Urushi was so fast that he managed to close the gap between us and the pirate ships in the blink of an eye.
We used our birds eye view to observe the pirates, only to find that they were staring up at Fran with dumbfounded looks on their faces. The daze lasted for a moment, as they immediately drew their bows, knocked their arrows, and attempted to shoot us down. It was a vicious attack, but not one that bothered Urushi even in the slightest. He dodged them all with ease.
『Alright, let’s do this.』
「Nn.」
『You know what? I’d say this is actually probably as good as chance as any to run a few experiments, just so we can be a bit informed going forward.』
「Explain?」
『I was thinking we could try and figure out the most efficient way for us to sink a ship. What do you think about hitting each of the five with a different kind of attack?』
We were still going to be at sea for quite some time. I highly doubted that we were only going to run into a single group of pirates. Figuring out the most efficient way of eliminating them would definitely function to our own benefit.
Fortunately, none of the pirates out on the deck seemed strong enough to catch my eye. They weren’t going to be capable of getting in the way of our experiments—unless we messed up really hard, that is.
『Let’s start by trying out Lightning Magic.』
Last time, we’d only managed to sink the pirate ships we encountered by hurling massive rocks at them. We’d grown a lot since then, we now had a much wider variety of options.
「Kanna Kamui?」
『That’s a bit too extreme for just pirates, don’t you think? Plus, we won’t be able to use it several times in rapid succession.』
I figured Kanna Kamui would allow us to obliterate all five ships off at the same time if they happened to be close enough, which, upon further inspection, they actually seemed to be. However, I wrote decided to write it off for the time being, as it would defeat the purpose of the exercise I’d planned.
Kanna Kamui aside, I began to consider our options. Spells like Thunderbolt were rather decent, but they lacked the power to take out an entire ship in just one hit. What we needed was something in the middle.
『Oh, I know.』
I began to focus so I could cast a powerful spell. It wasn’t anything on Kanna Kamui’s tier, but it was still powerful nonetheless.
『Alright, let’s go!』
「Nn!」
『Ekato Keraunos!』[1]
Countless thunderbolts descended from the sky the moment I chanted the spell’s name. They shot towards one of the pirate ships, razed it, and annihilated it in the most literal sense of the word. It had been completely and utterly erased, there wasn’t even the slightest trace that it’d been there in the first place.
Looking at the result made me feel as if I’d gone a bit overboard.
Ekato Keraunos was a spell that created exactly 100 bolts of lightning. It was up to its caster to determine exactly how those 100 bolts would act. It didn’t take much effort to concentrate them on a single target as I’d just done.
Though it only output 10% of Kanna Kamui’s power, it was still evidently way stronger than what was needed to take down a small ship. It looked like we wouldn’t need to use anything more than our regular AOE lightning spells to wipe them all out if we wanted.
The pirates stopped attacking. Seeing one of their allied ships flat out vanish seemed to have scared them shitless.
That said, they didn’t seem to think Fran had attacked them, but rather, that the ship had been hit by some sort of abnormal, weather-related phenomenon. To them, it must’ve looked like the lightning bolts had just randomly descended from the clear sky above.
「Next, my turn.」
『Sure.』
「Nn. Thor’s Hammer!」
Her follow up, however, clearly revealed that it’d all been her doing from the start.
A huge magic circle appeared right above one of the ships as Fran chanted the name of the spell that we’d gotten by leveling Lightning Magic up to level 8, the spell that’d failed to break Fermus’ defenses.
The thick, high powered lightning bolt that came with the spell descended from the magic circle. It tore the ship in half and left the pieces it came into contact with charred black. Whoever named the spell had aptly described it; its aftermath made it look as if the god of lightning himself had descended, swung his might hammer, and smashed it right into the ship.
『That spell looked like a pretty good fit.』
「Nn.」
I could help but think back to our battle with Fermus. He’d managed to mount a perfect defense against an attack that could totally wreck a pirate ship in one hit, albeit a small one, with nothing more than just his threads. He really was one hell of a strong fighter.
『Let’s try a different approach now, namely one that doesn’t make use of brute force.』
「What do?」
『I mean, all we’re doing is sinking a ship here, so we should be able to finish it off by just blasting a hole through its hull or something.』
「Really?」
『I’m pretty sure, yeah. We’ll have to see how this goes.』
I used the level 4 flame spell, Exploding Flare, and shot it towards the sea.
It did exactly as it was supposed to, and launched a large fireball that ultimately ended up exploding with a loud boom.
『Welp. That failed.』
「But made hole?」
『Yeah, but I didn’t hit the right spot. I was supposed to make a hole in its belly, not in its flank. I mean, they’ve still got water flooding in, but not enough to sink them right away. Man, Flame Magic gets really hard to control when you’re at sea.』
「Then what?」
『We’ll have to change it up a bit is all.』
I recast the same spell, but this time, enveloped the resulting projectile in a wall of wind so I could stop it from touching the seawater.
