“Well, I hope you all were right about me being good.” Marco lifted his pistol and took a shot that he knew would be useless before he even pulled the trigger. The Zombified Captain looked every part of a legitimate captain, complete with an extra long saber. “Looks like I’m going to have to be.”

“I can tank it first,” Riv offered. “It’ll help to know what it can do.”

“Dodge,” Marco yelled as he waved his companions back. “I can take care of myself. Just don’t let it get close enough to hit you and help from far enough away that I don’t have to worry about you.”

“But…” Both of Elisa’s hands sparked with fire. “I can fight.”

“Maybe. But not well enough to go head-on. I’ll get distracted helping the two of you. Just pick your moments, like you always do. I’ll keep him busy. I should be good enough to do that.”

Both of his partners nodded like that made sense. They had faith in him, somehow. Marco didn’t really have the same level of confidence they seemed to. He just needed to find a way to believe in himself. There really wasn’t another option. The zombie captain was big, but he wasn’t moving like a big man usually did. The weight that should have made him clomp dissipated through his leather boots onto the ship’s deck like he was padding along on cat paws.

Marco wasn’t the tallest, though he was a good height. It was just enough that he wasn’t quite beaten out for overall length by the ridiculously long saber the captain carried. He decided to do his best to nullify that reach from the get-go, bursting forward like a cannonball and weaving to the side just in time to avoid the edge of the sword swinging downwards. The weapon buried itself in the planks of the ship, sending splinters flying as it firmly wedged into the boards.

The big zombie growled and pulled up hard on the sword, sending Marco reeling back as he got pelted with pieces of shattered plank and the broad edge of the blade. He was just regaining his footing when the captain swung the saber down again, grinning evilly at what looked an awful lot like a for-sure hit.

Marco parried the strike just in time, slapping his rapier against the captain’s sword and defecting it into the boards again. This time the blade remained free, and the surprised captain brought it back up into a slash immediately. He had been surprised by the power Marco could put out, though, and that moment of hesitation gave Marco just enough time to put a bullet into the zombie’s eye.

The orb burst like a grape. It must have hurt too, at least judging by the bellow that the zombie let out in the immediate aftermath. The sword slashed out side to side again and again, too fast for Marco to do anything besides dodging desperately backwards. The captain eventually recovered, reaching up and pulling his own eyelids closed over the wreckage of his former eye before setting himself, holding his sword forward and charging.

It wasn’t a delicate, trained sort of charge. It was not a finesse kind of thing at all. The captain’s charge was a wild thing that relied on weight to do its work, and Marco put everything he had into stopping it. A quick shot with his pistol caught the zombie in the shoulder but did almost nothing to slow it down. He let loose with another heavy strike, but even that did nothing to stop the sheer force of the lunge. The most Marco accomplished with the strike was to turn the blade up just far enough to keep the cutting edge off his skin, but the hit still sent him flying, knocking him nearly senseless on the floor as he crashed and rolled away.

The zombie didn’t let up. Marco was barely sliding to a stop when it appeared over him, slashing downward with a force and speed he had no chance of stopping.

“Now!”

Elisa appeared behind the zombie, planting both of her hands on its back and sending electricity coursing through his back. Following her lead. Riv slid in under the descending sword, grabbing the zombie captain’s wrists and stopping him flat. The element of surprise was working hard for the team, and Marco was sure the captain wouldn’t be held for long. Marco rose on wobbling legs, fired his gun again, and leapt in with his sword, skewering the captain’s arm at the elbow while shooting him point-blank in the belly.

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The zombie responded by swinging his whole body violently side to side, sending Riv flying as Elisa jumped back, then ran. Marco kept the captain from giving chase by mercilessly stabbing him over and over when he tried. It was hard to keep the zombie focused on him, but after taking a small wound when he stayed too close for too long, the captain shifted back to trying to take down Marco.

“You have to let us help!” Elisa yelled at a safe distance. “He’s too much for you alone!”

Marco hated to admit that she was right, but the captain was well past what he could handle safely on his own. The zombie was stronger, faster, and even just plain better at fighting. Marco had been able to somewhat even the score by using his gun, but it wasn’t going to be enough. He would need the others to help him, even if that meant they put themselves in the way of danger.

He nodded in assent before pressing his attack. The captain recovered initiative little by little, finally sending Marco off balance with a particularly well-timed slash at his stomach. The follow-up would have devastated him if a Riv-thrown barrel hadn’t crashed over the captain’s head and bought Marcos a few more unanswered hits from his sword and pistol. The next time the captain should have been able to crush him, he was rescued by Elisa, who set the zombie’s clothes ablaze with her hands.

Every single time he needed backup, they managed to help in one way or another. Marco picked up a deep cut across his chest and a crushed radial bone in his shooting arm despite their help, but not before the captain was finally worn down courtesy of a few dozen rapier stabs and bullet holes.

After that, it was just a matter of cleanup.

“He’s still coming,” Riv said. “It’s sort of sad, really.”

The zombie was still clawing across the dungeon floor at them, determined to get the invaders off his ship or re-die trying. He wasn’t moving fast, and he had long since lost his sword. The team had come together near the end, pounding him with everything they had until he was de-clawed and helpless before them.

“Sure. Sad.” Marco rubbed his still knitting arm bones and flipped his sword to a reverse grip. “I wouldn’t call this a real tragedy. Elisa, should I apply this guy’s skill too? Assuming he has one.”

“What did the lesser pirates have?”

“Nothing.”

“Then I don’t know. This isn’t a dungeon anyone ever wrote about, and human enemies tend to have a bit of variance in how they work anyway. Let’s see what it is first.”

Marco considered that as he stepped forward. The pirate had been strong, almost ridiculously so compared to the kinds of fights they had before. He wanted that strength. At the same time, they were floundering in a windless ocean at the moment, slowly running out of supplies. The cool factor was mostly suffocated by that reality.

He stabbed down through the pirate’s head one last time, then waited for the system to do its thing. Notifications usually came in a certain order, and this time the completion of the dungeon took precedence over the conquest reward the system had promised him.

More notifications immediately followed in its wake. Marco planned to go through them quickly, then changed his mind when his eye caught the implication of the next two notifications.

“That’s all for you, right?” Marco looked at Riv. “I don’t need the club, if that was a question.”

“I think so, yeah.” Riv picked the newly brought-into-existence club and crystal from the ground. “The only question is if I want to use these. Most Sturdy classes don’t specialize this much, you know.”

“No?”

“Nope. They pick up all the skills they can before they decide on what to focus on, if they get that chance. This sounds more like a full alignment shift. If I got a fighting skill normally, it would just be an add-on to the class. This would change everything.”

“Which is bad?”

“Now that I think about it? No.” Riv turned the crystal over in his hand a few times, then absorbed it without another word. He shuddered. “It’s just a direction I’ll head in for my class. If we want to survive, I need this.”

“You didn’t have to, Riv,” Elisa said. “We could have figured something else out.”

“Now we don’t have to. But let’s say we are even for all the life-saving now, okay? I’m getting tired of feeling in debt to you two all the time,” Riv said.

“Deal.”

The last window popped up then, pulling Marco’s attention away from Riv’s mixed fortune back to his own.