image [https://imgur.com/oPouFuo.jpg]

The pirate captain’s men had us surrounded, even worse was the fact that little Indena was being held at gunpoint. Had she not been in his clutches, I could have easily taken them all on. But my First Law Protocol was telling me to keep her safe. She was priority one.

The captain was grinning from ear to ear, holding an upper hand well above my reach with pride.

The pirates led me down the stairs, lining Marek and I up on the edge of the ship. Plenty of swords and guns trained on our heads, adding another layer for me to worry about. Now I needed to make sure Marek wouldn’t get shot either.

As an extra precaution for them, four nephilim demons rose through the cracks in the floorboards. Two flanked us, and two on the captain. It also proved their affiliation with the demon lord.

This captain wasn't Ghostbeard like I was assuming, but he had a similar face, much younger looking too. Not anymore graceful. If I had to guess, this might have been his son or something.

“Do you have a plan here?” Marek quietly murmured from the side of his mouth, sweat dripping down his face.

“Uh…” I gave a glance to all the pirates around us, especially the ones on Marek.

Elemental magic was the only thing I currently had at my disposal that could damage them, and even that was limited to one spell that I learned from watching Indena. To top it all off, I was low on MP, so I probably only had enough mana power left to use it once.

As versatile as Flame Wall was, it would be hard to use it in a way that would take care of all of the surrounding threats. I’d hardly call myself an expert at it too.

My breathing picked up a little to accommodate for the climbing stress. All these weapons on us felt like they creeped closer by the second, closing off any chance of escape. Just another reminder how vulnerable human life was, and how easy it was to use that as a weapon against me.

“You lot should fetch a pretty penny when I claim your bounty from Lord Belphegor.” the captain said.

“Who?” I remembered hearing that name. The Actor used it back when he summoned that Tarasque. He called him some sort of prince of Heck.

“Oh, yee don’t even know who placed a mark on yee wee little heads?” chuckled the pirate. “Belphegor be the whole reason wer’ liven the dream in this world now.” He took off his tricorn hat and casually detached his own head! “I died a while back, but now I’m sailing again in these waters I called home so many years ago!”

I had to assume The Actor was involved here too, considering bringing those pirates back was his handy work. But his master was my real target, and taking him out would hopefully end this dream reality too.

“Thanks for the clarification,” I said. “Now I know the name of the demon lord I’m after.”

“Yee won’t be getten close to him though, dear. Wer forcing yee to walk the plank!”

If that was all he was planning to do, we’d just be able to swim away. He had another thing in mind.

At the end of the oh-so-stereotypical plank of wood was a giant shark patrolling the waters.

“A megladon…” I uttered.

Ghostbeared Jr. seemed pretty chummy with it, literally tossing fish guts out to sea to excite the big predator for his breakfast.

“We’ll have the lass go off first.” He had his men force me out onto the wooden beam.

“Wow, so clever,” Indena uttered. “A pirate and a plank. You just had to add in that shark for good measure, didn’t you?”

“What was that?” The Ghostbeard Jr. growled, pulling Indena close to his face and glaring at her. “I hope yee wasn’t making fun of me.”

“Nah…” she had a mischievous little smug face. “It’s just, Ghostbeard was a lot cooler than you. He used darkness against us. He was awesome!”

“Why you…!” Ghostbeard Jr. growled. His eyes turned blood red, and a shadow aura erupted around his body. “I can use darkness too!”

What was her game here? She was just peeving him off…

“Me was thinkin’ about lettin’ yee off the hook and swab the deck for the rest of yee life, but now yer walkin the plank with the others!”

“Ooh, I'm so scared,” she taunted, making the captain even more upset, also increasing his dark aligned power. “Oi, Captain Angel…” Indena shouted to me. “How dark is this guy right now?”

-Analyzing Ghostbeard Jr.-

-...-

-Analysis complete!-

-Advisory: Weakness to stardust found!-

-Notice: Leadership skill detected! Pirate crew is also weak to stardust!-

Based on my analysis, his darkness affinity was so strong that it made him weak to light. His crew also gained that same affinity through what appeared to be a leadership skill. I didn’t even know I could scan for active skills like that.

Oh! I saw where she was going with this!

I winked to signal my permission. “Dark enough that we'll probably want to brighten his day.”

“Eh?” Marek looked very confused. “I don’t know if I like where this is going.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” Indena’s grin grew ever more maniacal with a twinkle in her eyes. “Time to shine!”

Her little cheeks puffed up and she curled in on herself like she was ready to self destruct. Suddenly an intense brightness burst out of her flesh and shined like a tiny star.

The power of her light wasn’t enough to overwhelm the dark aura of all of our enemies, so I joined in on the solar flood.

With two very bright stardust users combining their luminosity, all the enemies around us quickly turned to dust. The only ones that remained standing as we dimmed were the nephilim, but I dispatched them quickly with my spear before they could attack.

Suddenly we were all standing alone on the ship, not a single pirate left among us.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Good thinking, getting him mad like that,” I said.

“Yeah. I took out the other pirate jerk with stardust before, so I figured…” Indena collapsed into Marek’s arms from exhaustion. “Oh gods… I’m tired.”

Her little body just forced out a lot of stardust energy, so she had every right to be sleepy.

“We need to leave now,” Marek said, carrying Indena to the helm room under the poop deck. “It won’t be long before they know we took out one of their leaders.”

“How long do you think we have?”

*SHOOOO!*

*BOOM!*

A cannon ball struck the side of the ship!

“Not long, no?” Marek shouted, swinging open the door and rushing inside the room with the wheel. I followed him in.

He placed Indena down in the corner and took hold of the wheel. With a spin we were turning around toward a potential escape route behind us.

