Author's Note: Another one down. Starting around this arc we'll be looking at a few of my more *ahem* outrageous divergences from Canon. Please Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 27: The Battle at the Beach
Katarina was not the only one under levelled here, Midori and Blitz were fresh off their class ups, while Sadeena, Fohl and Rishia were fresh off of their level resets, Atla never even got the chance to start. The rest of the slaves they would not be bothering with, since these were the ones the heroes intended to add to their parties. The revelation that it was mostly Maple's relationship meter that was responsible for her group's ludicrously high level did nothing to dissuade those present from seeking as much raw power as possible.
"Fue!" Rishia seemed to have been handed the short stick, given the suit of Otto fur that had the unique unwashed smell to it. "When did the bow hero last wash this thing?"
"Your attention please!" Katarina shouted, head sticking out of a otter kigurumi, and slamming the butt of her spear against the rocks she had been standing on. "We are here to get our levels up! Seeing as how Sadeena here has nearly hit the hundred cap twice before she was 20 I feel inclined to listen to what she has to say on the matter!" Katarina stated indicating the whale woman with her harpoon, newly copied from a fishing village, which together with the water magic crystal she got from the king would be helping her make some waves here, off the coast of the former territory of Seatto where the fishing was prime.
"Leave it to me!" Sadeena stated laughing coyly. "We'll be having grilled shark and fried octopus tonight!"
Katarina nodded her head as she put on the head of the costume and dived into the water. Elena in the mean time was dressed in a actual swim suit, two pieces of string with a few patches of cloth between them. Mind you she wasn't going into the water, merely laying on her back on a blanket on the beach while working on her tan. There are costs to taking a overly large number of people into your party, partly the reason why Tanya chose to leave Eli back in Rishia's village when the sudden increase in numbers neared that limit. So given the choice between robbing the half dozen new recruits of Prime XP or not Elena made the sacrifice play and choose not to follow her hyperactive and often scatter brained hero into the monster infested pit this whale woman was leading them to and instead stay behind to work on her tan and drink margarita's.
The sacrifices she makes for her country.
"Nobody is buying that you're being selfless for a second Elena." Rino stated dressed slightly more modestly than her associate.
"I have been attacked by zombies and ghosts, fought against knights, been stuffed into a suit of stink and Kushtaka fur, and dragged all over hell and creation doing it!" Elena would broke no terms about how selflessly she had been living and so closed her eyes to resume her tan. Then the sun went away. "One lousy day." Elena stated opening her eyes and glaring at the object whose shadow she was in. "One lousy day!"
Takt was currently seated in the captain's chair looking out the window at the ocean. Before coming here he managed to 'acquire' the tracking relic that the church of the four heroes uses to keep an eye on the legendary heroes. Two were currently off to Siltvelt and Shieldfreeden, while two were still within Melromarc's boarders. Given Malty's intensive grudge against the Spear Hero and the fact that she was both closer and reportedly weaker than the Sword Hero Takt decided to start with the Spear Hero.
"She appears to be beneath the water Sir Takt." One of the women working the controls for the ship's radar announced.
"Leave the brath and the resth tho me!" A demi-human woman with a crooked grin full of sharp teeth and a retainer stated clapping her harpoon and beating her chest with her free hand.
"Okay Shate. You can kill the rest but we need the spear alive." Takt stated very poignantly remembering that he was short on weapons at the moment, and that besides that his Quote Un-quote master the king wanted all four of them alive for his own amusement.
Who ever does surveillance for these people do shoddy work. Kyurie had flown up to the blimp under the cover of illusion and was now preparing to enter it. A tube opened up underneath the blimp and a shark demi-human was spat out of it. In the split second before the door closed Kyurie and his super human stats, for which he thanked his personal goddess Katarina Claes, zipped up the tube and into the air ship proper. Stealth training and illusion magic worked fine and all but he needed a disguise to be able to roam freely. Observing the people inside he noticed two things, a unusually high concentration of women and engineering uniforms. Well it would be easy to blend in anyway.
