After my conversation with Martin, which left me feeling like a stray dog kicked to the street, even though I knew Martin meant well, I thought long and hard about what he said.

He was right of course, I had lost most of my drive since defeating the Black Dragon. Sure I still had the Stygian Order as a driving force but they were more a nuisance than anything else. And the Guild wasn’t something I would ever be able to defeat and that irked me.

I only struck back at the Stygian Order as payback for the shit Stone pulled in Houston and way back in Chicago. And now I was going back to my old habits of retaliation by building something specifically designed to kick the Guild in the teeth in Houston. Well, not them per se but their lapdog Edward Rosewill.

Eventually, I decided on a course of action. It was a hard decision to come to but I felt it was the right one. First, I would get help dealing with Houston, once we secured the city again, I would bring Ska back to Saint June, then I was off. I wanted to see what this world truly had to offer and if it was larger than Jupiter when everything was smashed together, I could spend the rest of my life exploring and still not see everything there was.

I admit finding a purpose again was exciting. I now had something other than revenge to look forward to. Sure I would run into enemies along the way but I would find new friends as well. And I could always return to Saint June when I needed a friendly face.

***

Two months went by quickly as Charles and SJ contractors gathered the materials and helped build the ship.

The Guild had only left a few people to watch the city but they made no move to get close, making it easy to build the ship without them knowing.

Titanium was not as easy to source as we had hoped but we found enough to use as armor plating. After it was compressed with earth magic we were left with one-inch thick plates that had originally been four inches thick. The rest of the superstructure was made from compressed steel bracing with holes punched in them to remove as much weight as possible. The quarter-inch thick beams looked flimsy but were as strong if not stronger than thick steel I-beams.

Mesh grating was laid down as flooring and the interior walls were formed from hollow aluminum tubing as they weren’t structural. It gave the ship a very spartan aesthetic but that was fine. I could liven it up on my travels.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know shit about building an actual ship. Not that anyone could say they knew how to build a flying ship. The end result was something that might be classified as a small corvette in tonnage and only measured forty-five meters from bow to stern. It was smaller than most yachts.

That was where the resemblance ended. Unlike a normal ship with a sharp V-shaped hull, my ship had a much more shallow bottom. The design was a bit of a compromise as it was hard to shape compressed titanium, so flat plates were used anywhere we could.

The end result looked extremely menacing and reminded me of the stealth ship designs that were starting to be built around the world before everything went to shit. The top of the ship was almost completely flat except for an angular protrusion near the back that rose up four feet off the deck. I had wanted to leave it all flat but design and material constraints required that I add it in. At least it wasn’t useless.

The hump provided three main purposes. One was an angled hatch that faced forward and allowed entrance to the top deck. Another was a larger rear surface area for the propulsion runes, giving just a bit more speed. And the last was an elevated mount for a ball turret.

The ball turrets were my favorite bit of design that I implemented. The top-mounted one sported four of my modified mana lasers in a square configuration. There were three more ball turrets on the top of the ship. One on either side at the midpoint of the vessel and hanging slightly off the sides like tumors. This gave them the ability to fire at a forty-five-degree angle downward. Then there was the forward-mounted gun. Unlike the side ones, it was set back from the front a few feet. Those three turrets were triple barrel configurations of standard mana cannons that were designed by me.

They weren’t quite as powerful as the Guild’s cannons but with three firing as either a burst or alternating, it was a withering barrage. I had decided to add those types of cannons because they offered more explosive impact versus my penetrating impact of the mana lasers.

There weren’t any turrets along the sides of the hull, mostly because it would have been overkill if I had included them. Targets were likely to be below me or above me and I could tilt the ship or raise and lower it to bring them in line with my weapons.

That brings me to the bottom-mounted weapons. These were trickier to build as I did want the ship to be able to float so there couldn’t be any open seams.

I had toyed with the idea of making floating gun platforms that could be released but controlling them all from one terminal proved impossible in my tests. So I modified the top-mounted ball turrets slightly.

The turrets were half-spheres that would flip open when needed, when not in use they would flip closed, leaving the underside smooth and flat. The barrels – like the ones at the top of the ship – would slide along a central channel and the ball itself could rotate a hundred and eighty degrees allowing the turrets to fire at any angle I desired. This was only possible due to the weirdness of magic. If the turrets were electrically operated it would not have worked. The bottom of the ship sported eight turrets. Four quad barrel mana laser turrets and four triple barrel mana cannons.

The cost in mithril alone was staggering and I did have to pull from SJ’s coffers to purchase the last of it. Charles was a bit grumpy about the loss of capital but he was happy once he saw what it went toward.

Was it overkill and ridiculous, maybe but some of the monsters and people I had come across couldn’t be dismissed easily. Besides, firing all of the weapons at one time would probably deplete most of the core. Speaking of the core, I had taken the three separate mana hearts used in the fortress and fused them into a massive crystal. It was housed securely in an armored cabin, inside the control center of the ship, which itself was thickly armored. If anything hit that, I was screwed, so better safe than sorry.

I had decided to go with one crystal instead of separate ones due to the mana gathering array I built inside that room. It was similar to the drainer but pulled from ambient mana instead of items or other mana hearts. It wouldn’t be very good if my weapons kept running out of juice while I tried to power them.

