My claws sink into the soft netting over the wood cargo bay, almost slicing them in half. I start clamoring my way up the side of the ship, while the ship bucks and weaves like a startled horse.

I hear the noises of gunfire right before climbing onto the back deck. The kid is already there, clutching onto the railing, and looking at the cloud bank as if expecting more of them to emerge.

"Hey" I say while squeezing through the railing, while he looks at me like I was from the sister world. I lean against the bulkhead to inside, trying to catch my breath. At this point we are several hundred feet up, and it's only been 30 seconds since I jumped onto the ship.

However the gods above do not humor me, as from the interior I hear a muffled "gods dammn it!", before a small circle of metal above me starts to glow red hot. I leap away from it, and grab onto the railing again. A bit of my fur is singed, but besides that I am fine.

Suddenly we are over the polished black top of a ironbound ship. Its slowed down considerably, shunting its power into weapon systems.

Suddenly the cabin boy runs out with 2 automatic pistols, with rocket attachments on them. A relatively large box is attached to each pistol, containing 4 rockets. He takes aim at a raised hump on the ship and fires the first 4, followed by a second volley. They shatter the lens, as well as cause it to collapse.

Suddenly the ship scrapes against the smooth metal, and the cabin boy hands me a flare gun.

"Fire this when your ready to be picked up" he tells us, before pushing us off the deck. The clouds suddenly roll over us, enveloping us in water droplets. We push onward, cracking a sphere of sulphara to melt through the deck. It sizzles through it like a fully fed acid vine.

We drop down to the next deck, a dorsal access corridor. Its ceiling is only around 5 feet and you have to stoop. The walls are bags of hydrogen gas sacks, and the floor is made of corrugated metal grates.

I quickly take my boots off and sneak down the hallway, followed by my loud companion.

"Take your boots off"

"Why?"

"We are sneaking around inside a enemy ship, you want to see who can yell the loudest?"

He wordlessly takes off his shoes, and we continue onwards. Towards the prow of the ship. However, the access shaft ends about 1/3 of the ships length away from the ships bridge. There is a access panel in the floor, which I carefully remove with a screwdriver.

Looking down, there's a metal table with what appears to be a artillery shell, surrounded by bits of metal and testing equipment.

"What do you think we should do?" I ask

"Drop down a grenade?"

"We dont have any. Unless..."

I look down towards my belt, which holds 4 small gas spheres. I only have 3 others in my pack.

"There's no definitive proof th- "

Suddenly I hear a loud scraping and the a shadow falls across the table.

"Ok, dropping now"

I drop one of the spheres down the hole, and then cover my ears. I can feel my ears ringing, and the shockwave through the metal floor.

After we both jump down we can observe the interior of the ship. The floor is made of steel panels, and the walls are made of a darker steel. There are pipes running all across the ship. After a quick check to make sure the ironbound were completely vaporized, we turn our attention to finding a way forward.

"Hey uh... what's your name."

"James. Yours?"

"Revel"

"Like the name of the god?"

"Yeah, it's annoying sometimes"

"I imagine. Anyway were heading that direction." James says, pointing out a door into a hallway. Were in a large room, spanning the width of the entire ship, 30 meters ,and the height of a deck.

The hallway has a heavy blast door, with yellow and black striping on it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Crud, its shut"

"We need to get to the bridge, before we get too far"

"The doors shut. Can we use another one of your spheres"

"No. I have a very limited supply"

"Darn. Um, do you see any exposed panels."

While we were looking however, an ironbound stumbled in. The important thing, is that it was a soldier type, which can have many weapons. This one has machine guns attached to its left arm.

However, his other arm was much more helpful. It was cylindal, and ended with a red lens. It had heat ablative protection surrounding it in it's dark protection.

After some slight shooting, and some viscous disassembly, we look down at our (mostly mine) handiwork. On one side there's a spherical generator, about 2/3 of a meter across, humming quietly. Connected by 2 thin wires, is the heat gun, surrounded by its ablative armor. One of the wires is cut near the ablative surface, to turn it on or off.

The whole process had only taken 10 or so minutes.

"Ready?" I ask james, while hefting the gun underneath my arms.

"Ready!"

I touch the wire to where it's supposed to go, and the generator starts running louder. A small circle on the door melts away, and I have to move the beam around to make a hole we can get through.

The fumes from the melting metal, are acrid, but when they cleared, we saw a long corridor full of tubes on either side.

Each tube was about 5 feet wide, and the ones on the left have a fleshy creature in there suspended in a light blue fluid. They dont seem to have any orfices, but there are 2 or 3 tubes going into it.

On the right there are a bunch of complete ironbound. Scientests, soldiers, and heavysets, all unmarked, painted white and black.

"Proceed carefully. I think those intelligences are ready to go into their body's so do -"

*Klink*

"What. Was. That"

"Nothing."

A loud draining noise can be heard, as the fluid drains out of the tube james is standing next to. The are pulled out with a loud shlup, and cords the fleshy creature is moved via a piston into the body across from it.

James stumbles backward away from me, getting out of the way of the piston. The intelligence is dropped into the dome on its head, and filled with a cloudy gray fluid. The cords are plugged back in, with an equally disgusting noise.

"The fuck did you press?"

The last peice of glass is moved down via suctioncup, and fused via a torch. Then, 4 plates moved down, and were bolted into place, covering the sides, back, and the top.

Finally I hear a low whirring spin up, and then look upon a new being.

