The crew assembled around the mast, each doing their best to keep the little fairies at bay as they swept towards them like floodwater. Marco fired his gun wildly as he sliced back and forth with his rapier. Elisa slammed her palms into the ground again and again, making little explosive blasts of fire that seemed to do a very good job of keeping her side clear. Riv, like Marco, had nothing better than sweeping his club back and forth, making Fairy fly around every time but slowly letting them through.

It was Aethe who started to stagger first, though. Shooting each target with a bow was not efficient, and stomping on them would only do so much so fast. She took bites and scratches, and Marco could tell she was starting to slow down just from the pacing of her bow-twangs.

In the meantime, he and Riv weren’t that far behind. He suspected the only thing keeping the sturdy up and fighting at the moment was his superior vitality, but that wouldn’t last forever.

“Elisa! We need a better plan!” he yelled.

“I have one!” she yelled back. “But it’s going to suck!”

“Then it sucks!” Marco tried to angle himself to protect Aethe, who was really starting to lag behind now. “We need to move fast.”

“Riv! Can you get a powder barrel? And open it?” Elisa asked.

“Yes,” Riv said. “It will be all I can do, though.”

“Then do it. Now!”

Riv jumped away from the group, stomping quickly over to the cannons and bashing the lid of the barrel into splinters with his club before picking it up. On the way there, he picked up a few bites. On the way back, he got tons of the wounds, so many that he was dripping blood through his boots as he returned.

“This sucks,” he said. “I have a few more seconds. What now?”

“Put it on its side. Spin it. Hard. Marco, help him.”

“Elisa…”

“Juth doo it.” Aethe slurred, obviously numbed. “Fasth.”

Marco obeyed. With Riv’s help, they managed to snap the barrel into a spin so strong it emptied almost completely, sending powder spraying across the whole deck.

“Hold on to your ears,” Elisa said. “This is going to be the worst.”

Lighting her hand on fire again, Elisa slammed it into the now-explosive deck. Little venomous Fairies went flying everywhere as Marco’s eardrums all but burst from the sound of it. This was a much less intense explosion than if the powder had been all in one pile. It was still a lot to deal with. The stuff they had been supplied with was top-quality, system-enhanced stuff. It contained a lot of power in each grain, which meant that as the Fairies were torn apart or sent screaming through the air the crew was getting blown up a little, too.

Marco got back to his feet, dizzy and disoriented. He was the first up, and there were still fairies around. He staggered around the deck, stabbing stragglers and putting half-dead enemies out of their misery. Aethe was now fully grounded, as was Riv. Elisa did what she could to help, but this was mostly his job.

The powder had done its task though.

The Fairies were as the system said. Their fragility couldn’t deal with a sudden flash of flame and explosion of any size. Meanwhile, Marco and the crew had taken some damage, but not enough to keep any of them off their feet for more than a few moments. It took a long, painful, staggering minute, but soon the ocean was clear except for them.

“Well, that was horrifying.” Riv was recovering a bit faster than the others. “The entire deck is scorched.”

“The entire us is scorched.” Aethe rubbed her burned arm. “I hated that entire fight.”

“I guess it teaches us something. We aren’t good against swarms of things.” Elisa scowled. “And I don’t have any great way to fix that.”

Marco was the only one grinning. “Looks like we did get something, though. Before I can cash it in we need to haul these little boats aboard for repair materials.”

The miniature watercraft weren’t hard to get ahold of, considering the Fairies had brought them right up to the sides of the hull. They hauled the aboard and initiated the repair process, which really didn’t have to do a lot to bring them back up to ship-shape.

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As soon as the materials had turned into usable energy for the repair process, the notification in Marco’s head completed almost immediately.

“Useful,” Marco said, explaining the prize to his friends. “Not something that makes us stronger, exactly, but we won’t have to get our clothes wet nearly as often.”

“Good.” Riv began pushing the now-dead Fairies to the side of the boat. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few dozen fairy corpses to toss overboard.”

