I sent a message to grandpa. Finished here. What's the situation?

Got another set of skeleton pirates, but these ones had a chance to dig in before we got there. The so-called admiral is with them so I assume we defeat them and then we’re done. They've got a gun boat pulled up on shore.

A what? That didn't seem era-appropriate.

Like our landing craft, but with a small brass cannon in the front of it. It's got a decent range. We lured five of them out and took them down. I was considering just charging in now.

We'll be there in five minutes, I said. Want to hold up?

I think we will. There was no way of telling from the plain text, but I wondered if the new recruits weren't performing up to grandpa's expectations.

We crashed through the jungle, not much caring about noise. I checked my mini-map regularly. No new red dots appeared. We could see the little green dots for grandpa and his party and made right for them.

They were concealed a little ways back in the forest, peering around palm trees to study the enemy setup. I poked my head out.

This crew had a pirate boss, "Admiral Scaggers", and a Ghostly Cockswain. The cockswain was giving all the others a buff to their ranged damage, and these pirates were armed with muzzle-loading long guns. I couldn't quite make out the details from here, but they looked like wheellocks to me, not flintlocks. They probably weren't very accurate, would be slow to reload, but pack a heck of a punch.

"What's the operational plan?" I asked.

Grandpa turned to Team Mongoose. "We haven't had a chance to see you fellows take the lead. What would you suggest?"

Smith, the tall one, who I was pretty sure was at least an O-2 like myself, peered out, then ducked back behind cover with the rest of us. "Anything wrong with just charging them head-on?"

"That would probably work," Grandpa agreed. "The thing is, we might take the opportunity to get a better look at some of their capabilities. We've gotmore waves coming before we've claimed the node. I'm gonna assume we're going to see more of these guys."

"Then I think we need to use your team as bait while we sneak in behind them and knock them out," Smith said at once. "How often can you use that trick to get them all to pay attention to you, Williams?"

"It's back off cooldown now," I said.

"What else have you got? We need to understand each other's capabilities if we're going to work together," Smith said.

Grandpa grinned wickedly. "Indeed we are. So why don't you share your ability list with us and we'll share ours with you?"

Smith blinked like he hadn't been expecting that. The four men that Colonel Ames had landed us with had been pretty reticent to share much about their capabilities. "We can just tell you," Smith said.

Grandpa sighed. "Now I get that there are things you are hiding from us. I don't rightly understand why. We're all on the same side here. I assume the colonel's given you some secret orders, but for as long as you are going to be working with my team, we need to work together. Shad, Sage, send them over."

I pulled up my abilities list and sent it to the men. Sage stuck her tongue out and followed suit.

The other two newbies sent their info without being asked. I'd already seen their skill lists before. They weren't particularly impressive. Neither one had a very coherent class. Ice Spice was a [Self-Defense Self-Taught Specialist] with moves like [I Know Kung Fu] that gave him a 30-second ability to fight unarmed in melee and actually inflict some serious damage, and another one called [3 a.m. Martial Arts Movie Marathon] that sounded like it gave him a different batch of martial arts skills for a five minute period but had a three hour cool down.

Lara was a [Soccer Mom] with a [Minivan] ability that could teleport her entire current party out of battle space. That seemed like it'd be situationally very useful. Her offensive moves included [School Run] which let her get in and deal crippling blows to three different enemies, then disengage. [I Brought Oranges for Everyone] was actually a grenade lobbing move like our buddy Deputy Young had.

Tall Smith blinked. His eyes went distant for a minute. "Thanks," he said. "Yeah, I'm getting the idea for a plan now." He did not share his own sheet.

"Captain Smith," Grandpa said, his tone dangerously cold. "I will now make it an order. You and your men share your skill sets with Shad and me immediately." There was no room in his voice for questioning him.

Smith's jaw muscles worked. I could see the men glancing at each other and knew they were having a private conversation in chat. The seconds ticked by. They were getting dangerously close to insubordination.

Finally, Smith said, "Understood, sir." A moment later, an information pack pinged on my system.

"Good. I'll take a look at that at my convenience. Now, it sounded like you had a plan," Grandpa said.

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"Yeah." Smith was definitely ruffled now. "Right, so it is pretty clear those guys have a ranged move. The ones we fought earlier were mostly melee. I'm wondering whether they can switch back and forth. So what I suggest is we drive in hard and scatter them, then take some time to see what moves they're capable of. Everyone here ought to be able to take one hit. If you take more than that, get out of combat by any means necessary."

"I can keep people topped off," Sage offered brightly. "And my team buff is powerful enough now to hit everyone here. It's not just limited to my original party."

"Then cast that as we start," Smith said. "Williams, I want you to charge in and do your 'pay attention to me' move. Lara, I want you to lob some grenades at the group as soon as they're focused on Williams. I've noticed a few cases where sonic damage will break a crowd control, and it would be good to know if these suffer from that limitation."

That was good to know. We had used plenty of crowd control with Frank, and I'd never noticed that. I filed it away for future reference.

"After that, pay attention to how much damage they take from which abilities. Don't use any AOEs," Smith continued. "We want to be clear about who did what damage. We will debrief after the firefight."

That made sense to me. I could have suggested a few refinements, but Grandpa seemed to be interested in letting Smith do the leading here.

"On your signal then," I told Smith.

