The Fiends were nearing the end of their high-seas adventure. Except for a few smaller inhabited isles, Archlave was the only major island left on their journey. The Tourist calmly strode across the water since they weren’t in a huge rush to reach the next island. It was in its boat mode, which was almost exactly like its car mode. The only difference was the propulsion coming out of the exhaust pipes in the back.

A ship appeared in the distance, and it looked like they’d pass it on their way. They’d come across several others in their voyage so far, including fishing boats, a few shipping barges, and even a cruise ship; the inhabitants of which took several photos of them. They’d even run into the CP Coast Guard. At first, they’d flagged the Fiends down for what looked like a routine inspection, but immediately fled once they saw who they were.

Shortly after, several CP boats tailed them from a distance for an entire day. At one point, they even tried to steal The Tourist when it was docked at an island. However, the car-boat kept shocking them when they tried to get close, so they were forced to abandon their mission.

The ship that was now approaching them was unlike any of the others, surely a one-of-a-kind vessel that couldn’t be found in any other sea. It was an old-style wooden ship that didn’t look like it belonged in this millenium, and there was a black flag waving atop the mast. “Is- Is this a joke?” Xard sputtered when they saw it. “An actual pirate ship?!”

“Yarr harr harr!” a voice yelled when the oncoming pirate ship was close enough. There were three figures standing on the deck, all dressed in pirate garb as depicted in films they’d seen. “Avast ye wenches and male-wenches, prepare to be plundered!” All three pirates started laughing in a way which somehow felt like it would be offensive to any pirates that had lived before them. Another climbed out from below, and joined them in their chortling.

“No seriously, are we in a movie again or something?” Xard spouted, having trouble holding a grip on reality. One of the pirates aimed a harpoon-gun towards The Tourist, and fired it on the assumed captain's command. Then, their boisterousness and hearty demeanor turned entirely pale when Drim caught the harpoon with his bare hands.

The conflict didn’t even last a minute before all four Fiends were standing upon the deck of their ship, and three of them were tied to the mast. Only the captain remained free, and he was cornered on the edge of the plank. Though ‘cornered’ was the wrong word. He had gone there of his own volition when he realized resistance was entirely pointless. “To think you would make a captain walk the plank on his own ship. Ye be heartless scoundrels.”

“Uhh, no, we’re not saying that at all. If you’ll just come and sit down with the rest of your crew, we can talk this over,” Drim tried to reason with him.

“You say you’ll kill my crew if I don’t walk?! What devilish fiends ye be!” the captain continued his delusional response.

“Well, I mean we are Fiends, yes, but really we’re not asking you to do that. Please come away from there or we’ll have to use force,” Drim was clearly starting to lose patience.

“Boss… err, I mean, Captain! It’s time to drop the act, okay?!” one of the crewmates pleaded.

“They say a captain must go down with his ship, but if you’re making me choose between me ship and saving the life of me crew, there is but one choice!” The captain backed up to the edge of the plank, until his feet were half off of it. “Farewell, me crew. Let’s set sail again on the next sea!” The captain fell backwards, plummeting towards the briny ocean.

Before he could even hit the water, Phon grabbed him with her Curse. She had already covered her eyes with her hands in preparation. Instead of gingerly placing him on the deck, she made him appear at the underside of the crowsnest. His momentum carried, and he built up even more speed. Needless to say, his crash into the deck wasn’t gentle. Drim immediately tied him to the railing with vines once it was confirmed that he was alright.

“So, what’s this about it being an act?” Phon interrogated the crewman who had spoken up earlier, the shaggiest looking of the bunch.

“Well lassie- err, I mean miss. We aren’t real pirates. I mean, I guess we sort of are, but it’s complicated,” the maybe-pirate was poorly explaining. “We’re criminals, yes, but just normal ones. Like my shaggy beard, it’s completely fake!” The man grabbed at his beard, and pulled it down, exposing his surprisingly dainty jawline. “Also, I’m actually a woman!”

“Aye, we be fake indeed!” the next pretender pirate spoke up. “My hook-hand is actually just a hand with a prop hook from a party store covering it! Even our boat is fake!” Xard peered below deck to confirm his claim. There was no actual bottom to the boat, just a normal speedboat. They had built the framework of a pirate ship around it.

“Let me guess, your peg-leg is actually fake too?” Kada went up to the last pirate and tugged on the wooden appendage. However, only a stub remained.

“Oi, what the mawhg do you think you’re doing?!” the woman screeched at her. “Just because I don’t have good enough health insurance to afford a proper prosthetic, you think it’s okay to just go around and pull people’s legs off? Are you a monster?”

Kada apologized profusely as she reattached the woman’s leg, but then turned towards the captain. She pointed at him with force, and accused, “But I think I understand what’s going on here! Your captain is putting on this farce and making the others act like pirates so you wouldn’t feel isolated because of your injury!”