Sadeena didn't lie, this place was prime for fishing. A few minutes into their adventure and they had already run into their first monster, a octopus creature that was spitting jets of water around them. Sadeena made quick work of it, which was impressive when you consider her level one status, but with a whale like cry she sent a pulse of high frequency ultra sound through the water. The ultrasound was accompanied by crackling electricity which when sent through the highly conductive sea water fried the octopus from the inside out and Katarina absorbed it into her spear.
"The air time on these suits are about half way through, and after that burst of XP the siblings should be ready for their first growth spurt." Sadeena nodded her head in agreement to Katarina's words on the matter.
Fohl's body was already starting to convulse, his sister seemed to be taking hers a lot better though. Suddenly something dropped into the water from above them, strangely enough it looked a little like the current Sadeena who was in the form of a whale. However in spite of the overall similar body type this creature was clearly a shark woman instead of a whale woman, the arms and legs off to the side speaking to a demi-human in their therianthrope form as opposed to a wild monster.
"LUKA!" The garbled speech of the shark creature snapped glaring hatefully at Sadeena.
"You aren't talking about me now are you?" Sadeena asked tapping her spear and glaring suspiciously. The answer was apparently yes, as the shark charged at Sadeena teeth first. "I'm gonna be minute, the rest of you head back to the surface." Sadeena stated waving the rest of the group off.
When they did get back to the surface they were treated to the sight of a pitched battle, Elena and Rino were fighting, mostly defending, against a group of women with what Katarina had quickly realised were guns.
"ONE!" Elena at some point in time had picked up a fishing boat and was now using it as a blunt object to fight against the women in question. "LOUSY!" The fact that said boat must weight at least three hundred pounds and Elena was swinging it around like a flail spoke volumes to her recent spike in power from Maple's power up method. "DAY!" Mind you once the opposition was finished being stunned by the fact they were under attack by a boat they promptly went to work, fire from their machine guns ripping the boat in half.
"Earth Wave!" Katarina seeing this pitched battle in action loosed a wave of earth with the Hoe, newly powered up by Tanya and Kuro and thus instead of the ground merely moving beneath the enemies feet the sand turned into a tidal wave and buried them. "Elena what's going on!?" Katarina shouted looking at the people who were quickly digging themselves out.
"Faubrian air ship." Elena stated pointing at the source of the shadow that was currently delaying her efforts to get a tan. "Seeing as how they haven't shot us yet we should probably assume they're here on a raid."
"Crystal Spike!" Katarina switched over the spear to the familiar crystalline structure that made up the spear she got from the Shieldfreeden wave and slammed it into the ground. The masses of crystal were much larger and longer than they were before and the women were soon skewered to the cliffside behind them. "Raiding what?" Katarina asked recalling the village she walked through to get here and the scene of ruin that made it up.
"Us!" Elena snapped in reply. Elena and her friends grew up telling each other stories at slumber parties about how the King of Faubrey would send his ships of leather and steel sailing through the sky to abduct young women from their homes and add them to that twisted little harem of his.
"I'm not entirely sure what they came all this way out here for but they would have zero problem with abducting some pretty ladies while here and giving them over to their king for his own amusement." Katarina nodded her head in understanding while she looked up into the air at the airship that was already getting ready for a second round.
"Blimps aren't too popular in my world." Katarina stated as she selected a spear for the job ahead of her. "Wanna know why?" Katarina nearly forgot about the two demi-human children who should've just started their growth spurts and so threw them a large swath of grilled octopus meat.
"I reasonably suspect that you're going to tell me." Elena stated looking up at the air ship.
She could reasonably make a few guesses as to how that thing was still floating, Earth magic to reduce it's weight and air magic to life and push it around she assumed. The Zepplins of earth were well known for being especially difficult to get off the ground. There were reliant on that huge balloon to get their lift, which either required an absurd amount of hot air which also means burning through massive reserves of fuel, or lighter than air gasses, helium is the most well known though it's also well known that it takes an absurd amount and very little of it would be recovered, hydrogen on the other hand could be mass produced as easily as taking water and subjecting it to electrical current splitting it's hydrogen and oxygen molecules, the problem with hydrogen though was that it's highly flammable.
Course Katarina didn't know any of that, she just recalled that Zepplin's burn really easily.
"Blitz! I need a lift!" Katarina stated spear in hand.
"Kay!" The Griffon gave out a loud exclamation of approval and turned into her griffin form.
