Right, it was time to scare these pirates so badly their leaders left their nice cushy shielded area to see what the hell was going on. Which meant stopping them from working. If anything was going to get the people in charge to lower the shield long enough to come out so I could get some invisible ghosts inside, it was making the people they had searching for treasure out here stop digging. Challenge their ability to make money or gain power. Even back in these days, that seemed like the way to go.
To that end, the first thing I did was position dozens of ghosts close to the various tools and machines these people were using. Now that I was able to look through their eyes up close, I could see what the workers out here were doing. It involved a lot of using various machines to scan the ground within and slightly beyond the trench, the sides of it, every bit they could reach within maybe two hundred feet of any spot the ship had touched as it crashed. Every time their machines told them there was something possibly metal or giving off some sort of reaction to the scan, they would dig it up using high-tech jackhammers, laser tools, and just plain ordinary shovels once they were close enough. It seemed like they used the easier, higher-tech stuff until they were within a couple feet of the thing they’d detected, then switched to the primitive version. Maybe they were afraid of damaging whatever treasure they were trying to dig up?
Whatever it was, there were about twenty teams of two all spread over the length of the trench. They had a stack of crates on hovercarts that drove up and down, accepting everything these guys dug up, before returning to a spot closer to the shield where other guys, who looked like they were slightly higher ranking, were sorting through the stuff. From what I was hearing, it was an ‘okay’ haul so far, but they still hadn’t found the big, amazing score they had actually come here to look for. Still no actual word on what that score was, but it was clear they all knew about it. Or at least knew enough to be excited about the prospect of finding it. And they were all annoyed that it hadn’t been located yet. Every time the hovercart came back, the five people there would get excited, then loudly disappointed after they dug through it to no avail.
Well, they were about to get even more disappointed. Or maybe more excited was the better term. As soon as my ghosts were in position and ready, I gave a nod toward Gaia. “Go ahead.”
The slight smirk of amusement and anticipation that crossed the woman’s face then was quite a bit different than what I’d come to expect from the future headmistress. But then, she was several hundred years younger. And much closer to her days as Morgan le Fay. Terrorizing some terrible people probably was pretty fun for her.
To be honest, I was probably smirking just as much. Was it weird that I was bonding with this younger version of Gaia even more at the thought of terrifying some pirates?
One thing was for sure, Avalon and Shiori were going to be so jealous. To say nothing of Savvy. Though I wasn’t sure whether she’d think that me scaring ‘bad pirates’ was amazing, or kick me for scaring pirates at all. That kid really liked the idea of space pirates, but she made it clear that her future crew would be fighting the ‘bad ones’ while only stealing from very rich people.
As soon as I gave Gaia the go-ahead, she lifted her chin, eyes drifting closed as she clearly focused. In the distance, every tool, scanner, and other piece of technology the searchers were using stopped at once. At least, all the ones Gaia could reach with her power from here, which ended up being about three-quarters of them. Only the ones quite close to the magical forcefield over the still-intact portion of the crashed ship were out of reach. Still, even just the ones Gaia was able to affect shutting off all of a sudden and at the same time caused a bit of a reaction. Not panic just yet, but everyone through the length of the trench was slapping the side of their tools, calling out in confusion to one another, talking about recharge, or about a possible EMP that might’ve fallen off the ship and randomly detonated just now.
Well that wouldn’t do. We couldn’t have them coming up with logical and mundane explanations for what was happening. Fortunately, Gaia could do more than shut things off. Plus, it was going to be pretty easy to convince the group that ghosts were responsible. What with, well, me actually having ghosts to throw at them.
I had already given the ones I put in position enough power to make their voices heard, and to become somewhat visible. Not enough for distinct features to be identified, because I wanted them to be mistaken for the possible crew of this ship. Instead, as they gradually appeared near the pirates, they were mostly outlines, translucent figures that were clearly there but not distinguishable. And as they appeared, the ghosts began to snarl, spitting hate-filled curses and threats toward the pirates for disturbing their rest trying to steal their treasures. Some of them went into great detail about what they were going to do in retaliation, hissing threats that would’ve sent shivers through even my spine if I hadn’t known what was going on. I had the suspicion that they were enjoying themselves a little too much, really playing up the whole terrifying ghost thing. But who was I to complain? They deserved the chance to have some fun with it too.
At first, I hadn’t been completely sure this was a good idea. After all, these people had to know for a fact that ghosts were absolutely a thing that existed. They didn’t have to be suspicious about it. But then I realized that only helped our cause. They knew ghosts were real, and probably knew that if they were strong enough to manifest, particularly in these numbers while apparently causing all this equipment to act up, then they had to be incredibly powerful ghosts. Or they were drawing from some sort of very powerful source nearby. Which was probably scarier than simply wondering if ghosts were real after all. They were an actual, tangible (sometimes) threat to these people.