“No way...” the woman was in disbelief. “Captain, is that true?” The captain looked away, doing his best to avoid eye contact, but blushed.

“Captain!” all three crewmates called out to him with tears streaming down their cheeks. “We’ll follow you forever!”

The rest of the interrogation went smoothly, with the pretend pirates now being unbelievably loose-lipped. They revealed they were actually a sub-family that was part of a mafia syndicate. The captain was the patriarch and the rest were his subordinates. Apparently, the hideout for the main family was nearby, so the Fiends followed the fake pirates back to it. The hideout was a floating naval base that was built for the Drazah war, but after the war ended, it was overtaken by the mafia.

When they got close, Kada switched The Tourist to submarine mode, and they hid underneath the pseudo wooden ship in order to stealthily infiltrate. There were many other ways they could have accomplished this, but they just wanted an excuse to try out the submarine function.

Drim called out to the pirate crew once they resubmerged. “Alright, we’re gonna go raid your base.”

“Okay, have fun. We’ll be waiting here,” the captain called back to him. The pirates then all retied themselves in their restraints.

“Looks like around 60 goons or so,” Phon reported. “No Fiends, 9 Lessers. Should we make it a contest of who can kill- catch the most?”

“Contest?!” Kada’s eyes started to shimmer brightly. “You want me to beat you in something else now that I beat you in a bank race, Phonnelly?!”

Phon let out her biggest sigh of the day yet. “I keep telling you, my name’s not short for something. Stop making stupid guesses!” This had been a recurring event for the past two days in an attempt for Kada to stave off boredom.

“Actually, do you mind if I take this one?” Xard requested. “There’s a new technique I’m trying to work out. This would definitely be a good chance to practice.”

“I have no problem with it,” Phon accepted. “I wanted to check in with Uncle anyways.”

“Oh, I think I’ll go play cards with the pirates then,” Kada relayed. “Wanna join me Drim?” Drim shrugged and joined her, and before Xard was about to jump off onto the dock, Phon stopped him.

“Just thought you might like to know there’s a guard standing directly behind that door,” Phon mentioned.

“Oh? You don’t say!” Xard’s eyes glinted in excitement. There was something he had always wanted to do ever since he’d seen it in an action movie, and he finally had an opportunity. Xard went and knocked on the door to make sure he had the guard’s attention, then kicked it in with all his might. “Ah, whoops…” Xard had subconsciously used his Curse when kicking, and applied a missile’s worth of energy to the door on top of his innate strength.

The door went flying, carrying the guard along with it, until both crashed at the other end of a long hallway. Xard ran over to check on the guy and confirm that he was alive. He was still breathing, but his limbs were pointing in directions that shouldn’t be possible. “Hey, what was that noise!” A door along the hallway opened, and a woman stepped in to check on the other guard. She saw Xard, and immediately pulled out a pistol.

A few pointless shots later, and Xard was gripping her forehead tight and lifted her up off the ground. This was required for the technique Xard wanted to try out. He called it ‘concussive blast’ and it was meant to apply just enough energy to knock out someone. It was quite effective, but hadn’t been perfected just yet. The last time he’d tried it, he had managed to find a good range of energy, and it just required a bit more fine tuning.

Xard absorbed his grenade ring, and let some of the energy out through his shoulder pads. He found that he could perform the technique more consistently if he adjusted the energy inside his body first, rather than trying to only release the right amount. The woman was wriggling wildly, trying to get free, and beating him with the butt of her gun since she was out of bullets. He was currently taking the hits rather than absorbing them, not wanting to add more to his built up energy. Plus, the hits felt like barely a tap to him.

He released the energy spread out over his hand and into her head. If he refined it to a single point, her head would surely explode. The woman’s body went limp, and her gun fell to the ground. Xard had successfully knocked her out, but a noticeable cracking sound resonated through the hall. Ahh damn, I forgot to adjust for the gunshots she hit me with earlier. Xard had become used to lower levels of energy, and could hold them in his body almost indefinitely. He didn’t even notice the energy swirling around in him all this time. Whelp, you should be fine, miss, but I’m sorry. The shape of your forehead may never be the same again.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

As Xard progressed through the base, he took out goons in the same manner. Once he managed to knock out 10 in a row without any surprises, he decided to change-up his tactic. The concussive blast was definitely a great non-lethal tactic, but it was very limited in its current state. It required him to get within grabbing distance of someone, and that wouldn’t always be easy. If possible, he wanted to try and make it a ranged attack.

The next room he discovered was a kitchen, and the men inside immediately began throwing knives at him. One chef caught him by surprise, charging at him, so Xard used a concussive blast reflexively when the chef was just a few inches away. It succeeded in knocking him out, which proved the concept, but point-blank range wasn’t exactly a huge upgrade.

