Later that night.

Further south, where the city's walls met the shore of eastern Westerens, there was a military harbor right below the ramparts. There were six piers, each standing on the trunks of hundred-year-old trees, acting as piles driven a hundred feet into the ground beneath the waves.

The piers were meant to service the kingdom's navy in case of war. But there wasn't a war, and so the city saw it fit to be used to service passing merchant marines and privateer escorts.

Jon and Damian surveyed the dark harbor with magic spyglasses, able to see in the dark. They were looking from the window of a nearby brothel, perched on a hill overlooking the wharf. The brothel had its own little bell tower, though not as grand as a cathedral's. Still, a bell the size of a baby was deceptively loud — enough for sailors from the nearby harbor to hear it. The plain blue flag that fluttered beside the bell, plain to see for anyone standing on any of the piers, easily drew the eye, and curious sailors would check what the fuss was about, discovering that it was a brothel all along.

By word of mouth, sailors would tell their buddies, and the brothel would attract its customers.

From the loose mouths of its customers came information, information that Damian lapped up like a dog and a bowl of water.

While the brothel's customers made merry below, Jon and Damian discussed their next course of action in a private room, lit only by a weak light. The brothel's maids had already passed on what they'd heard to Damian, but it wasn't anything they didn't already know.

What was curious was talk of an eastern warrior joining the sailors — talk of the warrior's ears, specifically. The cat ears of the Kittari tribes from the Aranai Peninsula, marking the easternmost end of the Middling Sea, was the most popular gossip among the ladies, and they'd tried swarming the poor — or lucky, depending on who he was — man.

The warrior in question had been reprimanded before anything happened, and had been sent back to the harbor. It seemed they weren't supposed to show themselves quite yet.

There were three ships moored to the wharf at the moment. One of them was a merchant barge, likely only meant to go up and down the coast.

The other two, however, were sleeping giants with far too many gun ports. The line ships Damian was familiar with had tall castles to the aft, where the helmsman stood and steered the ship. These, however, didn't have such a castle, the topmost deck being almost perfectly flat.

Even so, he counted two decks of gun ports, which meant that they were three-deck ships, the lowermost deck being the ship's hold. One deck had about forty cannons, which meant each ship had 160 cannons, or 80 on each side — twice what he'd told Jon.

"Oh dear." He turned to look at him with troubled eyes. "Those are much too big. And they look like they're busy down there."

On the wharf, in the space between the piers and the warehouses, was a small town of tents. Patrols marched between them, each wearing clothes and weapons foreign to this land. They navigated the dark with red light stones — bright enough to let them see their path, but nearly impossible to notice from far away, masking their buildup in the area.

"The Order didn't notice," Jon said.

"They didn't...or couldn't. The schedule said they'd arrived yesterday, but you see, there was a thick fog yesterday." Damian shook his head. He didn't want to entertain the possibility, but... "Agh, they must've come in with the fog as camouflage.” It was the only way they could've possibly gotten here. ”Where could they have found such an expert navigator, I wonder?" He wanted to hire the guy if he could.

"On the other hand," he continued, "they'll find out soon enough. They have the records, after all, though I suppose it would take some hours between them finding out and mustering enough forces to confront an entire mercenary company. I hear Kittari warriors to be fierce and prideful, too, and I'm sure the Order doesn't plan on belittling their presence with a weak response."

Jon looked through the spyglass again, counting the mercenaries' numbers. He counted the number of people going in and out of a certain tent, then the number of tents. He didn't see any Westeren sailors entering those tents.

He grimaced. There were definitely well over 200 Kittari mercenaries camped out on the wharf, while Westeren sailors continued to tend to their ships. Given the size of the ships, they must have needed at least 100 men to operate apiece.

There ought to be over 400 enemies down there. He might have lost count over the number of people he'd killed in his first life, but even that number wasn't all at once. There was no way for him to just waltz in and kill everyone down there.

[Doubtful, are we?]