"Elena! I'm gonna bring them down! I'll need people ready to deal with their ground forces!" And on that note Katarina took off with the griffin to go reenact the fall of the Hindenburg.
"My my, you have been up to no good haven't you?" Kyurie stated looking down at the information he's been able to gather thus far.
Who they were here for was made clear by the fact that they had in their possession some kind of ancient magical machine designed specifically to track down the heroes weapons. And while that was good in of itself the listing of where the seven star weapons currently were was also extremely valuable and so Kyurie wrote that information down. However seeing the ongoing threat that such a contraption poses to his lady it's continued existence was also completely unacceptable so he set about destroying it.
"Liquid hydrogen?" He had no idea what that was or what it was for but the two blood red octagon's one with a fire symbol inside of it and the other a explosion gave strong implications. So naturally he took as many of the tanks he could find, jammed them into the thing that he wanted to die as violently as possible and retreated to a safe distance. "I call upon the origin of power, decipher the laws of nature and create a beam of light to pierce and ignite my target. Zweite Light Ray!" With that whispered incantation Kyurie focused the light from a nearby bulb through a light bending illusion and created a laser beam that cut through one of the tanks, slowly mind you, enough for him to get out of the room and lock it.
The ensuing explosion could be seen from the ground level, let alone felt along the rest of the ship.
"What happened!?" Takt shouted getting up from his chair as if he'd get a better look at the situation from a standing position.
"Explosion at cargo room one!" The woman responsible for the internal monitoring room announced looking at the screen.
"That's the one with the Hero Monitor!" Takt shouted and the woman nodded her head in confirmation.
"Looks like we've got gremlins." One of Takt's women, this one with short dear like antlers and a black dress which did nothing to hide a long lizard like tail, stated as she left the captain's deck.
"I'll leave it to you Nelshin." Takt wasn't concerned about the members of his harem, after all he and the people here have the highest level in the world and are therefore the most powerful. Another explosion rocked the ship. "The Gremlin again?" Takt asked as he got a firm grip on the captain's chair.
"No! We're under attack!" One of the women didn't even have to look at her screen, merely watch the child on the back of a griffin take shots at them. "Ashil!"
"On it!" A young girl with bird like wings ran out of the room and jumped into the same tube that the shark woman from before went down.
"I, the Spear Hero, again call upon the origin of power! Once more read the laws of nature and-"
"Driefach Tornado!" A sudden and massive gust of wind caused both Katarina and Blitz to be tossed back into the ocean, where Sadina and the Shate woman were both still fighting.
"Your friends look like they're giving mine quite a bit of trouble." Sadeena stated simultaneously sitting on and talking to a block of ice that had formed in the ocean.
"H-H-How...?" Said block of ice, also known as Shate, barely managed to get the word out, considering she had been reduced to a block of ice and all that.
"You should apply a little more caution when throwing out that much power around a Dragon Priestess." Sadeena stated nonchalant, causing the shark woman to pale even more then what the ice had done to her.
"Y-y..." It was more then just the cold that stilled her tongue now.
"You called me a weak little Luka." Sadeena stated clearly annoyed. "I don't know who hurt you to make you this way and speaking frankly I don't have the time to find out. You have something my party needs." With that Sadeena raised up her spear to striking position. "Give it to me!"
Kyurie noted that he just became flush with experience points and went up several levels. One of the enemy combatants must have just been eliminated, which while good news he had his own enemy combatant to worry about, or rather he didn't and that was the most concerning thing about this situation.
"Come out, come out where ever you are!" Nelshin, the Aototsu chief and one of the top Demi-humans of Shieldfreeden, stated in a tone of sadistic glee as she walked around the engineering quarter in her Draconic Therianthrope form.
So Shieldfreeden was participating in this madness? He would understand it if Faubrey was forcing them to cooperate but something about just how much it sounds like she's enjoying this told him otherwise. No matter, though born and raised in Shieldfreeden he is a shadow of his lady, and he will strike as viciously at her enemies as he would against those the enemies of the nation he once believed in. Now how to kill her?
"There!" Draconic claws ripped through the section of pipe that Kyurie had been hiding behind moments earlier.