The chefs were throwing pots and pans at him now, having run out of utensils to throw. Luckily, they were standing in place, so they’d make for easy target practice. Xard fired a blast towards one of them with the same level of energy he’d been using so far. It made the chef’s head reel back, but they were ultimately fine since a lot of the energy was lost over the distance. With each successive shot, Xard steadily increased the power, alternating between the two remaining chefs.

Finally, he managed to knock one of them out, and had a new gauge on the amount of power he’d need to use. However, adding the ranged component made it a much harder technique to use reliably, since the amount of energy needed would vary depending on distance. It would require a fair bit of further testing and mental calculation.

Xard fired what he guessed was an appropriate amount of energy at the last chef, but this time the chef finally learned and decided to dodge. Instead, the blast hit a spice rack that had been behind him and splattered fragrance all over the kitchen. The chef then tried to make a run for it, but Xard shot the nearby refrigerator, making it scoot a few feet before falling over and blocking the exit.

Xard was starting to get frustrated. He kept just missing the surprisingly nimble chef. A lot of the kitchen had been destroyed from inaccurate shots. The latest stray shot had hit the stove, and now gas was flooding the room. Luckily, Xard’s attacks inherently didn’t cause sparks, but if he kept missing and hit one metal object into another it could be disastrous. “If you don’t stop moving and take the hit, I might accidentally blow the whole base to the bottom of the sea!” Xard’s words caused the chef to hesitate for just a moment, providing an opportunity to cleanly hit him and knock him unconscious.

Xard’s raid continued without incident for a while, managing to successfully knock out another seven with his ranged blast. It only got exciting again once he’d entered the armory. Nine men were waiting for him in a firing line, and they all unloaded clips from their fully automatic weapons once he entered the room. It was an interesting sound, so many bullets hitting the ground at once. He found it oddly soothing, and if he’d had the foresight he would have recorded it to use as white-noise later on to help him sleep.

This situation also presented another unique opportunity he didn’t get often. Rather than attacking the men shooting at him, Xard decided instead to fire at the bullets. He was trying to snipe them out of the air before they hit him. There were so many that his chances of hitting one were high, but it would still be good practice. Xard did this for a few minutes, as the firing squad kept getting more and more panicked since they weren’t getting any results. Xard guessed that since he wasn’t retaliating, they would keep trying this until they ran out of ammo.

Unfortunately, Xard had to give up on his practice before it came to that point. He had stored the maximum amount of energy he could possibly handle. He took a wide stance, and let all of the energy out at once in a full circle around him. Everything in the room went flying and piled into jumbled messes along each wall. He had purposefully not released any at his feet, so the mound of bullets wouldn’t go flying with it. The blast also hadn’t knocked out everyone, but anyone who was still conscious was incapacitated, buried under a mountain of weaponry.

Xard waded through the puddle of bullets to the next room. It appeared to be a large meeting room, most likely the center point of the base. About 20 mafia members were waiting for him, seeming to be all that was left. However, they were not preparing an ambush. Instead, they were all on their knees with their hands behind their heads with not a weapon in sight around them. They surrendered without question as soon as he entered the room.

It would have been easy to simply accept their surrender, but Xard felt it would be a waste. They were still criminals, and it didn’t seem fair to only punish the first group but not the rest. More importantly, they were invaluable targets for his training, and all nine Lessers were here as well which would help him improve even more. He made them all line up, and began blasting them one after the other.

Xard tried shooting each one from an array of different distances for varied experimentation. The Lesser Fiends didn’t take much adjusting, a flat doubling of his output seemed to accommodate for it. He had allowed them all to sit down first so their drops to the floor wouldn’t be as harsh, but with each passing fleshy thud they seemed to be getting more and more unsettled. When he got to the last mafia goon, she had peed her pants, was quaking, and crying inconsolably. Xard felt a little bad at first when they started getting restless, but knocking her out seemed more like a mercy at this point.

“Hey Phon, I’m done I think.” Xard called her up once the last body dropped.

“Yeah, looks like it,” Phon confirmed. “I’ll load them all up onto the pirate ship later. We’re in the treasury right now, I’ll move you.” Xard appeared in the treasure room a few seconds later, and joined the other Fiends in rummaging through it.

There was an unseemly amount of cash stored in the mafia’s vault. It was enough to fill at least 30 average-sized bank vaults. Most of it consisted of Archlave Alexims, but there was currency from all over the world. “It’s a good thing we stumbled across this place, or we would have missed out on a lot of money,” Xard commented as he looked over the piles.

“Yeah, this was definitely a blessing for us,” Drim agreed. “It wouldn’t have had much effect on the public, but it would have made it easier for criminals to resist the change. Oh, and you guys can take these coins if you want. They’re not used anymore as currency, but they’re still pretty valuable.” Drim was referring to a large pile of silver coins filling an ornamental vase like a piggy-bank.

