Provided we survive the next ten minutes, he thought as the shouts from overhead redoubled in noise as something wooden audibly shattered, making the entire ship rock.
"Fine," his aunt grunted as she started to steer him by the crook of his elbow down the hall and around the occasional passing crew-woman. "We need to go."
Even as William obliged, his thoughts were going a mile a minute. Mostly he was thinking about how shit his luck was.
Kraken attacks were rare. Very rare. The massive creatures weren't usually too interested in ships, given that the crew's invariably served as a poor source of food for an animal whose preferred prey was whales.
That was why it was assumed that when attacks did happen, it was a case of mistaken identity – or a female getting territorial during mating season.
He clambered onto the deck, blearily blinking the rising sun from his eyes, and watched a tentacle thick as his torso latch onto the deck, wrapping around the mast.
Just from a glance he knew this wasn't a case of mistaken identity. The bright red spots running down the back of the oversized limb was proof of that. A sure-fire sign that a female was ready to lay eggs and was in the throes of heat.
And thus, very territorial.
"Get off my ship!" The captain's voice cried from the ship's raised quarter-deck as more and more tentacles slithered up to grip at the handrails of the vessel.
William watched with muted dismay as the woman actually hurled a fireball from her outstretched hand, a massive ball of flames lancing across the deck to strike the nearest tentacle.
With next to no effect.
The blow barely even seemed to register to the beast. Nor did the second. Or the third.
And now she's probably spent, given the size of the contracts she just expended, William thought glumly as he watched the elven woman seem to sway in place.
"Idiot," his aunt hissed, likely coming to the same conclusion. "She should know better than anyone that Kraken scales are magic resistant."
After their size, that was likely the second most famous thing about the giant squid creatures, and a large part of why many coastal houses lined their airships' hulls with their hide.
Perhaps it was desperation more than stupidity? He thought idly as he watched another bit of handrail shatter, before being dragged down into the water.
Fortunately, that fate hadn't befallen any of the crew. Yet. For while the creature's tentacles seemed possessed of an almost malign intelligence as they quested about the deck, latching onto things at will, the fact of the matter was that the squid below was basically just flailing blindly at what it perceived to be a rival creature of some kind.
Unfortunately, blind flailing or not, it was still entirely capable of dragging the entire ship down once its clawed beak poked enough holes in the bottom of the hull.
"We need to get to the lifeboats." Karla grabbed his arm, pulling him in the direction of one such item.
William's focus though was on the crew. As he watched, the mixture of humans and orcs desperately hacked and stabbed at the limbs invading their ship, using whatever means they had available. Some had axes, others had harpoons, and some poor souls had been reduced to trying to sink their daggers into the tough slippery flesh of the great beast.
The young man didn't even bother to ask if his aunt's boltbow would have any effect. An aether-propelled crossbow bolt might have been plenty deadly against a person, but they'd be little more than a splinter to a Kraken.
With that in mind, he knew the smart thing was to do exactly what his aunt was planning on doing; getting the hell off the ship.
Given the size of the attacking squid, a small transport ship like the Fair Gentleman was practically defenseless.
Once it had been sunk, hopefully the beast would lose interest, mistaking the lifeboats for little more than debris.
That was what usually happened.
Lindholm lost a ship or two every other year to krakens, and the unfortunate losses of goods and lives were simply considered the cost of doing business in the Azure Sea. A sentiment he was feeling a lot less sanguine about now that he was actually aboard one of those 'unfortunate losses'.
"You there!" His aunt grabbed a nearby crew-woman. "Start getting this boat in the water."
The sailor in question looked panicked for a moment, the human woman's eyes darting between the marine-knight and whatever duty she'd been attending to. Eventually though, feudal conditioning won out and she moved to help his aunt. Soon enough the pair were fiddling with the pulley system that would lower the lifeboat over the side and into the water.
William actually moved to help himself… before pausing.
A wet thud from nearby drew his gaze, and as he turned, he found his gaze landing on a 'new front' that had opened up in the nearby battle. Across the deck from him, an orc woman with a tattoo around her throat desperately stabbed at a tentacle that had just wrapped around another one of the lifeboats.
Her efforts were for naught though. Even as he watched, the pulleys holding the thing in place snapped, and the boat was dragged overboard, shattering into little more than kindling in the process, before the splintered remnants were dragged down into the water below.
…Taking with it roughly one quarter of the ship's lifeboat capacity. Only three of the craft now remained.
Which meant that at least one quarter of the crew would now no longer be able to evacuate given the total absence of redundancy that he could see.
Turning to his aunt, he had to pitch his voice to be heard over the carnage around him. "Has the captain contacted the Indomitable? We're only a day out from Ashfield County."
The loss of the lifeboat wouldn't be so bad if rescue was on the way. The kraken would lose interest in the ship once she dragged it under, and the crew would be able to hotseat the lifeboats – or use pieces of wreckage as floatation devices while they waited for help.
Help that would only take a few hours if an airship was on the way.
"The captain doesn't have an orb," the human sailor answered before his aunt could. "We used to… but she sold it last year. Said we didn't need it given how quiet the route was."
Karla cursed, sending him a pitying look even as she continued to turn the lever for the pulleys. "There's your answer kiddo. Unless some other ship stumbles across us. And they have an orb. And they manage to avoid pissing off this kraken when they arrive - then we're on our own."
Meaning they'd have to row for the coast.
Which was doable, he thought as he gauged the distance. Swimming that far won't be though.
No, unless something happened to scare off the Kraken, a lot of people were going to drown today.
And with that thought, the weight of the pots in his rucksack seemed to grow incredibly heavy. Not that they'd ever been light. Both physically and metaphorically.
The contents they contained were capable of upsetting the balance of power across the planet after all. They represented an avenue of technological development that hadn't even been broached in this world.
That power was one he'd intended to harness for the greater good of the entire planet.
Just not here. And not now, he thought frantically.
Secrecy was his first and best defence after all, and it was a protection that he'd only ever intended to shed once he reached the academy. And even then only in part, to build some notoriety, with a fair amount of subterfuge thrown in to obfuscate the 'how'.
What were a few random crew-members on a ramshackle transport ship compared to that?