The control center had four seats, a throwback to the fortress but I would control everything from a single console. And boy, what a control room it was. I had utilized some advanced runic techniques to implement this next piece of tech but the end result was amazing.

Like with my helmet, the entire interior of the room could be made see-through. The only things not affected were the small areas around each rotating station. Apparently floating on nothing made most people sick to their stomachs. Cleaning that up wasn’t much fun but that wasn’t the only feature of this new command bridge. With a special pair of glasses, I could target anything with a visual indicator like a crosshair. It couldn’t compensate for wind or fall off but I would figure those out on my own and adjust the settings later.

The glasses were a temporary thing meant for testing and eventually, I was going to just tattoo the runes over my other eye. The final feature of the bridge was the ability to zoom in, like an enormous telescope. It was much more useful than the top-down view the remote viewing device gave me. I still kept that though as there were blind spots on the ship and it would help prevent me from missing something.

I poured all of my knowledge and improvements into this ship. Gone were the simple defensive systems I had employed before. I built a runic program to determine if an object was a friend or foe and determine the best way to deal with the threat. I couldn’t really call it AI, as it was magic-based and wasn’t even as complex as some of the operating systems Earth had been using before the System but it was a step above my previous kludged together system.

I couldn’t even say the idea was original. I came up with it after mulling over that homunculus and those weird cleaning golems I purchased. I figured if something like that could be autonomous, why couldn’t the ship's systems operate that way. The ship was essentially a partial golem. I didn’t give the control systems full autonomy as that would be dangerous. Plus it is a completely untested system, there may be changes I had to make.

The control systems were new but the ship still sported shields and the ability to cloak but the shields were upgraded to be twice as strong as before. I couldn’t go beyond that or the system would drain too quickly. The cloak was only improved through energy usage and I now added a third system called active camouflage that deployed a simple illusion spell. The computer would determine the surroundings and try to mimic them as closely as possible.

It wasn’t a perfect solution. I had spent two weeks trying to get it to function properly at all. It looked ok at a hundred feet or more. Any closer and it was a dead giveaway that something was off. But the illusion could be maintained indefinitely for just the original mana cost. So there was no more worrying about the mana heart running dry while I’m off galavanting away from the ship.

The last big upgrade was the propulsion. My techniques and skill had improved to the point where I was able to increase the speed by twenty percent and the lift by thirty percent. It may not seem like much but the ship was less than half the weight of the fortress and that fat bastard was capable of flying at forty miles an hour. I figured I could fly at almost eighty now, due to having fewer thrusters but being more streamlined. And my altitude could now reach a thousand feet, doubling what the fortress was capable of. Most of that was thanks to the larger bottom surface area. This was all theory though as I hadn’t finished installing all the systems. I also hadn’t named the vessel yet, deciding a launch ceremony was in order for something this monumental.

I hadn’t only spent my time on the ship though, no I had a surprise for Martin and the city. I smiled thinking about his reaction when he saw it.

***

It took a few more weeks to get everything installed into the ship, which I had named Retribution because that was what would happen if anyone fucked with it. Charles had done an outstanding job of decorating the dry dock for the occasion and colored ribbons flapped in the breeze off the ocean.

A gaggle of people had come to see and tour the craft. I let it happen, suppressing my annoyance at having people I hardly knew aboard. Martin said it would help my image, not that I cared about that but I did it for him and the others. It wasn’t like they would learn anything from it. The systems were offline and other than the turrets at the top of the ship, everything else was artfully hidden behind armor plates or runes. In some cases both.

“I gotta say, I think you outdid yourself with this beast,” Martin said, clapping me on the shoulder.

“You should see it when it’s in battle mode,” I whispered.

“Oh, I can only imagine,” he chuckled. “When is the first trip?”

“Well, shakedown cruise today. Then fix any issues that crop up. So probably next week.”

“Oh, that soon, anything I should be aware of?”

“My goal has always been to retake Houston. But I can’t do that alone. I sent a message out to Marshall Sumner to see if he wants his city back. If not, I'll just decapitate the snake and be on my way.”

Martin didn’t look too happy at my pronouncement. “I wish you would reconsider but I know you are set on this path.”

“It's not good to be surrounded by enemies,” I said with a shrug, “Besides, it's time you get your alliance back on track.”

“That would be nice. Trade is starting to falter and reports are coming in from Nashville that our traders are being turned away. It seems like someone figured out they were working for you.”

I nodded, “It was bound to happen sooner or later. At least there is Huran and with the improvements, I added to the barges, they can get there and back in two months.”

I chatted with a few other people as the spectators all toured the ship and eventually everyone walked off and sat in the stands to witness the christening of the vessel.

I watched Martin step up to a podium. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this monumental day. For so long we have been scrabbling just to survive this new world, living off scraps and making do with what was available. But no more!” Martin pointed behind him at the gleaming metal ship. “This is proof that humanity is past the point of simply surviving. We are now capable of building and growing, of taking on the threats around us. And this was one man, we are so much more together. With our bond, we will persevere and carve a nation anew!”

There was a standing ovation as Martin nodded to the gathered crowd and released the bottle of champagne someone had found against the bow of the ship.

“For our future!” he shouted, and the crowd joined him.

I wanted to slip away from the attention, but Fiona eyed me from beside Martin. I sighed and stuck around for the back-patting and handshakes that followed. Ska was here as well but he was on security duty for the party so didn’t have to play nice.