Chapter XXIV: A little Piracy I

The Wildlands South of the Heian Kingdom, The Great Plateau

Month of the Garuda 37, 172 ,328 DE

The fuselages of the two big airships have lengths of more than one hundred and fifty meters and widths of about sixteen or seventeen meters. They are the biggest airships I have seen in person.

Through the lowered ramp at the back of one large airship, the one that cargo was being unloaded from, a swathe of dim, red-tinged light illuminates a small section of the landing field. Looking at the steadiness of the light, it should be produced by light crystals or electrical lighting, rather than gas or oil lamps.

When we reach the base of the ramp, I pick up the scents of hundreds of humans. Most are faint enough to be certain they are not on the ship. However, twenty-five are much stronger.

"There are people on the airship. It could be as many as twenty-five to thirty." Despite my soft-voiced words, I know full well that there will not be more than twenty-two men and three women on the airship. I just cannot give away too much about how keen my senses are. If I were a Core Formation Cultivator, I could pass it off as Cultivation technique, but as I am, I have no excuse I could use to cover for my superhuman sense of smell and Ferocious Beast-like hearing.

Vorn looks up at the airship. "In the Dunkle Sonne Empire, a ship of this class has a crew of twenty-five, and that's all that are on it."

As I glance at Vorn, he shrugs and grins mockingly. "I'm a Body Cultivator with the blood of the Great Bear, diluted though it may be, in my veins. My senses are superior to a human's senses. Yours are even sharper than mine. You should already know there are only twenty-five people in this airship."

I cannot keep from narrowing my eyes. Vorn is not as dumb as he looks. I do not know exactly how sharp his senses are, but if he has the blood of the Great Bear in his veins, even in small amounts, he will have much sharper senses than common humans. While I have not shown exactly how sharp my senses are, I have, still, given him enough evidence that they are sharper than his. He has realized there is something different about me.

There are more Great Beasts than just the Great Wolves. In total, this world has thirteen species of Great Beast. The Great Bears fought against the Dragons, alongside the Great Wolves. They never turned traitor like the Great Snakes and the Great Alligators, the only Great Beasts that the Temple of the Celestial Court acknowledges as "good" Beasts.

I nod. "Yeah. I know. You take the guard on the left of the ramp. I'll take the on the right."

Vorn flashes another grin, one overflowing with violence. "Okay!"

"Three. Two. One. Go!"

Springing from the ground into the open hatchway at the top of the ramp, I grab the edge of the fuselage. Using the fuselage, I flip around and hammer both my heels into the chest of the half-awake guard leaning against the hull just inside the cargo hatch.

Clunk.

The guard bounces off the wall he was leaning against, and I grab him in a chokehold, before my feet hit the deck.

Crunch.

Wrenching my arms, I break multiple bones in the guard's neck and dislocate his spine. The dead guard's body hangs limply in my arms. He was a Cultivator at the peak of Qi Condensation, but he was so inattentive to his surrounding that he never had the chance to fight back.

Corrugated iron plates cover the floor of the cargo hold. It runs from the back to the front of the airship. All the cargo it carried has already been offloaded.

Large metal lockers line both walls. After opening a few lockers, which are filled with tools and cargo nets, I find one with enough space to fit the corpse. Stuffing the corpse inside, I lock the door and find another locker to stuff my backpack and the chest in. Turning, I see Vorn closing a locker on his side.

Ladders on the walls lead to higher decks in multiple places, but there are no stairways. Using the nearest ladder, we climb through the open hatch to the next deck. Two large, silent steam engines take up most of the space in the thirty meter long room. I place my hand on the cold outer wall of the firebox. From the coolness of the metal, it has been more than a day since it was last running.

Opening the firebox, I see a single fist-sized chunk of black rock that radiates a faint warmth, a firestone. Mined from the outer edges of the cones of volcanoes, these rocks have the dormant Power of Elemental Fire residing within them. During operation, sigils etched into the interior surfaces of the firebox stimulate the fire stone to release heat and fire. A single fire stone this size could run this steam engine for a year or more before the Elemental Fire has been used up.

After examining the sigils, I pull out a knife and painstakingly etch new lines into several of the sigil.

"What are you doing?" Vorn's soft whisper carries an irritated edge to it, and the odor of that irritation fills his scent.

"Rigging this to blow up, when they try to get more than half engine's potential output. It won't sink the airship, but it will crack the firebox. It'll be crippled."

"How long will it take?"

Pulling my torso out of the firebox, I close the door. "It's already done. Just one more to go."

With Vorn standing next to the hatch leading to the rest of the deck and frowning, I lean into the firebox of the second steam engine. It only takes me a few minutes to finish my work.

