He sighed and stood up, stretching out his limbs as the last of his cuts healed. Then he took the wheel and spun it, stopping once the ship was on a bearing leading straight into the next school of fish.

It wasn’t time to be safe, he decided. It was time to level.

“Ready for round two?” Marco asked.

Elisa looked at Marco like he was crazy. “Are you sure? We barely beat the last group.”

Marco glanced at his status again and tried to remember what just the last seconds of the previous fight had been like. It hadn’t been easy, but it was much more manageable to dodge the fish at the end than it had been at the beginning. That had all been stats, and the ship had not been in play except as a place to stand.

I can do better now.

Marco looked down at the ship itself. The upgrade hadn’t been significant and would have been lost on anyone else but Marco. But after spending hours working on every detail, he could notice the way that the bow now tapered to a knife-like point or how the hull now had slight scale-like protrusions.

“Yeah. I think it’s going to be fine,” Marco said with all the confidence he could muster in the moment.

Elisa thought for a second, then nodded. The fact that she had thought about it first before nodding meant kind of a lot to Marco. He could feel the confidence in his chest swell. He didn’t have to talk about it anymore than that.

The school of fish noticed them not long after, turning as one to come attack them. Marco had noticed something odd about the way they attacked in the first wave. In a larger craft, the Bladefish were relentless in their apparent rage at the sides of the boat, bashing into the boat in a futile, constant way until they finally tired. In this smaller ship, they weren’t as focused on taking out the structural components of the ship to vent their anger.

It was probably because they weren’t actually trying to get the ships to sink, Marco thought. They were trying to get at the people in them, and the ships were just in the way. Overall, it was very convenient that he didn’t have to worry much about them going after the sails or wearing down the ship’s tiny mast.

As the fish began their attacking leaps, he spun the wheel to the side one last time, putting the ship into a turning loop. The first Bladefish in the air caught a bullet for its troubles, and the next two got stabs from his rapier. The shot fish was injured, and the two that got the sword were outright dead. It would have been a good start all by itself, but what the ship did blew Marco’s damage out of the water.

Every so often, one of the Bladefish would aim a little too low and clip the side of the ship on its way in. They did very little to hurt the stout wooden sides. The ship, however, did a whole lot more to their fragile, fleshy little bodies. Marco could smell the blood in the water behind them as the ship left a path of carnage through the school of fish. Every time one of the Bladefish touched the boat, they leapt away from the encounter a little worse for the wear. Soon, the ship was leaving a cloud of gore in its wake.

“Why is it doing that?” Elisa yelled, keeping low down underneath the level of the ship’s rails. “We aren’t even going that fast.”

“It’s a skill. I’ll tell you about it later.” Another three fish took to the air, and Marco barely parried the first, dodged the second, and shot the third before they ripped him to shreds. “After this. Okay?”

He continued to eviscerate the fish that left the water as the boat slowly straightened itself out. Elisa crawled across the bottom of the boat and spun the wheel again. The turning ship made it much harder for the Bladefish to have a straight shot without clipping the wooden sides, which meant a new cycle of carnage.

There were even more fish in the water than Marco had initially thought, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. The ship was leaving so much free food in the water that only the most motivated monsters were even bothering to attack.

In the meantime, he was leveling. He was up another level within a few moments, and he felt his gun and sword skills climbing as well. Now he was catching the fish before they got close to him, either shooting a hole clean through them or stabbing them just enough to kill them without getting them caught on his sword. Soon, the entire school was cleared out, and he felt meaningfully stronger for the experience.

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“No.” Elisa caught the ship’s wheel on her foot when Marco tried to turn it towards the next distant swarm of carnivorous fish. “Not yet. Tell me what’s going on with your skill.”

“It’s something to do with my class. The consumption part, I think. When I killed a fish, it let me put some of what they do into the ship. It’s faster, but not much. The bigger thing seems to be that it hurts things when it touches them, like how the Bladefish does.”

Elisa’s eyes widened. She said nothing.

“And I just thought, you know, having the boat fighting too would be helpful. And nothing can go wrong,” Marco continued. Elisa was still staring and quiet in a way Marco didn’t really recognize as normal when it came from her. “Is that… wrong?”

“It’s not wrong, no. It’s… listen, it’s hard to explain. Do we have a minute? A real fishless minute, I mean.”

“I think so.” There were no fish within a half mile of them that he could see, at least in the kind of numbers that would matter. He turned it away from any potential schools of fish just to be safe anyways. “Go ahead.”

