Iario Malliosi stomped across the deck in rage, thorned vines rippling out from his steps between cracks in the wood. His crew cringed away from his path, and a few even yelped in pain as the vines pricked their feet and ankles and greedily drank the blood that was spilled.

It didn’t even cross his mind; he was entirely focused on one thing: that damn naval captain. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, Garo in the crow’s nest reported that it was clearly a lesser naval vessel, and had been at sea for some time. There was no reason for someone of such strength to be slumming it among what was almost certainly a group of dregs. Instead, he’d responded with overwhelming force, and Iario was personally forced to mend the breaks in the hull while his incompetent crew missed more shots from their new cannons.

He cursed that slimy shopkeeper from Haven as he snatched a telescope offered by his first mate and brought it to his eye. “These Sky-iron cannons won’t impede your speed, and are so accurate anyone can fire them.” Charlatan. All the cannons did was get their own hull damaged and weigh his ship down, eating into their speed even if less than a normal cannon would.

Iario sighed and handed the eyeglass back. It was time to get back to what had gotten him his wealth in the first place; charging at the other ship, and taking them down with superior power. After he’d found the shard to the aspect of nature, he’d become unstoppable. He immediately broke through multiple power and control barriers, and had been terrorizing merchant ships when a letter arrived at his doorstep.

A handwritten missive from Angelo Zenari, The Sovereign of Haven, and the strongest pirate alive. The threat of his power singlehandedly kept the navy at bay from the shores of their little island of freedom, and Iario had been personally recognized.

The Sovereign wanted him to turn his strength to navy ships themselves, thinning their numbers. For what reason he didn’t know, but asking questions of the Sovereign was just begging to be killed, and he hardly needed an excuse to attack the navy anyway. He set out immediately. If he did well in this task, he was almost guaranteed to become one of the esteemed and feared Peers to the Sovereign.

If this backwater naval Captain thought he could stand between Iario and his path to greatness, he was sorely mistaken.

“Standard formation!” He shouted to his men. Some were filled with trepidation from his intense demeanor earlier, while others were chomping at the bit for blood to be spilled.

Conjured thorny vines pooled around his feet, somehow worming their ways through the grains of the wood until they waited for his command just under the floorboards.

Moments later when he could make out the faces of the other men on the ship, the vines shot out across the distance, lodging themselves in the enemy’s vessel. Less than a second later they widened to the size of bridges, and with practiced motions, his men started running across. They immediately were assaulted with a hail of crossbow bolts, arrows, and in some cases even simple stones. Sailors wielding large axes moved to the vine bridges, looking to break them off before they could cross.

It never occurred. He followed immediately, dictating the battlefield through gusts of wind, walls of wood and vines, and blasts of water, all blocking or turning attacks from his men. The men breaking the bridge stumbled backwards, their fronts ravaged and bloodied as the exterior exploded, peppering them with thorns and sharpened vines. The layer regrew instantly, the bridge not faltering for a moment as the central loadbearing vines held strong.

The moment his crew was upon the other, Iario turned his eyes from the crowd, seeking out the Captain. He found him immediately, a modestly tall man with a tattoo covering half his face, and a podao at his side. He was currently at the edges of the battle attempting to pierce his way deeper, moving in a constant stream of attacks. Jabbing, tripping, blocking, and more, all weaved together in a symphony of death. Still, his breathing was somewhat haggard as he pushed himself forward.

Iario sneered. He obviously had worn himself out with that massive attack earlier, and now fought in the melee like a common marine. The navy truly was where promising aspected went to waste away. An attack of that magnitude was sincerely impressive – he had Iario scared for a moment – but no doubt this Captain lacked the tempering through blood that Iario and other aspiring Peers had gone through to reach their level of power. The navy simply didn’t have the stomach for it.

He manipulated the wood beneath him to form a spike, lazily raising his hand to end the fight before it even began. The wood shot up beneath him in the blink of an eye, but amazingly the man danced out of the way, using his podao to generate even more momentum by pushing against the spear as it shot up.

Iario raised his eyebrows in surprise, but continued the offensive. Spear after spear shot out from the wood of the ship, but the wiry captain managed to move out of the way of every single one.

