#AN: Took a while to massage this into feeling complete. Some of you have guessed around what gets revealed in this chapter, but that doesn't make it less fun! Also, I noticed this story passed 300 favs shortly after the last chapter was posted. Over 400 followers, over 100 reviews, and 65008 total views as of posting this chapter. I know I'm not very fast at publishing, so I thank you all for your patience and support.
Chapter 18: Gryphon With a Red Dye Job
Iron Mask was back.
His first "visit" came scant hours after they had cleared Tristania's airspace. Astride a grizzled elder Griffin, he seemingly materialised out of thin air to sweep past the top of their ship from the stem. The wind of his passage knocked most of the deck crew prone before they could even think to train their guns on him. Without the threat of immediate reprisal he wheeled around to hover just off the prow.
Who?
His face and identity, were covered in a mask of black iron. However his furred leather high-altitude armour bore the mark of many battles and the silvery sheen of a mythril spell blade established him as a critical threat regardless.
Damn it all, I was too careless! Tabitha berated herself, realising with dawning horror that he was hovering over Louise, who had gone to enjoy the wind coming over the forward gunwale before they ascended to the cooler altitudes that would drive her below. Panicked, Tabitha scrambled for her staff and began desperately weaving a spell to-
He was gone. Upon spotting Louise struggling to regain her footing, he seemed to pause for the barest moment before his mount folded its wings and dropped like a stone. Letting the gathered magic dissipate, she dashed to her diminutive master's side.
"You're unhurt?"
"I... I'm fine." She was clearly spooked, but didn't appear injured at least. "Tabitha, who was that? What was that about?"
"Unknown. Assume hostile," she ground out tersely. "Stay nearby now."
Even this close to the capital. I'm such a fool, and Louise could have easily paid the price.
"Tabitha..." Despite the expression on Louise's face telling her that it wasn't her fault, she knew otherwise. Louise's face fell into a sad grimace. "Very well, let's go to the aft launch and... and teach me more knife drills?"
I can't properly watch if I'm helping...
"You need to relax, girlie. She's fine and nothing happened. Don't get so wound up you lose sight of what's important." Right. Talking sword. Undoing the loop that kept the sword at her hip, she held him out for Louise.
"Derflinger will supervise. I will keep watch."
"Girlie-"
"Hush."
He heaved a great metallic sigh. "Okay Pinkie, let's see where you're at with that bread cutter of yours..."
She had forced Kirche to alter their course in anticipation of an attack, but it had only bought them time, and she finally caught sight of him in the waning sun of the approaching dusk.
This time, she met him in the air.
However, it ended as only a short exchange of spells- the interloper decided to cut his losses after she surprised him with her secondary affinity and ice started accumulating on his mount's wings. She was sure he would be back and that she hadn't seen the extent of his skills. The speed of his departure made it clear that he was at least a mid-tier triangle wind mage.
At that point, Tabitha wanted to turn the ship around, wanted so badly to give up on this silly excursion and retreat to a heavily-guarded air lane where Louise would be safe. But she knew with bitter certainty that the girl would never accept it. She didn't need to ask or even see Louise's face to know that. She had to visit the bridge again.
"Kirche."
Looking up from her chair, Kirche cleared her throat and gave Tabitha a pointed look. Sighing, resigned, she rolled her eyes.
"Captain Kirche," she ground out.
"Yes, ensign?"
She stared. She couldn't not stare. Ensign? Ensign!? She was the Left Hand of God, not some disposable filler material! She levelled a powerfully unimpressed glare at her friend.
"Kirche. We are being hunted. By a mage. All possible speed."
"That's Captain Kirche to you, missy!"
She barely heard it, she was already out, making sure the crew had secured all loose items to account for the coming acceleration. Kirche played her role very well, and knew the stakes better than anyone else. They would be moving regardless of the danger.
That had thrown him for the night, but the sun hadn't even passed its zenith and he had already found them again.
This time, he came with a flight of dragoons at his back.
