Forcibly United
A Weekend With Eda: Chapter 8
oOo
"I can make a bigger hole than you can," Ranma asserted to his companion, thirty feet away. Ryouga shook his head and gestured with one finger.
"Bakusai Tenketsu. I don't care how much chi you pump into the blast, Ranma. If I touch this point I'm seeing right now, the ship is probably going to split right in half. There's no way you can win!" The Lost Boy asserted.
The pair had cleared the ship of combatants and destroyed the engine. Every single unconscious body was piled on two of the six lifeboats and lowered into the water and cast adrift, the ends of the lines which held them lazily drifting in the waves. The ship now drifted in the ocean tides, the current actually bringing it closer to the island. Ranma and Ryouga had each thrown a chi blast into the sky to let Eda know it was safe to approach before going below deck to find a way to sink it. After a time of pointless wandering, Ryouga had stopped and identified the place they'd use to sink the boat.
"We go on three," the pigtailed boy grunted, reaching within himself to tap into his chi. There was absolutely no way he was planning to lose. "One..."
"Two..." Ryouga continued, lazily reaching out with one finger.
"Three!" The pair yelled together.
Ranma's chi blast was a flash of blue energy which impacted with the outer hull just to the left of the bow itself, the force of it leaving a huge chunk of plating missing. His blast was a little high, and only the bottom foot or so of the hole was allowing water to rush in. Ranma stared at it in triumph for a moment, especially when he looked over at Ryouga's efforts.
The bandana-clad boy's technique had produced a vertical seam which looked tiny, running up to the ceiling and down below their feet. Blue eyes narrowed in triumph as Ryouga's rival opened his mouth to crow about his victory when everything to the left of the seam seemed to... tilt. Hearing the scream of stressed metal, both boys ran down the hallway a small distance as the front end of the boat slowly started to pull away from the back end, right along the seam.
"My hole's bigger," Ryouga noted smugly.
"Shut up."
oOo
Twenty five minutes before...
The pair of blue and green glowing balls flying into the sky immediately caught Eda's interest as she fought against the current. Whatever the boys were doing, the ship they'd been on had stopped moving forward and started slowly drifting back nearly ten minutes ago.
Even though the water was neither particularly cold even as night truly began to fall in full, nor was it pleasant to be in. Still, given the choice of swimming back to the island or swimming toward the boat, she'd chosen the boat.
Twenty exhausting minutes later, she was cursing modern ship design. Specifically, the lack of any way of climbing up the damned side. It was then that she noticed the lines from lifeboats which had, apparently, been used.
It was easily a fifty foot climb. Noting that her options were climb the fucking rope or float in the ocean, Eda chose to climb the god-damned rope. Near the top her shoulders started to burn, but the blond dextrously swung the rope back and then launched herself onto the decking. Rubbing her arms, the nun privately congratulated herself on her decision to hit the weights a little harder. Without it, she probably wouldn't have been able to make the climb after that long swim.
"Now, where would the captain's cabin be?" Eda muttered to herself, crossing the deck of the boat to an open hatch. A few wrong turns later, and she found the place. No doubt this would be the best place to start with their looting of the vessel. She'd have to give the boys a bigger cut than she had: If they could sell this warship to the right people, it might well be worth more than the gold which had been scuttled with her small fishing boat, not to mention whatever valuables and equipment might be on board.
Some part of her wondered if her luck was turning around. If she was finally being blessed with some measure of good luck. This was a feeling reinforced by the welcome sight of the safe face in the captain's personal office. No doubt it would contain some funds of some sort, not to mention valuable information on whatever fringe group could afford to field a ship of this size.
Before she sold this ship, she could even use it as a base of operations in order to salvage the gold. Not even the local military would dare to ask too many questions of a ship this size, let alone whatever their foes could hope to get back in these waters in time to stop her and her two comrades.
Then she heard the ominous sound of metal screaming as it was torn apart. Almost like the ship itself was coming apart.
But no. Those two little bastards had to realize the value of the ship they'd captured, right? They couldn't possibly be dumb enough to sink this valuable ship, could they?
She felt like crying.
Of course they could. Those two assholes were, the both of them, ignorant to a fault. Not dumb. Neither of them could be accused of that. The level at which they fought with nothing but their fists was proof of their intelligence. They just didn't know anything about anything.
And it had just cost Eda millions of dollars, if the rush of water below deck was any indication.
She could have screamed. She could have cried. But she knew she didn't dare trust even Revy and Dutch with the score she'd had. It had been too big. Anybody but those two, and this venture would have turned into a bloodbath of a clusterfuck long before this point.
Still.
