Internally, I was jumping up and down like a kid. Not only had I rescued a bunch of civilians who were going to be sold into slavery, there was a bunch more loot to be had. I normally wasn't such a… loot goblin, but this was a fantasy world with RPG mechanics. I felt I was absolutely justified in being excited; I was getting a massive payout for very little work, as far as I was concerned. Those three triplets alone surprised me, offering what was originally a dowry for potential suitors as a reward. In addition, I had discovered that my armor’s visor came with some sort of identification function. It didn’t tell me someone’s name, but it at least told me what race they were. That will be unimaginably helpful in my journeys. Still, as I led the group towards the new warehouse, I tried to maintain my veneer of professionalism. It wouldn't be good to have the rescues be killed because I wasn't paying attention.

And yet, despite my caution, there was no ambush waiting for us as we moved into the room proper. Unlike the warehouse that had been turned into an impromptu jail cell, this one was still a warehouse. And it was absolutely full of the pirate’s ill gotten gains. Most of it resided in some sort of round container with magnetic lids. Off to one side rested a fair number of tool belts with a dizzying array of tools strewn about. The gaggle of humans all let out pleased exclamations before swarming over those tools.

“I take it you guys are technicians?” I inquired bemusedly.

“Yes, miss.” One of them, a redheaded woman, spoke up. She was fairly scrawny with fire engine red hair and silver eyes. “We are– were, I suppose– ship technicians from Westfallen Armories, one of the largest ship manufacturing firms in the Termia Empire.”

“Interesting. I might have to seek your company out for ship maintenance.” It would be nice to see if I could secure some discounts after saving some of their technicians.

The human technicians glanced at each other briefly before the same lady spoke up. “If you've got a ship that needs maintained, why not just hire us?”

I paused, not expecting the offer. “Surely Westfallen Armories has a clause that prevents you from going freelance in your contracts.”

“They do,” came the agreement. “But we were kidnapped to be sold into slavery, and we've been in captivity for three months. Those contracts are now void. Technically we could return and work our way back to our old positions, but realistically Westfallen has no shortage of technicians.”

“I might take you up on that offer.” I was pleased. “I'm flying what amounts to a gunship carrier with four hangers. I can't imagine there's going to be a shortage of work. We'll work out salaries when we're not in the middle of a pirate base.”

One of the kitsune also spoke up. “If you're going to be taking them on, why not add us to the mix?”

I held up a hand, forestalling additional offers. “We should really not be having this discussion in what amounts to enemy territory. Let's get you folks clean, clothed and safe first.”

Despite my wishes, one of the cevanti still spoke up; this one had a pale pink ribbon in her hair as the only way to tell her apart from her sisters, though I still didn't know any names. “Are you sure this is wise? The nobles who wanted us aren't going to let us go so easily. They will come after you.”

“So I'll kill them.” I stared them all down with a piercing look I had been told I was really good at in my old life. “Not to toot my own here, but I am the equivalent of Unicorn Nobility. Only the greatest of fools would dare decide to covet what is mine and then try to take you from me. As far as I'm concerned, you are now a part of my retinue. I will hear no more protests. Clear?”

A chorus of affirmatives answered back. I grinned at them beautifully again. “Great. Now, let's pack all this up and get out of here. My intuition is rarely wrong, and I've got a nasty feeling that the maggots who were planning to buy you lot are almost here.”

The cevanti with a lavender ribbon started to move forward, like she was going to start lifting containers despite her manacled hands. I could tell she was a bit malnourished, but her and her sisters thought they would likely be able to help carry some things. But before she could take more than a step, my terminal glowed and started sucking the loot into itself. The cevanti woman stopped with wide eyes. “A codex?! Those are incredibly rare!”

I didn't have the slightest inkling what a codex was, but I rolled with it. It wasn't very safe to reveal the fact that I was a Champion of a goddess. It was better to wait until they were back on the Yunikōn to drop that bombshell. “I feel like I'm going to have a lot of things that'll surprise you. For now I'm just storing all this stuff until we're safe enough to go through all of it.”

Even as I said that, there was something that caught my eye as the terminal (codex?) sucked up the items like a vacuum. Specifically, there were four things. I tapped on them on the interface of my codex and a window popped up.

Ship summoning token: a token capable of summoning a ship of a certain classification. The summoned ship will feature characteristics based upon the pilot who summons it.

Huh. I finally had something that seemed to tie into my Summoner class. I briefly wondered if this was more of Artemis’s guiding hand. It seemed almost too convenient to find such tokens in a random pirate base. I wasn't sure if Artemis had the power to set up this entire venture just for her champion, but it was likely that Artemis knew that I was going to end up taking down this pirate base eventually and so slipped these tokens into a place to be found.

