Hardened wooden peels splintered and shattered as the cannon ball hit D in the chest, as his wrappings failed to weather the blow. He slid backwards, feeble knees bent and struggling to keep him upright. He finally came to a stop when he collided with the mast with a thud and a muffled groan. The cannon ball dropped from his chest and slammed into the deck with a crack. For a slim second, it looked to Morgan like D had withstood the impact without issue, until he doubled over, falling onto his hands and knees.
He wheezed as he gasped for air, his thin frame rattling. His wrappings fell away from his face, revealing the long matted brown hair and forlorn face of the older man that Morgan had forgotten was under there. Maya ran over to his side as he coughed up blood as his chest rose and fell erratically.
At the same time cannonballs were still flying around them, carving trenches into the deck and whittling down their numbers every few shots.
D forced out chants between ragged breathes as Maya slowly helped him up until he finally choked out "Mother Bud," in the echoing voice he commanded nature with. The massive wooden peels began wrapping around the top of Daiah's Locker in a tight spiral, swelling and softening till the entire deck was enveloped in the spongy peels the inside resembling that of a closed flower. The cannon shots that were lethal a second before became wet thumps against the altered wood.
"Why don't we just take this ship and leave? We are literally standing around on a ship getting blow to bit, watching each other get dropped one by one!" Tibbles said. Golden necklaces and bejeweled pendants were draped around his neck and he was uninjured and hadn't broken a sweat. Morgan was surprised that the cutthroat had survived this long and especially mystified by the fact that he hadn't seen the cutthroat since they'd escaped the lowest decks of the ship.
"We've already discussed this. Daiah's Locker is the slowest of the three; the other two ships will catch us almost immediately. Therefore our best chance of survival is on Ransom's Burning Lady. It's fast and it eliminates their option of pulling us in with its harpoons."
"What if this is the only chance we get? Did you forget that Dagon has Harcovians with him? If they get to us, it's over," Vella countered. Morgan hadn't seen the woman from Black Veil fighting either, but the golden pistols and diamond encrusted daggers hanging from the petite brunette's waist provided a similarly unsavory explanation.
"If we don't take the Burning Lady, we won't survive past an hour."
"Maybe we can wait and let D regain some of his strength," Morgan offered.
"Dear child, this kind of injury won't be getting better. The rest of you need to get going. Save yourselves before Dagon gets to you."
"You have to come with us. We can make a stand on The Burning Lady" Typhon said firmly.
"Not while Dagon's ship is firing on us. He won't give me the time to establish another domain on the Burning Lady. I can keep Dagon and his crew busy long enough for you to escape, but dealing with the remained of Ransom's crew will be up to you."
Typhon took inventory of their forces. Excluding D and their family there were only 15 of them left.to each of them, all panting and some wounded from the previous battle. Morgan could see the worry gradually creeping into his father's face, materializing a frown that mirrored Morgan's doubts as Typhon watched them huddled around the man who had won the battle for them almost on his own and taken a cannonball to the chest, asking him to give more.
"Morgan, how close is it?"
Tilting the shard of wood, Morgan searched for the right angle, and when he found it, the shimmering blue light solidified on the wood giving it a glossy reflective surface. In the reflection was a map of the Knife Isles detailed enough to see the individual isles, a stationary white dot just past the Blot in the open ocean and a blue dot moving down the isles towards them at an astonishing speed.
"We are the white dot?" Morgan inquired.
"And the blue dot is what remains of our boat," Maya added. "That piece of wood was and still is bound to the rest of the boat, so I was able to use the seeking rune already on it to convert it into a beacon tome."
"Wouldn't it take weeks to get to us though, even if it was on the Scab channel?" Morgan asked.
"The beacon tome instructs the boat to convert its physical form into pure mana as it homes in on the beacon's location, allowing it to move faster than ordinarily possible, while ignoring physical boundaries. Of course, we can't be converted into pure magic ourselves, so it's not a viable escape option, especially since less than half the boat is left either way."