They are at least 2 meters tall, made of interlocking metal plates shaped into a humanoid. Each arm ends in a actual hand, Instead of weapons.

In each arm I know there are weapons that swing outwards, and that their entire body is reinforced.

He turns to look at me, while james try's to squeeze past the ironbound.

"Dude, go"

I start slowly backing away and then turn to run away. From behind me, I hear heavy clomps from behind me. I run away from the ironbound past several dozen tubes of blue fluid, and bodys.

I charge through the door, directly into a openair hanger. There are interspersed ironbound along the walkways, and they all see me. Immediately the scientests try to run away, while the soldiers hunker down and attack with missiles. I quickly roll away before the rockets can get a complete lock. I pull the crossbow of my back and crouch downwards while winding up the automatic crossbow.

Suddenly the heavyset ironbound shows up behind me, along with james. The ironbound (He is going to need a name), look around, observing the fight starting to unfold.

Ignoring the formative experiences that they are having in the corner, both me and James's unload our weapons, and they fall beneath our hail of bullets, bolts, and .... missiles? We,ll worry about that later.

After taking out the guards inside the airship hanger, we get to explore the hanger. There are catwalks going around the room, which was about 20 meters long, and ran the width of the ship. There were 2 catwalks that ran lengthwise, with several small craft docked along them.

Each catwalk had a door, leading further towards the bridge, all of them closed shut.

"Revel?"

"What?"

"Mind if I do something drastic?"

"Umm mayby?"

James walks over to me, followed by the heavy footsteps of the heavyset.

"What if we ask them if they can open the door. He is an ironbound afterall."

"Can we trust him?" I ask.

"Well, he did attack other ironbound In the previous fight. I dont think he sees us as enemies, but the ironbound. "

"I suppose you can give it a shot. Not my grave."

James calls the heavyset over and asks them to open the door. After some re explaning, they nod, and then proceed to tear the relatively thin door out of its frame, and threw it down into the stormy clouds below.

"That worked surprisingly well." I say. Venturing into the next room, I can tell that were nearing the bridge, as the room tapers slightly towards the bridge. There are crates with various objects I dont know how to use, and ammo that I cant use for my weapons.

The door to the bridge was exceptionally well armored, and the ironbound couldn't get through. So we had to backtrack all the way to pick up the heat gun and transfer it back to our current location. We had the ironbound cut the entire door out of its frame, while we flanked the door.

The door fell forwards, and we started firing, leaning out of cover and shooting. We can also see snipits of shooting is on the bridge. There are several scientist ironbound manning stations, and the captain is a heavyset.

The captain turns around, and our heavyset starts attacking the captain. 2 autocannons pop out of their arm, and they start shooting the captain. The captain continues to remain unscathed, as the bullets deflect out of his way, smashing into the windows behind him.

Seeing that the 2 heavyset were locked in combat, james decides to run in, and start taking down the scientests, while I look for the balloon control board.

I jump out of my hiding spot, and start using more of my fuel to attack one of the scientests. After that, I shoot them with my crossbow, and am already turning to the next one before I hear the shattering. Suddenly the one I'm facing gets flung back into the glass, as one of our heavysets shots misses.

Turning to look at the panels, I try to figure out what each one does. The one I'm standing at has a cross section of the ship, lengthwise, with various highlighted segments, either glowing red or green.

I look up to see that James had taken care of the rest of the scientests,and was hiding behind a control panel, reloading his 23 shot rifle. I realize I'm standing behind the captain, in probably the most dangerous spot on the battlefield.

Ok, next panel. I check one that was all the way to the side, out of the firing range of the 2 heavyset. Their battle is still going strong, both of them deflecting away bullets, and tanking missiles. Neither of them are using their energy weapons.

Turning back to my panel, this one has several brass levers, about 6 inches long each. There is also a gauge, showing that we are around 2000 meters above the ground. I grab the left lever and yank it downwards. Almost immediately, the ship starts leaning to the left, sending the scientests bodys sliding into the wall.

Panickdly I pull the other lever, and we stop rotating, although we do remain at a 30 degree angle. I look up to see the captain has knocked out heavyset back into the outside wall.

"James! Cover me!"

Before I can hear his response I'm running towards the captain. I leap up, and latch onto him, and start clambering up. He thrashes about trying knock me off, but I remain attached.

Suddenly I hear a loud whirring noise, and then the captain stumbles over. Taking advantage of the opening james gave me, I quickly climbed the rest of the way up, and then tried to stab his face with my left hand. However I couldn't get my hand close to his face because of the magnetic shielding.

Before I can shred the glass with my other hand, the glass starts glowing, and then melts away, draining the fluid out.

"Thanks. Your getting better at this"

"Damn that was scary!" He yells with a grin. "Never thought I would actually survive."

"I'm glad your alive. But please, let's get started on downing this ship. Those brass levers are altitude control"

After several minutes of looking around I found the heading indicator, and after turning the ship towards the sea, this is where it gets a little hairy.

We have to break the glass, which isn't very hard due to its damage during the previous fight. Next we need too fire the flare and get the attention of the treader. And finally we need to release the gas from the front gas bags.

While we were preparing to release the gas, the dawn treader finally showed up, and gos as close as they can. We carry the heat gun over and drop it on the back deck. Then we yell a word of warning to the crew, and the heavyset gets on. Finally the gas is released and we run for the ship, making it just in time.

We sit on the back, watching the ship continue towards the ocean, as it slowly pitches forward. I simply utter one word.

"Victory"

"Victory I guess"

"Victory", says our unpainted companion.