“Nice one, Dad!” Leahna cheered as his barrels left the Talons’ men in disarray. She followed the statement up by picking off another soldier with a well-aimed arrow.

  Rylan followed suit, two more of his knives finding flesh in quick succession.

  While the soldiers’ sprint had been aborted and their path partially obstructed, they were quickly rallying and putting up their shields towards the ship again.

  At the front, men were scrambling to their feet and pushing away barrels, rapidly clearing a path towards the gangplank.

  At that moment, Yuel finally untied the last knot and started pulling the heavy rope through the metal ring embedded in the dock. Seeming to feel Rylan’s gaze, he glanced up. “What are you waiting for?!” he yelled. “Drop the plank!”

  It took Rylan a second to process, but then he was moving.

  Like almost everything on the ship, the gangplank was made of lightweight bamboo. Unfortunately, due to its length and width, it was still pretty darn heavy.

  Rylan grabbed onto the top edge and, with a grunt, started to push. The other end of the plank scraped forward over the docks inch by inch. However, before he could get it fully off the deck, a heavy boot stomped down on the gangplank. Followed by another, and another.

  “Push!” Leahna yelled, firing another arrow into the column of men now advancing up the gangplank two-by-two, their shields overlapping at the front.

  Rylan did, straining with the effort. Of course, at this point, he wasn’t pushing the gangplank towards the docks, but rather the ship away from them.

  It was working too, the deck slowly scraping out from under the plank, but it wasn’t going fast enough.

  The two men at the front raised their blades, speeding up their steps as they sought to close the distance.

  Right then, however, there was a loud crackling of fabric. And as the kitesail caught wind, the ship jerked forward, away from the docks.

  Rylan almost stumbled as the plank suddenly slipped forward and off the deck.

  Right before his eyes, almost a dozen men suddenly had the ground fall away beneath their feet, screaming as they disappeared into the fog below.

  Their commander bellowed angrily from the docks, storming off towards Yuel with his blade drawn.

  The blonde former pirate—well, current pirate, to be honest—just bowed at the man with a flourish, before leaping off the docks, swinging into the fog from the rope he’d just finished untying.

  Some of the soldiers left standing on the docks started shooting arrows, but the ship’s deck lay quite high above the driftline, and the railing had been fortified with plates of cloudmetal as well, so they had plenty of cover.

  “Somebody grab the wheel!” Nazyr shouted, still cranking the winch to let the kite up higher, where the stronger winds blew.

  Rylan spun towards the cabin and started sprinting. Rather than bothering with the stairs that ran up along its side, he charged a small Jump, and leapt straight up.

  He grabbed onto the railing on top, swung his leg over, and took hold of the wheel, arresting its slow spin. Then, he took in the situation inside the harbour.

  Cliffport’s southern harbour had a triangular shape, having been built into a relatively wide gulley that extended into the cliff for hundreds of feet. They were currently drifting away from the limestone docks towards the centre. However, the path out to the cloudsea was not quite as clear as Rylan would’ve liked.

  Floating piers with smaller vessels lined the docks, bobbing up and down with the waves rolling in, and they were heading straight for one of them.

  Rylan spun the wheel, trying to get the ship to turn, but they were mostly drifting sideways.

  The massive kite that was drawing figure eights in the wind above them, still rising higher, really wasn’t made to be deployed inside a harbour.

  “Brace yourself!” Rylan yelled, shortly before their massive metal-clad ship rammed into a tiny twin-floater. Bamboo cracked and snapped in the smaller vessel, the pontoons of the floating pier creaking as they were bent aside by the weight of their vessel.

  Slowly, they started to rotate towards the open cloudsea—more due to the crash than Rylan’s steering, if he were honest.

  Still, he was mightily relieved when Yuel came up the stairs, huffing and puffing, and waved at him to step aside.

  “You have the makings of a fine pirate, milord, but we can work on your helmsmanship later.”

  Rylan huffed out a breath, but didn’t reply, his eyes scanning the docks and the other Talon warships.

  Aside from the remaining two warships docked at the southern harbour, he could see at least two more to the east that had embedded their massive harpoons into the city’s walls. Talon soldiers streamed up long ladders, seeming to have gotten a foothold on the walls.

  And then there was one more, that seemed to be sailing from west to east, passing by their harbour on its way to the central one.

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  Leahna hurried up the stairs, shooting Yuel and Rylan a relieved smile.

  “Where’s dad?” Rylan asked, belatedly realising that he could see the blue glow from his father’s spirit shining through the cabin’s roof.

  “In the cabin, resting his legs. What’s going on?”

  “Hairy floating fognuts,” Yuel swore. “We’re being hailed!”

  Rylan, who had cooked with the milk from floating fognuts a time or two and rather liked them, frowned and looked in the direction Yuel indicated.

  Rather than exotic fruits from the Northern Isles, he found himself looking at the Talon warship passing in front of the harbour, where someone appeared to be waving a repeating series of coloured flags in specific ways.

  “Quick, sign something back,” Yuel said, waving at a chest that stood nearby.

  Leahna was first to react, opening the chest to reveal a collection of coloured flags. “Ehm, I don’t know what any of these mean...”

  “Neither do I; just sign something, anything!” Yuel replied, gesticulating agitatedly at the ship coming closer and closer. “As long as they’re trying to figure out what we’re saying, they’re not shooting at us!”

  Apparently convinced, Leahna grabbed an orange flag and chucked it at Rylan.

  He caught it wide-eyed, then awkwardly started waving it back and forth. After a moment, a blue flag was thrown his way, which he moved up and down, then a black one which he moved in circles.

  He was just getting into it, zigzagging a purple flag lined with red, when the other ship stopped signing, and Yuel gestured for him to stop.

