It was about what he had expected, if not that Aethe would get the boon this time. That was a new aspect of his skill, as far as he knew. There were other windows popping up that might explain it, but he had no time for them. The few remaining crews on the island outside of his own were recovering, and he had no idea what to expect from them.

They also collapsed. Not in death, this time, but in despair and exhaustion.

“Boy.” An older, stronger-looking man who would have normally intimidated Marco just by looking how he did was sitting on the ground, weeping. “You freed us from this?”

“He did, really.” Marco pointed at Riv, who was just beginning to have the strength to sit. “How did you get here?”

“Just got too close. Got sucked in. We couldn’t sail away, and eventually we had to land or else sink. Our ship is still out there, somewhere.”

Elisa nodded in grim satisfaction as her theory that they couldn’t escape was confirmed.

“What I don’t understand is how you could have done it. You didn’t go insane,” the man said. “How is that possible? No offense to you, you saved us. But…”

“But we aren’t as strong. No, we aren’t. We just have some talents that made it possible.”

—

It took Riv the better part of a few hours to heal up, and the other crews were about the same. Freed of the influence of the island’s insanity field, their color was coming back pretty quickly. As soon as they were able, Marco’s crew led them down to the boat, where they fed them as best they could from their still ample stocks.

The food did everyone involved a lot of good. For the not-them crews, it was the first real meal any of them had had in days, weeks, or possibly even months. Presumably they had been able to scavenge something over the time they had spent out of their minds, but Marco was too reasonable and fearful to even begin to talk about what that might have been. As they ate real, wholesome, nourishing food, their classes and body stats converted the food into health at a speed that was actually visible.

Meanwhile, the crew of The Foolish Endeavor got a different kind of thing. Theirs had been a raw, panicked rush into danger. Just being on the deck of their ship took some of the edge off the tension and stress left over from that, and the food did even more. Even the chickens helped, directly comforting Riv by climbing all over him while clucking and cooing. Indirectly, everyone else who watched that happen got a little boost.

Once everyone was somewhat recovered, they went right back to dealing with terrible things. The island was well-stocked with unfortunate non-survivors who needed to be put into the ground, and nobody felt they had a right to avoid that work. Riv and a few of the other labor types from the other crews dug holes while other people did the unpleasant work of dragging and depositing bodies. It would have been much quicker to dig one long trench for all of them, but Marco didn’t feel good about it somehow, and the others seemed to agree.

Eventually, after hours and hours, all of the bodies were in the dirt, topped with simple grave markers. They hadn’t been able to get names for most of them, and the graves went otherwise unmarked.

“Elisa,” Marco said, when it was all over. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“Anything.” She wasn’t in much better shape than Marco was, but she was still willing. “Anything at all.”

“Put a description of all of us into your notebook, along with our names and where we are from. Can you do that? I mean all of them that can be marked from now on.”

Elisa was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. Her eyes filled with shrewd comprehension.

“Of course. Say no more.”

The group had had enough of the island by then. There was no use staying there any longer for any of them, either. Since the battle had ended and the initial recovery had been made, various scouts had made a circle of the island. Everyone there had a ship still, though some of them were in worse repair than others. The sheer oversupply of vacant ships meant none of them would have a hard time repairing their ships, either.

As the crew put the last touches on preparing to leave, Aethe spotted something in the distance. Marco could always tell when she did, these days. She had a certain tension when she had something potentially dangerous in her eyeline that she just didn’t have other times.

“A ship,” Aethe said. “It’s hanging just at the edge of things. Where is the spyglass?”

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The glass was quickly found and handed to her. She looked through it, closing one eye and holding perfectly still as she took in the blip on the horizon.

“Some sort of surveillance. Waiting out there to see what happens, or what happened,” she explained.

“Quill?”

“It must be. Whatever we accomplished here, we have to assume they saw it. And that Quill had an unhealthy interest in that.”

Riv sighed and stood up.

“I don’t think we can let them report back. Any chance we have at keeping things civil with Quill as we get stronger evaporates when he’s sure these just aren’t flukes. Double that if he knows we are getting stronger against the way he fights every time we take one of these down.”

