Layla didn’t have time to be annoyed. Or irritated, or pissed off, or any other negative emotion directed at the runescript engine, the Second Runeer, or Captain Mitchell. She certainly didn’t have time to be annoyed with the plane in general.

This wasn’t really a proper plane, she knew. It was too deep in the Chaos Sea and any plane should be capable of bearing life. Here, with the fluctuating ambient Chaos, with the density and the pressure, any newborn would be snuffed directly out of the womb.

Ah, but shouldn’t life find a way? Shouldn’t those already living here manage to adapt, to change, and to grow stronger? Instead of that happening, the ambient Chaos in this place changed frequency enough that any adaptation made to survive an initial state became fatally wrong when things shifted. The only way to stay safe, the only proven way in all of the Myriad Planes really, was to sheathe oneself in a Protective Field, or live in an area with such a protection.

While she initially thought that the settlement that was nearby was one such area, when the crimson coloured Luminous Moon appeared in the skies, everything changed.

The ambient Chaos behaved differently. It was much more lively and wouldn’t stay within the narrow lines of the runescript. With a simple line that wouldn’t have been much of a problem, but for the complex beast that was the Horizon’s Runescript Engine, it was a disaster waiting to happen. Ambient Chaos that was in the process of being tamed into usable Animus leapt out of the lines and came back having lost progress.

Instructions from the lines were gone and the ambient energy refused to be denatured. That, in turn, meant that the succeeding lines were worse than useless. It was a miracle that the entire thing didn’t just go up in smoke!

Well, Layla supposed that there was a reason why these things cost an arm and a leg.

“Before everything else, the ambient Chaos must convert to denatured Animus.” She muttered.

“So do it?” Christoph Sandmeier said.

“It’s not that simple you half-wit!” she growled.

“The ambient Chaos is moving out of the lines, right? Then just make the lines thicker.”

“Right, so you want to rewrite the engine’s entire runescript code,” she said with a grunt. “How many lines do you think the engine has?”

“Uh, thousands?”

“Haah.” Layla sighed. Then reached over and thwacked him upside the head.

“Ow!”

“Each square inch of the engine probably has a hundred lines,” she pointed out, “and that’s only on the surface! There’s no way we could rewrite or even reinforce that in less than a year! And even worse, we won’t have the swarm foddering space for it!” Each line was hair thin, and the space between each line was just about the same, if even less.

“Stop hitting me, woman!” Christoph growled, then under his breath, “No wonder you’re still single.”

“What was that?” Layla asked sharply, tapping his foot in warning.

“Nothing. Nothing. Ehehehe.”

“Hmph! Get to work then!”

“Eh? I thought you said rewriting all that will take years!”

“What are you blathering about? Scribe a separate converter field and attach it to the feeder lines!” Layla groused. “If we have any hope of getting this tub to fly again we’ve got to restore power to the lifter coils, and for that we’ve got to start the conversion process! Build a separate conversion area and slap it on the engine! It will work if Animus is put in rather than ambient Chaos, but we can’t personally do it!”

“...I don’t know the sequence. I’m not at that level.”

“Oh for the Burning Moon!” Layla snarled, “I’ll do that, you fix the degradation!”

“Yes ma’am!”

Layla huffed as she grabbed a block of Venere Wood. It was about as long as her forearm and as thick as her palm. From her hip satchel, she grabbed her scribing pen, a narrow strip of alloyed jade that fit comfortably in her fingers. The tip was fine enough to carve a line that was as thin as a hair.

She put on a pair of magnifying goggles and got to work. It took her a couple hours of painstakingly precise work to build a converter. This piece acted much the same as the engine, but on a much lesser scale. The process of taking ambient Chaos and converting it to denatured Animus was quite complex, but only if it was done without someone’s intervention.

Layla, for example, could fill a jade cartridge with her Animus and it would be stripped of her signature after a couple of hours. That Animus could then be added into the ship’s power network and used for whatever purpose necessary.

