"Good job convincing the captain to not skin us," Adam joked as they soared through the air on a barrier, the other two stretched to be longer and curved around them in half-circle screens. They were constantly moving to not block their view of the surroundings, but Adam had given them the command to fly out to intercept any projectile if it came within 10 metres. He wasn't entirely sure the complex command would work, but if it did it would basically be like reactive armour, which was pretty cool.

"The trick with the Stages from here on is to play within their rules and lore," Emelia said. She was sitting in front of him on the flat barrier, between his legs, which made it a bit hard for him to concentrate. Especially since she kept shifting and pressing herself against him.

"How do you mean?" he asked, trying to distract himself.

"So, since those idiots stole the map, it was easy to claim they did it out of greed. Especially since it has treasures marked on it. As you know, within this Stage, greed is often a side-effect of someone succumbing to the Gold-cursed affliction. Using that bit of Stage lore, we could give a plausible explanation for why we aren't associated with their actions. Of course, it might have worked without that, but we'd have needed to spend more time pleading our case."

"Still, despite how fast we are able to get out of Windtop, I don't see them anywhere," Adam remarked.

There were the distant silhouettes of islands around them, but he couldn't see the shadows of any airships. The gold-tinged clouds covered everywhere the eye could see, and the unseen sun's light warmed him while the wind played with his hair. Emelia's platinum-blonde hair kept blowing back into his face, tickling his skin.

"It sounded like the White Flags got one of their airships after them, so it should be easy enough to spot. And I doubt they'd have gone in any other direction than straight away from the settlement, so it's only a matter of time before we spot them," Emelia said.

"If we land somewhere, I can double-fuse my barriers and give us more speed."

"That might be a good idea. If you can control it."

"I might even be able to control a triple-fused barrier here," Adam said. "There's certainly enough space for it."

"Have you ever flown on a triple-fused barrier?" Emelia asked.

"No. I kept blowing holes in the tower every time I tried making one of those go fast," he replied.

Emelia turned around so she could look right at him. They were incredibly close, but neither of them pulled away. Her pale golden-tinged skin glittered with perspiration and her purple spiralling eyes bored into his. They'd flown together on his barriers on Interim Island, but it hadn't been this close or intimate. Despite the situation they were in, Adam could only look at her, and his heart pounded in his chest.

"I forgot what I was about to say," she then admitted with a grin.

Adam was about to reply when his wandering eye swirled around and spotted the shadow of a ship. It was limping towards an island slightly to the left of the way they were heading.

"I see it," he said.

Emelia turned around to look as he steered them down towards the airship. He'd been keeping them above the point where most ships floated, since he doubted Maalia, Leon, and Ruimin would look up. Although they'd seen him use his barriers to transport himself and Emelia, they were unlikely to know that they could also be used to fly across the Floating Sea.

As the airship came within sight, Emelia tensed up and scooted forward on the barrier. With her Spring Boots, she could technically survive a fall from any height, and given how she was positioning herself, she was probably considering dropping straight down onto the ship when they got close enough.

But then the tension left her.

"It's not our ship," she said. "It's the White Flags' pursuer vessel."

Adam had thought it was theirs as well, until the clouds parted and he realised that it was a different colour and slightly different shape, although the same weight class as the Creaking Madam.

"We should still see what clues we can find," Adam said. "Maybe they think they're in the clear if they outpaced their pursuer. They might believe that we're stuck at Windtop."

Emelia nodded. "Let me do the talking here. The White Flags pirates might believe we're up to no good if we're coming in hot on their crash landing."

"I'll bring us down a bit away from where they made landfall," Adam said.

The closer they got, the more obvious it was why the pursuer ship had picked an island to land on. If Adam understood it correctly, airships didn't need to touch down on islands to 'anchor' but could just use their tethers to keep their vessel from floating away. But the airship had planted itself on top of the island because massive holes from ballista bolts had torn open its hull, not to mention arrows had destroyed the sails and killed at least three of the crew.

Looks like Maalia realised that her arrows could in fact reach far enough…

But to use her power to kill members of a peacekeeping faction is not something I think I can forgive. It's just like how Maggie killed all the Elphin.

