"You weren't kidding…" Adam muttered in disbelief as their stolen airship coasted to a stop just outside the boundary of what could be considered Iffenguard.

Twenty metres below where the airship, which they'd discovered was named Thunder Rider, was floating, rose the edge of a dark-grey wall that surrounded an elliptical island covered in stone fortifications. The fortress island itself was impressive enough, but the only thing Adam could focus on was the enormous shape that took up half its area. Its skin was like moss, and cracks in its surface pulsed a neon-green light. Its shape was just like a slug, which surprised him, since he'd expected something more. But it had neither arms nor wings, although tentacles rose from its body at random intervals, swishing through the air.

So, this is Iffen.

Adam wondered how exactly the giant was a threat to anyone, given that his enormous bulk was hemmed in by the stone wall of the fortress island. Somehow his weight, which was distributed across several buildings, like a garrison, tavern, armoury, and houses, was not enough to crush the structures or even damage the stones. It was quite a peculiar sight.

"He should already know we're here," Emelia said ominously.

Then there came a loud rumble as two large salamander-like arms sprouted from near the front of the slug's body, pushing down against the buildings and ground to lift up his massive head. It didn't have any eyestalks, but there were plenty of large feeler-like tentacles on its head, all of them more or less ringed around a mouth consisting of three large tooth plates positioned diagonally to each other. The plates scraped loudly as though Iffen was chomping at the bits for a snack.

He can shapeshift… That changes things.

It probably wouldn't be hard for him to make wings and take to the air, I'm guessing.

"He can smell the corpses," Emelia said, casting a glance to the pile of dead Cloud Skimmers in the middle of their airship's deck.

"Delightful," Adam deadpanned.

"We should feed the bodies to him first," Emelia decided.

Adam frowned. "I'll do it. You stay back here. If it looks like he'll attack, just take off. I'll catch up to you."

Emelia smiled. "Thanks."

He brought his barriers out from the back of Thunder Rider, shaping one into a sled he could sit on and turning the other two into scoops that he slid under the corpses, risking three on each barrier so he didn't have to make more than two trips.

Even though there were more than 70 metres from the deck of their ship to Iffen's open maw, the wandering eye was locked firmly onto the gigantic slug. As always, its attention was a troublesome sign, though he didn't need it to tell him that the Slug Dragon was a threat. He could see it with his own eyes easily enough…

"Alright, here I go," Adam said and floated his barriers down towards the monster's open mouth below.

His barriers passed over the fortress island, keeping well out of range of the slug since he had no idea what Iffen was capable of, especially considering his ability to grow limbs at will. The closer he got to where the Slug Dragon's head lifted up into the air, the louder the scraping of his tooth plates became. The sound was like screeching metal and deeply disturbed his faculties just by sheer volume alone.

But then Iffen seized his gnashing when Adam halted directly above his head.

Although he had thought to simply dump his cargo right into the giant maw below, Adam understood that the slug did not operate by sight and thus such an act might surprise it or upset it, either of which was unlikely to go well for him.

So, as Iffen's feeler tentacles reached up towards his barriers, Adam lowered them down within his reach. In contrast to the Slug Dragon's gigantic size, Iffen's slimy tentacles were quite gentle as they each grabbed a corpse from Adam's barriers and moved them down to his open mouth, placing each one deliberately against one of the tooth plates before rapidly chomping the corpse to bits.

When all six corpses had been grabbed by the tentacles and awaited consumption, Adam hurried back to the airship to retrieve the rest.

Once he'd made the trip a second time and Iffen had devoured all of the Cloud Skimmers, the Slug Dragon lowered its head back down onto the buildings he'd been resting on when they arrived. The two large arms also retracted back into his mass, reabsorbed with no sign of them ever existing in the first place.

I wonder if all Slug Dragons are capable of that kind of transformation.

Emelia didn't mention anything about it, so I have a feeling it might only be the really powerful ones that can do it.

Adam returned to the main deck of Thunder Rider.

"It should be safe to go down there now," Emelia said.

"And there's no other way to find the Golden Slug?" he asked apprehensively.

"There are other ways, sure, but this one is the fastest," she told him.

He sighed. "If it eats me, I'll come back and haunt you."

"Please do," she replied, nudging him playfully.

"That's… not the response I expected."

"What can I say? I wouldn't mind getting haunted by you," Emelia said, laughing at the look of confusion on his face.