This time, I managed to accomplish my original goal of blowing a hole in the ship’s underside, but I didn’t actually manage to sink the vessel right away. The seawater had weakened Flare Explosion drastically, so the hole had ended up being way too small.
On the bright side, I did manage to move the fireball to the exact place I wanted it before it detonated, the pirate ship’s propulsion system was no more. The ship as a whole wouldn’t be sinking right away, but it’d eventually go down, especially seeing as how it could no longer move. Of course, that wasn’t to say I’d succeeded. The method I’d just devised would allow the pirates on board more than enough time to escape.
『I guess that means we should fire a few more at it.』
「Got it.」
We fired off another five projectiles and totally wrecked the bottom side of ship’s hull. It was no longer able to keep the water out, and so, it began sinking in earnest.
Our third approach did work, but it took far too might time, and required us to get too close to the ship. Honestly speaking, it wasn’t very practical.
『Next, I guess.』
「Next method?」
『It’s been a long time since I’ve used a full powered Telekinetic Catapult, so I was thinking of maybe giving it a go.』
「Got it.」
I was really curious as to the total amount of damage I’d be able to output, so we put every last bit of effort into powering up my attack. We used my telekinesis, alongside elemental blade and Fran’s wind magic. We poured in every last bit of mana we could and purposefully avoided considering the effect the attack would have on my durability.
「Ready?」
『Ready.』
「Nn!」
Fran borrowed the help of a wind spell to boost me up to a high speed. I telekinetically accelerated myself even further the moment I left her hands.
『Leggoooooooo bitchessssss!』
It felt really nice to finally let loose and just bash myself into something as hard as I could.
I destroyed both the ship’s masts. I hit the first head on and totally wrecked it before striking the second around where it was rooted into the ship. Despite that, I didn’t show even the slightest sign of stopping.
My blade smashed through the pirate ship’s hull; it penetrated every last wall and pillar before opening a massive hole in the seacraft’s belly.
I knew that was what’d happened, but it’d all gone by so quick that I hadn’t been able to process it. For me, it’d been more of a three step process. I left Fran’s hands, hit the mast dead on, and then suddenly found myself underwater.
Only after returning to Fran did I realize that I’d punched a huge hole in the ship. My telekinetic catapult had done quite a bit more damage than I’d been expecting it to do.
That said, overboosting elemental blade had totally killed my durability. It was kinda wasteful, and probably not worth using on a mere pirate ship.
「One ship left. Last method?」
『It’s kinda already started running away, so we should probably find ourselves a method that’ll allow us to sink it real quick.』
I began thinking about what we’d done so far in order to figure out what might work. It looked like using wind magic might be a good idea for the time being, as I’d be able to stall them with a cross wind.
「Can I choose?」
『Sure, what do you have in mind?』
「Need to ask Master to do something.」
Fran explained her concept to me. I was honestly quite surprised to hear it, as it involved pushing my ability to transform to the limit. Long story short, she told me to make myself huge.
Shape shifting itself wasn’t really anything out of the ordinary. I’d already tried becoming threads, as well as a shield on occasion. But this was going to be my first time literally just supersizing myself and nothing else.
She still wanted to be able to swing me, so I kept my handle the same size, but boosted the hell out of both my blade and guard with everything I had.
I ended up being way bigger than I expected. I’d long surpassed the horse slayer in terms of size; my blade had grown to be almost a whole 10 meters long. I’d more or less transformed into one of the anti-ship swords that a certain mech would always swing around. [2] [3]
『This work for you?』
「Nn. Perfect. Going now.」
『Please do. I won’t be able to keep this up for too long, so I’m going to have to ask you to be as quick as you can.』
「No problem!」
Fran more or less did the same thing she did to Rynford to the pirate ship. She jumped off Urushi, boosted my weight, cast elemental blade, and drew me from a sheath made out of air as she approached the ship.
「Haaaaaahhh!」
Naturally, the attack divided the pirate ship in two. The sheer amount of blunt force the strike carried caused the wood that made up the ship’s hull to fly all over the place as Elemental Blade set the whole goddamned thing on fire. The ship had no hope of surviving the attack. Neither its its front nor back half could do anything but sink into the ocean’s depths.
In the end, we figured that Thor’s Hammer and my Anti-Ship Sword mode were probably our two best options, with the former being better against a smaller number of foes, and the latter a larger group.
「Done.」
『Pretty much, yeah.』
_______________________________________
[1] I may be wrong, and please correct me if I am, but I believe this means Hundred Thunderbolts in Greek.
[2] A horse slayer, or zanbatou, is often referred to as a sword big enough to split both a man and his horse in half in one slash in the world of fiction. It’s a pretty commonly used mention in Japanese culture, and something whose origin can be blamed on China.
[3] I’m thinking this is referring to Schwert Gewehr, a 15.78m Anti-ship Sword from Gundam Seed. Though, in the raw, he says it comes from a game specifically. The game is probably Super Robot Wars, but I’m not actually 100% what the unit+sword he’s referring to is, because, though sword gundams are in SRW, they’re pulled in from animu, so….