The island was rather small, maybe a kilometre wide and just as long, with tropical palm trees, yellow-beige sand, and a few skittish animals that fled into the shrubbery of a small forest that took up a third of its surface.

Adam landed them a hundred metres from the downed airship. The surviving crew of five were inspecting the damage, with only one of them keeping an eye out. He quickly spotted Emelia who hopped off the barrier and walked towards them, waving her arms above her head. Adam moved off the barrier as well and added it to his orbiting curved shields. The first one spun clockwise, the second spun counter to that, and the third mimicked the first but offset slightly. There was no way anything would hit him, but he was worried about Emelia.

Then he remembered how quickly she'd dealt with Riccardo.

She'll be fine, he had to remind himself. She's done this twice before.

Four of the five White Flags pirates stayed by the ship as the lookout was assigned the role of meeting with Emelia. Adam was a few paces behind her and saw the slight worry on the lookout's face as he stopped in front of her. Although they'd fortunately gone with the assumption that the two of them were friendly, he saw how the four that remained by the ship looked on the verge of attacking, their hands awfully close to their swords and spears. Strangely, none of them had ranged weapons.

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"We're pursuing the ones who shot you down," Emelia told the man before he could ask. "Can you tell us which way they went?"

"They continued heading west," the man replied. He wasn't very old by the looks of him, and clearly the crash had him worried. "But I can't say where they headed. Our navigator got shot by one of them."

"Do you mind if I inspect the damage?" Adam asked, an idea coming to mind.

The lookout cast him a dubious expression in response.

"He's a mage," Emelia explained, catching on to Adam's intentions. "He has a way to track them."

The guy glanced back over his shoulder at the four waiting by the airship.

"If you need wood to repair your hull, then I can chop down a few trees for you," Adam offered.

The lookout nodded. "Alright, deal."

Emelia went with Adam as he quickly moved towards the nearest palm tree and prepared to chop it down with a barrier. Before he even had the chance to shape something resembling an axe, Emelia punched the trunk, blasting a huge chunk out of it and toppling it down towards them.

Adam quickly moved his barriers to catch the tree and lower it down gently, but the sudden arrest of motion caused a pair of coconuts to drop from the canopy, both striking the ground with a dull thud. Emelia surged towards the next tree, punching it hard enough to topple it as well, then she went to a third, repeating the motions and leaving him to scramble to keep the trees from smashing into the sand and breaking. She moved so effortlessly fast that he doubted he'd be able to defend himself against her attacks if she seriously tried to hurt him.

And her punches are terrifying…

Adam shaped his three barriers into claws and dragged the trees back to the downed airship. The crew had their own saws and tools ready to reduce the logs to more manageable planks to patch up the holes. It wouldn't be pretty once they were done, but it might be enough to just keep them afloat until they returned to Windtop.

True to their deal, Adam and Emelia were allowed to inspect the damage as much as they wanted.

"You wanted to find one of their projectiles, right?" Emelia asked as they walked around the hull that was partially buried in the island's sandy ground.

"Yeah, I was thinking I could use my hand to figure out something," he replied.

In theory it might work, but he hadn't tried using Alepheria's Mandate in that way before, though he was hoping the Tome Keeper's Relic would help with that.

After walking all the way around the ship, Adam came to the realisation that the bolts had passed right through the hull the two times it'd been struck, leaving nothing for him to inspect other than a few fragments. The first metal scrap he found and touched turned out to belong to the White Flags' ship as part of a metal rivet, giving him a glimpse of its construction and its time floating along the sea of golden clouds, before the sudden impact of a ballista bolt tore it free from the hull, depositing it inside the ship.

The next piece he found was a hit though and it showed him the creation of the bolt, followed quickly by it being equipped onto the Creaking Madam by unseen people and then loaded into a rack to await being used. He saw glimpses of Leon running about during their initial fight with the first airship they'd encountered. Then there was a long beat of silence as nothing happened around it, before Leon reappeared to grab the bolt and place it on a ballista before firing it with a yell up to the others on the ship. A brief vision of the bolt soaring through the air and piercing a cloud was followed by abrupt destruction as it tore through the White Flags' ship, most of its mass emerging out the other side and leaving just the fragment and a few other bits behind.

"It's a bust," Adam told Emelia. "It only shows me Leon loading it, nothing else."