I quickly flipped over to yet another new tab that had appeared in the codex, and this one detailed a little more about summoning in general, in addition to the role spaceships apparently played in magic. Summoning was more or less a contract between two parties that provided benefits to both and allowed the summoner to call upon their summons to help in combat. The data entry wasn't super detailed, and I resolved to learn as I went. The one thing the codex did mention was that summons obtained extra stats based upon the level of something called the Summoner’s Bond, while in return the summoner obtained a selection of skills and spells based upon the summon’s class, in addition to a percentage of the summon’s overall stats. This also seemed to confirm that the native residents of this world also made use of the same stats as the champions did.

Interestingly enough, spaceships acted as conduits for a pilot’s skills and spells. Nearly all ships had spell arrays designed to harness the mana from the pilot or crew and manifest the effect into a much larger spell or skill to be used on a ship. As an example the codex gave, a mage type cruiser would have five mages more or less captaining the ship while other crew positions would be filled with those who didn't have a class designed for combat. When the RPG class of the spaceship matched the RPG class of the person using the skill or spell, the potency of the effect was doubled.

Now that I had this explanation, I realized that the pirate who had successfully hit the Yunikōn’s shields had probably used some sort of ability that guaranteed a hit. A skilled pilot would have been able to score a hit regardless of my evasive flying, but I wasn't confident that a pirate would have had enough experience to predict exactly where I was going to end up. This would also explain how the pirates had been so successful; civilian ships weren't likely to have a crew with a combat oriented job, and a guaranteed hit skill would be hard to counter with just standard civilian shielding.

I was pulled from my musings by a sinking feeling nagging at the edge of my thoughts. It was time to go. My combat instincts had been honed over a decade of combat situations, ever since I'd turned seventeen and volunteered for the military. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that danger was approaching quickly. I estimated we would have just enough time to reach the Yunikōn and get back out into open space before the danger would be upon us. The codex finished storing the loot with a cheerful beep. I rose back to my hooves fluidly. “Let's go. Now.”

I barely waited for my new companions to organize themselves into a group before I was taking off back down the corridor at a swift trot. “What's going on?” the third cevanti, the one with a pale blue ribbon asked, puffing slightly.

My reply was decidedly clipped, but I didn't have time to be polite. “Danger approaching. A good soldier trusts their instincts. If we don't get to my ship now, this place will be our tomb.” The group needed no further prompting and raced to keep up with me. We reached the hanger that housed the Yunikōn, and despite our hurry there was a smattering of awed gasps.

“I've never seen a spaceship like this before,” one of the technicians breathed. She had stopped, staring at my lifeline in this strange new existence.

“Beautiful, isn't she?” I remarked proudly as I used my codex to lower the shield preventing unauthorized entry. “Come on. You'll find the crew quarters on her bottom deck. I would suggest hunkering down in those rooms until I can get us far enough away from here. Heading to the nearest colony isn't likely to be a smart idea if there's going to be slave buyers hovering somewhere in this system. I'm going to try to hyperjump a couple of systems over before we stop and take stock of everything.”

Our group scrambled up the ladder to the ship. I darted past them as they stopped to stare at the rather spacious interior, heading to the cockpit. It was a little rude, but I simply didn't have time to give them a tour or help them settle in. I threw myself into the captain’s chair and engaged the auto launch portion of the navigation system. Piloting the ship was starting to get easier and easier the longer I remained in this life. The docking clamps disengaged as soon as the request for launch was sent, as there was nothing like a port authority on this asteroid to control the flow of ships. Ever so slowly the Yunikōn eased herself back out into open space. A moment later, the Yunikōn’s sensors picked up a sea of red dots. The awareness monitor was almost a solid red color with how many enemies were exiting FTL into the space surrounding the asteroid. This was certainly far more than I could handle just on my own. For the first time since my awakening, I keenly wished that I had an entire mercenary company at my back to even the odds. I began ramping the Lunar Core up to battle mode.

A voice crackled over short-range communications. “To the unidentified ship: you have several somethings that belong to our lord. You have one opportunity to fork them over to us and walk away.”

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I frowned. It was obvious he was referring to the civilians I had just rescued, and I didn’t much care for the insinuation that they were mere commodities to be bandied about. The Yunikōn indicated that these ships belonged to a House Orion, of the impossibly huge Termia Empire. I didn’t have the luxury of digging around in my codex for possible additional information, but I surmised that this noble house was a fairly large one if they were sending an entire fleet of ships into a completely separate space empire to collect would-be slaves. My visor had notified me that the trio of cevanti were natives of the Imperium of cevanti, which suggested that I was somewhere in cevanti space at the moment. Maybe I was more of a bleeding heart than I had thought I was, if I was so keen on keeping my rescues away from House Orion. “Yeah, I don’t think I will. Finders keepers, right?”

The man sighed. “We gave you the choice. Kill her.”

