I focused past the annoying feedback my wards were giving me and listened to the voices outside my cabin.

“—don’t know! Suddenly went dead! Get one of the trackers up here!”

Okay yeah, that was bad. Time to go.

Only, I had no where to go? I didn’t want to fight my way through pirates (okay that wasn’t entirely true, a part of me really wanted to fight magical pirates but I don’t listen to that part for obvious reasons) because they had things like guns and knives and probably some form of harmful magic. I looked around my room, trying to ignore the growing headache forming at the base of my skull from the wards. If I tried to bust through the walls into another cabin, they’d hear the noise and the cabin I’d enter would not have the benefit of being protected by wards. I could try to go through the wall that was sea-facing and climb to deck below, but, I’m pretty sure that side of the wall was steel. I didn’t have a handy steel cutting spell, and any other spell I had strong enough to punch through steel would also be very loud and probably fatal to anyone (me) in the room with it.

I looked at my hands, covered in shadow stuff from another dimension. I leaned forward a little bit and saw my toes, with little claws on each of them.

Ah, fuck it.

I grabbed the broken table I had stolen the leg from and moved it to the door to my cabin. I held a hand above it.

“Ljós,” I said, forming the spell in my mind.

A corner of the table began to smolder and give off a feint trail of smoke. I repeated the spell several times, until the table was covered in smoking embers and the room filled with the nostril curling smell of burning wood finish. I covered my face with the collar of my shirt, took a deep breath before shaping another spell in my mind.

“Reykr,” I growled out the spell, shoving as much power into the spell form as I could.

Smoke EXPLODED from the table as I opened the door into the hallway. The embers that had been all but out suddenly blazed, not quite igniting the wood but still consuming it at a prodigious rate as it fill the cabin and then hall with several house fires worth of smoke. Soon I could no longer see and I hopped over the small smoke pile into the hall, ignoring the shouts of the pirates as I moved in the direction I normally didn’t go, towards the stern of the ship.

I heard coughing and cries of surprise as the smoke rolled down the hallway like a wall. Only twenty seconds had passed but with the amount of blood my adrenaline was forcing my heart to pump, it felt like an hour. I blindly felt along the walls to my destination, the small observation lounge with the big window with the magnificent view of the horizon towards the back of the ship.

Knowing my mitts would offer some protection and that my own modifications to my skeleton were substantial, I found a middle part of the glass with my palm and then reeled back and slammed my fist into it.

Oh ow that fucking hurt. And I couldn’t even look to see if I had cracked it.

Dumbass, you know a glass breaking spell.

I cleared my mind and painstakingly formed the spell in my mind. I wasn’t super familiar with it as I had not run into a lot of glass that needed breaking that couldn’t be broken with a rock. But murderer #4 had been paranoid (rightly so) and had reinforced glass in his windows. It was thanks to him that I added this spell to the ones I had memorized, as I hadn’t had my magical cubby to store my grimoire at the time.

After what seemed a bicentennial, I finally finished shaping the spell.

“Brotna,” I hissed.

The glass shattered thunderously away from me, creating a draft that sucked the smoke out of the hole I had just made. Uh oh. My cover was quickly leaving and I decided I’d best follow. I leaned out over the window, trusting my mitts to protect me from any glass shards as I gripped the ledge of the broken window. I swung myself out, slamming awkwardly into the side of the boat before I felt safe enough to open my eyes.

Smoke was rushing out of the roughly eight foot window above me, like it was coming out of a hose. Below me the back of the ship sloped away at an angle, with the outdoor eating area Alice and I had had our first “date” in below and behind me. It was populated by pirates. They were looking at me.

“Fuck me,” I breathed.

One of them lifted up a rifle looking thing with a cartoonishly large barrel and pointed it at me. I yelped (very manly) and began to climb to the side, slamming my new claws into the metal and doing my best impression of Spider-man as I attempted to avoid being shot by what looked like a blunderbuss from the future.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

My enhanced “reflexes” warned me and I lunged down the wall I was scampering across, arresting my sudden downward motion by digging my claws into the side of the ship, creating a racket of screaming metal. A loud “THOOM” came from below and a I felt an impact on my back and a racket beside me. I glanced aside, seeing a net attached to a rope fall below. One of the weighted ends of the net had smacked me in the back, apparently.

Okay, they were trying to capture me, which is both relieving and terrifying. But now the violence had gone from an abject possibility into a reality, evidenced by the bruise growing on my back. I shaped a spell in my mind, twisted back towards the pirates and snarled while pointing my hand at them.

“Brember!”

From the deck surrounding the pirates, black and green vines suddenly punched through the wood. The vines were covered in savage, mean looking thorns from just below an inch in length to a few being half a foot. The vines started as a few, but were soon joined by many more as I poured power into the spell. One of the pirates pulled a machete from his belt and began to hack at the vines as they approached, keeping them away with some success.

His companions—especially the guy with the net launcher, weren’t doing as well.