Again, Ravena whispered messages from his left shoulder. He wasn't appreciative of the mind-reading. Even if it wasn't mind-reading, being cold read to such a precise degree wasn't any more pleasurable.

[I'll make this easier for you. There are certainly slaves on one of those ships — I won't tell which one, of course — and if you liberate them, how about I unlock one of your Skill Claims?]

Prematurely unlocking one of his Skills? This was a serious offer. He couldn't ignore the sheer threat that magic possessed, and it seemed that his employer was going to keep throwing him missions with a lot of the very same magic involved.

He froze at the thought of confronting someone like Alyssa; for now, she was a young woman of whimsy, but he knew her abilities. If those guns were turned on him, he’d be dead before he even reached her, no question.

Right now, his only counter against magic was other magic, and Skills were a way to invoke magic without shaving off his lifespan. Not that he cared much about his remaining lifespan, but if he could find any happiness whatsoever at the end of this, he at least wanted to spend a few years — maybe three — basking in it.

To live long enough to get to that point, he needed Skills more than he needed magic.

Besides, there were slaves on one of those ships, weren’t there? He got a little pissy just thinking back to Amani. The girl had been almost dragged into slavery a second time. He couldn’t say that he fully understood how she felt, but he never wanted to see lifeless eyes again.

He pushed the thought down. The motivation would always be there, but right now, he needed focus.

He looked through the spyglass again, desperately looking for a pragmatic way to slip inside. He already had an inkling of what he could do: cause a distraction to pull the mercenaries one way, and free the slaves and make them run the other way. There was bound to be a lot of munitions in those ships. He could definitely use those somehow, and even if the situation went south...well, he’d definitely use them somehow.

He spotted a crew of motley sailors bringing a cart of casks up the hill. Their pack mule didn't look like it was struggling to pull it along.

"Can you get me in there?"

Jon's question threw Damian off. "What" — a peek through his spyglass answered his own unfinished question. He would have called Jon a crazed daredevil for even bringing up the possibility, but the man left no space for doubt. "Don't forget to bring back some souvenirs for me, would you?"

***

Damian stuffed Jon in a huge cask. It wasn't Jon's first time getting stuffed in a cask — or a barrel, or a concrete box — but this was his first time agreeing to it, not to mention even suggesting it in the first place.

He wasn't just in the barrel; that would be suspicious. The crew would check the product by turning the tap and sampling whatever came out.

So, Jon was neck-deep in light bear. Not only was it dark, claustrophobic, and shaky as hell, but he was soaking in alcohol. Because of this, he breathed through a discreet snorkel that snaked through the faucet, tucked inside just so it wasn't obvious.

Damian silently hoped that the beer wouldn't taste too strange.

The sailors from the harbor eventually came to the back of the brothel-tavern with an empty cart. Jon withstood being rolled around as his cask was tipped over and rolled to the pickup point. There were some muffled voices, then the sound of the tap being opened.

"Huh, it doesn't taste like shit like usual. What'd you put in this? What's your secret, eh?" the sailor remarked. Good thing Jon didn't hear that. He wouldn't have known how to feel about it.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The cask got hefted onto the back of the cart, along with several more.

Jon closed his eyes the whole way in a bid to trick his body into not becoming nauseous. He paced his breathing; too deep or too quick, and the sailors outside would hear a strange-sounding barrel. Sailors were a superstitious sort, so it wasn't out of the realm of imagination to think that they would throw the barrel off a cliff, believing it to be cursed.

The cart stopped. Jon felt the cask get rolled off, then properly stood up on the pier — it should be the pier, if the washing of the waves were any clue.

The cask shuddered for a split second, giving way to a swaying sensation. It must've been up in the air somehow…a crane?

It jolted as it found ground again, but there was still a hint of a swaying sensation. He couldn't tell if he was on the ship already or not. He could just be dizzy from the entire trip.

Little did he know, hell was only about to begin.

Two sailors tipped the cask over and started rolling it…towards the ramp.