“Is it weird that I kind of want to melt them down and make an armored bikini out of them?” Kada queired to the others.

“Everything you say is weird,” Phon retorted. “But this is an advanced weird, even for you.”

“Speaking practically, it would probably be a detriment while swimming for you,” Xard rationalized. “You’d be far more likely to drown with that extra weight. I suppose it could be useful when training, however, for increased resistance.”

“As for the armor application, it really wouldn’t be helpful at all,” Drim added. “Silver is a pretty weak metal. I doubt it’d provide any more protection than your skin already does. Not to mention the coverage would be less than ideal…”

“Yeah, well, I’d look fabulous while wearing it anyways!” Kada rejected their criticisms. “Silver is my color, so I’m going to give it a shot at least. I may just wear it for formal events, or something, if it really is impractical.”

The Fiends returned to The Tourist after planting a sing, and Phon loaded each member of the mafia onto the fake pirate ship. They filled the ship to the brim, the criminals practically spilling over each other. The Fiends then pushed the ship out to sea, in the direction of a far off coast guard ship that had been spying on them. “We’re really close to Archlave, aren’t we?” Xard asked once they got back to sea, pointing to the island within their eyesight. “Shouldn’t we have just teleported them to the prison over there.”

“No, Archlave is pretty small and doesn’t have a proper prison,” Drim explained. “Most criminals from the islands get shipped to the mainland. Archlave will almost certainly raid this place now since it’s empty, and they will undoubtedly confiscate all the money they find. This is fortunate for us because the only place they could store it is their own national treasury, saving us having to rob it ourselves since the sing I planted was on the money itself.”

“Aww, my brother can be quite the schemer when he tries. I’m so proud,” Phon praised him.

“Wait, how will Archlave know to raid it in the first place?” Kada questioned as they pulled up to the docks of the island. “We sent the criminals to the coast guard, it could take forever before they get around to sharing that information, even past our deadline.”

On cue, there was a large explosion behind them. They turned their heads to see the roof of the naval base blown to bits and smoke pluming out. “Ah right, the stove… Knew I forgot something, oh well,” Xard shrugged away the worry. “There’s all the attention they’ll need."

The Fiends all climbed out of The Tourist onto the Archlave dock. They had picked one that didn’t seem popular with no other boats around: a good place to stash their ship. However, there was a solitary old woman sitting on a bench at the end of the walkway looking out at the sea. She immediately stood out with her radiant hair and wrinkled old body. She had to be at least 90 years old, but looked rather healthy for her age. “You there,” she called out to them. “Did you come from the floating metal island?”

“Uhh, yeah,” Drim answered hesitantly.

“You don’t look like the rest of the people that come from over there,” the woman observed. “I don’t know much about that place, no one will tell me anything, no matter how many times I ask. I just know that it’s filled with a bunch of big meanies. Tell me, did you cause that?” She pointed at the dark cloud billowing into the sky.

“Uhh, yeah, sorry if we disturbed you with it mam,” Xard apologized.

“No, no,” the old woman insisted. “From what I do know, that place has been hurtful to this island for nearly a decade. You have my thanks. Is there anything I can give you in return?”

“How about pointing us to the nearest bank,” Drim quickly gave an answer to try and end the conversation.

“Oh, is that all?” The woman seemed disappointed. “I believe there is one in that direction.”

The Fiends followed the direction she had given, and once they were a reasonable distance away, Kada stated, “Wow, her hair was really shiny wasn’t it?! I wonder what conditioner she uses.”

“Probably something really fancy and expensive,” Xard deduced. “Did you see her clothing? She’s definitely got money. Maybe we should rob her too.”

“I’m more concerned with how she talked,” Phon interjected. “Who says ‘big meanies’ over the age of like 7?”

“What I really want to know is how she knew what we look like,” Drim wondered.

“What do you mean Drim?” Kada asked.

“Huh?” Drim seemed confused. “Her eyes, she was blind wasn’t she?” They all turned around at this statement to get another look at her, but the bench was empty with no trace of the old woman.

“Well, that’s mawhging freaky,” Kada spouted. “Did we just see a ghost or something? Oh, maybe she’s a Fiend!”

“I doubt that,” Phon disputed. “Who would an old woman like that be killing anyways?”

Before they could discuss the matter further, a voice cut into their ears. “Princess! Princess, where are you?!” a woman’s voice was yelling repeatedly. Soon they saw the source, a maid bearing the crest of the Archlave royal family. She approached them as soon as she saw them, and immediately demanded, “Have any of you seen the princess?! She’s too young to be out on her own!”

“Uhh, sorry,” Xard responded. “I can’t say we’ve seen anyone princess-like.” The maid stared at them oddly for a moment, then it seemed to click in her mind that they weren’t from the island. Without pressing the issue further, she ran off, calling after the princess once more.