Surprise turned to anger as his impatience grew, but the lithe captain moved just out of the way of each of his strikes. He spat to the side and marched forward. It was time to end this.

He drew his scimitar from the side, and vines began covering every inch of his body. Within seconds he was covered in a thorny carapace that he knew from experience was far harder than appearances suggested. Vines even grew along his sword, coiling at the base.

A pair of sailors lunged forward to attack him as he pushed towards the Captain, who stood almost dumbly, waiting for Iario’s approach. His rage grew even larger; who was this failure of a Captain to look down on him like he was some piece of common trash? He dispatched the two sailors with swings filled with disdain, one being pierced through the heart by a sharpened vine whip that struck out from his blade, while the other didn’t account for the power that coursed through his veins from the aspect of nature, and his sword swung with enough force to shatter the sailor’s and bite deep into his collarbone in one fell swoop. He kicked the body off; the blood already being absorbed by the vines along its length.

The rest of the crew wisely stepped out of the way, engaging in the frenzied melee between the grunts of the two opposing crews. Iario didn’t even spare them a glance as he looked upon the enemy Captain with a contemptuous sneer, flicking the remaining gore off his blade. The outcome of the other battle didn’t matter – no matter the state, he would take care of it after he dealt with this cockroach of a Captain.

He advanced slowly, vines growing behind him, writhing like a mane of snakes in his shadow. The aspect that ran through his veins switched on a dime from plant-water focused to purely air, and in an instant, he appeared in front of the Captain, already swinging his sword and attacking with his vines at the same time.

This was Iario’s ace in the hole, to an extent, and in his opinion the strongest ability the aspect of nature granted. Nature held many facets, and each granted different physical characteristics. He usually held onto water and plant, granting him far higher physical strength and vitality than the average human, but a quick burst of air granted enough speed to move within the blink of an eye.

As soon as he began moving, he switched back to his tried-and-true combination of water and plant, increasing the power behind the deadly swing he unleashed against the fledgling Captain. In all, it was an unstoppable attack; combining extreme physical strength and speed into one fluid motion aimed to kill, it was the culmination of everything Iario had worked on over the time he’d acquired the shard of nature, and had required multiple barriers of control to drop before he could perfect the technique.

And yet, the Captain dodged it.

As if he had a second sense, the Captain’s body dipped out of the way, the sword passing by his neck close enough to ruffle his hair. The podao was swiftly driving towards his midsection immediately after. Iario was so dumbfounded that his attack had missed that he was too slow moving out of the way, and he received a nasty gash along his side, easily pushing through his armor with shocking power.

The Captain didn’t stop there, however. Attack after attack rained down upon Iario, each empowered with the indomitable strength of the ocean. The strength felt familiar – the ocean was a subset of nature, after all – but distant simultaneously. It was as if this Captain’s strength was an artists masterwork, while Iario’s own was merely the sketch it was based upon.

The thought enraged Iario further, and he pushed himself to his limit. Countless vines rushed towards the Captain while the wood under his feet rippled and shifted, aiming to disorient and push him off balance enough to score a deadly strike with his vines.

The Captain seemed only mildly hindered by the rippling wood. He used his podao like a third limb, correcting his balance any time he was in danger of falling. A thick oceanic mist spread from his body as he did so, making Iario’s nose crinkle and his eyes water.

The vines shriveled and died the moment they penetrated the field he projected around him, not even making it within three feet of the Captain before they fell withered to the deck. In moments, so many vines were piling atop one another an absent thought from Iario wondered if he’d be walled off soon.

Salt. The Captain projected an oceanic mist with such a high salt content that it became functionally poison to the vines he sent after him, robbing them of their life-granting moisture.

For the first time since that fateful day Iario found that shard of nature, he felt true fear. He attempted shoving it down, but it was a beast that could not be tamed. It bucked and thrashed at his every attempt to push it out of his mind, circling back around and rearing its ugly head at the most inopportune times.

The other Captain advanced upon him, his podao twirling in an endless acrobatics display of death. First, he received a shallow cut across his left arm, then a deeper one in his thigh, and soon countless wounds were accumulating across his body. His every attempt to turn the tide was promptly squashed, and he soon realized his arrogance.

