by Dante King
The lead ship in the body of the Church Navy had the Grand Commander on it. I would spare them until the end; I wanted the old fool to witness the destruction of his entire fleet before I killed him. I could see the ballista operators of the leading Church ships, and those on the vessels that had flanked us, taking aim at our ships.
“Uh, maybe now, Captain Chauzec?” Percy said. “Once they let fly with them ballistas, our ships—”
“Not yet, Percy. On my signal, not before, no matter how dire things look.”
We were almost in ballista range, and the circle of Church ships had closed a hundred yards behind my fleet. We were now surrounded, and all the enemy had to do was close their fist of warships and crush us—or so they thought.
“You know what, Percy?” I asked.
“What, Captain Chauzec?” he asked. Sweat oozed from the pores on his forehead, and his jaw was almost chattering. He fidgeted compulsively with his fingers, and his eyes darted from side to side, taking in the terrifying sight of the enemy ships closing their trap around us.
“I think it’s time to shoot ballistae!” I roared.
While we were still just outside the effective range of the Church weapons, their ships were very much in range of ours. The instant I yelled out this command every one of my ballistae, each aimed at a different ship’s hull, fired their Death spears. The projectiles streaked through the air and punched barrel-sized holes in the hulls of the enemy ships, which seemed more than eager to let seawater come gushing in.
The battle was on.
“Yes Captain Chauzec, yes!” Percy roared, his nervousness banished at the sight of suddenly floundering enemy ships.
“Reload!” I yelled before I turned to Rami-Xayon. “You ready for this?”
“Your Plague Storm combined with my Hurricane powers will hit them like nothing they could ever have imagined,” Rami-Xayon said with a grin.
“These sons of bitches are about to get smashed with a Plague Hurricane.”
We both closed our eyes and focused on our respective powers. Rami-Xayon called up a hurricane, while I infused it with the Putrefaction energy from my zombies and the whale. A huge black cloud glowing with streaks of yellow and green began to materialize in a whirling vortex above the bulk of the Church fleet. Seconds later, the storm broke, and for the Transcendent Sails soldiers who were caught in it, it was a storm straight from the bowels of hell.
Not only were ships tossed around in the raging winds and battering waves, but a foul squall of rain was wreaking havoc among them, splattering slimy globs all over dozens of ships.
While this storm raged in the center of the Church fleet, my fast and agile pirate ships on the flanks started raining fire on the outermost warships. With the sticky, highly flammable tar mixture of their fire arrows hitting the sails and decks of these warships, it wasn’t long before they began to go up in flames. And now that the outermost ships were being set alight, it was time for the next phase of our plan.
“Call off your hurricane, Rami-Xayon,” I said. “It’s time to send this fireship into their midst.”
Rami-Xayon ceased her hurricane, but I continued to let my Plague Storm rage.
“Percy, hand me my bow,” I said.
He grinned. “I’ve been waiting for this, Captain Chauzec.” He lit up a fire arrow before handing me my longbow and the burning projectile.
I notched the fire arrow, took aim at the deck of the fireship, and loosed. The arrow ripped through the air and slammed into the tar-covered deck. Within seconds the entire ship was on fire, burning with a hellish fury.
Rami-Xayon sent a powerful gust of wind into the fireship’s sails (which had been soaked with seawater so they wouldn’t burn right away), and the flaming vessel raced across the ocean, making straight for the close-packed core of the Church fleet. The warships spotted the massive fiery deathtrap rushing toward them and tried to maneuver around, but all they succeeded in doing was crashing into each other
“Is it time, Captain Chauzec?” Percy asked eagerly, all traces of his earlier nerves gone. “Is it time to unleash the kraken?!”
“Almost, Percy, almost. Let’s just light a few of these suckers up, shall we?”
I pulled out my kusarigama and started summoning man-sized tornados with a crack of its chain. On their own, these little wind rascals would have been pretty useless against a ship, but in the way I was using them, they were gloriously destructive.