"I'd be careful about how much of those I throw around if I was you." The bat-man stated as he looked around the corner. "I imagine this equipment is quite important to the function of the ship."
"It can be repaired, which is more than what I can say about you..." The dragon woman sniffed the air. "Little bat." Flammable liquid started to drip out of the dragon woman's mouth, for though she has no affinity for fire magic all dragons can breath fire. Kyurie suspected she might've intended to roast every thing in this room that wasn't her.
"I didn't know that the proud Aototsu have reduced themselves to being henchmen for Faubrey." Kyurie stated throwing his voice so that it would instead come from the far side of the room in the direction he needed her go.
"Henchmen? Nothing of the sort hatchling." The dragon woman gave a snort of derision.
"This ship belongs to someone who is very important. He is destined to become king of this world, and crush you and your pathetic fake heroes like ants beneath his boot!" There is the need to gather intelligence and then there is blatant insults directed at his lady. The latter he had no use for.
"Lemme guess? Takt the Hero of the Whip?" Kyurie asked throwing his voice in a different direction now, one part to throw her off again and another to keep leading her where she wanted her to go. "Well former hero. I guess without the contract he forced onto those weapons he's not much of a hero any more, not that-"
Suddenly the dragon woman released the mass of hydrogen, oxygen and fire she had been preparing to release and set the entire room on fire breaking the darkness that had been Kyurie's ally in all of this.
"Ah I see I hit a sore spot then." One of the engineering women Kyurie saw earlier stated in his voice. Thank goodness his is naturally high pitched voice.
"You have a lot to answer for!" Nelshin snapped zipping over with unnaturally high stats to grab the illusion, at which point in time Kyurie opened the bomber bay doors that the Illusion had been standing on. However rather than falling through Nelshin seemed to disappear into thin air. On cue blood started coming out of Kyurie's mouth as he looked down and realised that the dragon woman had shoved her hand through his abdomen. "Are you done yet?" Nelshin asked rage in her voice and Kyurie responded by looking her straight in the eye and smiled.
"Are you?" Kyurie stated as his illusion dropped and revealed the pile of hydrogen tanks that Nelshin had just set on fire.
A second explosion nearly singed the other griffin that Katarina and Blitz had been fighting against while the others take on the ground forces. Katarina observed several silver flashes as the growth bonuses applied to the Hakuko siblings allowed them to zip around the battlefield and the enemy soldiers dropped below. Midori benefited from the surge of levels too, as did Katarina, Blitz, Sadeena and Rishia. The amount that they benefited from relationship meter though was minimal, maybe if it was one of the other three were here but they barely knew Katarina. Their attempts to pop that balloon was still not bearing any fruits. The griffin keeps intercepting her attacks and given how ludicrously high her defences seemed to be, and how utterly pissed off she was after Blitz casually mentioned that the last griffin she saw was the griffin king that Tanya had dropped a mountain on.
"YOU KILLED NELI'S DADDY!" The griffin screeched as it loosed another slash of wind magic on them.
Seeing the very real possibility that they needed some help Katarina was actively looking at which of the allies she could take to help deal with them. To her surprise the enemies ground forces weren't doing that hot, between Hyoga and her old swordsmanship instructors she has a understanding of what proper swordsmanship and fighting styles in general looks like, they don't have any. Oh don't get her wrong their movements were clearly practised, in duelling styles, yah know the ones where you're suppose to leave your opponent alive. It might have something to do with the fact that their weapons looked like guns which if true meant they should be trying to maintain a range advantage and they still came down here to fight. Atla on the other hand well... was she really a cripple until a little while ago? She was moving so fast that she was a blur of silver and green in Katarina's eyes, the sword Kuro made for her bounced off the enemy forces but made their bodies rupture with each strike, the strong contrast that was the label of prodigy was further enhanced by the fact that she unlike her brother hadn't grown any. In comparison her brother, a seasoned gladiator who did grow during his level spurt, and after he consumed twice his weight in grilled octopus, looked like a amateur flailing his fists around blindly, and when he did connect the vastly superior stats of his opponents instead broke his knuckles.
"Atla! We could use some help up here!" Katarina shouted and Atla looked up into the air at the dense mass of Mana that she had been fighting against up until now.