Space came alive with a multitude of green beams of death seeking to turn me into space debris. Fortunately for everyone on my ship, the Yunikōn was no longer where it had been previously. I had reacted before the officer had even finished his sigh. I sent the gunship carrier into a downward corkscrew pattern to avoid the worst of the incoming fire. A few lasers still glanced off my aft shields, which shimmered briefly before stabilizing. The damage readout suggested my shields could take several more strikes of that caliber before failing, which told me that those were likely Class II weapons. They were definitely a step up from usual pirate fare. The Lunar Core roared proudly as the ship continued evasive maneuvers, but then I discovered the first limitation of my ship: the turrets housing the weapons weren’t designed to rotate a full 360 degrees. It made sense now that I thought about it, as firing those weapons behind a ship could potentially interfere with the ship’s engines.

With a grunt of annoyance, I flipped the attitude control thrusters from automatic to manual. With a sublime grace that the large vessel should not have been capable of, I rotated my ship until it was nose up to the still relatively stationary private army above. The thrusters continued to drive the Yunikōn backwards as my own Class III weapons opened up. Blue heavy pulse lasers tore through shields to boil the armor beneath while my autocannons punched holes through shields and armor alike. The private army was slow to break formation and return fire, still reeling from such a comparatively small ship deciding to take on battleships and cruisers. Still, I knew that I had to get out of this sector of space. There were entirely too many enemies for me to take on with just one ship, and even now lasers were trying to box me in during my erratic patterns. I didn't even notice as my horn lit up a soft lavender and punched in coordinates for an emergency FTL jump. The nearby colony, Jinkath Prime, was a dangerous prospect at the moment. Instead, I found a colony three systems away named Laloria Prime. That one would have to do for now.

I reoriented my ship towards the direction it was still flying in as the automated voice announced: “Emergency jump to FTL in three… two… one…”

With a muted boom, the Yunikōn entered FTL travel. The ship raced towards the nearest hyperlane, which was situated halfway between Jinkath Prime and Jinkath Secundus. I let out the breath I’d been holding. Now that we were in faster-than-light, we were decently safe. It was always possible that my enemies could pick up my trail and follow, but I still had a head start. I was pretty sure the Yunikōn was slightly faster than most of the enemy’s cruisers judging by how quickly I was able to flee, meaning the only ships that might have been able to catch up would have been corvettes and destroyers. But by the time the private army would manage to regroup and try to give chase, the Yunikōn would have already entered the hyperlane and be long gone. Even if they moved directly towards the entrance of the hyperlane I would still beat them there. I paused in the cockpit for a moment, just to make sure that there were going to be no sudden alerts. Satisfied that the navigation would get to Laloria Prime without any further incidents, I left to go see how my passengers were settling in.

The ship was suspiciously quiet despite the fact that I had ten new souls aboard. I figured my best bet would be to check each of the crew quarters first, and the first of my rescues that I encountered was the still-silent siren. It was then that I realized that somehow, my codex had transferred all of the pirate’s spoils to the Yunikōn already. I knew for a fact that the crew quarters had no clothing or other necessities, but somehow the beautiful siren in front of me had ditched the dirty rag she had been wearing for new digs. For the first time, I really took a moment to glance over one of my new charges.

The siren actually came up to about my chin, which was astounding seeing how tall I was at 6'3". Her eyes were heterochromatic, the right a soft lilac and the left a deeper violet. Her hair fell gently to her shoulders in lilac tresses with streaks of the deeper violet like her eyes. Her face was finely angular with traces of lilac scales around her eyes and high cheekbones. She was clothed in a simple, sturdy tank top and pants combo that showcased her sizable breasts and curves of her ass. The unflattering black of the clothes somehow managed to compliment her rather pale complexion, although her skin still wasn’t anywhere close to my own snow white tone. The only thing that seemed out of place was the strange blood red choker around her throat. I tilted my head as we studied each other.

“Are you able to speak?” I finally broke the silence. The siren shook her head, gesturing at the choker. I frowned at the odd accessory, before reaching a cautious finger towards it. There was a sound like shattering glass as I just barely brushed the thing, and it split into two pieces before disintegrating.

“Oh!” The siren breathed, then paused, like she was astounded at the sound of her own voice. Honestly, I was astounded too. That single syllable held me spellbound. It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life. It was lilting, almost like bells, and a brief moment of heat suffused my body.

“What… was that all about?” If I was being honest with myself, I had asked the question primarily to hear the beautiful creature before me speak again.

“My lady,” the siren murmured, inclining her head. “My name is Naida Shadowrose. That abhorrent device you broke was what they call a Collar of Silence. A siren is capable of charming someone with just their voice alone, and so my captors forced it upon me to ensure I could not escape. Normally only the mage who originally used it would be able to remove the collar, yet it would seem that a Unicorn Magus is powerful enough for that stipulation to not apply.”

