10 - +1
Speed: 18 - +5
Charm: 14 - +3
Health: 64/80
* * *
Skills: Two-Weapon Combat, Acrobatic Dodge — 2, Multi-Foe Tactics — 2, Feint — 2, Bladesmith — Master, Prescience, Seamanship, Navigation
Experience: 36,900/38,400
Attribute points: 2
Skill points: 1
* * *
Even with the healing potion they gave her, Cari still wasn't fully healed, which explained the pain in her side. She'd have to get something to eat. She wondered if Cookie had survived the fighting. It would be nice to have some of his stew.
Cari looked over the stats attribute scores, trying to work
out in her mind where she'd best use her two points available. Given as how so much depended upon her ability to lead and navigate this ship, she decided to place her two points in Wisdom.
She also decided to increase her Navigation skill to level 2 since she was expected to bring this ship in to port safely.
That done, Cari pulled on her boots and waistcoat, grabbed her hat, and headed for the quarterdeck to see the crew in action and for them to see her up and about. Appearances were important, so she moved with care so she wouldn't wince when she twisted her torso to climb the steep, ship's stairs. They needed to see a captain who was whole and capable. It was hard enough being a young woman in the role.
A cheer went up from the crew when she stepped out into the bright sunshine on deck. She smiled and waved before turning to climb up to the quarter deck. There were signs of damage, especially on the starboard side where she could still see charred wood from the close proximity to the burning Bonnie Beth.
Approaching the helm where Mr. Bowcott and Mr. Dawkins stood watching the young helmsman keep them on course, Cari smiled at the deadly serious stare on the face of the man at the wheel. It was an important job and essential to keeping them moving in the right direction.
She knew she was expected to say something. Unable to come up with anything else, Cari simply said, "Things seem well in hand, Mr. Bowcott and Mr. Dawkins. Good work."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"How many are we? How many made it across from the Bonnie Beth?"
"Thirty-two, counting yourself and the girl we found here aboard the Bloodletter."
Cari scowled. "I don't care for that name. Do either of you?"