To say that we got an immediate response was an understatement. Within a few seconds of the ghosts starting their routine, about half of the pirates who had been scanning and digging threw down their suddenly unresponsive tools and started backing away. Shouts echoed back and forth about what the hell was going on and that ‘the boss’ had promised this wouldn’t be like what happened on Oerdon and how they absolutely weren’t going to deal with this. Wait, did we luck out and actually trip over a group who had even more reason to be anxious about ghosts?
Of course, we weren’t about to let it go at that. These guys might be reacting even better than expected to the start of our little haunted play, but we still had to push them even further if this was going to work. So, I slipped a little more power into my ghosts, which they didn’t use to make their images any more distinct, but instead pushed into the amount of light they were giving off. It created bright, yet still indecipherable images spread all over the field. Even better (or worse in the eyes of the pirates down there), the glow continually shifted direction, shape, and color. Now the ghosts were really getting into it. They waved their arms, moaned, cursed the pirates, and even used their actual names in the cases of any we had overheard while setting this whole thing up while our poor targets were talking to each other. Every little personal detail we’d managed to pick up went into scaring these guys just that much more. Seeing a glowing, enraged apparition appear and start threatening you was bad enough, but having the thing actually call you by name had to be so much worse.
Oh, and then there was Gaia, of course. She didn’t stop at simply turning off their equipment. Not at all. Some of the digging machines turned back on and started bouncing around. Several of the scanners activated and shifted their beams toward the nearby pirates, which had to look like targeting lasers, especially as the digging tools began moving that way like they were possessed. One of the hovercarts that was half-full of treasure they’d dug up revved its engine like a growling monster before launching itself forward to nearly run over several of the distracted pirates. They dove out of the way at the last second, but the doors on the cart flew open, managing to slam into a couple of them.
Seeing that, several of the men down there drew their weapons and took aim, mostly at the cart but also at some of the seemingly-possessed tools. Unfortunately for them, that was technology too. Their laser pistols refused to fire no matter how many times they pulled the triggers. Worse, the weapons immediately began to overheat, giving off high-pitched warning sounds until the men panicked and threw them away just as they began to either literally melt, or explode. Which, of course, the ghosts took full advantage of by closing in on the suddenly-disarmed pirates, surrounding them while keeping up the threats. I added even more power to them, this time making it manifest in the form of deep cold or blazing heat that the ghosts gave off. All of that was just part of another new trick I’d picked up over the course of my practice time over the past couple months. I could make the power I put into them expend itself through temperature changes, light, sound, even wind or small gravitational changes. I couldn’t completely shift gravity or anything, but I could create a bit of suction that would pull small objects in, move dirt around, that sort of thing. The heat wasn’t enough to damage, the cold wouldn’t freeze anything, none of it had the strength to be an actual attack. Not yet anyway, I was still training. But what it did do was cause even more panic down there. Now the pirates were disarmed, surrounded on all sides by even more ghosts, their tools were acting out, and Gaia had taken control of their radios and was alternating between making deafening bursts of static or eerie whisper-voices that hissed at them similarly to how the actual ghosts were.
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Suffice to say, these people were not having a good time. The ones who hadn’t immediately thrown their tools away as soon as they acted up soon did so, and even more shouts about getting help down there went around. They were using the name ‘Laein’ and calling for her to get down here to help them. I wasn’t sure who that was or why they’d call for her help, but if they thought she could do something about ghosts, this situation might’ve been about to get even more interesting. I was going to have to watch for her.
Another thing I had to watch for was ghost-fire. Which a couple of the men down there actually used, pulling out swords and other simple weapons that Gaia couldn’t take control of before lighting them up with that spell. Obviously, I wasn’t about to let them hurt my ghosts, but I was ready for that sort of thing. As soon as I saw the distinct blue-white flames appear, I immediately made the actual ghosts withdraw a bit. At the same time, I sent in the physical troops. Which, in this case, meant corpses. The corpses of animals, that was. Yeah, even as the men started to think they’d actually gotten somewhere by producing ghost-fire, they were beset by the rotting corpses of every dead animal I had been able to pull together out of the surrounding area. The birds struck first, dozens of dead robins, ravens, bluejays, owls, even a few hawks and eagles went diving down at them from the sky. But there were also deer, squirrels, snakes, rats, an actual bear that was half-rotted into a skeleton, and more. It was a swarm of dead creatures coming out of nowhere.
From the point of view of these people, their tools had suddenly been possessed, they were surrounded by angry ghosts who were calling them by name and threatening them for disturbing their rest, and now a small army of zombie-animals had begun to descend on them from all sides. Things just kept getting worse for them. And more hilarious for those of us on this side of things. I could hear Gaia chuckling softly to herself even as she made a point of allowing a couple of the men to think their weapons were working, only to make them malfunction just as their hopes were raised.