The siren had a rather formal way of speaking that I found unexpectedly cute. “Why did you call me your lady?”

Naida blinked at me owlishly. “You are nobility, are you not?”

I snorted, though I was careful to not reveal that I wasn't from this universe. “It’s been years since I’ve considered myself nobility; I don't even have a planet to govern. That being said, what do you bring to the table? Everyone seemed pretty thrilled with the idea of working for me, so now that you can talk, do you have plans to also stay?”

“If you'll have me, I'd love to work for you. Not to toot my own horn, but I started flying spaceships almost before I learned to walk. Granted, I haven't seen a whole lot of combat myself, but my family as a whole has. I… kind of ran off on my own because I wanted to see if I could do something other than take over the family business.”

I arched a fine eyebrow. “Do I even want to know what your family does?”

Naida emitted a tinkling giggle. “The Shadowrose family are well known private contractors. Or smugglers, to use the less polite term. We generally try to operate within the confines of the law, though, so the term smuggler isn't entirely accurate.”

“I see. Well, welcome to the team.”

Naida opened her mouth to reply when we were suddenly interrupted by something that resembled a terminal screen, hovering between us. Naida had a better time reading it since it was facing her, and her eyes widened while her mouth formed a little “O” of surprise. “And suddenly, everything is starting to make more sense!” She was so shocked that her stiffer way of speaking lapsed.

Contract of Summoning

This is a contract offered from Celestia Nadir to Naida Shadowrose, whereby the receiver agrees to become the summoner’s summon. This is a basic contract designed to only establish the Summoner’s Bond between two willing parties and is the basis upon which the Bond grows.

Accept?

Yes

No

Without an ounce of hesitation Naida selected yes. Something snapped into place between us, and I was now a little more aware of the gorgeous siren standing before me. I could pick up hints of excitement and even what she thought was infatuation, but the feelings were muted. If I wasn't so sensitive towards the body language of others I might have missed the feelings entirely. Well, there went keeping a low, guarded profile. Before I could comment, I was distracted by yet another window. This one detailed Naida’s statblock.

* Name: Naida Shadowrose

* Class: Songstress

* Race: Siren

* Deity: Artemis

* Age: 25

* Level: 50

* Sex: F

* Strength: 100

* Agility: 100

* Perception: 100

* Willpower: 100

* Endurance: 100

* Traits: Hidden (level Summon Bond to see)

* Titles: (level Summon Bond to see)

“Oh wow,” Naida breathed, and I glanced over to discover that the siren was also reading over a statblock, this one detailing myself. I noted with interest that my own trait and title was not hidden. “You are a Champion?! I mean, there are stories about Champions carrying out the will of the gods and goddesses, but to think that I would actually meet one…”

“Why are your stats all 100?” For some reason, that was what caught my attention the most.

“They got reset when I agreed to the Summoning Contract. The only way for the people of this universe to increase their stats is to follow whatever deity they feel the closest to and pray at one of their shrines. When I agreed to the contract I was automatically registered to Artemis from Apollo. Do you have a shrine to pray at?”

"The Yunikōn has something that acts as a Shrine to Artemis. After I get everyone else settled in I'll introduce you to my Goddess. But yes, I am Artemis’s only champ–”

Whatever else I was going to say was cut off my Naida. The bombshell of a siren had closed the distance and kissed me, stunning me into silence. The kiss was tentative yet full of passion, and before I could even register the soft pecks at her lips I was returning the favor. We seperated a moment later, a string of saliva connecting us. Naida’s heterochromatic eyes were studying my luminous blue orbs tentatively.

“What was that all about?”

The siren grinned impishly. “Staking my claim while I have the chance to do so. You will grow to become immensely powerful, my lady. I do not know you very well yet, but the fact that you were willing to rescue a handful of would-be slaves tells me everything I need to know: you have an exceptionally beautiful personality despite your insistence that you are a soldier. So, I'm tendering my claim to be the first of your soon-to-be harem.”

I prided myself on being well put together. But the last sentence caused my mind to skip off the rails and crash into the next zip code. “Wait, what?”

Naida emitted that tinkling laugh of hers again. “I think I broke you, hm? But yes, your harem. You're basically already married to those cevanti triplets. I am simply… Cutting the line a bit.”

For the first time, I understood what those three angels had done. “Ah. So them offering their dowry and me accepting was a promise to take them.” Let it be known that even I am a colossal idiot sometimes.

Naida’s eyes crinkled as she grinned. “That's the long and the short of it. Now, shoo. I am going to make my way to the mess room and start preparing a meal. Stale bread and water is not much to subsist off of. When you're done talking to each of the others, send them my way.”

I could only watch as the siren swayed away. I wasn't afraid to admit to myself that I enjoyed the view, but I had the distinct impression that I was no longer entirely in control of my own life.