Fire-aligned. Slower, but this ship is still flammable. A distraction?
"You know, girlie, I'm starting to think this guy is a fan of mine!" Ignoring the sword's quips, she murmured some terse instructions for the gunners into the tubes to not waste ammo unless necessary and gave a sharp whistle to rouse her own napping dragon.
"Delta red null. High." Her clipped tone made it clear that it wasn't time for play. Tabitha swung her body over the rail of the cavalry launch, mounting smoothly as Sylphid rose to meet her. They were aloft and bearing down on the leading edge of the hostile formation in moments, far from the ship.
"Break!" Young as she was, she was still a rhyme dragon and Tabitha had every confidence in her familiar's ability to shred these mundane beasts. But Iron Mask was nearby, so the show-off lizard took all the attention, going above, while Tabitha released her prepared glamour to slip under them and reached for the curious pistol she had acquired from the stockpile of otherworldly relics in Tristain.
It was light - far lighter than any of the more primitive siblings carried by the musketeer corps - and held six bullets with alchemical properties she had yet to tease out the secrets of. Most importantly, though, were its power and accuracy, especially in her hands. In the span of three seconds, she had fired six shots and crippled or killed six dragons. With her off-hand. It hadn't even broken her concealment spell.
Terrifying. Wonderful.
Holstering the sidearm, she released the illusion and switched to a flight spell, shooting upward to rejoin her mount so they could take care of the main threat.
"Clever, little dove! Too bad this is checkmate!" While Sylphid was downing the other four dragoons, Iron Mask had interposed. "It's been fun playing with you! Aquila!"
Bastard.
Bloody bastard.
He had waited for her. He wasn't fooled for an instant, had sacrificed ten dragons to distract her, and still wanted to be close enough that he could get his last digs in.
He wasn't even planning to finish her off with magic.
Bastard.
I really didn't want to use this already...
A normal mage in spell-flight would be helpless when facing down the talons and beak of a flying apex predator. A normal mage would be beside herself in fear. She wasn't so vain that she couldn't appreciate that Iron Mask's mount, "Aquila" he was called, was a magnificent specimen of gryphon-kind. It was quite the shame, what was about to happen.
Her heavy metal staff really wasn't as well-attuned as her wooden one had been, and its limits were nearer and harder to overcome. But...
Bracing the broad, boxy end on her shoulder, she brought the narrow end up and looked down its length at the oncoming beast.
"Sorry."
She pulled the trigger of the rifle called "Boys" and the resounding report of an anti-tank shell was near-instantly followed by the rear of the majestic eagle head bursting with viscera and Iron Mask shouting in shock as he held his side. She rolled with the recoil that would have broken several bones in her shoulder without the blessings of the Void and the inertia of the dead beast with its shocked passenger carried them harmlessly past. She was already sliding the massive bolt to chamber the next round and take him off guard from an angle he couldn't defend from.
Still alive. Soft tissue only.
She adjusted her aim, and fired at his centre mass, but somehow he managed to react, thrusting an arm surrounded by an extremely dense air pocket up in time and twisting his body away. He jerked - probably in some combination of surprise and pain - when he acquired another graze as the heavy slug tore through his barrier and punched a blossoming hole in the armour of his shoulder.
She rolled over and allowed herself to come to a neutral hover, lowering the massive rifle through which she was still channelling the flight spell while he shot downward in a bobbing and weaving pattern that would be nearly impossible to hit.
He'll be back again.
"Hope you've got more aces in those sleeves, girlie," Derflinger cautioned. "You showed off more than he did."
"Mmm."
Allard Rutger considered himself rather well travelled. Son of a fur trader, he had grown up on the road and had spent ample time in all five major nations for one reason or another. It was getting close to seven years with the Breakers, too, and he wasn't looking to quit. It was challenging, rewarding work that exercised the mind for practical things. None of that "suppose you..." or "imagine that you have..." here! Everything was an overt calculus that came in forms like, "if we hang ballast on the port hardsails, will we be able to right this vessel with block bracing and some rearrangement or will we have to rig a tug drop?" "Will the fresh timber around this crash site be strong enough remount the windstone engine or will we need to get a spellwright in to redo the reinforcements before we get her back to the assessor?" "Should we go after the wool shipment that will be an easy recovery or the paper that will take several days time?"
