Hello, hello is this thing working? I am not sure if now is the best time for me to be doing this, but one shouldn't look a gift horse in its mouth, I guess.
Right now, there are strings of mana that are linking me to every formation in this room. This gives me absolute control over this airship. Not that I am sure if there will remain a ship though the way things have been going
Behind me are at the moment, three pirate ships that are trying to board onto our ships. If I were to go based on a general estimate, each ship behind me should have at least fifty soldiers.
Thankfully they seem to be much slower than us. Granted I am not sure if I can maintain our speed for much longer. any second now, the propulsion formation will start failing and we all will plummet to the ground. From this high, even If the suspension formation is working (which is a big if, trust me) it won't be enough to stop the ship from being shattered.
This ship does not have any useful defenses at this point, making me feel quite defenseless. Thankfully the enemy ships also do not have any method of attack. It also seems to be that these people are using very crappy ships. Any pirate with a better ship would have boarded us already.
I have to assume that these ships are battering rams. It is slang among the pirates for very cheap ships that barely run. They can only attack you by ramming your ship head on. In this process both ships are destroyed, so it is a rarely used methods. This guys only seem to have battering rams though.
Their presence doesn't make too much sense to me. Pirates are bad for business, especially bad ones. The people guarding this path would be hunting these battering rams for sport. For them to exist in such quantities doesn't bode well for me.
for now though, I have to outrun these bunch of boarders. This I have to do while making sure that my ship does not end up destroyed in the process. With a standard ship, this would have not been a problem, but with this ship the chances are looking quite slim.
Even now, I can feel the ship break apart in my hands. Any moment now the propulsion formation will fail the way that it is vibrating in my hands. If that happens we will fall to the ground without the pirates even needing to do anything. Can you imagine the scenario, of us losing to pirates because our ships failed before theirs?
It is only my familiarity with this formation, considerable skill on my part (hey, i accept any challenge) and a lot of luck that we are still running. Even now, I am weaving through the sky trying to make sure that the damn ships do not get their hooks into us.
To get some theory aside, What is called a hook is nothing but a harpoon. Granted, it is enchanted to make sure that once it enters into the opposite ship it will not be quite impossible to remove them. All ships have them due to their many and diverse uses and the pirates have been quite creative with theirs. I angle down the ship to dodge another hook flying above us.
Once the hook enters the ship the enemy will be trying to board . individually they are not very strong but the other side has like fifty people per ship. When you have a crew that can be counted on a single hand, you do not fight, you run regardless of how strong you are. Even if you can take on ten of these soldiers for sport, you do not want a fight to the death with a hundred of them. That would be such a pointless endeavour.
Fuck, pirates are not supposed to be this persistent. We have been chased for about half an hour and that is leading to very serious worries about the durability of my ship. I can't even slow down to let the ship cool because then these guys won't even need to use hooks to board us. We are dealing with battering rams after all.
Thankfully at the very least I don't think that they will be doing this for a very long time. I don't know why they are after us in the first place. Our ship is quite crappy, even if I do not like to admit it. Now that things are slowing down a bit, it is Time to get this log started properly.
Honestly, I should have gotten started on this particular log nearly a month ago. That is the beginnning of our mission. It is also when I took control of the bloody arrow. (It is my first mission outside after being made a captain if I am honest. Before that i mostly did missions as a powerless soldier.)
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Before the head office loses it mind at me this was completely out of my hand. My incompetence with mind magic is legendary. I would also like to point out that this delay does not exist due to a lack of trying. I have been trying to do this for a week now. I cannot help it if I have succeeded in this the moment that we seem to be about to die. (As if to annoy me more, the ships behind us have accelerated again. I am forced to accelerate myself to keep ahead of them. Not sure how many more times I can do that. I can feel the propulsion formation burn up.)