The vines were doing their best to drag them to the deck, leaving cuts and stab wounds behind to mark their progress. One fool pulled a pistol out and tried to shoot the vines away, managing only to irritate a few and shooting his companion in the calf. His companion turned, vines momentarily forgotten, and punched the offender in the jaw.

By that point I had dropped the spell and began to move along the side of the ship. The vines would soon stop moving now that I was no longer guiding the spell and I needed to be out of sight when that happened. I made sure to avoid crawling over windows or portholes or whatever and tried to ignore the burning in my arms, legs and core.

Climbing was a fucking work out.

I was also being affected by a mental lethargy from using so many spells in such short order, as well as the feedback from the spells. My brain felt like it was being crushed by my skull and it was hard to keep my eyes open.

Magic is the coolest shit ever, so you might be surprised that I don’t do a ton of spell casting on a day to day basis. While yes, magic is indeed the best thing since anything—actually casting magic can be dangerous. I have stacked the deck in my favor as much as possible, but the truth of the matter is that I am mostly self-taught and I don’t know how much magic I can cast, how much feedback my mind can take before I do something that I can’t fix. What if I cast too many spells and cook my goddamned brain?

I’m not too worried about it now, because the alternative is being caught by pirates and I’m pretty sure who sent them. I’d rather die than be caught alive by him.

I was crawling across the ship like a scared ant, trying to ignore the building burn in my arms and stomach when I heard raised voices from below. I stopped and gingerly moved myself as from the side of the ship as I could, like a sideways push-up, to see what was happening on deck two.

The pirates were in the process of dragging the mostly unconscious passengers somewhere towards the front of the ship, but one man had woken up and was doing the “I’m a loud American tourist and I demand EVERYTHING!” bit you see depressingly frequently.

A pirate shot him.

Just casually. He took out a revolver and put a hole in the guys sternum and went about his work as the loud passenger slumped down on his rear and began to bleed out. Like business as usual. Like he shot people all the time.

I…

I don’t know what to do.

I’m pretty much out of gas on spells for the next few hours, at the very least. I am one man without body armor or my favorite gun, (Holy shit do I wish I had my old Webley right now, I’d feel so much better.) or any guns. Very little combat training outside of my fathers shitty dojo. I have some combat experience but that was against non-human combatants and I have a strong aversion to actually killing people.

But that’s becoming less of a problem the more I see of how these pirates operate.

I do have one ace in the hole but I really don’t like using it. It makes me feel… alien. Like I’m not me anymore. Obviously I’m probably going to have to use it if I want to survive but… I’ll probably be up against a wall. If I can avoid using it I will.

The thing I’m struggling with, more than what I can do, is what I should do. Aside from my habit of kidnapping murderers, I like to think of myself as a somewhat good man. Or at least someone who strives to be good. If this were an action movie I would have seen the casual violence against an innocent (if stupid and belligerent) I’d have hopped down and started a fight right then and there and somehow come out with only a minor cut above my left eyebrow so I look cool but not invincible.

But I’m not an action hero. I’m a nerd who stumbled into magic and survived on some panicky decisions that should have killed me but didn’t and now I’m muddling through.

What I really needed was a place to hide and rest. Unfortunately I’m on a fucking cruise ship being taken over by pirates and they probably know ships better than I do, what with my struggling with basic nautical terms. I started heading for the roof. (Is there a nautical term for the roof of the ship? Probably not. A lot of sailing terms comes from old timey sailing ships whose ships didn’t have roofs.)

I found a spot to plop my ass down near what looked like a bunch of communications equipment and got to rest for an entire three seconds before I remembered what radar and microwaves were. Man I’ll probably be cooked up here. A quick glance around showed a hatch leading down and that settled it. Someone would probably check. I sighed in frustration and started to head towards the front of the ship.

It took a frustratingly long time and a lot of panic-filled moments, but I finally found a part of the ship that was designed as a kind of wind break that I assumed you had to access via removable equipment.

My new hiding spot was near the bridge, which I didn’t like as that seemed like the best place to find pirates. What I did like was that it was just below and to the side of the rightmost window. If I hung back against the curving part of wall, I couldn’t be seen. I was on the same side of the ship the pirate ship was on, which was also non-optimum, but it was far enough back that they couldn’t see me either. Another drawback was the wind. It was constant and pretty strong. I had to keep my eyes closed for extended periods of time or they’d dry out.

But the surface I was sitting on was wide enough for a grown man to stand comfortably and had a rough surface, I would wager to make it harder to slip. I could only assume that this little ledge was to serve whatever crewman needed to wash the bridge window.

As I rested I etched, slowly and gently, an attention ward into the side of the wall. I needed to go slow because I was making it as subtle as I could. The only thing it would do was gently, ever so gently, nudge attention away from this spot. It wouldn’t stop anyone. It wouldn’t even deter. But if someone happened to think or glance in this direction, they would find everything else much more interesting.

That was my hope anyway.

Another hope I had, that filled me with ambivalence and relief equally: I hope Alice is okay.