Chapter Eighteen.

I’m honestly not sure what I expected from fight club. Visions of cult-like circles of men fighting in close quarters made me nervous that this was some kind of social trap for the ‘odd man out’, i.e. a convenient excuse to try and beat me up. Curiosity eventually defeated my common sense though, as I figured in the absolute worst case I could always transform and just blast my way out. Even if that might cause some… difficulties later.

So it was with a fair amount of tension that I walked into the ship’s hold, following the sound of voices echoing up the stairway. When I actually entered the room though, I felt my eyebrows creep upwards in surprise as I looked out over easily sixty people. It was cramped— cargo boxes had been stacked all the way to the ceiling to make enough room for people to stand— but the atmosphere was relaxed, even orderly. It felt almost like an organized social event, not some hidden fight club.

I think I may have misunderstood some things.

I stood around kinda awkwardly for a minute before I saw corporal Tibbs waving at me from a smaller grouping of about a dozen people. Smiling with relief I waved back in acknowledgement and walked over.

"Evening, sir!" Tibbs greeted me. "Glad you made it. The master-at-arms will be starting things shortly, think we're just waiting on a few more."

Nodding my understanding, I was then introduced to a dizzying array of people from the ship's contingent of enlisted marines. They all seemed friendly enough, if a little reserved around me because of my 'special' status as a mage.

The last people to arrive were my final shock of the evening, as a group of men strode down the stairs headed by Cade. These people practically oozed danger, marching in like a pack of wolves and standing aloofly in their own group. At least until Cade broke formation and stepped over to my group, which seemed to take the wind out of their sails in a hurry.

I tried to keep the suspicion off my features as he approached, carefully forcing a blank expression. A few "hrmh"s of introduction later and everyone had easily accepted him while I played along despite my misgivings.

“Alright lads, listen up!” An older man with a greying beard stood up on one of the crates and shouted through the room to get everyone’s attention. “Been an easy trip so far and I don’t want you lot getting soft and sitting on your asses all day, so here we are. Light sparring only, there’s no healer aboard. Keep it clean— yes you, Sevran— and professional. Ale and water are in the corner if you want it, but I see any of you slobs getting drunk and brawling then you’ll be on night watch until I get tired of writing your name on the list. We clear?”

A chorus of agreement answered him, and the various groups in the room formed into small circles that defined impromptu ‘rings’ for us to spar in. I briefly hoped Cade would rejoin the group he’d come in with, but that was crushed pretty quickly when he happily stood right next to me. Two of the men in our circle— I’d already forgotten their names— stepped into the center and without further prompting began what looked like a fairly complex series of martial movements. Which caused a fairly embarrassing realization in me.

I don’t actually know how to fight.

Oh I had plenty of experience slinging magic around or going full beast-mode, but it had honestly never occurred to me before accepting this invitation that I had effectively no experience fighting as a human. This was a problem, because I wasn’t sure how much strength and speed I could display without raising some eyebrows— in particular, Cade’s.

The whole situation with him was making me nervous, as I still had no idea what he wanted. He’d approached me and been friendly enough, but I kept playing back that conversation I’d overheard in my head.

What exactly is going on here?

“You up for a round, sir?” Tibbs asked from across the circle, a friendly challenge in his voice as the last two broke apart.

“Uh… sure.” I said, hesitantly.

Stepping forward, I squared myself against the corporal and took a pretty basic boxing stance. Tibbs arched an eyebrow quizzically at the unfamiliar— and probably terrible— stance, but shrugged and came at me.

I did my best to slide around his blows and get myself some space, but the crowded confines of the room and our fighting ring limited my movement. Strikes and kicks came from multiple directions as the corporal tried to pin me down. It was completely different from the time I’d fought off the angry mob back in Delmoth. Tibbs was fast and obviously skilled, lacking the obvious telegraphs that made fighting the workers so easy. It also didn’t help that I was struggling to hold myself back to something approaching human levels. I hadn’t really done any physical fighting since entering larval stage II, and I was scared between that and my new Path I would accidentally hurt the guy if I got serious. Which is an awful lot of excuses for me justifying getting my ass handed to me in a spar.

Ducking quickly under an overhead strike, I only had a moment to realize it was a feint before I felt my legs get swept out from under me by the more experienced fighter. My reaction speed was fast enough that I probably could have caught myself, but in a split-second decision I took the fall and landed heavily with an audible “oof!”. Staring up at the ceiling, I struggled to push down my growing embarrassment.