  On the deck below, Artoran hobbled towards the railing, where he produced a spyglass and brought it up to his eye. “Well,” he said after a moment. “You’ve certainly confused them, son.”

  Rylan raised a hand above his forehead, squinting against the light still glaring off the bright fog between them and the ship. Even without a spyglass, he could faintly make out some people who seemed to be wildly gesticulating.

  Thankfully, the ship didn’t stop or deviate from its course, leaving space for them to pass through its wake.

  As they sailed out of the harbour, Rylan let out a sigh of relief. Ahead of them stood the Eye of Auris still, but beyond the massive lighthouse was only a field of gently roiling white.

  However, while the signalling ship hadn’t tried to block their way, it was now slowing down, and all of a sudden, an arrow clad in bright green flames was shot up from the bow, drawing a big arc before it dropped out of sight within the fog.

  Rylan stared at the spot where it had disappeared with a frown. He was pretty sure the light hadn’t been spiritual, as it would’ve been too far away for him to see, and moreover, shouldn’t have disappeared from view for him within the fog. He didn’t think it was tinted mana either—thank the spirits—as it had looked too much like actual fire, except for the colour. Some kind of chemical flame, then?

  “Who are they signaling?” his father wondered out loud. “It doesn’t appear to be aimed at us this time, but I don’t see any...”

  A smaller, winged vessel appeared from behind the warship, moving at a safe distance from the walls. It appeared to be mostly made of shiny, yellow metal, with only the hull made of aquamarine cloudmetal.

  Rylan’s stomach roiled as he saw it.

  He jumped down onto the deck and was next to his father in three strides, holding his hand out for the spyglass.

  After a moment, his father handed it to him wordlessly.

  As the distant view sharpened into clarity, Rylan’s fears were confirmed.

  “It’s Vidric,” he bit out, spotting the smiling blonde scion and presumed heir of the Talons. Then, despite expecting it, Rylan jolted as he spotted Tamina next to Vidric, face blank as usual. Finally, at the helm, behind the two of them, stood a balding, scarred man who missed a bite of his right ear. “Wait, that helmsman... dad, is that—”

  “Yup,” Artoran said lightly, though with an uncharacteristic strain in his voice. “That’s Vidric’s torturer. Told you he was ugly.”

  “Vapours!” Leahna ‘swore,’ having joined them at the railing. “Why is he even here? Shouldn’t he be helping conquer the city?”

  “He’s the heir,” Artoran said with a sigh. “Too valuable to risk on the front lines, too useful to leave at home.”

  Leahna drew her lips into a thin line. “What do we do now? Can we lose them?”

  Finished with raising the kite sail, Nazyr silently drew up next to them as well.

  “Not a chance,” Rylan said grimly. When he’d first spotted Vidric’s vessel from the tower’s balcony, back on Thistlebloom, he’d wondered how it was propelled. But that had been before he’d met the professor, and asked him many a question. “It definitely has an Aetherium drive; that’s a runegear engine shaped like a tube, attached below the hull. It uses its runework to suck air in on one side and push it out the other. Those engines can provide ridiculous amounts of thrust.”

  The way the Professor had explained it, the thrust an Aetherium drive delivered scaled almost linearly with the amount of mana provided. Of course, the faster you drained a Cube, the less efficient the conversion of Quintessence to mana was, and thus the less mana you could get out of it overall. Which meant the main limit on an Aetherium drive’s performance was the contents of your wallet.

  Bigger Cubes could more reliably deliver relatively large quantities of mana without deteriorating, but that’s also why they were way more expensive.

  A Hectocube was worth a staggering fifty gold crowns, as much as an Enhancer. And yet, Rylan had a sneaking suspicion that was exactly what Vidric was using to power his vessel.

  As they watched, the smaller vessel indeed started accelerating towards them, its wings lifting it up out of the driftline until only the rear part of its hull was still immersed inside the fog.

  It was catching up, and not too slowly either. Behind it, the warship started turning towards them as well.

  “All right, so we’re not losing him,” Leahna said, her knuckles growing white as she clenched her hands around the railing. “Any other ideas?”

  “Maybe we can fool him somehow?” Artoran suggested.

  “That might also be difficult,” Yuel drawled, joining them as well after—hopefully—tying off the steering wheel. “We’d need an excuse that Vidric Talon would accept for one of his warships leaving the battle...”

  A silence fell over them.

  “Family emergency?” Artoran tried.

  Leahna took a deep breath. “I vote we attack, try to catch him off guard. If we could take him out somehow, we might be able to get away.”

  Rylan winced. “That might be difficult, especially with Tamina guarding him... I’d really prefer to avoid hurting her, if we can.”

  “Thar Tamina’s on board as well?” Nazyr asked. “Ah... course she is.”

  Yuel shot Rylan a most sympathetic look, and he quickly turned away, not able to handle it right at that moment.

  “It would be difficult to take him out either way,” Artoran said with a sigh. “Given the Talon’s resources, you can assume Vidric’s Mana Shell is right at the tier 10 cap, which, at the Sapphire Grade, provides a capacity of 20 points of mana. It wouldn’t be easy for either of you to hurt him through that without Sapphire-Grade Skills. And even if I was in any kind of shape, to be honest, I’m more of a lover than a fighter.”

  Something about his father’s words tickled Rylan’s mind. “You mean if we had Sapphire-Grade Skills, we could do it? I guess you specifically mean Skills like Pierce or Cut then, right?”

  “Those are especially effective,” Artoran agreed. “But you shouldn’t underestimate textured mana in general. It’s a force multiplier, and any attack that includes textured mana is more... tenacious. Harder to stop.”

  The gears in Rylan’s mind started to grind. By now, the vessel was halfway to them; they only had a couple of minutes tops before they’d be overtaken. It was time for action. “Then let’s use some textured mana.”

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