The speed upgrade helped the ship turn around in time, Kuli stopped it when it perfectly faced the incoming wall of water.

Sofia used her aura to keep herself and Bookie secured to the deck and watched the wave come.

The sails flapped and furled in the wind, and the wave struck, lifting the ship skyward. The hull creaked under its layer of bone, but it held. Cold salty water cascaded over the deck, washing away anything that wasn’t properly secured. Finally the bow plunged after the wave, the ship falling back into calmer water.

“Bookie! Job for you,” Sofia said as soon as the wave passed, “Summon the engineer.”

“Yes!”

At the same time, Sofia quickly made a rough miniature replica of the ship with bones, and as soon as the engineer skeleton was there, she gave it to him.

“We need this ship faster and sturdier, I can modify it, so show me where to.”

While kuli steered the ship in a wide arc around the Ark to go toward the large goblin ship, Mornn and Pareth protected it against the incoming steel eggs that rained from the sky every so often. Sofia left them behind, following the engineer below deck.

Given a notepad and a pencil, the engineer started drawing things at a terrifying speed. First he had Sofia demolish and empty out most of the ship’s insides, leaving it as a large open space. Any excess wood was stored in Sofia’s eye for quick disposal. The engineer then started drawing mechanical parts seen from multiple angles, with size measurements and number of parts next to them. Though he could still not write words, numbers and measuring units were fine, apparently.

Using her bones, Sofia created the parts to the best of her ability, and the engineer used his skills to assemble them, creating some kind of weird windmill.

“Are you sure this is going to help?” Sofia asked, watching the thing taller than herself that she had just helped create and couldn’t understand the aim of.

The skeleton nodded, and showed how to install it, which involved carving a large hole through the bottom of the ship and plugging it up with the thing before it had time to sink. Once it was done, only a horizontal pole sticking out of the thing was left inside.

“I think I get that the thing is supposed to spin, I see how it could make us faster now, but what now? Am I supposed to spin it with my aura?”

The engineer shook his skull, and started drawing again.

The mimic? Not what I expected…

Following the schematics, Sofia built a giant wheel for the Mimic skeleton to run inside of, connecting it to the rest of the machine. The mimic was Sofia’s fastest skeleton, up there with Pestle, and as it ran and the wheel spun, Sofia could feel the ship start to go faster. It was powered not by mana but by the undead’s infinite stamina.

“I’m not sure how much this is going to help but it’s a good start.”

The entire thing had only taken a few minutes, with that done, Sofia returned to the deck to watch the situation outside.

“We’re almost there,” Kuli said to Sofia, seeing her come out, “What are you doing down there?”

“Just working on a speed upgrade, did you not feel the difference?”

“Neh?! So that’s what that was? I thought we hit some kind of strong current or something. Well, stay here now, might need you.”

“I see that… How is it looking for the other teams?” Sofia asked, seeing many other galleons all going the in the same direction.

It was Mornn who answered, “A few got overrun by the goblins, we haven’t seen the big thing come back. The other strong groups have all been keeping their distances aside from your sister’s which is that ship farther in front of us, no one’s tried anything so far but they are watching us. Total of about seventy boats out, as you can see, some with multiple teams aboard.”

“Do we even know if we can attack each other?” Sofia asked.

“We sure can,” Mornn confirmed, “One of the ships rammed another earlier and they both sunk, I think both teams got eliminated.”

“They didn’t try to jump to another ship or at least fly around a bit?”

“Try to fly if you want,” Kuli said from the wheel, “we’re stuck here. Your fairy’s been complaining she can’t invade the other ships.”

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“Wait, really?”

Sofia quickly located Pestle who was on top of the highest mast, and flew up join her, finding her looking at the sky, sulking lying on her back, legs hanging in the wind.

“Is everything alright, Pestle?”

“Sofia… Pesle bored… No like small boat. No explore, no kill, no leg…”

Sofia tried to think of something to say, but explosion noises in the distance captured her attention. Pestle stood up, watching as several red steel eggs were fired from the giant mountain-like goblin ship.

Red ones? Ten of them exactly… Is one coming our way? Ah, yep, two. One for Saria’s ship probably. Did they just fire them at the ten strongest teams?

Sofia yelled at her team below, “Can you leave this one to Pestle?”

Mornn and Pareth shrugged, while Kuli just said “Don’t break the ship!”

“There you go. Have fun.”

