Over the next thirty minutes, the larger ship kept on them. It was likely due to a combination of having a better ship, a faster navigator, stronger rowers, or all three. Any plans of easily shaking them evaporated. Elisa offered what tips she could, but even almost infinite knowledge wasn’t magic. It couldn’t move the ship faster than it was capable of going, no matter how much they wished it could.

Marco put his hands on the wheel and leaned into it, as if that would make the ship go faster. Just a little bit of speed would have really helped here, beyond the few bonuses he got passively from being the captain of the ship.

Please, ship, he thought. Take whatever you need.

He almost thought he felt something leak out of him, then. Elisa was alternating between looking at her book, caring for the direction, and glancing back at their pursuers. After a few moments of his mock feeding-the-ship play, she glanced up.

“We’re going faster,” Elisa stated.

“Are we? How could you possibly tell?”

“Parallax effects,” she said. “Don’t worry about that. We are going faster. I can tell. Why are we going faster?”

“I think… is it possible for the ship to eat my magic?” Marco kept his hands on the wheel. It was hard for him to find the words to describe what he was talking about, not least because his head was suddenly killing him. “I guess that’s dumb. I can’t cast spells.”

“You can’t cast spells yet. The system descriptions don’t mention every aspect of the class, especially when those aspects are future class features. They are still there in the class, even if they are undeveloped.”

“Shouldn’t it not work yet?”

“Probably. But that wouldn’t explain why you are getting pale. Lay off whatever you are doing for a while. We can’t have you passing out.”

After a few minutes, Marco started to feel much better. It was almost like when his foot used to fall asleep, except for covering his whole body and mind. Now that he had taken a minute or so of deep breaths, he felt significantly stronger than he had a few minutes before.

“Why doesn’t that happen to you? When you cast too much?” Marco asked.

“Because, like I said, I don’t. I can’t make any effect that outpaces my magical regeneration by very much. Even if I did, the class would have some safeguards in place to keep it from overdrawing the way you just did. Usually, the ability to overdraw is a class feature.”

“Like Berserker’s Fury?” Marco knew all about that skill. He thought every young man probably did. It was the stuff of heroic stories, where men would fight until they were just about ready to drop, then activate the high-risk, heavy penalty laden fury skill to give them just a few seconds more of sheer power. Either they’d fall flat on their faces afterwards, or they’d win the day. In the stories, it was always the latter. “You think I have something like that?”

“No. I don’t. Even if you can feed the ship magical power, you should default to a very conservative opinion on how much you can do it. That you aren’t is… weird,” Elisa said.

“It’s a unique class.”

“Then it’s weird multiplied by weird. Rare classes are one in hundreds. Unique classes are… let’s say they don’t come up in the books very often.”

“So how do I keep myself from passing out, then? I need to keep us ahead of the people chasing us, right?”

“Right. Just stop when you feel about as bad as you did before. You didn’t actually pass out then. We know that level is safe.”

All the space Marco’s ship spell casting had given them was eaten up by the time he had replenished his magic stores. He regained some distance by pushing more power into the ship. As intensely curious as he was to what this overdrive power would be when it was an actual skill or how it managed to work right now when it wasn’t one, he didn’t have any time to dwell on it.

Five or ten minutes went by as Marco began to flee in one very general direction. He had a note in his pocket still, something promising some level of safety if he followed its instructions. If he went into the hidden sea that the system had promised him, he was mostly confident this guard ship wouldn’t follow. It was outside their jurisdiction, really, even if they could get in by the same door.

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The obstacle in the way of him using the route wasn’t that, really. It was something different, in two parts, both of which came up from belowdecks at that moment. Elisa had been moving around the ship so it wasn’t that surprising to see her again, but he was honestly shocked to see Riv up and about.

“Riv, could I have a word with you?” Marco asked.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“There’s a chance we could get away from this ship, but only one. And it wouldn’t be easy. Or safe. If I had that chance, would you be mad if I took it? It might keep you away from home for a while. Or forever, if we don’t survive.”

“You’ve saved my life twice or three times now. I owe you.” Riv looked back at the ship chasing them. “What do they do if they catch you? Kill you?”

“It’s not quite that bad. I hope.” Marco wiped the sweat off his forehead and cut off his magic flow, leaning on the wheel to recover. “I have an evil class from what they say. They’ll put me to work making pickles or something. Helping people make pickles, more likely.”