I used my tornados to scoop up burning tar goo from the deck of the fireship, and they became tornados of howling fire. Then I hurled these spinning devils of tar and flame onto the decks of enemy warships, setting them alight and burning screaming enemy soldiers to ashes.
The fireship was now in the midst of the Church Navy, setting ships alight all around it. The roaring flames jumped from ship to ship via my fire tornadoes. Soldiers and sailors all across the enemy fleet were writhing in agony on their decks, which were choked with the thick, yellow-green fog of my Plague magic.
“Let’s rain some acid on them!” I yelled when I’d had my fun with that, and had put on quite the show for my apparently bloodthirsty new pal Percy.
My enemies were dying in droves, but their suffering had only just begun. Rami-Xayon called up another hurricane to batter the fleet, but this time Isu infused the clouds with acid, and the rain that lashed the ships from this storm melted both steel and flesh.
The Transcendent Sails Fleet was floundering in disarray, and now it was time to hit them with my most devastating weapon.
“What do you think, Percy?” I said. “Time to unleash our pet?”
“Get ‘em, Captain Chauzec, get ‘em!”
I decided to start with the ships behind us, who were closing in. I launched myself into the undead kraken. The moment my spirit fused with its body, I felt a potent hunger: a hunger for ships. I swam up to the closest ship and shot my many arms up out of the water, grabbing the ship’s mast and deck and sides. The suckers of my tentacles stuck like glue to the vessel, which felt as flimsy as a balsawood model. I laughed, observing the scene through my own eyes and the kraken’s simultaneously, then I tore the ship to splinters. As the ship disintegrated, screaming soldiers and sailors tumbled into the ocean, where my zombie sharks were waiting to tear them to bloody pieces.
I moved to the next ship, meanwhile sending my whale to ram a massive hole in the hull of the ship behind it. Panicking sailors and soldiers jumped off the whale-rammed ship as it sank, and either drowned, pulled under by the weight of their armor, or died in the jaws of my sharks.
My kraken’s hunger for thirst had only just begun, and I hardly needed to control it. But I wanted to experience its joy, so I kept my mind firmly inside its head as it obliterated the enemy ships. In the height of my enthusiasm, I even managed to pick up two of them and smash them together like a pair of rocks. They exploded in a cloud of snapped masts, shattered decks, and splintered hulls, all covered in a confetti of downward-tumbling limbs and gore bunting.
On the ship next to mine, golden-armored Elyse was firing torrents of white Light from her warhammer. The intense heat of the magic beams blew holes through ships’ hulls, felled masts, and roasted dozens of sailors and soldiers at once. The leading enemy warship was close enough for me to see the Grand Commander’s face now. His dismayed expression turned into one of blind fury when he saw me. He rushed over to one of his ballistae, shoved the operator out of the way, and took aim at me with the weapon.
“Hand me a shield, Percy,” I said calmly.
Percy obliged, tossing me a tower shield. I caught it and enchanted it by redirecting souls I’d stored inside Grave Oath. The dull metal of the shield turned glossy and black with the power of Death just as the Grand Commander shot the ballista at me.
The old man’s aim was true, and the huge spear would have impaled me, if it hadn’t shattered into a shower of splinters when it struck the gleaming black shield.
“Nice try, asshole!” I yelled as I tossed the shield a
side. “But now it’s my turn!”
I cocked my Tree wrist crossbow, quickly calculated the angle for the little projectile to hit him in the face, then loosed the bolt.
It was beyond any distance I’d ever made a shot with the tiny crossbow before, but my aim was perfect. The bolt arced up through the air, came down a few seconds later, and plugged the Grand Commander in the side of his neck. He staggered back and swatted futilely at the bolt in his neck, before he started coughing and writhing. Tree magic spread like a virus through his body, turning his skin to bark and his insides to living wood. Roots ripped through the soles of his feet and branches burst through his armor, and the piercing shrieks of his agony were music to my ears.