Who was he to turn the tides against the ocean itself?

The podao pierced deep in his chest, narrowly missing his heart by centimeters. A bitter, hateful compartment of his mind was awakened, and he was all consumed by an irresistible desire to destroy, to ruin what this Captain had built for himself, one final act of rebellion against the robber who took his life from him, both metaphorical and literal.

With a dying breath he scanned the deck, until he spotted something peculiar. A lanky, scrawny man looked in his direction with awe, no doubt at the display of his Captain. He was obviously a new recruit, lacking the rigorous tanning that all sailors developed over years at sea as well as the physical fitness from working a vessel day in and day out.

He sneered through red-stained teeth as blood began to fill his mouth. The moment his eyes met the new recruit’s, a shocked and fearful look crossed the rookie’s face.

Iario’s only response was to raise his hand palm out, and with the fleeting remnants of energy in his body, he pushed it all out into a beam at this nascent seed, a chaotic mixture of every aspect of nature. Life, death, rebirth, air, earth, water, fire, lightning – everything the wide umbrella of nature covered was contained in the beam of pure hate, unstoppable in its strength. Concepts he hadn’t begun to scratch the surface of wove their way within from the power in his soul, powers he couldn’t even control let alone summon on demand. Something integral to his existence as a whole cracked, but his mind was only on the impressions contained in the beam he let out. If he’d been given insights into these concepts a month ago, he’d be the most powerful Peer the Sovereign ever raised.

The half-masked Captain severed his hand in an instant, but it was too late. The beam was already flying, the beautiful beam that was the entire centerpiece of Iario’s mind as he drifted towards the darkness of the afterlife. His last contribution to the world was a gurgling, blood-filled laugh as his eyes glazed over, and his corpse slumped to the ground, lifeless, his soul shattered.

* * *

Wilhelm was in awe.

He knew Jieming was preternaturally talented and powerful, but seeing it with his own eyes was something else entirely. One moment the pirate captain was pushing the corpse of a sailor Wilhelm regrettably couldn’t remember the name of off his sword, and the next he was swinging down at Jieming with enough strength to cleave the ship in two. Even from how far away he was, Wilhelm could swear he felt pressure on his soul as it happened, the presence of power so far beyond his own. It was enough that he stepped closer to Calypso in an instinctual desire to be sheltered behind an immovable rock in a storm.

Calypso didn’t appear to be as affected as he was, but she did have a small frown on her face, and her brows were ever-so-slightly creased as to betray her outwardly calm demeanor. This pirate captain, it seemed, was no joke.

Still, Jieming made it look easy. In moments the pirate was impaled upon the end of his podao in a life-ending strike, and Wilhelm finally let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. The rest of the pirates had been mopped up by the superior naval crew leaving Wilhelm with a false sense of confidence, but that captain was something else. Soon, it would be over, and he would be back to training.

Then, the captain’s eyes locked on his own.

A jolt of terror and adrenaline shot through his system, and his mind was painfully torn between running for his life and cowering in fear, screaming at him to do both and neither at the same time. The effect was paralyzing, and instead he stood completely still like a deer in the headlights.

The captain raised one hand like the divine judgement of God, and a beam of nature shot out. Wilhelm didn’t know how to describe it any other way – within he sensed the distant calls of birds, the rustle and crackling of leaves as a breeze passed through an autumn forest, vultures feasting upon the carrion corpse of a felled beast, and tadpoles gently propelling themselves through the water for the first time under the watchful eye of their parents. It was endless, but it was also deadly.

Even Calypso was intimidated. She hesitated for just a moment before the display, but that was a moment too long. By the time she began moving, the beam was already a foot and a half from Wilhelm’s chest, and there was no way she could move fast enough to get in the way.

Wilhelm stared at the incoming beam with a mind devoid of thought, and all he could do was grimace.

In silver blur, Absalom appeared, sword drawn. The beam struck the sword, the latter flashing an impossible shade of silver at the exact moment of contact…and the beam was deflected. The chaotic nature beam became a pillar deflected towards the sky, putting holes in clouds as it shot into the distance. The moment passed, and silence reigned across the deck.