That didn't mean she couldn't take her anger out on the two little shits.
oOo
Ranma was very, very thankful that the waters near this area of the world were warm enough not to trigger the curse he found himself under. Not that being a woman would have impeded him, per se, but it would have been an unwelcome distraction from escaping the lower decks to the surface, where they could escape the now-rapidly sinking ship.
They just reached the hallway level with the deck when an angry blond poked her head out of one of the cabins.
"What the hell did you two do?" Eda demanded, a scowl dominating her features. Faced with the wrath of a woman, Ranma decided to to the responsible, mature thing.
"Ryouga did it!" The pigtailed boy yelled, pointing at his cohort.
"I'll send you to hell, Ranma! Sinking the ship was your idea!" Ryouga counter-accused, leveling a punch at his comrade. Ranma ducked the attack, allowing the Lost Boy's right fist to cruise past his shoulder as his left leg shot out, pinning the bandana-clad youth to the wall with a clang. Ryouga raised his other arm to smash down on the offending limb.
"Guys, that's enough!" The blond girl interrupted, grabbing them both by the arms. Ranma hesitated, refusing to continue his friendly disagreement with Ryouga with the nun in such close proximity. The brown-eyed boy apparently agreed, merely flicking his eyes down to the foot pressing him against the wall.
"So, what's up?" Ranma asked, his leg leaving Ryouga's torso. While prepared for Eda dragging his face close, he wasn't entirely comfortable with the position.
"You two idiots have sunk a ship worth more than our score," Eda hissed. Ranma would have wiped the bit of spittle off of his cheek if he wasn't sure the gesture would get him shot. Not that he thought that she could hit him, but still... The principal applied.
They should be working together.
"Why does it matter? We still have millions on the boat," Ryouga mentioned. Ranma thought that perhaps, in one of the few, rare times in their rivalry, his counterpart was trying to help. Judging by the way Eda's eyes went... feral, he judged that the interjection had not exactly helped.
"Our gold is gone! It sank!" The blond woman snarled, and Ranma felt a punch in his gut harder than any he'd ever felt. Only his glance at Ryouga's slumped form confirmed that no, the Lost Boy hadn't done violence to him for the news.
It wasn't just money.
It was their cure.
"How can it be gone? We had it in our hands. We had it on the boat!" The Hibiki protested, laughing a bit. Ranma noted that the water flooding the ship was starting to touch their feet now.
"The fucking boat sank! Right before you left to fight these assholes, one of the shells landed close enough to split our hull and kill our engine! This sinking boat we're on sunk our god-damned gold to the bottom of the ocean!" Eda yelled. She grabbed Ranma and bodily dragged him into one of the ship's quarters, one far nicer than any of the ones he'd poked his head into while he and Ryouga were making their way downstairs.
The blond dragged the pigtailed boy to a safe set in a wall.
"This is our profit. Rip it out of the fucking wall before we drown!" Ranma hesitated, but Ryouga did not. The bandana-clad youth ripped the metal box out of the wall, frowning at the clumps of the steel wall clinging to the rods extruding from the safe.
"Huh. You guys can actually do that. Duly noted," Eda admitted, her voice filled with a little bit of awe. Ranma glanced at Ryouga, who shrugged in response. Eda was lost in her awe just long enough for water to touch their shoes before snapping into action. "Are you two idiots trying to get us drowned? Let's get the hell out of here!"
Both young men chose to ignore that in favour of evacuating the rapidly flooding cabin. Ryouga was pulled up short for a moment, the rods sticking out of the safe too large to pass through the door, before he finally just ripped it through. Turning to walk down the hall, he discovered that the rods were also too wide to pass through the hallway.
With a resigned sigh and the feel of the steel deck buckling beneath his feet, with the water slowly rising, Ryouga dragged the safe, and a large gash along each wall, along with him as he followed his two companions to the top deck of the battleship.
As the ship sank behind them, Ranma considered the safe in front of him. Ryouga was propelling them towards Roanapur, his tireless arms paddling them ever forward. The pigtailed boy had offered to take over once his partner got tired, and both had chuckled a bit at the joke. And despite the massive hit to their profits, the blue-eyed youth noted that even Eda was smiling a bit as they made their way back to their current port of call.
oOo
Author's Notes:
So... I've still got an epilogue of sorts to write for this arc. Then I'm delving into a more serious arc. However, my author's notes next chapter will be a little longer next chapter. I'm going to discuss just why, writing-wise, it took me a year and a half to finish this arc off. I mean damn... I wrote everything up until three chapters ago in like a five-month span.
Anyway, catch you folks next chapter. Expect it soon, because I'm back in the game!