I have finally got this piece of nightmare in my hands working. Nobody would think much of the device in my hand. After all, kids use this as a toy back home.
Well, my skill with mental magic (or lack thereof) is legendary in the hexmountain. To be honest, I don't know how it got activated. I wasn't even trying to activate it, you see. I really should not get bogged down with that right now. There is a very real chance I might die if I get distracted.
Why did it have to activate in the middle of a battle? Based on how things are going, it feels like I have activated the damn thing just to record my demise.
Okay, I have gotten distracted enough with the thing. It is time that I return to my actual task. After all, what I am doing is very dangerous. I am pushing the sensory formation of this ship to its very limits. If I were to push the thing any further beyond this, it would result in the entire thing exploding on my face.
It is a surprise that the formation has not already failed. I have been running the formation at its full power for a while now. Hells, I am surprised that I can process the information that I am getting. (I am actually surprised that the formation can acquire so much information.) Most people would damage their souls taking in this much information. (Thankfully, my soul is sturdier than most people.)
Well, I have wasted enough time right now. Let's get to the issue. We are being chased by three ships. Studying the ships behind me, I would say that they are the worst type of ship that you can find on the continent.
Well, ships like this exist in many parts of the continent. These ships are what are popularly called battering rams. These ships serve only a single purpose. They are meant to collide with the enemy ship, taking down both ships in the process. That is why the battering rams tend to be the worst ships you can find. They tend to be just a few years away from being sold as scrap wood.
It is rare to see such ships with pirates, though. After all, how will you loot a ship if it is down on the ground, shattered to pieces? On top of that, you will have to sacrifice a ship of yours to do this.
The ships following us are antiques. This means that they won't be able to catch up with my ship any time soon. That doesn't mean we are safe because my ship is about as bad as the ships that are chasing us. Even now, I can't tell when the propulsion formation of the ship will fail.
I am sure that you have never heard of a propulsion formation failing. It does happen, though it is supposed to be almost impossible. These formations are built to last for millennia, you see. Well, this ship is not even a hundred years old, by the way.
As for why I am driving such a shitty ship. You can blame the head office. They had offered this ship to me as a gesture of diplomacy. I can't blame them too much. They were ready to give me a standard guard ship. I was the one who had accepted this ship.
I will have to speak about this some other time, though. All you need to know is that it is my fault. I was too arrogant. To any future captain going on their first mission. If the head office begins to praise your abilities, be sure that they are trying to screw you in some way.
I don't know when the thing will fail, but the instant that it does, the ship is going to drop from the sky. When that happens, I can't even try for a crash landing. The thing has a busted suspension formation. Even a gentle touch with the ground will wreck the ship.
My musing is distracted by a knock. That should be Trevor. With a wave, I open the door, letting the man in. (A neat trick of my control strings.) He is a soldier under me, though he has been placed more as a guide than an underling. It is a pretty interesting arrangement, about which I will have to speak some other time. Really, why did this thing have to work in the middle of a battlefield? I do not get to speak at all.
"Trevor, how are the hooks? Have they managed to get any into us?"I ask the man.
I don't want to be dealing with boarders. I guess my soldiers should be able to handle them for a while. Still, I would rather not rely on them too much. They are well-trained, but they just lack the experience of real combat.
At the moment, I really can't allow myself to leave the helm. Doing so would allow the ships behind me to catch up. Do you know how much I have been working to prevent that exact thing from happening?
"No, Captain. They have not managed to get any hooks into us." Trevor speaks. "Still, they are close enough that they can try something."
"Let's hope that they do not have any more patience. The way that everything is failing, this ship won't even need the pirates to be destroyed. Still, I have managed to activate the thought logger." I speak, pointing to the crystal device I have in my hand.
"Better a month late than never. The head office was behind my back due to your inability to get that thing working." replies Trevor. "You found the absolute worst time to get it working, though. It will act as nothing more than a distraction, right now."
"What can I do, Trevor? It is not like I have been sitting free in the last month to focus on just the thought logger. You people have given me the absolute worst ship present in the shipyard. The only reason that this ship is floating is due to my work." I speak, getting annoyed.
"Well, you were the one who accepted the ship. It is not like the head office was forcing it on you. Anyway, learning a thought logger should take a week or two at most. It is the first time that I have seen it take a month like this." replies Trevor.