Boats were closing in fast on our path, all of them firing cannons like lead confetti. This flagship was taking some serious abuse, but it wouldn’t last much longer under all this pressure.

“Uh…!” I panicked, turning all around and then at Marek with my arms stretched out. “What should we do, navy man?”

“Euh…” he uttered, continuing to steer the ship along our only path. “Can you…euh…”

*SHOOOO!*

*BOOM!*

Another big one hit us!

“Yalda!” he announced, gathering his bearings. “We need to take out those other ships!”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“You have an energy cannon, no? Go shoot them!”

I would have loved to have shot every last one of those ships, but my body didn’t have much power left in me for even one more shot. He groaned when I told him that.

“Alright… Then the only other option is to use the cannons on the ship.”

“Blue Boy, aren’t those hard to load for one person?” Indena asked.

“These aren’t normal cannons. One person can fire them with ease.”

Sounded fine with me. I headed out to the deck and checked out the artillery…

These were certainly cannons, but they had a lot of glowing green and orange marks, likely because they were enchanted.

I put my hands on a trigger placed in the back and pressed down on it.

*Pwoof!*

A puff of dust flew out.

“Oh crud, it’s empty…”

There were some cannon balls in a box next to me. A small compartment on the cannon was for loading those up as ammunition. I dumped a few of those heavy things in and took aim again.

*BOOM!*

With a pull of the trigger, the cannon ate one of the lead balls and fired it through the air. It hit one of the more aggressive boats and momentarily halted their fire on us.

“Yes!” I cheered.

It wasn’t just that boat that was an issue. I had to run back and forth all over the deck to deal with our pursuers, also trying to keep myself from falling over every time we got pelted with ammo.

Another issue was that they were forming a blockade in our path. They layered up enough ships that I wasn’t going to be able to shoot through all of them and sink em’ in time.

“Crud…” I ran back into the helm room. “Marek, look!” I pointed to the blockade.

“I noticed…” he grumbled, assessing his options. “We can’t turn around. There’s too many of them behind us.”

“Ramming speed?” I shrugged.

“Our boat isn’t strong enough for that.” He shook his head.

There were a lot of bops and buttons on the control console behind the wheel, so maybe there was something useful here.

“Shields?” I gave Marek a disappointed look when I saw an instrument for that. “The heck? We could have been using those.”

“Sorry that I’m a little preoccupied making sure we don’t get trapped by pirate vessels!” he shouted, sliding a knob upwards and causing a shimmering light of electricity to layer over the ship. As we continued to take on hits, the energy shield prevented the ship from suffering the damage. It did drain our power a lot, according to another reading.

“See if there’s anything else!” Marek pointed to the console.

Indena recovered enough to take a look around too. We were both very closely inspecting everything, but a lot of the things here weren’t very relevant enough to mention to Marek.

“What’s this thing do?” Indena looked closely at a lever next to the wheel. “Altitude? What’s that mean?”

“The height of an object or point in relation to sea level or ground level.” I read from my internal dictionary.

“No, fool!” She pointed to the floor. “What does it mean for the darn boat? Why would a boat have an altitude lever?”

Now that she mentioned it, there were a lot of instruments on the console that I’d expect to see in something like a plane. What was up with that?

Marek let out a loud gasp, then pushed the lever forward. A weak amount of magic energy pulsed across the ship.

*GEEGUURG!*

The ship rumbled as a loud grinding sound shook the floor. But then nothing happened.

“Why didn’t that work?” he grumbled.

“What was supposed to happen?” Indena asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? The altitude lever controls if we go up or down.”

“In other words, we can fly this boat?” I asked.

“Oui!” Marek nodded.

We were closing in on that pirate blockade fast, so if this hunk of wood could take to the skies, we’d be able to escape with ease. The only probably was that it wasn’t actually going up for some reason.

I was ready to go down to the ship's engine and see if something was going on with it, but Marek figured out the problem on his own.

“We need to lower the shields. There’s only so much power the ship can use at any given time, and it’ll take a lot for us to get up in the air.”

“But if we decrease the shields, we’ll be taking damage again,” I said.

“That’s better than ramming into a blockade,” Marek said, resetting the altitude lever. “Lower the shields!”

If this is what we have to do, it’s what we have to do…

I pushed down the knob that controlled the shields, watching the energy covering the ship fade away.

*BOOM!*

As expected, we immediately started taking on damage all over the hall.

Marek pushed the lever forward unable to get it to budge.

“Why am I so weak now?!” he growled as he pushed with all his might.

Indena and I both gripped tightly to the lever and pushed right along with him.

-Combat Mode : Active-

With all three of us pushing, we got the lever forward.

As the shields faded, a green and blue swirling light pulsed around the ship to replace it. The energy swirled faster and faster until the whole ship was pushed up off the surface of the sea.

“Woah!” we all cheered.

The boat wasn’t just flying, it actually took along with it a large sum of water that constantly pushed it forward, riding that into the air. It was pretty much making its own artificial wave in the sky.

We thought there was enough room to clear the blockade, but the bottom of our ship hit the crowsnest of one of theirs as it passed over. It might have done some damage, but at least we were able to make it up and over!

“Fantastic!” I cheered, deactivating my combat mode.

“Killer!” Indena shouted.

“Don’t get too excited yet!” Marek cringed, noticing the ship declining in altitude very quickly. “We’re running out of power! Brace yourselves!”

*SPLASH!*

We cleared the blockade, but we splashed down and shook violently upon impact with the sea.

A bunch of warning alarms went off, signaling some sort of distress across the vessel. Lucky for us, we had enough momentum to keep forward and escape the pirates. At least, for now.

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