Gabriel Stone had been in the Royal Navy since his eighteenth birthday. Literally to the day, he’d slept outside the recruiting office and been the first one in the door.
And he’d seem some shit, both weird and horrifying. But today definitely took the cake in both categories.
He’d seen a few demon-type summons before now, but those things were on a whole other level. Normally, they were all basically the same, humanoid, with skin that could be anything from red to black to everything in between, they wielded hellfire with various degrees of proficiency, and they usually had some combination of claws, fangs, and horns.
But these things were on an entirely different level. And Level.
A massive winged monster was calling up a storm, but had been torn out of the sky by Isaac Thoma and carved apart by the strike group as they unleashed one or two big attacks in passing. It should be dead, soon.
The ice, on the other hand, had been spreading for the last thirty seconds and was showing no sign of stopping, and an entire army of red-armored demons was marching across it, surrounding the being that, according to the doctor, was the demon king of all things war.
If the ice reached the ship, it would be a problem in and of itself. But if that ice was covered in a literal swarm of monsters, that would be the end.
“Turn to port, bring us parallel to the shore, and bring focus all fire on Iammax,” he ordered, the deck under his feet shifting as the helmsman hurried to obey.
Behind them, the two other capital ships hurried to open the range, to avoid being trapped, while the destroyers advanced, forming a barrier between the big ships. Of course, they could get out of the ice rather easily, as could the Dreadnought, if necessary. Neither the Arizona nor Bunker Hill could.
“Fire.”
Hayes gave the order a split-second after the Dreadnought was in position, and every gun on both battleships roared, unleashing a time-on-target salvo, meaning it had been coordinated so that every single shell hit nigh-simultaneously.
Twelve rounds from the Arizona, and twenty-four from the Dreadnought, a mixture of fragmentation, armor-piercing, and high explosive shells that should damage the Demon King, crack the ice underfoot to dunk him in, and take out a good chunk of the army, leaving him a sitting duck for the follow-up fighter strike.
Iammax let his right hand drop to his side, the tip of his sword almost scraping the ice, lazily raised his left, and the sky was rent by countless explosions.
It wasn’t even readily apparent what had caused it, Stone only realized that a series of small motes of fire had been unleashed in an area-covering attack that had intercepted most of the salvo, flames diving into the shells and igniting the explosives within. Simple fire should not have caused such an effect, modern munitions were functionally immune to being detonated even by hellfire, but that thing was clearly beyond that.
High explosive and armor-piercing shells became outright useless while the fragmentation shells still caused some damage, but their normally devastating spread was obviously ruined.
One shell hit the intended target, the armor-piercing projectile neatly hitting the demon’s visor, getting wedged in the slit, and detonating after hanging there for a long moment. It hadn’t seemed to bother the monster much.
“Split your fire between Iammax and the General, and stagger your shots,” Hayes ordered, and Stone immediately relayed the information to the bridge crew. The goal was to take out the main target, the commander, but if all the shells were going at him straight on,he was going to fire his countermeasures straight down the shells’ trajectories.
By splitting their fire, they’d make intercepting it much harder, and in the distance, the Arizona was swinging out to the outer edge of the formation to ensure that its shells came along a significantly different trajectory.
Staggering their shots didn’t do much against Iammax, he just kept his hand up, wave after wave of small fireballs slamming into the incoming projectiles and knocking them out of the sky.
That was when the air strike hit, a combination of high-yield bombs that had been intended to clear the beach if Arthur Wells hadn’t managed to get rid of the mercenaries, and bunker busters meant for the enemy compound, hammering into the icy floor and causing a wide variety of devastation.
Bunker busters smashed through the top-layer of ice and detonated a good fifty or so meters into the new “floor”, shattering it into huge chunks and even causing Iammax to slip into one of the cracks.
In the meanwhile, the more standard explosives wiped out dozens of minions, clearing out some of the chaff.
But it didn’t last. The General of Cocytus stopped moving forward, went down on one knee, and placed a palm against the ground, icing over the entirety of the devastated area. The water that had flooded the cracks froze, sealing them. Of course, this also partially or completely trapped countless minions, and even the demonic king was stuck up to his chest for a brief moment until he vaporized just the ice holding him and climbed out of the hole.
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“[Instant Rearming], [Pinpoint Barrage], [Remote Enchantment: Armorbreaker],” Hayes announced, using the first active [Skills] in the fight, at least on the command level. Military commanders had more cooldown [Skills] than just their central ones, but they were expensive as hell, mana-wise, to the point where they took a day’s worth or more mana regeneration just to charge, and actual cooldowns that could number in the years.
From one moment to the next, all weaponry was suddenly restored to a useable state, something that might only spare a single second or so when it came to the battleships’ guns but was incredibly effective when it replenished the Bunker Hill’s air wing mid-flight. Then, that armament was enchanted to badly damage any armor it hit, and finally, all dumped straight onto the head of the biggest threat on the board.
“[Impact Echo], [Crushing Force].”