On the bright side, maybe my sucking at this will throw Cade off the scent…

Tibbs entered my vision above me and extended a hand with a grin.

“You’re right slippery, that’s for sure, sir. Can’t say I’ve ever fought someone with that particular style before, though I suppose you’re more for magic than fist-fighting, eh?”

Laughing, I nodded and accepted the hand up.

“Yeah, I suppose if I’m fighting hand-to-hand it means I’ve already screwed up.”

He agreed good-naturedly and offered to show me some pointers after the other people had a turn. We cleared the ring and I shot a surreptitious glance at Cade to see his reaction to the fight. He looked almost… pained, and catching my eyes he quickly approached me.

“Can we talk?” He asked, seriously.

Uh oh. Play it cool.

“Sure, what’s up?

“Hrmm.” He said, pointing with his chin to a corner of the room with fewer people in it.

“Uh… sure, ok.”

I nervously followed him over, and when we got to the corner he confronted me with a serious look on his face.

“You have… never fought before.”

He held up a hand to forestall my incoming protests.

“Apologies, I’ll rephrase. You have never trained to fight before.” The older man stated with the unshakeable confidence of experience. “You have seen combat, and you are fast, but your ‘style’ is mostly bad habits, guesswork and you copying fighters you have seen second-hand. Despite this, you were also holding back significantly against Tibbs.”

My eyes widened as the scarily-accurate deconstruction of my fight continued.

Who is this guy?

Cade seemed uncomfortable at speaking so much in one sitting, while I couldn’t think of a way to refute anything he’d said, so we lapsed into silence while he gathered himself.

“I’d like to teach you.”

Um… what?

Of all the ways I’d seen this conversation potentially going, this was definitely not one of them.

“I… I don’t—”

A familiar *crackle* in the air cut me off as the room went abruptly silent with tension. When it happened again, the entire room began racing for the doors just as an announcement came over the ship’s intercom.

“Surge incoming! All hands to battle stations! Brace for emergency core disconnect!”

A brief spike of worry for Shani filtered through me as the surge built up in the air around us. The room’s lights blazed brighter as the ship was saturated with power, and the nauseating feeling of wrongness pounded against my head with a shocking brutality that completely overshadowed my usual feelings during a surge. My vision blurred and I stumbled against the wall, the lights in the room growing almost blinding in their intensity until they abruptly cut off, plunging us all into darkness as I felt the ship slow to a halt.

What the hell was that??

“Two ships failed to disconnect in time. The Pride of Coleharbor got off pretty lightly and they’ll be back online in a few hours, but the Lady Terrise is dead on her feet. It’ll be days before they get her running again.”

Teadran swore violently as the man he’d sent to check on the other vessels reported in with the bad news.

“Of all the cursed luck…” He mumbled after he calmed down.

“I told him Lyssander wasn’t ready to run solo yet.” Shani said with a rueful shake of her head. “But Albrich is too cheap to listen. They’re lucky they didn’t ruin the core itself or we’d all be in trouble.”

I sat back quietly, not having much to contribute to the conversation. We’d been called up to the captain’s cabin first thing in the morning after the surge had cleared up, and I still hadn’t completely recovered from that particular shock to my system.

I need to ask Shani about this.

Teadran gave a disgusted grunt at the mention of the other captain and threw his hands in the air.

“And now the miser has set the whole damn caravan back. We’ll be reporting this to the guild and they’ll take the setback out of his share, but a fat lot of good that does us now. Barely three days from Delmoth and we’re already down. Grafton—” He said, turning to the burly XO. “Signal the other ships. We’ll pull most of the crew off the Terrise and circle her until we can get the core running again. It’ll be a right bastard without a full repair bay, but between us all we should be able to make it work. When you’re done, assemble a party and load up some of the skips; there should be a few villages nearby we can trade with and offset some of this debacle.”

Skips? Does he mean like a skiff? I wonder what that looks like…

“Take Baines.”

Say what now?

Grafton smiled toothily at me.

“Be my pleasure, sir.”

What the hell?

I was fuming in distaste at the oversized ape of a man, but Shani brightened visibly at the mention of the scouting/trade mission.

“Oh! Can I—”

“No.” Teadran cut her off.

“But—”

“You’re the best core tender in the caravan, and we need you here to help fix this mess. Not off galavanting through the swamp with him.” He said with a glare at me.