Captain Absalom inspected his sword for a moment, and turned to Wilhelm. He looked at him and Calypso, nodded once, sheathed his sword, and jogged towards the injured men on the deck. Jieming followed a moment later, handing out rolls of bandages to sailors trained in first aide.

“Wilhelm.” A voice called out from the group, and he rushed over immediately. He was handed a roll of bandages and got to work immediately. Calypso appeared frozen, but he didn’t spare her more than a glance. He had a job to do.

After he‘d told some of the crew that he was taught basic first aid for his brief stint as a staff member in a national park, he had garnered a small amount of respect, especially after he displayed his skill. It was nothing incredible, but apparently sailors properly trained in first aid was enough of a rarity to be valuable whenever stumbled upon.

He assisted in cleaning and bandaging the wounds of one of the men who had been peppered by shrapnel from the exploding bridge, a portly fellow named Esteban who stared forward with glazed eyes while he mumbled.

“What’s that he’s saying?” A familiar voice said. Wilhelm turned to his left, surprised to see Quinn helping him.

“I’m not sure, I can’t make it out.” He gestured with his head to the surrounding commotion, his hands never stopping pulling shrapnel, cleaning wounds, and bandaging.

“Come on Esteban, you in there? Can you speak up for us?” Quinn gently shook him, but he continued staring straight forward over the railing and out into the distance.

Quinn cursed a moment later. “Damn, looks like we’ll need the Captain this time.”

Wilhelm gave him a sideways glance. “What do you mean, ‘this time?’”

Quinn nodded towards the man they bandaged, “Esteban here is special. Sometimes he falls into a weird trance-state, constantly muttering one phrase over and over again. The Captain says it’s a premonition for things to come, and that people like Esteban are born with something called the ‘Gift’ which gives them insights into things to come. Esteban’s gift isn’t developed enough to grant anything more than a partial glimpse, but Captain Absalom says that sometimes, that’s all you need. I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been around long enough not to doubt the Captain at this point.” His eyes absentmindedly wandered to the swirling hole left in the clouds, but quickly snapped back to the task at hand.

“Anyway, sometimes we can get the phrase from him, but other times only Captain can. He’s the greatest source of authority in Esteban’s life, and so he can pierce the haze. Or something. I don’t think he ever fully explained it. I only learned this much after pestering them both.” Quinn explained with a small smile despite the solemn work.

“Does it always happen when he gets injured?” Wilhelm asked, pulling the last of the shrapnel from his leg. Luckily, it looked like Esteban only had surface cuts, nothing deep to worry about. As long as none of them got infected, he would be okay – and Estelle was fierce about properly disinfecting wounds.

“Sometimes he falls into it at supper, other times it’s after receiving a nasty cut across his abdomen. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, as far as I can tell.” Quinn shrugged.

“Captain!” He shouted out after the last of the wounds were covered. Absalom arrived a moment later, nodding at Quinn and hunching down in front of Esteban.

“Esteban. It’s your Captain. Can you hear me?” The glazed over eyes slowly scanned the surroundings, eventually landing near but not quite on Absalom. A trace of recognition bubbled to the surface.

“Speak up for me, Esteban.” The mumbling continued, the pitch not growing any louder.

“That is an order, Esteban. Speak up.” Authority that penetrated bone deep oozed from Absalom’s tone, and the man’s eyes finally locked on his Captain’s.

“From…from the sea. From the sea. From the sea…” He spoke like he was waiting for something, one final word to end the phrase, forever stuck on the tip of his tongue. His brows furrowed.

“From the sea. From the sea. From the sea!” His tone became more and more frustrated, until Absalom placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Easy, Esteban. Drink,” he passed him a canteen, “And rest. If you remember anything more, let me know, but don’t push yourself. You know how the gift is.” A trace of irony laced his voice.

Lucidity almost entirely returned to the man by this point, and he nodded wearily, first to Absalom, and then to Quinn and Wilhelm in turn.

“From the sea.” Wilhelm muttered, eyeing the endless ocean around him warily before he was whisked away to another makeshift triage.