"If we can't use it to escape then what's the point?"
Typhon spoke up this time: "The point is that it's holding something that we'll need to escape if things get any worse than they already have. I've been hoping that I wouldn't have to use it even up to this morning. Given everything that has happened to us in the span of a few weeks hope like that just feels like foolishness. For now just keep the beacon totem safe with you till the boat arrives."
"Alright," D said, standing up,"If you lot don't want to take cannonballs to the chest like I did, you'd best get moving. I've got a devil to eviscerate."
The peels unfurled and two of them lay across the gap between the pirate ships. As they ran across the soft bridge Typhon turned around.
"Maya, keep the children with you. Tibbles and Vella follow my lead."
Maya nodded but Tibbles' head poked out of the crowd with a rather displeased expression frown. Gold chains and jewels jangling on his neck Tibbles jogged up alongside Typhon.
"See, I'm not very well suited for the front lines, Mister sea smith, sir. I'm somewhat shy, not great with confrontation." Tibbles laughed sheepishly.
"Rat-tailed coward," Vella spat from behind him.
"If we make it out of this, I'll make a weapon for each of you."
"..But at some point a man has to grow to fill bigger breaches. I'm your man," Tibbles quickly amended.
"Great. Shadow me."
Bare Feet slapping onto the blood-slick deck, the former captives charged, sea smiths in tow.
Scooping up a sword by the bloody hilt, Typhon ran at the front. Tibbles, the smaller man ran an inch behind, him within his silhouette, and matching his stride with Vella beside them. The pirates reciprocated the sentiment; some ran forward them whilst the remaining gun men leveled pistols and rifles and fired into their ranks, carefully to avoiding hitting the sea smiths.
"You ready Vella? You're up first." Typhon said as an axeman approached.
"Born for it!"
He swung the axe over his head, to bring it down on Typhon's but with a precise strike, he parried it so that almost flew from his hands. Vella slid on the bloody deck, between Typhon's legs to the axeman's and sliced his calve with a golden dagger. And when he fell onto the other knee, she turned around behind him and shot him in the back with her pistol.
His father was using Hakkhan, the defensive martial arts they were taught as children and was hardly mentioned let alone used past that point. It was entirely composed of parries, dodges and an assortment of other moves tailored to survive close range combat and use an attacker's momentum against them. Morgan had forgotten most of it a month after he'd learned them, but he was sure that none of his teachers moved like his father did.
A swordsman came next. Typhon sprinted forward and swung the sword overhead but at the last second he let go. The pirate watched as it fell and Tibbles stepped out from behind him, caught it and slashed through his neck.
Death rattles rang up from the deck as three of them ran through the pirates, Vella and Tibbles on offense and Typhon defending and creating openings for them.
In contrast Daiah's locker was unusually quiet. Morgan turned around to check on D. He was just standing still staring at an enormous ink cloud, like pitch-black fog rolling across the water towards him. Dagon was using the Murk Blade to cover his ship's approach from D. While D knew he was already there, the massive paper-like peels D had fashioned from the ship's mid-section were an obvious threat that they probably wouldn't survive. So the pirate captain must have decided to close the distance under cover.
The Black Dagger practically flew out of the ink cloud. D barely had a second to brace himself before the black ship rammed into the left side of the ship, sending him tumbling into the far railing.
Dagon stood at the prow of the ship grinning and unfazed by the collision, holding a dark grey blade with a silver serrated edge; Morgan's Murk Blade. Dagon's crew swung over, five or so at a time while the rest simply jumped on board from their deck to the Locker's, forming a small crowd in seconds.
"Ransom! I know you're still there. Get your rifle out and watch my back." Dagon called. Ransom's head poked out from the bird's nest atop the mast and he smiled sheepishly. "I was just waiting on you. It would be problematic if the druid took me out before I had a chance to help you."
"You've had your fun druid; it's about time you go back into your cage. Remember, we made a deal for your cooperation" Dagon said hefting the murk blade in his hand.