They stopped by the top of the ramp.

"One cask! Coming down!" one of the sailors announced.

"One cask! Coming down!" a sailor at the bottom of the rank replied in confirmation.

The sailors at the top sent the cask over the edge, sending it rolling down that if a person were inside it, they'd become scrambled slush by the time they came out.

A net softly caught the cask at the bottom of the ramp before it could destroy anything. Another pair of sailors started rolling it away to another ramp.

The shitty rollercoaster finally reached its end. Jon waited until the voices of the ship's hands disappeared, then he waited a while longer just to make sure no one would see him pop out of the cask.

…Before that, he allowed himself a moment of reprieve. What a shitty rollercoaster. He couldn't tell up from down at the moment. If he weren't already used to rough treatment, he'd be soaked in beer mixed with his own vomit by now. This much wasn't enough to distract him, however; it was just a passing feeling, after all.

It didn't take long to regain his sense of gravity. The ceiling was flat, and so was the floor — which meant the barrel was standing, and he was curled up just the right way to stand once the lid was off.

He used a pry bar to loosen the bottom lip of the cask, where the round body met the lid. He loosened it enough that there was finally a crack of dim light, the first he'd seen in a long while. He listened closely to the sounds coming from the outside, confirming that, at the very least, there weren't any noisy guards; perhaps there was one dozing off on a hammock nearby.

He didn't want to risk detection, but the lid was surprisingly resilient despite Damian's assurances that it had been weakened beforehand to safely allow him to get out. Inch by inch around the circumference, he pried the lid open. When there was wide enough of a crack, he peeked out to check for guards. It was dim, but with his eyes adjusted to the dark, there didn't appear to be any guards — just more casks and crates.

This must be the ship's hold. He pried the lid once more, and there was a pop. The lid had come loose, and he was able to handle it as he stood and got out of the cask.

His legs were jello, and his senses were still a bit shot from being rolled around. It didn't help that the ship rocked a little. The rocking would only worsen as he climbed to the upper decks.

He didn't notice it at first, but it stank of human refuse — and there were bars dividing the cargo hold in two sections. He was in the half filled with crates and casks, and the other half…was filled with eyes peering at him. Each one was a catkin like Amani.

He was horrified. Not even in the previous world had he seen conditions this bad. There was barely any space between the people trapped behind the bars, packed worse than sardines. Sweat mixed with sweat until they all smelled the same. As they stared at him, it felt like being stared at by a ravenous horde of zombies. It almost made him feel that he didn't want anything to do with them — but his mission had everything to do with them.

He approached the bars, and the people behind them stirred. He put a finger to his lips to keep them from being too loud.

This one, simple action inspired all sorts of emotions in the people behind the bars: hope at the best, pessimism at the worst. Jon was, by all accounts, just one man; the pragmatic among them didn't think one man could save them. There were too many guards to go through, and too many of them to save. No matter how you'd think of it, there was just no way for them to escape without any of the guards noticing.

In Jon's mind, of course that was possible — a dead guard was a guard who couldn't notice anything, right?

Still, he needed a way to quietly take out hundreds of guards. He was self-aware enough to know he wasn't one for stealth. Actually being able to take out hundreds of guards without anyone noticing was a pipe dream, but if he could at least take out a chunk of them — enough to take over several key chokepoints — and give himself a tactical advantage that way…

Right, that sounded more feasible. Opening up a corridor of escape, while funneling the enemy into a kill zone — that sounded more like his style.

He approached the bars. He needed a sense of the layout of the ship: where the officers and mercenaries were, where the crew usually was, where the captain usually was.

He scanned the people behind the bars, looking for someone who looked like they bothered to memorize the ship's layout.

He found one: by the very end of the bars, leaning on the ship's hull, was a man with a scar on his cheek and a head of long hair. The others around him were insistent on respecting his space, even if that space consisted of a three-inch allowance between his elbows and the next guy's.