“So not much better,” Riv concluded.

“No, not much,” Marco agreed. “It sucks.”

“Marco, I’m a sturdy. It’s the most boring class in the world or one of the best depending on how you build it, but to build it, you need opportunities. There were none of those back home. So what are you saying?”

Marco frowned. There had to be some way to ask them the questions he needed to ask without actually asking them.

“You two,” Marco said. “Say I had a way for us to escape this problem. Would you want that?”

The system didn’t stop him. He was apparently being appropriately vague.

“Obviously we would, Marco.” Elisa’s face scrunched up. “Why bring it up? Do you have something?”

He started to say yes and his stomach lurched. He’d need to be less direct.

“Can’t say. Riv, say you didn’t get home for a while. Would your parents be upset?”

Riv and Elisa exchanged a glance. Marco couldn’t blame them for being cautious when he was being so weird.

“They’d be fine,” Riv said. “They have more kids and more going on than just me. Why?”

“Can’t say.”

“I think he literally can’t.” Elisa walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Marco, are you… geased? You have a geas, a restriction from the system.” Elisa turned to Riv and held up her hand “Don’t try to make him talk about it. It takes a lot of cleverness to work around something like this, and it’s not predictable even if you have it. Marco doesn’t have that cleverness.”

“Hey.” Marco’s voice sounded a bit too annoyed, even to him. “I’m doing my best.”

“We know you are.” Elisa patted him on the shoulder. “Riv, whatever he’s trying to ask, it’s unusual. Something very odd is going on here.”

“Odd is bad?” Riv asked. “The curse sounds bad enough by itself.”

“Odd is… odd.” Elisa said. “I know Marco. he wouldn’t be trying to steer us into certain death to save himself. This is more like a big decision at the most.”

“Ah.” Riv waved his hand. “Then do whatever you want, Marco. And stop talking about it. You look like death.”

“Just like that?” Marco sputtered. “No time to think?”

“I owe you my life twice and my job at home is boring. No need to think. Is it at least going to be interesting?”

“I think so.” Marco braced himself for the retaliation from the geas, but none came. “At the least, that.”

Marco adjusted the ship’s course slightly, and the guard ship followed suit a few moments later. The point described on the map wasn’t far, just a circle drawn in the ocean a bit closer to an unimportant shore that most boats wouldn’t travel to. In less than an hour, they were close. They were also almost out of time.

—

The system apparently loved running from the law, at least as it concerned Marco and his class. It had been giving him skill levels the entire time, each that came with its own little boost in speed. It was even affecting his proto-skill in a way he could feel every time it used it. He was using less magic now, and letting it loose in a more controlled way. It was also getting more out of what magic he did put in, pushing them faster and faster every time.

It still wasn’t enough. Marco had done the math in his head a dozen times now and he’d have time for just two more bursts of speed before the other boat caught up with them, well before he could do the third he’d need to get them through the door.

He burst the first time anyway, widening the distance between him and the good guy bad guys again.

“We aren’t going to make it,” Marco said. “And we are so close.”

“To what?” Elisa glared into the distance. “You know what? Don’t answer that. I’m sorry for asking. Is there anything we can do?”

“Not that I know of. I’m going to keep trying, though. They’re probably about as angry as they can get, right? There’s no harm in seeing it through to the last.”

The distance between the two boats was so close by the time his proto-skill came off cooldown that Marco was sure they could have taken him out with cannon fire if that was what the pursuers wanted. He almost would have preferred that. If he was going to spend the rest of his life cleaning up barbershops or something, at least he’d have a good story of escaping a capsizing ship to tell.

He looked out at the open, free seas he had just almost had access to and tried to fire off his second burst of speed, only to find it was stuck.

“It’s stuck,” Marco said. “The skill.”

“What do you mean it’s stuck?” Riv asked. “Skills don’t get stuck. Are you out of magic?”

“No, it’s there.” Marco could feel it pushing against some undefined part of him like shaken champagne against a cork. “It’s just… I don’t know. Stuck.”

The other ship was now close enough that they could hear voices. Most of them were yelling for the ship to stop.

“You had better get unstuck, Marco! Why aren’t you panicking, again?” Elisa yelled.

“Because this doesn’t feel bad, exactly.” Marco shifted side to side a little, trying to shake the skill loose. “It’s like it’s doing it on purpose.”

A split second before the ships actually got into grappling range, the skill finally burst loose all by itself.