Guardian Apprentice

by Cyblade Silver

It was Altair who found them first, bringing the Guardians to the attention of the Assassin Brotherhood. Now, with a Guardian living under his very roof, Ezio Auditore will have to work all the harder against the Templars to keep what remains of his family safe.

380. Boats will burn

Continuing on his way, Ezio managed to find the controls to open the floodgates, swimming through the resulting water to the war machine. From inside, the device looked even more like some kind of overly-designed gondola than it had when he'd merely been been looking at the thing from the outside. Still, that probably had been the base that Leonardo had worked off of, and Ezio could see the advantages in maneuverability that such a base would provide to anyone who might have been given the chance to use it.

If he'd been the type to allow such a dangerous device to remain in the hands of the Borgia, at least. Let's see how well you can bite your master's hand, he mused, turning the war machine in the direction of the Borgia fleet that he'd spotted while he and Aeon had been making their way down into this place. At first, while he was making his way into position, those manning the boats didn't quite seem to know what to do in response to his presence; he'd been expecting as much, however, both since he was in a machine that had been created through the means of their Templar masters, and initiative seemed to be a thing that the Templars sought to stamp out in its entirety.

One more reason to fight them; as though he needed such a thing, at this point.

After he'd fired his first shots – from what turned out to be a flamethrower, of all things – those on the remaining ships were quick to take up arms against him. Steering out of the range of the archers that had been emplaced on the ships before him, seemingly for just this sort of a situation, Ezio fired back when he could. He focused the balance of his attention on the sails, taking care to destroy the maneuverability of the ships he'd set himself against, but when he could he also set fire to the decks and hulls of the ships around him.

The same thing that made them proof against the water that would have otherwise rotted their hulls out from under them, of course, would also make them all the more vulnerable to the fire he was currently wielding.

Once the last of the twelve boats that had been moored in this area was in flaming ruins, Ezio breathed deeply so as to resolve himself to his next course of action. Stretching his hands, since they'd cramped up more than a little after having spent so much time wrapped around the handle that had controlled the firing mechanism for this particular war machine, Ezio made his careful way to the part of the boat where the flamethrower itself had been mounted. The controls on the modified gondola themselves would have hardly allowed for him to carry out the plan he was now enacting, and as he gave a harsh shove to the flamethrower's housing to fix it into position, Ezio again found himself wishing that he could've found a way to bring this one into the service of the Brotherhood.

Still, as impossible as such an idea had been with the rolling artillery platform that Leonardo had put so much work into, it would have been more than doubly so in the case of this fiery, waterborne weapon.