“Kill!”

Sofia followed Pestle down, and started reinforcing the deck where she predicted the egg was going to land.

The goblin egg hit the ship with a thunderous bang, making it sink almost a whole meter and rebounding up. It did not pierce the deck but was well embedded into it, the red egg seemed much sturdier than the usual.

A single big goblin inside.

Pestle did not wait for the goblin to come out. She disappeared from Sofia’s side, leaving a fist-sized hole in the red steel. A fight broke out, a firearm was fired with a bang, leaving a second, red-hot hole in the egg. The egg shook, and Sofia could barely follow what was going on inside, but it seemed the goblin was managing to defend itself against Pestle, even striking back and injuring her.

Pareth came to stand next to Sofia, he silently reactivated his [Sanctified grounds].

You wanted to help? Well, I don’t want her to struggle either.

Sofia fully activated [Runeforged Overlord]. Between the sudden buffs and the constant healing from Sofia’s close aura, Pestle could maintain the assault no matter how many times the goblin inside hit her, even when he shot her point blank with his firearm.

She’s really going all-out in there.

It was hard to even tell what Pestle was doing, as she kept moving and teleporting around inside of the egg. The creature inside roared several times, incomprehensible gargles of a mad goblin, and finally, after about half a minute, Pestle came out from the same hole she had entered, carrying a blood-covered mana heart that looked like a blue pearl almost as large as herself.

[You have defeated Elite monster ‘Zgrgl-nomn’, Striker of the Lootereers - Level 349’]

“Can Leg?” she asked innocently.

“It’s your kill.”

“LEG!” Pestle rejoiced, holding her trophy high above her head before taking a bite out of it.

“We didn’t even have to do anything,” Mornn commented from the side, “look at these guys on the right, they’re sinking.”

“Ah, yeah, not everyone’s capable of handling such an enemy huh.”

“Same level as the demon lords from the second event,” Mornn said, “and it’s just the beginning of this event. We better not lose… I need to buy that sword.”

“Wait, you’re still on a perfect win-streak?” Sofia asked, not aware as the saintess had just never mentioned her results for some of the solo events, and did not wear the pins.

“Huh-uh,” Mornn confirmed with a nod, summoning a pile of pins in her hand, “See, all gold, eight of them. I may not have as many points as you do but I’ve not lost yet.”

“And you didn’t get to the final floor of the tower back then?”

“Hey, no need to rub salt in the wound! These damn orbs man… I still see ‘em in my nightmares.”

“Ah, that’s no longer censored? That’s new, how did you fail exactly?” Sofia asked, the two saintesses carelessly chatting as more steel eggs rained from the sky and ships sunk left and right.

“Yeah the censor has been getting weaker, I could ask Sun what that’s about if you want, she probably knows.”

“No need, I have my idea of why.”

“If you say so,” Mornn said, “And yeah, how I failed… Wasn’t glorious. I tried to understand what orb was the correct one, searched for potential matches… But despite several attempts I didn’t find the damn thing, and as the orbs got faster and faster, my concentration slipped. The tip my left ear touched one of the orbs… Yeah, what we elves get for having long ears, huh.”

“Oh… I basically did that too, my wings touched one, if I remember correctly, just that should have been fine, though, no?”

“Could have… But hear this, it barely brushed against my ear but that activated the damn thing. It turned into an electric arrow aimed right at my head, I reflexively crouched down to avoid the thing, no time for anything else, it missed me but hit another orb that was behind me. That was another yellow one. Maybe earlier in the event I would have managed, but that late into it, it became hard to deal with two of those at once while also avoiding the others. Had to to let them hit me a few times, but it’s hard to keep thinking straight while getting constantly shocked. Bumped into another one, got pelted in the face by hail, sent me reeling back into three more. And I got overwhelmed like that, had to leave to avoid dying… Sucked ass. And you know the worst part?”

“No?”

“When I got back to Herzal later after failing this, Sun locked me up in a replica of that floor until I could survive a whole hour at the maximum speed without getting hit.”

“Sounds fun,” Sofia offhandedly answered, looking at the goblin ships in the distance, many had started to sail in the direction of the trialees’ galleons. “Looks like we have to get back into it.”

Mornn smirked and grabbed a particularly huge blue sword from her storage. “Let me show you the sword I’ve been itching to try out this entire trial. This one is called Exodus, the sea splitter!”