At the very least I am sure that I do not have to deal with a defective thought logger. The thought logger is a device that is meant to fuse our thoughts into strings of mana and then broadcast it to the thought crystal at the home base. It is a combination of earth magic( specifically crystal magic) and mind magic melded together in a way that I barely understand. For reason I have struggled to make the device work in my hands.
Well it is working, though i do not know how. Another thing I do not understand is why the fuck do they make the captain of an expedition be the one that has to maintain the records. I know why, they mention it so many times that my ears will fall off, but why? It is such a waste of time. Especially in the middle of a fight.
As for the why, whoever doesn't know. They make us do this for reinforcements. After all those guys cannot send reinforcements to us for every instance when we stop sending logs. They need to know that I am imprisoned and on the verge of death, rather rhan lets say lazing somewhere. it will not help that the person that they have to send reinforcements for is me. While they certainly have no reason to cause me any active harm. it is also true that they do not wish to see me prosper too much. why do I have to handle logging while dealing with pirates and you want my opinion, I don't know which is harder.
Well, there goes my peace. one of the ships seems to have overloaded its propulsion formation to get a burst of speed. It's now faster than us, which means I have to focus on the task. Okay, it seems to be trying to crash into us as I twist the ship to the left as much as I dare, to prevent that. It takes me five heart-pounding seconds as the two ships almost hit each other by hair's breadth. Driving this ship feels like being stuck in the water. The speed at which this damn thing reacts is abysmal.
I am sure that this is giving the other ships quite the opportunity to hook us, but that I will have to leave it to the other people of my crew. Meanwhile, I am going to be using one of my aces, which would be our only aces, our hooks. Turns out the formation on the hook can be overloaded such that once they activate they will explode. That would be when they link up with the other ship.
Well, I am not sure of its effectiveness but I have spent nearly a week supplying it with mana so it better work. Thankfully, the ships are close enough that there is no way for us to miss. The hook gets planted into the enemy's ship, not doing anything. For a second my heart fails. we had essentially given them four new points of entry, until a massive boom nearly threw me to the ground.
Okay, there was no way In hell that my hooks were that effective. If that were the case, it would be quite easy to earn a decent profit. Well, my hopes of becoming an enterprising businessman are dashed as I see what has caused the explosion. Their fucking propulsion formation was of the fire element. These formations are risky in general use, especially without a good enough way to manage all that heat generated. Once that much fire mana has entered the thing, giving a gap for it to leak will cause things to heat up quite quickly.
Fuck, I had assumed fire-based propulsion formations were banned in most places. It has almost been two centuries since such types of airships have even been used. Well, maybe I shouldn't have destroyed that ship, it could have been sold as an antique. You would be surprised just how many people like to collect this type of junk.
The explosion was enough to rattle a few of the sensory formations that were on the outside. my view of the outside to be affected quite a bit (basically speaking I was blind.) .Thankfully my mana sense is enough to at least approximate the location of the remaining ships in this area. I can't say for certain but the blobs of mana seem to be getting farther and farther. They appear to be slowing down, though I can't say for certain. (Airships are massive mana consumers. It is kind of hard to ignore the presence of an airship. It looks about as bright as the sun for those with the sight. Even crappy ones like this)
I don't get to celebrate this since there are an indefinite amount of hooks binding us. (I can't tell without the sensory formations but let's hope they are less than five.) this is something that I will have to leave for my crew to worry about.
At the moment I have a more immediate worry which would be that at the moment we are inches away from a burning piece of wood. I would not be surprised if many parts of our ship have caught fire due to this damn thing. The thing is that I have to essentially steer this ship almost blind and hope that I am skilled enough. I have to make sure that this ship will not collide with a ship close enough that spit from one ship will reach the other. This is a fine art and is going to take quite a bit from me.
Even if I succeed, survival is not guaranteed until the three people that are in patrol at the top of the formation remove all of those damn pesky hooks. (People tend to forget, that hooks are often also used to tow ships. let's just say that we are in no condition to tow a perfectly working ship let alone this wreck.)