Jon walked along the bars. As he approached the man, he noticed that he only had a stub of a tail, likely cut off during a fight.

He stopped his slow walk, confronting the man on the other side of the bars. The man eyed him back, half-wondering what this killer was thinking, and half-wondering how he'd kill him through the bars if he so much as breathed the wrong way.

"How many guards?" Jon asked as if he'd expected him to give a straight answer.

The man smirked. He'd suspected that Jon was here to do some damage, and he was right. He'd give him his straight answer. "Fifty crew around this time," the man replied, his voice gravelly, but giving off an impressed air. "What are you gonna do?"

"I'll come up with something," Jon replied.

"A breakout?" the man continued.

"Something like that."

The man hummed. That was a difficult ask, and not for the reasons their supposed savior would've expected. He looked Jon in the eye. "There's a problem." He tilted his head towards the other slaves. "You think they'll leave?"

Jon didn't know what he was talking about. It was obvious that anyone deprived of freedom would seek it. The man looked amused, however, as if Jon was the naive one here, so he entertained him and gave the catkin another lookover.

They were decrepit bodies, but even worse were their spirits. Certainly, many of them were staring at Jon, expecting something maybe-amazing to happen, but most of them didn't even bat an eye. He'd earlier found it too easy to silence them when they'd stirred, and now he knew why.

In his previous world, it was easier to expect people to seek the freedom they were deprived of. However, what if they were born into a life where they didn't have any? They wouldn't miss what they never had.

Many of the people behind the bars might have been born into it. Even if they escaped, they wouldn't know what to do with their lives.

He looked back at the man. "And you?"

"Oh, I'll leave, no problem." He chuckled. "And not just me."

Jon scanned the crowd again, and he noticed several eyes with the same glint of experience as the man.

"We'll even help you out, if you want," the man continued. "Just don't come looking for us when we get out of here, alright?"

There was a chance that Jon would be letting those of criminal minds escape. He didn't really need the help, either, but it was stupid to assume that things would go his way all the time.

He sharpened his mind. All these other thoughts were just distractions from the main mission: free the slaves. Whether there were criminals mixed in or not, it wasn't his place to judge which ones were criminal. Such a thing would come after an accomplished mission, and his mission stopped at accomplishing this one thing.

Even if these people didn't actively want to be free, he didn't care. People who don't know freedom must come to know of it, that was what he believed, or else they will live knowing nothing of life at all.

His life had always been defined by being chained to what others wished of him; he killed on someone else's command. Now, he led his mission however he saw fit, and he was more than happy that Ravena never told him how to do something — just that something needed to be done, and this time, she was even giving him a bonus for something he was doing of his own volition.

So, he'd get these people to taste freedom — force it on them.

He faced the man. His face must have changed, because the man had a nervous look. The man knew, deep in his heart, that he was about to hear an unreasonable request.

Jon wouldn't just say it in front of everyone, though. He picked open the lock on the gate and waited for the man to squeeze his way out of the hold. The people behind him, meanwhile, obediently stayed inside their prison despite the open door.

"Stir up the hornet's nest," Jon said, "then blow up the ship."

The man crouched down and pulled the hairs on his head. Well, this wouldn't be the first time he'd be following through on unreasonable things.

The man stood up, taking a second to pull his hair back, and introduced himself. "Call me Jiraya."

"Right." Jon nodded. "Jon."

Jiraya looked back to the bars and flashed a look at his accomplices. One by one, they squeezed their way out from the crowd, who did their best to make way for such scary people.

Eventually, behind Jiraya stood nine people, men and women alike. Although they were famished from malnutrition, they stood with such confidence — bordering on arrogance — that Jon easily identified them as experienced killers. Whether they were criminals, assassins, or something in between, he didn't know. For the sake of stealth, he hoped it was the latter.

Jiraya grinned. "Her Highness's Ten Blades, at your service."

Those were some curious words, but Jon ignored them. Leaving behind the question of what they were doing wasting away in a slave ship, they at least sounded like they could kill.