(The answers to these questions are, respectively, "yes, but the tug is faster, easier, and safer so why even bother", "should be fine if you shear the original mounts and use them as a laminate material" and "both, because you can pay the wool carrier crew to help and still make bank because the salvage assessor taxes are lower than the actual import taxes and they probably don't know that".)
Look, the point is he wasn't a moron, and he was sure something weird was going on with this little jaunt they'd been hired for from the very start. The circumstances were weird, the ship was weird, the "captain" was a lunatic, and the less said about their other "passengers", the better. And the guns! What were they thinking, replacing forty proper cannons with a dozen little peashooters to run a full Albion blockade? They weren't even musket-sized, most of them! Saving weight is one thing, but...
Well, that was what he had thought, at least.
That was before the redhead had shown up in the officer's uniform of the Germanian Youth Auxiliary and had them running though the list of shakedown exercises given a full warship. Before the young Vallière had casually drawn enough gold from the government vaults to massively expedite refit of the ship, get no-expenses-spared spellwork overseen by what he'd thought was their secretary, and still pay the whole crew two months of their average takings. And certainly before the quiet, waifish book-reading girl used a squadron of aerial raiders on a proving flight to demonstrate and teach of the sorcery she called "tracers", giving several of their number the chance to get used to the thunderous hammering of the hellish devices that could shred the beasts with impunity.
He shivered a little, remembering the impression she left when she was "thinning their numbers so they'd be good for training", that minuscule gesture of a barely-there malevolent smirk.
So one might call the appearance of ordinary pirates - with no flying mages for Dame Tabitha to fly off the handle over - a welcome reprieve after the tense "excitement" of the first leg of their journey.
She's certainly earned her right as the namesake of this ship... Not that he didn't trust his mates! But, not having seen it for himself, he thought there was still a good chance they were having him on. Right? I mean, it's longer than she is tall! Unlike the other guns, she had adamantly refused anyone else to even touch it, but with decades of cargo assessment he trusted his eye for these things and... yeah. It must weigh as much as a small child, yet she swings it around effortlessly? Magic is bullshit.
Oh right, pirates. They were flying a black flag, probably assuming that this svelte and apparently-unarmed craft was just some pleasure yacht that had gone astray and they'd be banking a hefty ransom soon. It sure looked the part.
Pity, that.
The bell of general quarters shook him to action, and he busied himself with letting loose the lanyards that battened tarpaulin over the bulge of the deck turret, humming a jaunty tune as he did. And why not? Life was honestly pretty grand when your employer's not a screw-up! (The Titan Salvage Company had all learned very quickly that these noble schoolkids didn't muck about when it was time to get things done.)
So sure, there were pirates coming for them and that was fairly awful. Allard had no love for pirates, not after what happened to a shipment of Marten pelts about seventeen years prior. He absently rubbed the stump of finger they took in that altercation. Conversely... while he wasn't really sure what "4.5-inch QF" truly meant, he was pretty sure it had something to do with dropping the red hot hammer of God on the poor outlaw schmucks who were so brazenly closing the distance. He smiled broadly.
It never hurts to end the day on a high note.
Hitting the pirate ship ended up taking four shots before one connected. It turned out to be more than enough, the bloom of explosive fire mangling the hull and setting off the powder in the hold. As the two halves of the Gallian war sloop traced a burning arc toward the ground, Allard let out a low whistle and patted the turret housing fondly.
"I have got to get me one of these!"
#AN: Figuring out what precisely they threw on this airship was an important part of my research for this arc. It may come as a surprise, but the 4.5"/45 Mark V twin mount is cited at only 44,706 kg, well under my budget of ~75 tonnes. (Iron cannons are extremely heavy!)