Obviously, the guys down there tried to fight back against my zombie animals. Now that they had recovered a little bit from their initial surprise, they even used some of their actual powers. I saw fire, the actual normal kind, as well as flying blades and blasts of light being deployed. We might’ve taken these guys off guard, but they weren’t completely helpless. They knew how to fight back. My army of dead things couldn’t stand up to a sustained assault like that on their own. Fortunately, they weren’t on their own. They had Gaia and me. In my case, I was able to direct them away from the worst threats so they wouldn’t blunder right into the line of fire the way a normal mindless zombie would. And in the case of Gaia, she directed various mining tools toward the people who were an actual threat. They were beset by lasers, jackhammers to dig through solid stone, and that cart. Not that the cart lasted long before one of them managed to make a boulder fly off into its rear axle hard enough to make the thing spin in wild circles several times, then crash hard into the ground.
I knew exactly when that ‘Laein’ they had been calling for joined the party, and unfortunately she didn’t come out of the big part of the ship we were waiting for them to open for us. Instead, the woman appeared in a dramatic flash of blue and purple lightning. She wore a gray-purple cloak with a hood, a humanoid figure who stood only four and a half feet tall. In one hand she held a staff with a skull on the end of it, and the other she held a book. Her cloak billowed out around her much more than was justified for the amount of wind we had, and it looked like the actual area around her got darker than it should’ve been. Yeah, she was definitely embracing the whole Necromancer thing.
She also didn’t waste any time before trying to wrestle control of my dead things. Fortunately, I felt her power crash against mine, and though she was decently powerful, it wasn’t enough. I could still maintain control. She might’ve been a fairly strong Necromancer, but I had absorbed the power of two world class threats who had been practicing their craft for thousands of years. Between that and the Incubus Necromancer I had killed just before coming back to the past, I felt like I had a comfortable lead over her power.
Part of me wanted to simply possess the girl, or one of these other people, in order to get through that shield. I had thought I had an option before but it felt too dangerous. Not for me, but for the timeline. Letting Gaia see a markedly-attractive figure who could possess people and completely control them? Yeah, that could potentially do some damage. Especially since I really didn’t want her to start to think that the ‘Jacob’ she had teamed up with for this had been Manakel in disguise. Thus, we had to stick to this plan.
Feeling the dramatic Necromancer down there struggling to take control of my army, I allowed her to think she was making way. I was trying to make it seem like the ghosts and zombies were simply overpowered and not like someone else was behind them. I carefully ceded some of my control over the actual zombie animals, letting her bring them to a halt. She kept expanding that control, pushing her power into more of the undead creatures. I simply kept up enough of a defense to make her feel like she was really trying to overcome a threat and barely succeeding.
But this couldn’t go on forever, especially not now that an actual Necromancer had joined the party. Even if I was stronger, it was time for the final big push, the last element of our plan to force these people to get help from the ship. To that end, I whistled to Percy and gave her a nod. The Revenant was standing just barely in sight, across the raised hill. Seeing me get the signal, she turned away and said something to the other figure there.
The response was immediate. A trio of unearthly howls filled the air going through the valley around us. Cerberus erupted into view, in his massive form. An Amarok, like the one I had faced during my first real hunt the year before, was the size of a city bus. Cerberus in his large form stood even bigger than that. The head of a full-grown Amarok would only have come up to Cerberus’s shoulders. Oh, and he didn’t look like a robot dog right now. That definitely wouldn’t have fit with the theme we were going for. So, instead, Percy had used a spell she knew that made him look like a rotting dog corpse. A three-headed rotting dog corpse that was big enough to swallow any one of the people in his way like they were kernels of popcorn. And he was still giving that terrible, three-headed howl.
And just like that, the line of pirates broke. Laein tried to stop Cerberus, but of course he wasn’t actually undead, so her power did nothing. At the last second as he charged toward her, she seemed to prepare a teleportation spell. But it was too late. One of his heads swung out, colliding with the woman hard enough to send her flying up against one of the overturned carts, where she lay still and stopped trying to interfere.
Meanwhile, the rest of the people went running for the safety of the shield. Several of the overseers activated something on their wrists, and the shield flickered before a series of doorways appeared for the pirates to rush through in their bid for safety.
That was it, that was all I needed. The second the doorways appeared, several of the ghosts I’d had waiting on standby, including Seth, passed invisibly through them. Which would’ve been a big enough deal on its own, but then one of the pirate overseers with the wrist thing abruptly jerked to a halt. He staggered one way, then the other, before collapsing. A previously invisible figure appeared behind him, holding an ethereal glowing knife.
Grover. And he had stabbed the man. What’s more, he took the wrist device from him, using the last of the energy I’d given him to make himself tangible enough to do that. Then he vanished from that spot, reappearing in front of me with the device held out.
I took it, looking at the complicated series of buttons before shrugging as I offered it to Gaia. She, in turn, took one look and then gestured with her hand. The device gave a loud, affirmative beep, before the shield around the ship in the distance completely deactivated. It was off, no matter how much the guys down there kept trying frantically to turn it back on.
“Okay then,” I announced.
“Let’s get down there and find our missing friend.”