Even as the man says this, I feel a burst of heat in my face. There is no need for the man to poke me where it hurts.
"How was I supposed to know that the ship was going to be so crappy?" I ask him. "It is not like the head office had shown it to me before giving it to me."
Trevor does not get to reply to this as one of the ships behind me shoots a hook. It takes me a moment to realise that it is right next to me. It cannot be left there for long. Any boarder there will have easy access to this room. Even as I think this, Trevor has already left the room.
I guess that I should explain what a hook is. A hook is nothing but a harpoon with a chain attached. Granted, it is enchanted to make it very hard to remove once it has been planted. You can barely consider it to be a formation. All ships have them in case they need to drag something behind them.
The pirates have been quite creative with using their hooks. The hooks enter the ship. The chains have been modified so that any person using the chain will stick to it. It is a pretty risky method of getting onto the ship, with half the people dying en route. The problem is that half the people are still too many for my soldiers to handle.
We simply cannot let ourselves get too close to those ships. Even with how far away they are, they pose a bit of risk. (Though the farther away they are, the less chance they have of hitting my ship.) That was the case until today at least. I need to let them closer, now. I have a weapon today, you see.
They are not the only ones that can weaponize their hooks. The only problem is that my modifications have greatly reduced their range. (It is not like hooks have a great range anyway.) I will only be able to use my hooks if the enemy gets closer.
Well, it is almost as if they read my mind. Behind me, one of the ships has begun to accelerate towards my ship. I am sure that they are overloading their formations to achieve this speed. From where are they getting the mana stones to do that?
Regardless, I get to use my hook as I aim it. The release of my hook is quite ordinary. I wouldn't be surprised if the enemy had not even noticed it. (Well, I would not have noticed it myself.)
I have overloaded the hooks in my ship with my mana. They are supposed to explode on contact with the enemy ship. This would have created a massive hole in the ship. That would have been enough to cause their environmental formation to fail. Without the formation to keep them alive, they would have literally choked to death.
I had almost given up and began to plan my surrender. Even as I begin to think of a death message, the enemy ship explodes. Well, explode is the wrong word. The enemy ship pops like a balloon as flames engulf the entire ship. My hook could not have done that. It simply does not have enough mana for such an explosive result. Well, I realised what happened soon enough.
The idiots were using a fire-based propulsion formation, it looks like. Such a propulsion formation grants a decent amount of speed, but there is always a risk of self-implosion. So much fire mana in a single place is always tricky to handle. My hook acts like a trigger, setting the entire thing off. Well, I am not safe yet. A burning ship is so close to mine that I am struggling to keep my ship steady.
I am sure that the explosion has already knocked out a lot of the formations placed on the outside of the ship. If I don't navigate through this area safely enough, then the burning debris is going to take my ship down as well. The main problem is that I have lost most of my sensory formations.
I can't say for certain with the remaining sensory formations, but the other ships don't seem to be accelerating. That is good because I am not sure if I can pull off something like this again. Thankfully, the ship that did come close broke apart into many pieces.
I am sure that the burning debris is causing quite a lot of fires on my ship. That is something that I will have to leave for later. As I manage to stabilize the ship, I have to return to a more immediate problem. The enemy ship did manage to get hooks into our ships. I am sure that at the very least four hooks had gotten into our ship in the time it took for the other ship to explode.
I am sure that at least ten boarders have climbed onto the ship in that period. Right now, there are only three people on the ship other than me who will listen to me. Of them, only two can fight. They are good soldiers, but they are not enough to handle ten people. (Nobody tell Trevor I said that. The man is already so annoying. A suicidal charge to glory will be one step too much.)
The only reason that I dare to do this is that the enemy will not dare to charge after us for a bit. After all, the airspace around me is a burning minefield. All I can do staying here is to keep my ship on its present path.
Anyway, it is not a fully bad thing as well. I have a formation to test, after all. It is an armor-type one that I have been working on for the last couple of weeks, in whatever free time I have. (Not that I got a lot of that.)
I am calling it "vine armor". Right now, I really need to get the formation working. It is the only way that I have of attacking. I don't have my sword after all. Now, about why I have not brought my sword here, you can blame my master for that. It was another of his challenges, you see. (He also felt that it would reveal my identity a bit too easily.)