They weren’t attacked again that day, or the next. It was a lucky thing. Marco had talked to the crew about what they viewed their biggest threats to be these days, and every single one of them was most afraid of attrition. If they were attacked by enough things in a row, the boat would get cut down piece by piece until there wasn’t enough to resist with. They could all swim, but nobody could survive on a diet of only salt water, violent waves, and whatever beasts were beneath the waters. If the boat went down, they’d eventually go down with it, probably eaten by the same thing that had managed to send The Foolish Endeavor

to a watery grave in the first place.

Thankfully, the day after that, they sighted the next island. And it was a big one.

“Funny,” Aethe commented as she waited for the others to also see what she was seeing. “I wouldn’t have thought we’d see a built-up island out here. Isn’t this supposed to be the hardest place to survive?”

The island was huge, almost a quasi-continent compared to Thatch’s small patch of earth in the middle of the sea. The differences didn’t stop there. Even from a distance, it was clear there were plenty of other ships, docked at real, honest-to-god docks. There were buildings, with some visible smoke coming from the chimneys.

“That’s probably why,” Marco said. “You come out here, you win for a while, then things start to get hard. Eventually you have to make a choice, so you settle somewhere.”

“And because you could survive on a ship with just your crew, which is harder, you can survive just fine on an island with numbers backing you up,” Elisa added with a thoughtful look in her eyes. “Although that means that the lowliest shopkeep out here is probably pretty high level. They had to get this far, after all.”

“We are going ashore though, right?” Riv asked. “It doesn’t look like a bad place to me, at least.”

It really didn’t. The entire island had a sense of health about it, like successful islands back where Marco grew up. It didn’t look anything like Gulf Isle, really, except for the fact that it was a settled island. The trees were different, the buildings seemed to adhere to a different kind of style, and the entire built-up area they could see was so hilly that the settlement had almost terraced it. Still, in a way he couldn’t quite place, it felt like home.

“I say yeah. Aethe?” Marco asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Me too.” Elisa said. “If only to get rid of the goldbag.”

—

When they anchored the ship and rowed the outboat ashore, it was riding low in the water. That was the fault of the gold-bag, an item that had been bogging down their hold for a longer time than any of them had really been willing to tolerate.

In the early days of their quest before Aethe had joined, they hadn’t really picked up much in the way of hard currency. Monsters didn’t drop it, as a general rule, although they sometimes dropped the raw materials that could be traded for money. After they picked up Aethe and their primary quarry had changed from monsters to pirates, they had started to get more.

Every ship they took down individually had some, and some of them had quite a bit. That alone had made them all sort of rich by the contexts of their childhoods. When they took down a good portion of an armada with a sneak attack, the old woman leader of the invisible island had made sure they got credit for every ship they had sunk by themselves when they divided the salvage after the battle.

Of course, the defense of that island had cost money too. Their eventual share was a lot, but it didn’t strain what was strictly reasonable until they got the entirety of Captain Steed’s share. As the leader of an evil armada of pirates, he had apparently been skimming a percentage off the top. Even after converting all of his money to the biggest denominations they could, it left them with a canvas flour bag completely full of coins. Up until now, they had no place at all to actually spend it.

“Everyone take a handful of coins. Whatever you want and can easily carry. Use these pouches, but keep them inside your clothes somewhere so people don’t hear them clink and steal them.” Elisa handed out a large leather pouch to everyone. “Riv, you too, even if you are carrying the money in your backpack. Try not to let anyone know it’s there. Sorry, I know it’s heavy.”

“Why do I need a pouch if I have all this?” Riv lifted the gold back with his hand. “Seems like enough.”

“So people don’t know you have that, Riv,” Marco said. “This seems like an okay place, but you wouldn’t want to tempt people unnecessarily. Just everyone keep close to everyone else, and we should be fine.”

When the outboat made it to the dock, there were already two people there waiting for them. They were smiling and friendly looking, but they were also official sorts of people. Not angry folks, not thugs sent to beat them up. Just people who looked like they were in charge of something and who were fully used to looking that way.