Jonas swore. “You idiot Yannis. That was a damn baby maelstrom snake and you had to kill it didn’t you?” He punched his first mate in the face. “You had to be the big man and try to take control of the ship didn’t you? Now you’ve got us all killed. Well done.” He rubbed his eyes and pried the intercom stone from Yannis’ attached hand. “Sis, is there any way you can increase the speed of the ship?”

Sleepy’s voice crackled throughout the ship. “I can transfer some of the wind batteries to the movement array, but if I do that things may get both loud and hard to breathe. We don’t have that many wind arrays on Rosie.” Jonas swore again. He moved to check the rest of the crew members sprawled around the bridge and began moving them towards the side of the room.

“Laurence, are you going to help me or are you just going to stare at that damn snake all day?” The sound of someone saying his name snapped Laurence out of the stupor he was in by seeing the snake. It was the biggest thing Laurence had ever seen, so he was slightly enthralled by it, but he was able to break himself away to start helping. He quickly grabbed three bodies and moved them out of the center of the room, leaving Jonas and Yannis slightly open mouthed at the strength the boy possessed. “Kid, are you a golden child?”

“Yes. I’m one of the golden children of the Absolution clan, a Saint ranked practitioner of the Book.”

Jonas whooped in joy. “The reason why a maelstrom snake is such a terrifying existence to us is that at at the point it reaches adulthood it becomes an extremely powerful pseudodragon saint-beast. If we have a saint with us, then the damage to the ship itself may be large, but we have a chance to survive.” Jonas stopped for a moment and began to move the last of the bodies out of the way. “Attention crew.” He said, grabbing the intercom stone once more. “I need all hands in the bridge or the engine. We are going to be cutting off the air supply to the rest of the ship, so if you are not in those places you will die. We will also need as many hands as possible to control the ship thanks to Zoo’s dumb decision to shoot at what turns out to be a baby maelstrom snake.

“You have two minutes to get to either the bridge or the engine. Go!”

Almost immediately the majority of the crew piled into the bridge from just outside, where they had been lurking and watching the events unfold. Now that their lives were in danger they banded together quickly, moved into combat positions and began grabbing for anything they could that would prolong their existences. The ship began speeding up, desperately trying to outpace the approaching wyrm.

The snake had obviously been watching its child play around, assessing the speed of the vessel in case anything happened that it did not expect. Originally the ship could be caught up with ease by the snake, but when the ship sped up fourfold the beast could not help but scream out in rage. Everyone on the ship could tell that the snake wanted for the ship to pay for what it had done to its spawn, and these screams of rage only hammered in the point more that they had made a huge mistake.

“Jonas, I have some bad news.” Sleepy’s voice crackled into life over the intercom. “I’m pushing the batteries as much as they will go, but I don’t know if they will last until the next major continent at this speed. Rosie was not meant to move this fast, there’s simply too much of her.”

“Just how long do you think she will last?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a day? I have Xuchi working out how far away we are from the next continent, but I don’t hold up much hope that we will actually have the batteries to get there.” There was a pause, then moments later the intercom crackled into life again. “I just had an idea. Laurence, you said you had several stones that possessed wind elements didn’t you? Please, bring them to the Engine. The more you have, the more likely it will be for us to be able to get out of this alive.”

Before even being ordered to do so Laurence moved out of the bridge and sprinted back towards where Sleepy was situated, inside the engine of the vessel. He pulled a small stone out of his bag of holding and stuffed it in his mouth before leaving the room. The stone was a soft yellow colour, one that people did not recognise, but since he had revealed himself as a Golden Child they had no doubt it was simply a peerless treasure. The moment Laurence left the floor of the bridge the stone in his mouth began working, supplementing him with a supply of non-dangerous air. The air itself was not too dangerous to the layman, but with the filtration and restoration systems in the ship turned off it quickly returned to its very low natural density. A density far lower than normal people could deal with. Laurence would have been fine, but he realised that the people on the ship would want him to fight the wyrm following them so he attempted to keep himself in the best condition he could. It was for this reason he took out a stone of air and used it as a simple air production and filtration system of his own.