The massive yet focused explosion of the previous second repeated itself as a ghostly echo, then all energy not directed at the monster seemingly dissipated, only Iammax’s torso to suddenly be crushed like a tin can, sending blood spraying across the battlefield.
But it didn’t seem to bother the monster much. It just climbed out of the newly melted hole and flicked a fireball skywards, detonating it in the densest grouping of planes. Of course, “densely packed” planes still had hundreds of meters between them, but when the fireball detonated, it still obliterated three of them and damaged half a dozen more.
And then, Iammax continued his slow and steady march, occasionally sending a flaming projected sword slash towards whatever caught his attention, while the few ice knights that were the General’s minions joined the main army. The ice was advancing ever so slightly faster than the two capital ships were retreating, but they had a little time to take down the boss.
Until the ice demon began to run.
Stone felt as though he were watching a timelapse of a lake freezing over as the ocean turned to a flat plane of frost.
Then was a declaration from Davy Jones, that he’d take care of the General of Cocytus now that it was no longer being covered by Iammax, but even as the Dutchman rose from the water, living up to its name as it took to the air, the monster got far too close.
The Dreadnought shuddered as it got stuck, ice trapping its keel, but that was alright, the armor held and there weren’t any demons there to board them. Yet.
And until then, well, Iammax was the one with the anti-projectile spell, and he was a full kilometer behind the Dreadnought’s now sole target.
A modern battleship’s main guns could be fired every four-ish seconds based purely on their mechanical and technological properties, but that wasn’t taking into account the [Skills] of the [Captain] and crew. [Skills] that helped coordination, [Skills] that let people “pre-load” shells even when there were already munitions in the chamber, [Skills] that made reloading just plain faster without providing even the slightest fig leaf of a logical explanation.
What had once been a steady metronome of full barrages, every single one of the Dreadnought’s twenty-four guns firing as one, had swiftly devolved into raged salvos where every gun fired whenever it was ready, the skill and [Skills] of the respective crews determining the rate of fire.
And they were managing to inflict some serious damage. Coordinated salvos were enough to knock that thing back a step or two, while the individual shots might make the best stumble, clean hits to the knees or feet a brief moment before a foot landed being the most effective.
They’d done one hell of a number on the thing, armor cracked, black ichor pouring from the holes, several fingers blown off, and the glaive was nowhere to be seen, but it was about to be on them and the ship certainly wasn’t built with fisticuffs in mind.
And then, they had to cease firing as the Flying Dutchman slid into the line of fire.
***
There were few people who’d transformed as thoroughly as Davy Jones had after the [System] had arrived. He’d abandoned his job, his life, his name, all to free himself from the normal trapping of society.
For a few years, that had been awesome. But as free as he was from all of society’s normal issues, he still lived on the same planet as everyone else. Of course, Isaac had given him the stuff needed to escape the potential cataclysm, but that would have been the wrong thing to do. As much as he didn’t enjoy being a part of what most people considered to be “normal”, he also preferred not abandoning most of the human race to die.
And quite frankly, he would have felt terrible just running off after plundering planet Earth for its historical artifacts so he could build his ship.
The Flying Dutchman’s various weapons had been firing continuously ever since the demons had come into range, but they’d largely stuck to alchemically-filled cannonballs and shells, not the special and irreplaceable rounds.
The ice floor came closer and closer as the ship drove towards the demon and the demon sprinted towards the Dreadnought, constantly being bombarded by its guns, clearly intending to take out the stuck battleship first.
Yeah, yeah, good luck with that.
Jones grinned, and lifted the Dutchman off the ocean’s surface a split-second before it would have been trapped by the advancing ice. Flying this deep in a gravity well cost a ton of mana, but they only needed to do so for barely a second.
His outfit was old-fashioned captain’s clothing, assembled from materials bought from antique collectors and museums and then placed in his [Legend’s Regalia] [Skill], becoming able to regenerate from near total destruction and incredibly durable, based on its historical significance.
Stepping up onto the bowsprit dressed like that, he knew he had to look like some idiotic reenactor who was two seconds away from kissing pavement, but who gave a hoot.
His saber, the one that had once belonged to the one and only Edward “Blackbeard” Teach and been given to him by Isaac, slid from its sheath with a soft whisper once he’d stepped onto the very tip of the bowsprit.
He raised it above his head and brought it down through the air in a swift slash despite the fact that almost five hundred meters still separated him and the General of Cocytus.
[Davy Jones’ Locker].
The world between them seemed to collapse into a single point, yanking both the Dutchman and the demon towards the mid-point, and the world melted away.
After a long moment of blackness, the Dutchman found itself lying on a sea of sand, rock, and dead coral, the bottom of the ocean without any water covering it.Yet the ship could maneuver on there perfectly well, as though they were aboard a calm ocean where the wind perpetually blew exactly how they needed it. Any vessel he sucked in here with them, on the other hand, would be stuck.
The effect wasn’t nearly as devastating to a foe with legs, but an ice monster should still be at a disadvantage in a world without water. And without the ice monster out there, Iammax should be screwed. After all, without the General to let his army march on water, they’d be fish in a barrel.