“You have an assignable skill,” Elisa said. “Customizable. People argue about the name of that kind of skill a lot, and it’s hard to settle because no two of them are the same, and there aren’t enough of them to draw a consistent pattern and limit on what they can do.”

“That rare?”

“Absolutely rare. Vanishingly rare. And useful.”

“I’ve heard of ships doing ramming damage before, though. This doesn’t seem that different.”

“Technically, it isn’t. If you kill a dragon and make the ship breathe fire, it’s not that special. Some classes can do that too. The point is that if what you told me is right, you get to choose what upgrades you add. If you kill an ice elemental, you get to skate this thing across icebergs, maybe.”

“Would that work?” Marco’s eyes widened. “Would that work like that?”

“I don’t know, and almost assuredly not. Doesn’t matter. The point is that you don’t know what you’ll need in the future. Even the system probably doesn’t know. This lets you react to what’s going on by changing your class to fit it. And it’s even better than that, since all the animals in an area you are trying to survive probably have to have what it takes to survive the biggest danger in that area, and… lots of things.”

“I mean, this seems fine?” Marco moved the ship’s wheel back and forth, and the ship followed along with the motion, carving through the water like a blade. “I might just stick with this.”

“That would be a waste. Trust me. You need to plan your build. Why is this such a fight?”

Marco waited a bit, still steering. Elisa knew him well enough. Right now, she was caught up in the thought of a thing but she’d understand if he just waited a few seconds. Sure enough, it was less than ten seconds later when she did get it, then bonked her own forehead with her palm.

“It’s the work. You just want to go on adventures. You don’t want to think,” Elisa stated.

“Who wants to think?” Marco questioned. “I have adventures to go on. I want to have fun, Elisa. That’s the whole point of all this.”

“That was the whole point of this, Marco. That was what this was about before you got a class that the government wants to kill you over. Now it’s about something different.”

Marco’s hands tightened on the ship’s wheel. He wasn’t mad at Elisa for pointing out the truth. He was flat-out enraged at the truth itself, and he didn’t see any good way to escape it. But he was also right where he was supposed to be in a lot of ways. He was on the deck of his own ship, he was out at sea, and he was surrounded on all sides by danger. It was everything he wanted, except for the tone of it all being off by a mile.

Planning his build was another thing that didn’t fit. He wanted to bash into and through problems, and now he had a power that was going to force him to study and think.

Every time I meet a new monster, I’m going to have to think about whether it’s a better fit than the enhancement I already have on. I’m going to have to make a hard decision, and then I’m going to have to make another one, and then another, and then…

“Fine.” Elisa shook her head. “I’ll do it for you. The way you are, you’d equip some skill and then never replace it. Lazy brain.”

“You mean it?” Marco almost shouted. “You’d do that for me?”

“I would. Very honestly, I’m probably the best person to do it anyway. I know an awful lot about the monsters. The ones I don’t know, I can figure out from other similar animals. It’s actually a pretty interesting problem.” Elisa pulled out her notebook and started writing, dismissing Marco to his piloting with a wave of her hand. “Go ahead. Kill your fish or whatever. Don’t let them bother me.”

Demanding. Oh well. It’s the least I can do.

Marco steered into another school of fish. He took them down even more quickly this time. That was the way of things with monsters, he had heard. The first time you encountered something strong, it either killed you or you managed to survive through spilling some blood. The next time, you had both practice and whatever experience points the monsters had given you. After a while, they were old hat. The accumulation of gear and levels would, over time, render even dragons weak.

That’s the story, at least. These fish aren’t very strong. Nothing is in these waters. Everything has been civilized and pacified outside of the dungeons. The only reason these fish are still here is because they migrate, and it’s too much work to actually clear them out year after year when they don’t really hurt much.

They sailed through the night, Elisa working on some sort of projected plan for Marco’s entire future strength while he took out school after school of fish.

Like he had timed it that way on purpose, the very last of the fish he found pushed Marco over the limit to a new level before the supply of targets dried up completely.

Marco spent a while at the wheel, feeling everything he could about how the ship moved through the water. He knew that was important. Captains talked about it, how knowing their ship got them out of some problem or another. He didn’t truly know this ship yet, but he would. Eventually, he’d know every splinter of every plank, even if he had to study them individually like Elisa did with her books.

Eventually, he felt himself nodding off. He pointed the ship in more or less the right direction and sat down to let the sleep happen. The light of dawn would wake him up soon enough, he knew. Even if he woke up lost, he knew the snoring girl lying at the bottom of the boat would help him find his way.