We head out and follow Laura’s directions. The mood has gotten lighter the more we walked, so I got that going for me.
To be clear, I refuse to mourn for a pair of ass-cheeks. For fuck’s sake, just thinking about it makes no sense! This world has magic and flying mansions, so it must have a way to regrow missing body parts. Not my fault that Mr. No Ass can’t use a Terminal.
I hate this place. Just walking around this hellhole is a hazard in itself. I lost count of the number of times when a member of our little group almost went through a platform or miscalculated a jump and nearly fell into the abyss. And we are in what looks like a nice residential area; I shudder to think what the bad neighborhood looks like. Maybe they just broke away from the rest of the upper levels and are drifting aimlessly into the void? That would certainly solve the problem.
Nevertheless, we finally arrive at our location. A small one-story residential home with a fenced yard that needs some maintenance.
“The boat is in the backyard; the captain told me that the door was unlocked,” Laura says as she pushes a small wooden door that leads to the yard. We enter the front yard, which looks like a miniature jungle, and head for the backyard.
There she is. The wreck is standing in all of its derelict glory in front of us. It looks even worse in reality, a feat that I thought impossible.
“Great leader, are we sure that we can salvage this?” an elf asks. All eyes focus on me.
Shit, I have no idea if I can save this pile of trash. I kneel near the vessel and touch it as I frown and do my best to look like I know what I’m doing. Now, can MERTICORE save the boat? I try to use the Object Editor on the sky-boat, but a prompt appears in front of my eyes. It warns that the level of my Universal Interface is too low. Luckily, I only need to purchase the next level to be able to properly interact with the sky-boat. I grit my teeth as I sink nearly all my reserves of MertiPoints into the upgrade.
My vision stutters for a second as I select the sky-boat again. A gigantic list of parameters appears in front of my eyes. I don’t even bother reading any of them and launch a MERTCORE.Restore(). The world goes gray around me for a moment, and I nearly lose consciousness as a bright white flash engulf the sky-boat.
The elves, not used to such a display, recoil in surprise. I blink a couple of times and look at my handiwork. The sky-boat is now repaired! However, it is even less impressive than I first thought. The creators of this particular sky-boat just strapped four engines to a canoe.
“What was that?” Laura asks as she looks at me with what I assume are wide-open eyes.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I say as I get up and pretend to inspect the sky-boat. In truth, I’m just recovering from my slight headache and playing with the parameters. First of all, I want to make this thing more durable and stable. I also want to make it faster and more reliable. I fiddle with all the parameters I can and end up with a good compromise. The cheap and fragile materials that the boat is made of severely limited my budget for modifications, so I did the best I could. I accept the modifications, and the boat is engulfed in another bright flash of light.
I feel dizzy and almost fall on my back, but I somehow stay upright. The resulting boat is— well it’s something made by MERTICORE. The wooden body has been replaced by a sleek, plastic-like material that feels slightly warm and grainy to the touch. The engines are now made of stainless steel and have striking similarities to a rocket engine. There was an ancient rudder, but it is gone and has been replaced by a joystick along with a pair of pedals that are suspiciously identical to the ones that were in my car.
We even have seats now! Granted, they look like cheap seats from my car but anything is better than sitting on raw wood.
“How did you do that?” Laura asks. Even the elves are looking at me with what I assume is newly found respect. One can only hope that these idiots can learn.
“This is the power of Ian! He’s one of the greatest Artificers!” Yoshiko announces with pride. Avryl looks at the craft with wide-open eyes, and her gaze keeps alternating between the upgraded sky-boat and me. She has a faint smile, but I know better than to speak to her when she has a crazy grin.
But all these upgrades are not the only thing to notice on this boat. The boat has been named by MERTICORE. ‘MERTIBOAT’ is now written in large white letters on the side of the flying vessel. I take a deep breath, it probably could have been worse.
“What are we waiting for?” I ask as I sit on the driver’s seat. We even have seatbelts! Don’t get me wrong, I have no clues on how to pilot this thing, but it shouldn't be too hard. There is the joystick, a button with ‘engines start/stop’ written on it along with a bunch of gages giving me what must be a lot of important information. I assume that the pedals at my feet are for accelerating and braking, but we’ll see soon enough.
I just hope that I won’t fuck up too badly and crash into the nearby houses.
The driver’s seat is at the front while the passengers are arranged in three rows of three seats each. We’re lucky that we do not have more people since Sword is so massive that he needs two seats for himself and his equipment.
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“Do you even know how to drive one of these things?” Laura asks as she buckles her seatbelt.
I shrug, “I only learned about the existence of sky-boats today, so make your own deductions.” I say as I press the button for starting the engines.
“Wait—” Laura is interrupted by the high-pitched but surprisingly manageable engine noises. The engines shift their orientation to point at the ground, and I see superheated air flying out of the nozzles. I take a deep breath, cough the dust kicked out by the engines, and slam the accelerator. Pressure pins me in my seat as the craft shoots up at tremendous speeds. I take in the sensation of the wind passing through my hair as we keep accelerating.
“HOUSE!” Someone shouts as a shadow looms above us. A small home is in our way, and we are going to crash if we keep going! I slam on the brakes as I move the joystick to the side. The craft decelerates so much that I feel my stomach moving down as I maneuver out of the way just in time for the flying house to pass us.