"Go!"

Sage cast Cowgirl Cheer on all of us. I ran ahead of the group. I didn't use my Fastest Gun in the West move yet. I wanted to save that for getting out of trouble if necessary. Its range had gone up as I leveled, and I could now charge a hundred feet in a straight line. I would just have to be careful where I was pointing and make sure I ran along the beach and not back into the woods and hit a tree. That had happened once in a previous mission, and it had hurt a lot.

The pirates looked up as I ran in. The admiral raised his arm and brought it down in a sharp motion and a pair of skeleton pirates in their beached landing boat jumped to the cannon. They began wheeling it around to point it at me.

I ran into the middle of the group and cast "Call 'em Out" as they were aiming their muskets at me.

A barrage of small orange grenades landed all around. They exploded. I hadn't expected the orange scent or the cloud of acrid smoke that arose. It made me cough. My eyes watered.

Some of the skeletons looked disoriented. They turned to seek the source of the grenades. My skill hadn't worn off, so this must be one of those effects that Smith had mentioned. I would have to see if we could figure out the rules later.

I fired a Barrage at the pirate admiral. We needed to get him and the cockswain down, and then the rest would be fairly easy pickings. The admiral had a flintlock pistol and a rapier.

He fired his pistol at me. The slug caught me in the arm. I staggered back, the pain burning. My eyes were already watering from the smoke, and now I could barely see. I took 25 points of damage just from the one hit.

Sage cast "Raise Your Spirits" on me and a cool wash of relief flowed over me, easing the pain and restoring my health. The heal-over-time aspect started ticking me upward.

The skeleton admiral dropped his pistol and swung his rapier at me. Grandpa Shadow Stepped in behind him and used Scalp, knocking his hat off. The skeleton whirled on him, rapier coming within inches of grandpa's hunting jacket.

Grandpa Shadow Stepped away to another of the skeletons, and I put another six rounds through the admiral. He was hurting pretty bad now, down to [10/150].

One of the Smiths came in behind him with a k-bar knife and ran it across the admiral's non-existent throat. That did the trick. The skeleton's health bar disappeared and he collapsed.

All of the other skeletons lost the buff the admiral had been providing. I turned to look for the cockswain just as the skeletons on the boat fired their cannon.

The cannon shot blew through the middle of the melee, knocking one of the pirates out of the way and nearly hitting Jones. My ears rang. I aimed at the gunner skeletons and shot one, dropping its health from full to nothing in two seconds flat. The other one was struggling to reload, a heavy cannonball in its bony hands.

Grandpa Shadow Stepped up and scalped it, then hit it with his [Take No Prisoners] move. He didn't use that very often because he was usually more mobile, preferring to dance around the battlefield and deliver a little bit of damage to a lot of different targets. But when he needed to drop a single damaged enemy fast and didn't have enough coup points to cash in, Take No Prisoners dealt a lot of damage really fast. It required him to have an axe in each hand, then hit the target three times with each.

By the time he was done, the skeleton was a pile of broken bone shards.

"Help!" Sage was shrieking. I turned to find her.

She was standing over Ice Spice, who lay on the ground with one arm and half his torso blown away. "My heal's not working!" she exclaimed. "He's still going down!"

"Potion! Quick!" I shouted, running over to her. There were still three skeletons up. The Mongeese ran around dealing with them.

"I can't!" She wrang her hands. Ice Spice lay on the sand, his blood leaking out. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and he was convulsing. His health bar was ticking down. Ten points left. Nine. Eight.

I grabbed a potion then hesitated because I had just noticed the debuff on him. It read [Shrapnel]. The effect was [This wound cannot be healed while Shrapnel is present. Time remaining: 15 seconds.]

I swore. He wasn't going to make it. "Can you hear me, buddy?" I said, grabbing his remaining hand and squeezing. "Hold on. It's gonna be alright. You're gonna respawn right back on the boat and we'll send someone for you. It's alright. You did good."

I held on tight as I could as his health trickled down to zero.

[Victory! You have defeated Admiral Scaggers and retain control of this island. Lick your wounds, savor your victory, and prepare for the next round of invaders!]

The battle was over. When I regained control of myself, I stood up. Sage was quietly sobbing. I put an arm around her shoulders. "It's alright, Sage. He's not really dead."

"I know, but it feels like he is. I was trying to heal him and it didn't work." Sage rubbed her nose as she sobbed.

"That was good intel," Tall Smith said, walking back to us. "Now we know those cannonballs apply a nasty debuff that we can't afford. We'll have to target any cannoneers first."

I restrained myself from calling him all of the names I was secretly thinking. He was right. Ice Spice wasn't really dead. In fact — I checked. He'd be back with us in five minutes.

We had 22 minutes remaining on our timer and the wave was 100% clear. I noticed something else. "Hey, look," I said to Grandpa. "It's asking if we want to start the next wave now."

"So it is," Grandpa said.

"You think if we do that, it'll make us able to take the node any faster?"

Grandpa looked around at the beach, the piles of broken bones, the looks on all our faces. "Everybody, grab a drink and a snack," he said. "I'm going to start this up in five minutes so we can find out what's going on. Leave a message for Aaron to get back here as soon as possible." We had left the boats beached, but Ice Spice would be able to recall one from the ship. "Then let’s see what we can do."