Shani’s protests cut off and she gave a worried back and forth look between Teadran and I. That immediately made me feel guilty for making things more difficult between myself and the captain, but at the same time it was so frustrating the way he and Grafton had been such complete assholes to me from the very beginning.

“Alright, I’ll get it fixed, Uncle Miles.” She said quietly.

The captain softened briefly at her address but quickly returned to glaring at me.

“Do you have any objections, Mr Baines?”

I felt my hackles rise at the clear challenge in his tone, but ultimately this wasn’t a fight worth winning. In the best case, I’d be inserting myself as a wedge between Shani and Teadran. I wasn’t about to make her pick between me and her family, especially since I wasn’t super sure there was a whole lot between us yet. Yes, she’d kissed me. Yes, it was awesome. But we weren’t officially an item or anything yet, and I wasn’t delusional enough to think a girl would effectively throw her life away for me after one date.

So, rather than lose my temper again and start something in the middle of a meeting, I backed down.

“I’ll do my best, sir.” I said, calmly.

Teadran eased up the glare a little bit and grunted.

“See that you do. Dismissed.”

I pride myself on not bolting from the room or punching anything as we all filed out. Shani pulled me to the side in the hallway and gave me a quick hug.

“Thank you for not fighting with Teadran. I know he can be…unpleasant, especially when he’s trying to protect me.”

The urge to grumble came but I successfully smothered it and hugged her back.

“Be careful out there, Ray. The villages… they’re not like the city. Without the wards they’ve had to do desperate things just to survive.” Shani warned me seriously, her golden eyes tinged with worry.

I smiled at her disarmingly, honestly less worried about mere physical danger compared to navigating the social minefield I’d found myself in on this ship.

“I’ll be fine.” I said, stepping away. “Which way do I go for the ‘skips’?”

The concern on her face vanished under a tide of raw jealousy at the mention of ‘skips’.

“He’s gonna pay for making me miss out on a skip-ride. I don’t care what his reasons are.” She muttered darkly. “Head aft and up. You can’t miss it.”

The pretty brunette stormed off after that, leaving me to make my way to the rear of the ship alone. The vagueness of her directions meant that I wandered around a little bit before I actually found the right place, and by the time I got there Grafton was already barking orders at the crew. They were scrambling to haul up a number of long crates and strap them to the underside of… something.

It was a large, metallic frame about the size and shape of a small bus with a completely open top and two rows of outward-facing seats lined up back-to-back down the middle, with the only exception being a forward-facing pilot’s seat. Six articulating legs were currently anchored to the ship’s deck, but they looked too spindly to be the primary form of movement. Two large, lime-green panels ran down almost the entire side of the strange vehicle, starting from just behind where the pilot sat and going all the way back, jutting out over a meter past the end of the frame. It was the panels that finally did it for me, and Shani’s jealousy suddenly made so much sense.

It’s a giant, steampunk dragonfly. That is just… awesome.

I had to quickly hide my excitement now, because I’m pretty sure Grafton would try to ruin it if he ever saw someone experience joy.

“Baines! Took you long enough. Load up, we’re leaving in five minutes.” The douche shouted from way too close for the volume to be necessary.

Giving my best, most sarcastic salute, I climbed up a ladder on what would be the dragonfly’s abdomen and strapped myself in to one of the spartan chairs. In a few moments I was joined by several crewmen and a few of the marines, including corporal Tibbs, who I was happy to recognize. He sat next to me (not that there was a whole lot of choice) and Grafton clambered into the pilot’s seat.

As soon as everyone was strapped in, Grafton signaled to one of the deckhands outside. The man pulled back on a heavy lever embedded into the floor, and the ceiling above us shuddered open while the platform beneath us rose to meet it. In no time, we were perched above the ship’s deck with the early morning sun shining through the dense fog of the swamp around us. I saw a similar scene occurring on several other vessels, with their own dragonfly ‘skips’ ready to launch alongside ours.

“And now… the fun part.” I heard Grafton half-whisper to himself as he abruptly pulled a lever beneath his feet.

With a metallic clank we were launched into the air, slamming back into our seats with the force of sudden acceleration as we gained altitude. Grafton expertly adjusted the controls as we rose, and at the apex of our height he deployed the skip’s wings, which opened with a deep *thrum* that I could feel in my chest.

The wings didn’t seem to beat or flap, they just hummed loudly and vibrated in place, keeping us in the air by what I had to assume was some kind of enchantment. The burly XO was grinning from ear to ear as he slammed the controls forward, and the thrumming of the wings transformed into a roar that shot us off into the mist.