He took the stone out the moment he entered the engine room, and saw the flashing lights and straining arrays, as they battled to keep the ship faster than the beast it was being chased by. Many of the batteries that had been brightly suffused with energy mere minutes before he had left were now dimming at an uncomfortably fast rate. It was distressing to watch them go down, and he began to realise that Sleepy’s prediction of a day was a very optimistic one, and would possibly cost the lives of everyone on the ship to pull off.

He saw Sleepy in the middle of the room, mana paths wrapped around her in abandon as she rewired things at break-neck speed. On the far side of the room was the navigator, Xuchi, staring into one of the water screens intently. He looked up at Laurence as he arrived and gave a wan smile. Things were not looking good, and the ominous shaking that had just begun did not make things seem better.

“Sleepy, I think I know how long we have until we get to the next island.” He said, pausing in dread. “I think we have three days at this speed, but I don’t know if the ship can even last that long at this speed. It wasn’t built for it.”

“I know, Xuchi.” The distressed engineer growled at her friend. “We have to do something though, I can’t just die like this. I refuse to!”

“Will these help?” Said Laurence, throwing her a small bag. Inside the bag were thirty tornadrite gems, each one the size and shape of a small grape but brimming with vibrant windy energy. Each one was like a storm trapped in a bead, bursting to get out.

When Sleepy saw the stones she nearly dropped everything, which would have killed them all, undoubtedly. Instead she screamed with joy, managed to get hold of herself and begin quickly swapping out the dead batteries that surrounded her feet, reattaching the stones to all the separate arrays that they were to become key parts of. The batteries before could be barely considered Earth classed items, but with Laurence’s reshaping the tornadrite was as close to Saint tier as could be without actually crossing over the boundary.

The ship ceased the shuddering it had just begun doing, but the effect was noticeable. Even when they had been travelling safely the ship would shudder slightly from the power draw, but now it was so smooth that there was near to no turbulence whatsoever. It showed a drastic difference in the quality of the batteries used. With just those twenty new batteries, all the element lacking arrays and wind based arrays were reignited with a fervour that was positively electric.

The crew collectively breathed a sigh of relief when Sleepy said they would be able to get to the island in less than a day thanks to the new batteries. A lot of them began laughing at their collective terror from the state the engine was in, but the laughter soon stopped. They were not out of the woods yet.

When the maelstrom snake saw the ship pick up speed once again it could not help but scream out again. Its wild wrathful cries spread out and stunned the crew of Rosie’s Demise into sobriety. They were definitely not out of the woods just yet. As the ship sped up so did the wyrm, the cat and mouse chase that had been happening for over a week going from dangerous to deadly proportions. The crew of Rosie were riding a giant bullet, and if they hit anything big enough to stop them then it would become very difficult to tell where the ship ended and the crew started.

Jonas’ voice crackled into being as the beast approached, “Laurence, I am so sorry that we have to burden you with this as well, but would you be able to defend the ship from the snake until we can get to land? If we can get to land then perhaps we will be safe.”

“Can you do it, for a whole day?” Said Sleepy, her brow furrowed with worry. “I mean, I know you must be from a big family, especially seeing as you just gave us twenty batteries of incredible power, but I don’t actually know how strong you are.”

“It’s okay Sleepy. I’m what you call a Saint, a golden child of the Absolution clan, and Yun is as strong as me.” Sleepy could not help but widen her eyes in astonishment. Finding out that a child was a Saint was incredibly rare, but not unheard of. Finding out there were two on the ship at once was mind blowing to the woman. She just stood watching her young friend leave the engine like a deer in headlights before slumping on the floor out of a combination shock and stress.

Shakily she turned her head to look at Xuchi and said “You know what, Xu? I think we will be alright.”