Now, the Church fleet’s desperation turned to fury, and they began a counterattack. The enemy ballista operators unleashed a shower of huge spears, the projectiles coming at us from all sides. They smashed holes into the hulls of my ships, and took out swathes of my zombies and skeletons on the decks. Luckily, none of my party members were hit, but a good number of my pirates and sailors were struck. One of my warships had also taken a bad hit to the hull, and it was floundering in the water, seawater surging in through the hole.
“We’re going to lose that ship, Captain Chauzec,” Percy yelled. “You gotta give the order to abandon ship!”
“No! Fang and a quarter of my undead army are on that ship, and I’m not just going to let them sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
“With a hole that size in the hull, Captain, you don’t have much choice,” Percy countered. “The sea will swallow that ship in less than two minutes, you gotta order the living crew on the ship to get into the dinghys.”
“That ship isn’t going to sink,” I said. “I’m plugging that hole.”
“You can’t just plug a hole that size, Captain. It’s the size of a wine barrel, and the force of the water coming through it is phenomenal! No man on earth is strong enough to stem that flow, and also, we don’t have nearly enough tar left, the Church ballista operators are reloading anyway, and—”
“I’m not going to be using tar,” I said. “There are other ways to plug a leak.”
One great thing about zombies’ bodies was that they were so much more flexible than living human bodies. Not in the sense that zombies somehow became more athletic, but rather that they didn’t feel pain, so you could rip tendons and muscles and break bones without consequence.
I started hurling zombie bodies against the hole in the hull, getting each zombie to sprint and throw himself against it to slow the raging torrent of seawater. The first few zombies were thrown back by the force of the water, but as more pressed in and shoved together, they began to overcome the intense force. They pushed the frontline zombies up against the hole and stemmed the flow of water. The bodies plugging the hole had their bones broken, flesh mashed, heads and limbs ripped off, but it didn’t matter—they were dead anyway. With enough flesh crammed against the hole, pressed into it by the power of almost a hundred zombies all shoving with all their might, the hole in the hull was plugged.
“You did it, Captain Chauzec!” Percy exclaimed. “I’d have bet every last gold piece I own that that ship would have been at the bottom of the ocean in less than five minutes, but you worked a bloody miracle, you did!”
Meanwhile, the Church of Light ballistae had almost been reloaded. More giant spears—and more holes to be plugged—was not something I wanted to deal with if it could be avoided.
A third of the Transcendent Sails Fleet was on fire, an acid rain hurricane was lashing another third, and the final third of the ships were either sinking, already sunk, or being smashed to splinters by my kraken. Far more soldiers and sailors had succumbed to my Plague Fog than not, and now the remaining ships were turning around and trying to flee, though a steadfast few men still manned the ballistae. I wasn’t about to let the enemy survive long enough to recover and regroup, though.
“Sink every last ship!” I yelled. “Don’t let any of them get away!”
Before the enemy could fire, my party members on the other warships had started showering the enemy vessels with Death-charged ballista spears. The projectiles burst barrel-sized holes through hulls or took out multiple rows of men, mowing through them with the wrath of a ravenous dragon. My tornadoes of flaming tar became a conflagration on every ship where they danced their deathly whirl. The fiery storms flung globules of that flaming tar mixture that was impossible to put out. My skeleton and zombie archers had riddled the ships within range with fire arrows and were now picking off individual sailors and soldiers with incredible accuracy.
My mind was simultaneously inside the kraken, directing its furious limbs, flinging warships around as if they were mere toys, smashing them to splinters, and dragging them to a watery grave below the depths.
It didn’t take much longer to win the battle. Most of the enemy ships ended up sinking, of their own accord or dragged down by the kraken. The few that were left on the surface were burning pyres, with all hands on deck dead. Once the fires finished burning through them, they too would end up as wrecks on the seabed below.
Percy stared wide-eyed at the aftermath all around him. “That was the greatest sea battle I’ve ever seen, Captain Chauzec.”
The waves were littered with flotsam and jetsam from the destroyed fleet, and thousands of dead bodies.
“Now that we own the seas,”I said, “we head straight for Yeng.”
“Aye aye, Captain Chauzec!” Percy exclaimed. “I’ll pass on your command to all the ships.”