When I join Vorn next to the hatch, he has his ear against it and his eyes closed. "I don't hear any movement outside. This rest of this deck should be a troop bay and galley. The airship crew quarters will be on the third deck along with the bridge. If they're following common military protocols, there should only be one officer and one airman standing watch on the bridge. The rest of the officers and crew should be sleeping. This is only a transport, not a warship. None of them should be above the Foundation Establishment realm, but the captain is probably at the peak of Foundation Establishment."

The peak of Foundation Establishment would mean he roughly compares to the Third Circle of Coalescence. The Third Circle for a common human, that is. My physical strength already reaches that level. The only problem is that a Cultivator can use Mana to fuel their Martial techniques, but I cannot.

I frown. "We kill him. I don't want to try and restrain someone that strong. We should be able to make a bit of noise without anyone outside the airship hearing. This thing is pretty solid."

Vorn nods. "I agree. Killing him is no problem. But if we want to capture him alive, it would take too long and be too risky."

"We'll start with the bridge watch. Lead the way."

I follow Vorn through an eighty meter long room fill with rows of bunk beds for troops. At the bulkhead between the troop bay and the galley, a pair of ladder leads on the outer walls to the top deck. The ladder opens into a corridor running the width of the airship. Next to the ladder is a closed hatch leading to the front of the airship. At the opposite end of the corridor, the other ladder and another hatch can be seen.

Vorn points at the hatch and whispers. "The bridge."

Nodding, I grab the hatch wheel. "Three. Two. One. Go!"

As soon as I spin the wheel and push open the hatch, I launch myself at a woman in a dark blue uniform with a thin line of gold braid on the epaulets. She spins around at the noise, but I am already on top of her before she can finish rising to her feet from the captain's chair.

Crack.

My punch snaps the woman's head halfway around, and she slumps to the deck.

Crunch!

Turning my head, I see Vorn's knee pining the deformed head of an airman to the huge wheel in front of him.

Coming over to me, Vorn flips the woman onto her back and places his fingertips on her neck. After a moment, he looks at me. His flat expression is at odds with a hint of surprise in his scent. "The first officer. She's in the seventh or eighth level of Foundation Establishment. If you can drop her this easily, we should be able to take the captain alive."

I look at the airship's wheel. "Do you know how to fly an airship?"

"You sabotaged the steam engines."

I point at the much smaller yacht, which can be seen from the bridge window. "I haven't sabotaged that one. Not yet, anyway."

"I can't. But I'm sure she can." Vorn points at the unconscious first officer.

After tying the first officer's hands with her own belt, I cut off her jacket and pants. While Vorn stares at me with raised eyebrows, and an odor of surprise mixed in his scent, I cut both into strips and use them to tie her legs together from ankles to mid-thigh. Cutting the arms off her shirt, I stuff one into her mouth and use the other to tie it in place.

"Let's find the captain." Rising to my feet, I leave the bridge.

Leading off the cross corridor behind the bridge, another corridor runs half the length of the airship. The first two doors on the opposite side of the corridor have plaques. Word etched into the plaques, using the alphabet used by the Dunkle Sonne Empire and about half of the Jeweled Kingdom, the plaque read "Captain" and "First Mate" in the Dunkle Sonne language. They make things much too easy.

Drawing my Bowie knives, I point at the knob of the captain's cabin. Vorn nods and grabs the knob.

"Three. Two. One. Go!"

As Vorn turns the knob, I slam into the door with my shoulder. The door flies open, and I launch myself at the figure sitting cross-legged on the bed. The figure springs from the bed to its feet, revealing itself to be a man clad only in braies. He reaches for a sheathed, thick-bladed sabre hanging from a chair near the bed.

Before the captain can draw his sabre, the toes of my right foot connect with his balls. The captain barely manages a loud grunt before his body slams into the steel bulkhead behind his bed. As he slides down the wall and crumples to his knees, red blood stains the front of his braies.

I spring at the captain, and he blocks my left-hand knife with his still-sheathed sabre. My right-hand knife punches through his left temple and out the opposite side of his head, behind his right ear.

"Hey! Who are-" A loud gurgle cuts off the lout question voiced in Sprache, the Dunkle Sonne language.

Running out of the captain's cabin, I see the door to the cabin next to the captain's wide open. A man wearing only a pair of uniform pants lays dead at Vorn's feet. A slash from Vorn's wide-bladed sword has nearly severed the man's head from his body.

As I hold my ear to the door of the cabin opposite Vorn's kill, the sound of soft snoring reaches me. Opening the door, I wrinkle my nose as the odor of humans fucking inundates the room. I slip over to the bed and slit the throat of the sleeping woman.

The eyes in the woman's heavily made-up face open wide. She stares at me in horror, but as I hold her down, the light of life soon fades from her eyes.

We quickly move through the rest of the cabins, killing as we go. No one else wakes up before they are already dying.

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