In response Atla jumped through the air, and then jumped again once she was in the air. To Atla everything was energy, the life energy given off by people and the planet, the traces people leave behind in objects when they make or use them, the spells that fly through the air and the magical energy inherit in all things. If for Atla there's no difference between energy and a solid object, then why treat them separately?
"Flock off feather face!" Atla snapped and swung.
The current of air the blade had given off shaved off the majority of the feathers and hair from the back of the griffin making it squawk indignant. She was about to return fire when she suddenly received a notification and returned to the ship.
"They're making a retreat?" Katarina looked down at the ground level at the mutilated remains of the people who had been fighting the ground battle and saw that there was no one left to return to the ship with the griffin. "She's making a retreat." Katarina returned to ground level with Atla and Blitz as they watched the air ship turn around and leave for safer pastures.
"Is everyone okay?" Beaten and bruised, otherwise alive though, at least up until Katarina saw that they were missing one. "Where's Kyurie?"
Shate was dead. Tact's fingers dug into his arm rest as he came to the realisation that another of his lovers was dead! And she wasn't the only one they nearly lost today, Nelshin's own fire nearly cooked her in that explosion, and that shave Ashil was now sporting, along with most of her hoodie and feathers that were missing, spoke to a similar near miss. The little vampire brat who broke into their ship had been nailed to a cross they had prepared for the singular purpose of displaying him and making their intense displeasure known.
"One of the people I care about is dead because of you and your friends!" Tact stated as he glared hatefully at the little brat. "My ship is in ruins directly because of you!" Tact grabbed the crucified vampire by his throat and held him face to face. "How are you planning to make this up to me!?" A wad of flem delivered to the face was the answer to Takt's question. Face cringing in disgust and rage he immediately stuck out his hand expectantly and one of his subordinates handed him a rifle.
"Perhaps it would be better to make use of him instead." Malty suggested idly standing up from the corner of the room she had been staying in this whole time.
"Would you prefer him to simply be killed, or would you rather wait until you have that brat on her knees and torture him to death in front of her?" Malty took the gun instead and cocked it with purpose. "That isn't to say that we shouldn't make use of him while he's here." Malty had yet to forget that this little punk and his fellow miscreants cut out her tongue!
"Has anyone seen him yet!?" Katarina stated as she emerged from yet another empty house and had no luck thus far.
"Not since you asked the last time!" Fohl snapped back as he cleared the third house.
"He's not here!" Atla stated as she instead watched the skies. "I would know." And then she caught sight of something. "The griffin's back." Atla stated as she watched Tact's griffin circle around the lord's mansion and drop something into the hole in the roof that one of the wave monsters had made when they landed on top of it before taking off again. "We better see what that was."
Fohl had volunteered in part because if he didn't Atla would and that was a major no-no, but also because after he volunteered he saw no one arguing with him, especially not the woman in a bikini nudging him forward. Glaring at him as he went he went into the room and question and came out a few moments later.
"Elena, you better come in to see this." Fohl stated and the others moved as well. "Just Elena, maybe Sadeena too."
The two women in question came in to look at what Fohl found only to find Kyurie's severed arm nailed to a board with a note attached telling them where to find the rest of him. Unfortunately Katarina had ignored his warning and went in anyway.
Review Section:
RonaldM40196867: True. Probably. He isn't going to burn to death if that's what you mean.
Captain Imaginat: You've said that too. Well it's basically what she did in the web novel and light novel. It grew back on it's own, it's been a few weeks and I won't speak about yours but my hair grows like weeds. I believe in earning your happy ending.
Kisame Hoshigaki: Eh he'll be happy for them. Keep in mind what I believe to be the age he started 'dating' Mirellia.
Halo: Sometimes you just stumble into a win-win situation. And still find a way to lose.
Onishen Tsukitenshi: A Big Fat One. Say, write into her flesh using a branding iron, same thing really.
Lq840i: Part of the definition of Crafting Correction is that the Sword does it automatically without Kuro having to do anything about it, the downside to that though is that Kuro can't physically make a low quality projection without ironically enough putting a lot more work and mana into it.
RedBurningDragon: In Theory if Kuro could get a vial of her blood. But why would anyone have that?
Illya Emiya: Still has a lot of lingering issues about that actually.