She considered the issue for a moment. "What if you try one of the arrows that Maalia used?"

There were quite a few of them stuck to the main deck and masts. None of them had been powerful enough to destroy the ship by themselves, but she'd managed to kill quite a few people and damage the sails, which along with the hull damage from the bolts Leon had fired were enough to sink the ship.

With the help from a barrier, Adam lifted himself up onto the deck of the downed airship and found an arrow embedded in the foremast. The moment he touched it, he felt a weird experience. Arrows in an archer's quiver were not permanent things. They appeared when they were needed, like magically refilling ammunition. The memory that washed over him started as the arrow he'd touched manifested into reality. Everything else he'd touched had given him brief glimpses of their initial origin or construction, but not the arrows. However, since the arrows appeared when needed and not just in the archer's hand, it gave Adam enough time to listen to the trio arguing about where they'd go as Maalia took shots at the pursuing vessel. One of the places they decided on was called 'Lucas' Grave'. Then the perspective shifted as the arrow was nocked and fired across the cloud sea, striking the foremast of the White Flags' airship.

Adam went around touching the other arrows to try and piece together more information, hoping to catch a glimpse of the map that they had stolen from the White Flags, but there was no luck. All of the arrows he could find had only appeared around the time that trio had been fighting the pursuing vessel.

One thing had been obvious though.

Their airship had a massive gouge along the side, no doubt inflicted on them during their escape from Windtop Cove.

"How far would they be able to go with a damaged hull?" Adam asked. "I think one of the harpoon launchers from Windtop was able to tear open the left side."

"With the upgrade from Herrman, they should be able to go quite far," Emelia said. "At least far enough for it to be an issue for us…"

"You think they'd summon the Cloud Leviathan?" Adam asked.

"They might. If not because of wanting to save Ruimin, then just purely out of spite, given what they've done already."

"They mentioned going to a place called Lucas' Grave," he said. "They also mentioned an unmarked island with a treasure icon, but they didn't say where it was, and I couldn't see the map."

Emelia nodded. "Good thing I remember most of the map from when the captain showed us. I just need to find out which island we're on."

She hopped down from the deck and landed on the sand next to one of the pirates, startling him.

While she figured out which way they had to go, Adam brought out his wand and went through the motions to summon a barrier using the spell he'd learnt from touching the spell-tome with his obsidian hand.

I should have tried to touch James' Spellblade to understand how its spells work, he realised belatedly.

If I could visit his dimension, then maybe it'd be possible.

Actually, I should probably try and touch a lot of things to understand them better.

Adam eyed the Spidersilk Sack hanging from his belt. He had the Rotmaker Idol inside.

"Are you ready to go?" Emelia asked, making him jump. He hadn't heard her get back onto the deck.

"One moment," he said, switching back to the spell-tome and fusing one of his barriers with the static one created by the wand.

Once combined, the barrier didn't move any faster, but he felt that it was sturdier at least.

So much for trying to chain together a bunch of barriers to get ridiculous speed, he mused.

He fused another barrier with it, and it was definitely a lot faster than before, thanks to his new upgrades.

I guess that the health of my barriers doesn't matter, since the Wandering Eye necklace ensures that they always break in one hit…

But having that extra barrier was worth the weakness it caused, since his crown made sure that they'd still last for 10 seconds after breaking because of the Last Stand's Fervour.

While it was tempting to fuse the last barrier with the triple-fused one, he refrained. Not only would it probably be too fast to control, but he also wanted to use it as a reactive armour to protect their flying barrier from getting hit. After all, he wasn't entirely certain he'd be able to resummon his barriers in time to catch them if the one they were riding broke mid-air.

"Alright, I'm ready," Adam told Emelia.

"Excellent," she replied. "Lucas' Grave isn't far from here. We'll also get to meet a proper Slugwhale, which means I can show you a trick with them."

Adam frowned, uncertain what exactly she meant by that.

Unlike their flight here, Adam decided to sit in the front, but Emelia just took this as an invitation to scoot up right behind him and coil her arms around his waist, like they were riding a motorcycle.

Adam started shaping their orbiting barrier protection as they flew in order to distract himself from the sudden flurry of feelings and sensations flooding his mind.

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