However, it took someone several hours to recover their reserves, and the transfer rate from someone’s Anima to the cartridge wasn’t even at fifty percent. A hundred Lumens from a single person would be thirty to forty Lumens in the cartridge. Even if she accounted for all the crew members, that was only eight hundred lumens. The Ebon Horizon consumed a thousand lumens of denatured Animus in flight. Per minute.

The engines outputted about ten thousand a minute. The coils that allowed the ship to hover cost a thousand a minute, while the propulsion field cost anywhere from two to three thousand. Finally, the Protective Sphere needed at least five hundred a minute to sustain, though that number could increase at need. And the living runescript lines that maintained the living conditions of the Ebon Horizon costs about six hundred or so per minute. A grand total of four thousand one hundred lumens a minute. At least.

Ah, and that wasn’t counting the Plasma Carronades, though those needed only a hundred Lumens per bolt, at minimum. But in battle, all three carronades could collectively consume more than a thousand lumens per minute each, maybe two thousand if the captain wanted to ensure proper penetration.

In short, it would take days of gathering Animus from the crew just for a single minute of operation. And that wasn’t counting the Animus needed to make sure the Protective Sphere worked properly.

The hastily-made converter Layla scribed would be able to output five hundred Lumens a minute. And she needed at least five more just to get the Horizon airborne.

“Here!” She tossed the impromptu converter to Christoph. “Copy the lines on a block.”

Maybe he had enough skill to do it, though she doubted it. Anyway, practice would eventually allow the Second Runeer to pull his weight.

It took three tries before he got it right and the efficiency wasn’t all that good. Only a hundred and fifty lumens a minute, thereabouts.

“Tsk. I can only fit five of these things in the engine.” Layla clicked her tongue.

“What! Then I’m just wasting time here!” Christoph shouted.

“Pipe down! Your voice is annoying!” Layla growled.

The engine room wasn’t really big enough for both of them to work, but the Horizon didn’t have a dedicated workshop so they had to make do. She’d managed to build four of the converter blocks and she began work to graft it onto the engine. All told, they had two thousand one hundred fifty Lumens a minute, just barely enough to fly. But…only if she finished repairing the lifter coils and propulsion field.

The Horizon suddenly shook, making her stumble and crash against the wall. Christoph caught her as she bounced off, his scrawny arms around her waist. Still, he wasn’t that strong or stable and they both wound up in a heap on the floor. Layla kicked out of the tangle, ignoring the young man’s groan of protest.

A messenger crane smacked her in the face as she yanked the door open, and with an outraged splutter, she opened and read it: “Route power to the carronades and Sphere!”

“Burning Moon!” she spat as she ran back inside the engine room and triggered a couple of switches. “Come on! Work! Swarm fodder!” She swore when the indicators remained in the negative. She ran back out, “Keep the engine stable!” She yelled to Christoph.

“How?!” came the Second Runeer’s howl.

“Just keep the rotting Chaos inside the lines!”

All he had to do was coat the transfer lines to make sure everything stayed where it should. His personal intervention would make sure the flow of denatured Animus would be sufficient, but he wouldn’t be able to move and he’d have the mother of all headaches tomorrow.

If they all lived that long.

When she got on deck, it was to the sight of several Chaos ships in the air, and all four of them had started their bombardment. The Protective Sphere was flickering, powered by the remnants left in to reserve cartridges. The starboard carronade fired once, but was intercepted by an icy boulder.

Layla dove towards the connector lines as she activated her advanced Chaos Sight. As she suspected, the denatured Animus flow stuttered from warped lines. The ambient Chaos was thick enough that they nearly obscured the engraved lines and she nearly had her nose pressed on the deck planks.

“Chaos!” She cussed even as she extended her Animus onto the warped lines.

There was no choice, she had to impose herself into the runescript. It would work for a time, but eventually, the discrepancy between denatured Animus and the lines infused with her Intent would cause the lines to explode. It should last just long enough until the end of the battle, hopefully. But as soon as she finished with all the connectors to the sailors’ station, she became aware of another problem.

