"What the hell are we doing here Ralk?" The question nestled in everyone's minds was finally out, "if I wanted guard duty I would join the guilds"

"Look how well that job works for them", Ralk was looking at the burning towns all along the shore like a line of war beacons.

"That's barely scratching the tip of their nose you know", adding after a short calculation, "even if everyone else are as lucky as we were then we despawned or captured barely five thousand Player avatars", letting the others do the math, "that's not even a pimple on their nose", looking at the game statistics for lowest ranked active Player, "there are over two billion Players that logged in yesterday", not counting NPCs, "the guild alliance population in a quarter of the total so make your own math", looking for confirmation, "the whole armada has less than a million Players thats two hundred guilders for every one of us"

"Most guilders are just indentured slaves", Shebra interjected, "all working to empower the one percent"

"At least fifteen percent are militia or support classes", Nephys added, "that means they have two high rankers that can kick everyone here to the moon and back", sounding grim, "and twenty more to cheer them when they do it"

"I heard the alliance is cracking over a bunch of kids being tortured", Gibor snickerd, "good for them rich snubs to learn something about the real world"

"Torturing children is where I put my foot down", Vashil said harshly, "don't really care about the other stuff but children are just children and hurting them for fun is just wrong"

"INCOMING" shouted from the com post had a miraculous effect of the entire ship suddenly turning dark and the guards scattered to protected spots.

"What the hell is incoming without a blast?" Nephys whispered a second before the explosions started.

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"Airstrike" the com post informed them too late as bombs dropped from some flying moster were already blossoming all around them on the deck and in the water, marking the ships for another pass.

Spell casters started painting the skies with ilusions and fairy fire to outline the enemy, but no cannons fired before they hit the kilometer high silhouette of something, fairy fire encircling the airship put the attackers well away from their anti air artillery and so squads of mages lifted into the sky to try and take it down.

Arcs of lightnings were exchanged for balls of flame as it became apparent the enemy didn't have a colossal range advantage for anything but gravity propelled bombs, as the numerically superior mages encircled the flying behemoth and started blasting it on all sides the tide turned and the enemy spell casters could do nothing but shield against the attacks.

When the airship blew apart Fezila heard cheers from the ships below before the thunders roared and almost made her lose control on her flight spell in the absolute noise of the explosion, when the steam cleared it became obvious the airship wasn't falling, but smaller aircraft were dropping toward their ships so fast it was all she could do to just follow them with her eyes before they started climbing back up, each trio of the new menaces hit a different ship with some sort of hooked line and when they pulled up the ship had been toppled like a toy.

Cutting the lines and flying away before anyone could do anything but stare the airplanes were gone and four ships were sinking fast into the ocean as game mechanics ignored physics and assumed that if the keel was over ninety degrees then the ship was sinking no matter what.

The stacatto of machine gun fire was so outlandish inside the game it took her far too long to recognize it before seeing Utim become a cloud of blood and starting an evasive maneuver.

Blasting more fireballs at the attacking airship finally scored a hit when four of them timed their attacks to a split second, and the planes returned, skilled at high speed aerial combat, Fezila evaded the first burst and was totally surprised when her magic missile failed, an aerial roll and tumble later put her in the position to blast it with lightning.

Arcs of electricity iluninating the flying demon let her see that it wasn't as small as she assumed at first but a smaller aircraft was painted at such a strange angle she couldn't target it directly when it was moving so fast.

"Look out" was the last thing she heard before respawning.