“I think we might be coming to the end of that period of time anyway,” Marco said. “He can only feel things out so long.”

“Either way.” Aethe jumped on the boat and unmoored it from the shore. “We need to hurry. They want to watch? Fine. Let’s give them something to see.”

“We can’t help.” The captain, who had been talking the most, looked legitimately sorry. “We aren’t in any shape yet. Our ships aren’t, either.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Marco said. “Just, if you could, try to stay some place we can maybe find you. I have the feeling things with Quill won’t be all that peaceful in the end.”

“We’ll try.” The captain flung him a coin. “Here. I had these enchanted a long time ago. Pump magic into it, and it will give you a vague direction to go to look for me. Don’t let this Quill get ahold of it, if you can help it.”

“We’ll try,” Marco said. “Good luck out there.”

“Same to you.”

The outboat got them back to their ship quicker than they could have imagined. It was like the small boat felt the urgency and caught every bit of outgoing tide it could. Once they were on the deck, it dematerialized to wherever it went when it wasn’t at the ready, and Marco pulled the ship around into alignment with their quarry.

“Yup. They are leaving.” Aethe had the spyglass out again. “Fast. Do you think we can catch them?”

“We can try,” Marco said. “We can try pretty hard.”

As much as he hated to, it was time to read the notifications he had been ignoring after the fight.

He choked back bile at the perverseness of it all. He had wanted to save those people, not consume them. The system was treating it like it was a normal Tuesday afternoon. He hated it, but he had no choice but to accept the power. Even if there had been a way to reject it, he needed it if he had any chance of catching up with this enemy ship.

“We are catching up. Marco, we might not want to,” Aethe warned.

“Why?”

“It’s a better ship than ours. Well, bigger, at least. More cannons. More crew. Quill seems to have sent out an actual fighting force this time.”

Marco took the spyglass and found that the enemy ship was a three. Stronger than The Foolish Endeavor, but even to his eye, he could see some flaws.

“Then why won’t they turn and face us?”

“My best guess? If they get close enough to Quill’s island, they might run into help. However confident they are in beating us, that confidence has to go up if they get assistance. Honestly, they wouldn’t be wrong. Even now, that’s a lot of cannons.”

“Oh. Those,” Marco said. “I wouldn’t worry so much about those. Can you set up one of our cannons with Elisa and fire ammo, one with Riv reloading, and the other one just autofiring?”

“Sure. But I could also help aim.”

“I don’t want that. Trust me. This is going to be fun for you.”

They chased the offending ship for an hour or so before they started to truly close to dangerous distances. From not-quite cannon range, it was clear that what they were dealing with was a truly gigantic warship. It wasn’t quite as big as Frisk’s ship had been, nor was it as high quality. It still had twenty cannons or more and at least that many crewmembers.

“We can never fight that many,” Aethe stated.

“We won’t have to.” Marco turned to where Aethe was standing. “Tell me when they fire, Aethe. As soon as it happens, yell. Everyone else, hold your fire”

He bit down and gritted his teeth as the waiting built higher and higher amounts of stress until Aethe finally yelled. At that moment, with booms reaching them and cannonballs zeroing in on the deck, Marco spun the wheel. The ship took a tiny bit of damage as it moved completely out of the way of the incoming fire, cutting towards the enemy ship at a sharp angle before skidding parallel with its boards a few moments later.

“Fire!” Marco screamed and pushed as much boost as he could into the ship, moving too fast for the larger ship to get a bead on it. The cannons on The Foolish Endeavor fired once, then twice, slamming fire into the other ship.

“Aethe!” Marco shouted. “Shoot the captain!”

There was so little chance that an arrow from this far would kill the captain that Marco considered it impossible by any reasonable standard. What wasn’t impossible, he thought, was that the captain would get distracted by arrow fire. It was hard enough to do precise steering already, and probably much harder when you were getting smacked in the chest by arrows every second or so.

He was right. The captain let go of the wheel entirely when the first arrow hit him, betraying his cannoneers and throwing their aim even farther off. Marco cut around the back of the ship, letting his cannons fire again and again. Aethe took potshots at anything that moved in the meantime, sending people flying for cover.