She could see the brave men and women of the Ebon Horizon’s crew sweating profusely. White knuckled grips, trembling arms, and nervous foot tapping. The lively ambient Chaos was wreaking havoc on their senses and they could barely output enough of their Animus, and Intent, to protect the ship properly.

What could she do?

Layla bit her lip. There was little she could do now in the midst of battle other than to jury rig a few of the lines. What she needed to do now was to ensure that the power supply going to the carronades were steady. Huh?

Why weren’t the carronades firing? It’s been a couple of minutes and a second shot hasn’t been fired yet.

Zoey stood near the rails, her short frizzy hair fluttered in the wind. She had her longbow strung, and an arrow ready. She drew back and ambient Chaos, red, angry Chaos, coalesced around the arrowhead. The arrow itself was also an Animus construct, but it looked completely stable compared to the angry red light.

A moment later, she released the arrow, and it left a pale red streak in the air before it smacked against one of the ships, the one that looked like it had been carved from a glacier. The fiery arrow melted a couple of inches into the ice before it stopped completely and was snuffed.

“Tsk.” Zoey clicked her tongue before she grabbed a metal shard from her hip satchel.

Animus and ambient Chaos coalesced around the shard, stretching it out, then formed into a shaft and fletching. She drew her bow and aimed, then released. The entire process lasted a couple of seconds, and this time, a halo of ambient Chaos surrounded the arrow rather than flames. When it smashed into the hull, parts of it shattered. Cracks crawled along the ice, before large head sized fragments fell off. Not much better than the first, honestly.

Shaking her head, Layla slid down the ladder towards the starboard gunnery. The gunner, Ordinary Sailor Lambert Tyr, was frantically pulling apart the plasma collector chamber.

“What are you doing?” Layla asked sharply.

“Ma’am!” Lambert snapped a salute, “After the first shot, black smoke rose from the collector chamber and the carronade wouldn’t load properly.

“Move aside.”

He snapped another salute then stepped back. Layla didn’t give him another glance and handily ignored Captain Mitchell’s voice screaming from the communication pipes.

“Fire again, swarm fodder. What in Chaos is happening! Shoot, burn you!”

The plasma collector had burst, Layla saw. The density of the ambient Chaos was too much. It created too much plasma and the chamber couldn’t take it. Thankfully, such equipment was prone to failure and there was ample supply. But…she glanced at the floor where nearly a dozen of the collector chambers lay smoking. Those things were about six inches wide and eighteen long, and each of them had burst. She grabbed a fresh one from the supply, installed it in the carronade, but didn’t lock it in. It would only burst like the others.

Instead, she opened funneller and modified the runescript lines. She had to overwrite it with her Intent, and hopefully it would survive long enough to last the battle. Spellweaving was all about fast application as opposed to runescribing’s lengthy and methodical progress. The first didn’t last long, but at least it could be performed quickly while the latter would take several hours.

She adjusted the lines to limit the intake into the collector. Too much plasma meant there was too much Animus going in. She halved the intake, paused, then halved it again, so that only a quarter of the previous amount would channel.

“Go!” She yelled to Lambert who scrambled back into the gunner’s sight.

Layla ran out of the gunnery chamber and back up the deck, just in time to see the starboard carronade blast a powerful blue plasma bolt that shattered the bow of the glacier Chaos ship. Cracks formed all throughout the hull, then its lifter mechanism failed and it crashed down on the plateau.

The other ships sailed out of the firing arc, but continued to bombard them with projectiles. The glacier ship’s captain had been a fool to underestimate the Ebon Horizon. They may have been downed, but she was still an Imperial vessel.

The glacier touched down on the plateau’s rocky surface, but that wasn’t the end of it. No, the broken hull disgorged dozens of figures.

Lignoculi, Layla cursed. The Xylarchy’s swarm fodder warriors. The other ships had all moved out of the Horizon’s immediate firing arc, but that only meant they would need to put full power into the Protective Sphere. Plus, the earthen barriers Layla had raised a couple of days ago would give them sufficient cover.

Ah, all of the ships have released their warriors. It looked like things would be settled blade to blade.