I only raised a handful of the Transcendent Sails men from the dead: the highest ranked commanders. They would be serving as my messengers to the Church from now on. I pulled back most of the anti-putrefaction magic from them. I wanted the flesh to rot on their bones. I wanted them to stink and invoke revulsion and disgust in everyone who saw them. I half regretted turning the Grand Commander into a tree, because he would have been perfect as a messenger, sent directly to Elandriel—after a few months of rotting, that was.
I assembled my new zombie messengers before my party. They were dripping wet after having been dredged by my sharks from the ocean depths. They still looked almost alive, having died so recently, but the vacantly lifeless stares in their glowing yellow-green eyes were a dead giveaway.
“They certainly are your most regal-looking zombies,” Layna commented. “And their armor is rather exquisite.”
“A suit of armor like this is worth more than a thousand peasants’ lifetime wages combined.” Rollar examined one of the zombies’ full plate armor, etched all over with the intricate designs of a master artist.
“And they have the gall to preach the virtues of modesty and a humble lifestyle, dressed like this,” Elyse spat. “I cannot believe how blind I have been to the Church of Light’s hypocrisy.”
“This is what all those tithes are drained into,” Friya remarked. “We in the North, with our Wise Women and Shamans, we never ask for fees to heal people or help them with spiritual matters, and we build no grand cathedrals. We saw the Church of Light’s hypocrisy long before they came to the North, and this is why my tribe fought so hard to prevent them from digging their claws into our society and brainwashing us, like they’ve done with much of the rest of Prand.”
Rollar sighed. “It is a pity my tribe did not fight harder against them.”
“You like brother to me, Rollar,” Drok said as he gripped Rollar’s hand. “Don’t matter if your tribe believe in Church of Light. You believe in Old Gods. You a true Northman!”
Rollar grinned and said something to Drok in their barbarian language, to which Drok responded in the same tongue, and both of them burst out laughing, as did Friya.
“What did you say to him?” I asked.
“I said if he really considers me a tribal brother, he’d let me fuck his sister,” Rollar answered. “Then he said, ‘I like you, brother, I wouldn’t want you to go through an ordeal like that’!”
I had to laugh too;
if Drok’s sister looked or smelled anything like he did, I wouldn’t want to fuck her either.
I returned my attention to my new zombie commanders. “How do I get these guys to rot as fast as possible?” I asked. “They should look and smell like total abominations by the time they get to Elandriel.”
“Heat, damp, and darkness, a place with such conditions is the quickest way to get a corpse to become very foul very quickly,” Isu answered.
“I’ll stick them in the cargo hold then, and get some zombies to keep a small fire burning down there,” I said.
Anna-Lucielle wrinkled her nose and crinkled her face. “Ugh, I don’t even want to think about what they’ll be like after a few weeks of that.”
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to be around them while they’re getting to the point of advanced decay,” I said. “We can’t be too far from Yeng now, right, Percy?”
“Aye, Captain Chauzec,” he said. “We’re about three or four days from landfall, I’d say.”
“Then let’s get some rest and prepare ourselves for the next phase of this quest,” I said. “You all fought hard, and you fought well in this battle. You deserve some rest.”
“You fought harder than any of us, Vance,” Layna said. “And I wouldn’t describe what I did in the battle as fighting hard. No, it was good fun! These ballistae are wonderful toys, and it is quite a sight to see one of their gigantic spears obliterate an entire squadron of men. I was quite sad to see the end of the battle, to be honest. I’ll have to order my engineers in Aith to build some ballistae. Mm, I could use them for public executions …” She rubbed her spider limbs together and smiled with patent vicious delight.
Everyone began to disperse, eager to get some rest after the battle. Friya stayed back, waiting for the others to go, as did Elyse. They whispered to each other before they turned to me.
“Vance, I can help you with certain choices you will have to make in Yeng,” Friya said. “I have seen in my dreams that you will face many challenges there. But to see more clearly, and for my dreams to be more vivid, I will need some of your energy …”
