Hello, hello is this thing working. I am not actually sure if now is the best time for me to be doing this, but hey one shouldn't look a gift horse in its mouth, I guess.
Right now, there are strings of mana that is linking me to every formation in this room, giving almost absolute control over this airship and I can literally feel the ship breaking apart every time I accelerate the damn ship.
Behind me are at the moment, three pirate ships that are trying to board onto our ships. If I were to go on the basis of general estimate, each ship behind me should have atleast fifty soldiers.
Thankfully they seem to have a max speed that is much lower than than the max speed of this ship. Granted I am not sure if I can maintain that max speed for much longer. any second now, that propulsion formation of mine will start failing and we all will plummet to the ground.
Honestly, I should have gotten started on this particular log nearly a month ago at the beginning of our mission the instant that I had entered the bloody arrow, but this is my first time taking on a commanding position.( It is my first mission after being made a captain if I am honest.)
Another thing to be noted is the nearly legendary incompetence that I tend to have with mental magic, so I am hoping that the folks at the head office can be a bit forgiving about the tardiness that I am going to send this in with. I would also like to point out that this tardiness is not present for a lack of trying( I would also like everybody to note that I have been trying to do this during a period when I have been the most busy in my life.). I have been trying to do this for a week now. I cannot help it if I have succeeded to this the moment that we seem to be about to die. (As if to annoy me more, the ships behind us have accelerated again, and I am forced to accelerate myself to keep ahead of them. Not sure how many more times I can do that.)
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 combination of earth magic( specifically crystal magic) and mind magic melded together in a way that I barely understand. Yet for some reason I have not managed to make that device work for me normally until now.
Now in my case, the creation of thought strings tend to work out pretty well. After all, you would not be reading this if I were to mess up that particular part. It is also can be considered to be a very basic skill for a person of my profession( the compression of mana into strings and enforcing it with your will specifically I mean.)
It is the broadcasting part of the device that never works out for me. My thought string just seem to dissolve when they go beyond a certain distance from me. Even now I am not sure why exactly is thing working now all of a sudden, but as I said at the beginning, do not look at a gift horse in the mouth.
While I certainly do not want this to be my last moments, it is also true that I have to deal with the situation as they occur and at this moment we are at quite the risk of being boarded. Now being boarded would not be a problem when you have an entire troop there to back you up. When you have troops that you can count on your fingers, you do not attempt to fight, you only run.
Another thing that leaves me really confused, why the fuck do they make the captain of an expedition be the one that had to maintain the records. I know why, I know the head office was particularly insistent that the captain has a working broadcast of their memory logs. After all those guys cannot send reinforcements to us if they do not know if the captain is not broadcasting a log because he is imprisoned or because he is not able to send a message. Also 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.
Being on this airship is certainly not doing anything good to my peace of mind. Now airships are something of a fascination for me. It has always been my dream to own one of these, you know. Being responsible for one, though not something I expected to be so stressful, especially a hunk of junk like the one that have been given to me. The black mountain is legendarily famous for our magics you know, and our nearly omniscient grasp of spells.
Sadly this omniscience does not extend to the field of building stuff you know. We are capable of casting magics that are capable of crushing mountains, evaporating rivers and lakes and conquering the largest mountain in the continent and yet we are not able to build airships that can last beyond five years. Now, if I were to say to people that this airship was only five years old, most people would begin by laughing at what I said. These are things meant to last centuries you know.
The propulsion formation and the steering formation always seem to have one issue or another, requiring my near constant presence to keep them in working order. The environment formation that is supposed to ensure that the atmosphere i am in is liveable breaks down every other day. You can say in a manner of speaking that it was mainly due to my persistance that I have even managed to keep our trip this short and survivable, otherwise I have been given nearly double the amount of time it will take to reach the destination. Most likely to account for the time we would have to spend on the ground because the formation that was meant to keep us afloat failed and I will tell you this, we have come damn close many times. It is only my magic and my emergency repair skills that has kept the damn thing going.
Don't even get me started on pirates, we have been sailing for a month and during that period we have had to face nearly ten attacks you know. Each is essentially a stressful game of cat and mouse where we push the ship as much as possible. Each time the propulsion formations are nearly tattered, making me spend a couple of days at the very least to repair and hoping that those pirates do not find us in that period, because our fucking propulsion formation had failed. Whoever heard of the propulsion formation of a ship fail literally five years after it has been built. Sadly, that is what I am worried is about to happen if the damn bastards behind me don't stop chasing me.
While all of that is still manageable, the thing that makes me saddest about this airship is that It does not even look like a ship, this airship of mine, it resembles more a cylindrical piece of wood. It is meant to reduce the mana costs of running these formations after all. What fucking airship, this was clearly meant to resemble a stupid arrow. A stupid arrow that was more likely to kill us than an actual arrow.
Now I have to be fair. It is actually pretty rare to find an airship that actually resemble the kind of ships that you can find in the sea. Now, it is not really a problem for the others but I have had dreams related to this you know. After all I am of the kin of greybeard at the end of the day. Now to get back to more important matters. I have to explain my identity and the mission that I have been sent on before I inevitably screw up and this log terminates again. I certainly did not expect that I will be doing this while being chased.
My name is Antonio sevenstars, a field captain of the black mountain, with three soldier level fighters escorting three captain level scholars. Normally I am supposed to give each person under my command the option to introduce themselves using my log for consistency during our introductions, but at the moment we are going at speeds where not being bound will have quite the disastrous result. I could call them up here now but there is a pretty significant risk that I might have to end up scrapping their remains if I do that, especially if the propulsion formation does begin to fail. For now, Their identities and their purposes shall be found in their respective mission logs, which I have to assume that everybody will be doing correctly. If they are not, well I honestly don't care. The head office can handle that. You want me to give a shit about protocol, give me a good ship or atleast a ship that won't end in my death.
Now, to describe what our mission is going to be. We are supposed to bring the scholars to documented ruin number 32, under our supervision and at the same time ensure that the folks who are in control of the ruin grant access to the ruin in accordance to the hexmountain treaty.
In our present case that is going to be the snowwind empire. Now the problem with the snowwind empire is that they are considered to be one of the bloodiest forces to exist in the continent who have literally built their empire in one of the most inhospitable regions of the continents while being surrounded by enemies on every side. They literally acquired each inch of their land by conducting bloody war. The main reason for this is also the fact that they consider themselves to be the kin of the draconians, incidentally whose ruin it is we are going to explore.
So we are essentially what they consider grave robbers. They fear the might of the black mountain and certainly don't want diplomatic relations to be strained but we still cannot be sure that they won't end up killing us the minute that they end up meeting us.
It is also a part of the reason that I am being sent over there. I am sure that my skills are going to be quite useful to the snowwinders especially now when it is the onset of winter for them. They are also pretty likely to kill anyone other than me especially since the time when a group of scholars ended up blowing up a draconian ruin because they were testing a spell in there.
I know it is for this reason that the head office was particularly insistent that the captain has a working broadcast of his memory logs. After all the guys at head office cannot send reinforcement to us if they are not sure if the captain of the mission is not sending his memory log because he is under captivity or because he has been forgetting to cast that particular spell for a couple of days. I am not sure that they will send reinforcements even if they are sure, but they have appearances to maintain.
Still, it does not make my work any less irritating you know. Anyway, it is about time that I stop this stupid thing. The pirates outside also seem to have finally started to fucking slow down. You know I can literally feel the ship breath a sigh of relief as I slow it down. This ship might just end up surviving this trip. I can't tell for certain though until I can slow this hunk of junk down and see just how many fires I have to exinguish in the ship, both literally and figuratively.