That was way too close.
“ANOTHER ONE!” Laura shouts as I accelerate out of the way and barely rotate the craft out of the way. We are now upside-down. Thank you, MERTICORE, for adding seatbelts.
This place is fucking insane, we need to get out of here as soon as possible.
“Laura, guide me!” I order the elven woman who is looking around.
“G-Go up!” she points at the sky.
“Okay!” I answer as I pull on the joystick and slam the accelerator. We shoot upward like a miniature rocket, the sudden acceleration presses me into my seat as I do my best to pay attention. The surroundings are blurry, so it’s hard to tell where we are going or if we are about to crash through someone’s living room.
“BAKERY!” a high-pitched voice warns me. I tilt the joystick to the left just in time to avoid a small bakery that wouldn’t look out of place in a medieval city. The pleasant smell of fresh bread makes me forget for a moment that I’m piloting a dangerous vessel. A vessel that I don’t know how to operate at speeds that would make most fighter jets look like snails on sedatives.
Let’s not forget that I’m doing all of this in a residential area full of flying houses. Luckily for us, it looks like we just passed the layer of small family homes and are back into a clear sky. Of course, I keep my eyes open in case a rogue garden shed threatens to crash into our fragile sky-boat.
“So where are we going?” I urge Laura to give me additional directions. This place is a death trap and the sooner we get out the better.
The armored elf tilts her head to the side and looks around after taking a deep breath. She looks a bit confused as she scans the foggy sky with her eyes.
Don’t tell me that she lost our target. I swear I’ll throw her off the boat if that’s the case.
“I think it’s around here!” Laura points at a section of the sky. I narrow my eyes, it sounds like she lost the trail and is just making things up to not look like a complete idiot.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Trust me!” she puffs her chest, “Even a target that moves so fast is no match for my tracking senses!”
I roll my eyes; I’m willing to bet that she lost her 'target' a long time ago and is too ashamed to admit it.
“Okay!” I nod and slam my foot on the accelerator. I’m pushed back in my seat as the sky-boat rumbles. I can barely see anything because of the insane speed; I don’t have the time to read the instruments.
…Did I just hear someone vomiting? I risk a glance at my back; everyone is grabbing onto what they can to stay in the boat, but one of the elves has some foul-smelling liquid dripping through their armor. It looks like I was right. I turn my head back just in time to see a wandering mailbox smash into the front of the boat!
Warning lights appear on the dashboard as I do my best to stop the aircraft from spiraling out of control. The engines scream and glow red as I push them as hard as I can while doing my best to not empty my stomach. The sheer amount of acceleration almost makes me pass out. But I hold onto consciousness, and we finally stabilize.
The members of the Alpha Team are pale, and all the elves except for Laura have vomit dripping out of their helmet.
“You knave! You did this on purpose!” Laura erupts while I try to regain my bearings. That was very close, and it was just a mailbox. I shudder when I realize that it could have been ten times worse if we smashed into a house. I take a couple of deep breaths to calm my wild heartbeat and assess the damages done to the front of the vessel.
I frown. It doesn’t look good. The part that was smashed by the mailbox is bent and cracks formed near the impacted area. There are a couple of warning lights still blinking on the dashboard, but a quick visual check on the engine tells me that they should be fine. Probably.
“That was close,” I say to no one in particular. “Now tell me where I need to go; I don’t want to spend any more time here than I need to.”
Laura grumbles before gesturing in the direction of our target. I realize that the area we need to reach is moving incredibly fast if our directions are anything to go by. Can this sky-boat even reach such speeds? Thinking about the sky-boat, I run a quick MERTCORE.Restore() on the vessel to make sure that it doesn’t explode because I accelerated too much.
I take another deep breath and accelerate. This time, I’m a bit more conservative on my speed. The warning lights disappeared when I repaired the boat, but another one just came up. I have no idea what it means, but it just turned red. That means it’s something bad, really bad.
The boat should be intact, so why is this light appearing? We’ve done nothing but climb up so far, so why—
Oh. I’m a fucking idiot. This sky-boat is warning me that I’m about to reach the altitude limit! The elevation gage is already in the red so I should have seen that coming.
“How high do we need to go? We are about to breach the cloud layer!” I shout at Laura.
“Keep steady, navigator! Our treasure is above the heavens!” Laura says as she does her best to make what must have been an impressive pose in her mind. It looks ridiculous since her movements are constrained by her massive armor and the seatbelt.
I grit my teeth as I push the sky-boat to its limits. The engines scream and faint smoke starts to emit from the reactors. I brace myself for whatever might be waiting for us since I can’t see anything. The vessel creaks as the elevation gage locks itself into the maximum value. The speedometer just went beyond its maximum and the engine temperature gauge is showing ‘400°C+’. The MERTIBOAT rumbles and shakes as I do my best to keep it from stalling and correct my course whenever I can.
Multiple alarms echo as I hear something spool up. A metal ring rotates on the engines as the nozzles expand. The previously colorless exhausts now turn pink as the sky-boat jerks forward. The constant screaming is covered by the loud noise of the engines as we breach the cloud layer.
I instinctively closed my eyes, so I open them again.
Let me tell you, I wasn’t expecting that.