"I promised my surrender, nothing more than that. Either way you forced it out of me with hostages, you're lucky I complied as much as I did."
"Can you really act so innocent after the way you killed Bora? Why not just put his head on a pike? It would send the same message." Ransom interjected.
"Wrapping him up keeps the fetid smell of rotting scum contained a bit better that's all," D said prompting a grimace and grumble from Ransom.
"A shame, your buyer was paying so handsomely for you alive. But half price for your corpse will have to do." Dagon said and drew a pistol from his coat and opened fire.
Ransom propped a long rifle on the edge of the bird's nest and with a resounding pop fired a flaming white bullet. It was too fast for D to react to but in his rage, Ransom's shot was sloppy. The bullet barely nicked him, leaving a chard line where it grazed his left side.
Then Dagon fired a spread of burning white shells from his pistol. He staggered back as they dug into his arm and ignited small white flames. D raised peels to block the bullets, while over a dozen of Dagon's crew charged closed in.
The first to reach the druid slammed a mace into his side, and then the rest followed with their own blows. D's wrappings were able to absorb most of the damage but the beating had him disoriented. A sledgehammer slammed into the back of his head, sending him stumbling forward into a woman that smacked him in the chest with her shield, followed by slash to his leg from another. D tried to speak, to begin chanting, but every time the pirates heard the indistinguishable speech, the shoving, blows and attempts at stabbings intensified in fear of his retaliation.
"Father!" Morgan called out. "D's in trouble, we have to help him."
Typhon glanced back at him and then D, for a second, before he turned back around, just in time to parry a sword swung at his neck.
"We can't help him yet! We have to take the ship first!" he yelled back.
He was obviously right, procuring the ship meant saving all of their lives, so it had to take precedent, plus Morgan wasn't sure they could actually take on Dagon's crew if they tried. So he took the beacon totem out from where he hid it in his shirt and tilted the shard of wood till the map glimmered into view. The blue dot was directly above the white, just beginning to overlap. The boat was almost here, but with the scale of the map and the size of the Knife Isles, it could still mean another five minutes, maybe even ten.
At the very least they were winning their own fight. The captives lead by Typhon had killed most of Ransom's crew and cornered the rest at the back of the ship. Ransom hadn't fired a single shot to help them or even stop the captives' attempt at taking his ship, the ship he was still on. He was so engrossed with revenge for Bora that he hadn't made any effort to save the lives of his crew, which surprised Morgan since they had often made snide remarks and ridiculed each other to their faces.
In that moment the Black Dagger pulled away from Daiah's Locker. They stood by in horror as the dozen or so men aboard Dagon's ship raced up their left side to assist the Ransom's crew.
"Surrender now and we'll let you leave with your lives." Typhon yelled in an urgent tone.
"Why didn't you just say you wanted the boat, sea smith? We'd be happy to share..." a balding blonde pirate smirked. Then he slowly backed up into a lever between two oversized rusted gears protruding from the deck and pulled it. Gears grated and turned and Morgan heard the ones below the ash grey and blood stained deck follow. And then the screech of a massive metal structure echoed up below the ship. Morgan ran to the side of the boat and saw the pale white eel that had been hauling it slither away beneath the waves.
"They released the eel!" he reported.
"Go on then, have at it," the pirate laughed.
"Morgan, how close is it?"
He pulled the shard out of his shirt and checked again. The blue dot had almost completely covered the white but the boat was still nowhere in sight.
"It's really close, practically here….but probably another couple minutes?"
"Two minutes?" he asked hopefully.
"Three? Maybe four?" Morgan guessed.
Sighs and exasperated groans echoed out from their allies as the Black Dagger docked, prow first, onto the back of the Burning Lady. The last of Dagon's crew boarded the ship, refilling the pirates' forces with fresh faced and rested men and women.
A man and a woman, clad in full iron armor and crimson capes boarded last. They were the Harcovians the buyer had hired. Their presence alone parted the crowd without a word or gesture, as they walked to the very front to face Typhon.