"Let's go," she then said, and Adam brought them down to Iffenguard on a barrier, keeping the other two as shields, though he very much doubted they'd protect them if the Slug Dragon decided to attack.

As they passed some invisible boundary line, an announcement appeared.

< < Secret Optional Stage Objective > >

< Speak to Iffen, Ruler of Iffenguard >

Not surprised this is a secret objective.

They stepped off onto smooth cobblestones that lay in a perfect grid across the island. Most of the light from the Floating Sea was blocked by the walls ringed around the fortress, but Iffen's body had its own internal glow, each slow pulse of it lighting up their surroundings in a neon-green.

The way the Slug Dragon's enormous body just lay there, covering half of the island, was so indescribable and awe-striking to behold. It was like the body of a lazy God who'd allowed them a moment of his time in exchange for their offering.

"Iffen!" Emelia exclaimed. "We've come to seek your aid in locating the vessel known as the Golden Slug!"

The ground rumbled and a large tentacle grew from the Slug Dragon's mass, reaching down onto the ground in front of them. Then a body emerged from it, tethered with a smaller tentacle like a power cord. It was humanoid in appearance but had no distinguishing features. A mouth similar to Iffen's appeared in the middle of its head, which was deeply unsettling, and then two eyestalks sprouted from its 'hair', regarding them with black beads.

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"Why do you seek the Whale Eaters' flagship?" the slug humanoid asked. The voice that came out was deep and guttural, like spoken by someone with a lot of phlegm in their throat.

It was peculiar that Iffen spoke to them through a facsimile of a person, but perhaps he had no real voice, or, more troubling, perhaps its real voice would be so powerful it might hurt them.

It's kind of like an adult using a sock puppet to talk to a child though…

"We are going to defeat their faction and its captain," Emelia replied. "Then we will steal their ship for ourselves."

"Their vessel was made from the bones of my kindred. It should be laid to rest. If you could bring it to me, I would assimilate it with myself and honour those that perished in its making."

< < Quest Unlocked > >

< Song of the Slugwhales >

< Bring the Golden Slug airship to Iffenguard >

Huh, that's not exactly what I expected.

I wonder what we'd get for that.

"We will bring it to you," Emelia promised. "But first we need to know where to find it. Time is of the essence, as the Whale Eaters are at this very moment flying towards the nest of Mast-Eater, the Slug Dragon familiar to the faction known as the Drakes."

Instead of moving closer or raising its arms, small tentacles emerged from the slug humanoid's head, rapidly crossing the few metres between them and touching both of them on the forehead.

Images and knowledge flashed through Adam's mind from Iffen's touch, showing him many different angles of the Golden Slug airship as it coasted through the air, passing various islands that he was certain he'd recognise if he saw them a second time. The clouds were tinged blue around it, meaning it had been observed around nightfall.

The airship itself was massive, well-deserving of the 'super large' classification that Emelia had attributed to it. Its shape was unlike any other airship he'd seen. First off, it was at least 20 metres wide, 30 metres tall, and maybe 100 metres long. Secondly, it wasn't just a simple straight deck, instead it had two humps since the deck traced almost an M-shape when viewed from the side, like a worm mid-motion, although the back was bigger because of the helm and captain's quarters. Where each of the three parts of its deck dipped down were a set of five fins sprouting from either side, giving it a total of thirty. It didn't have any masts, rudders, nor propellers, relying entirely on the fins. Banks of nasty-looking ballista dotted the two humps, as well as on the bow, stern, and broadsides, giving it a ridiculous amount of firepower. At the bow of the ship, where normally a bowsprit would jut out, the deck was shaped into something like a triangle, which looked like a horn when seen from the side, and one enormous over-engineered ballista rose from this spot, great lengths of chain coiled besides it and attached to a monstrous barbed bolt already loaded onto it.

What made its appearance the most striking however, was that it was entirely made from gold-veined off-white bone, and if it had all been sourced from Slugwhales and Slug Dragons, the Whale Eaters had surely killed dozens of them, if not close to a hundred.

Once the visions of the airship's flight passed, Iffen's slug puppet said, "These are visions of what is to come. Take over the vessel and bring it to me."

Wait, those images were of the future??

Emelia bowed deeply.

With another rumble, the puppet was sucked back into the tentacle it had spawned from, which in turn was pulled back into Iffen's great body as well.

Emelia got back onto the barrier and Adam followed her, taking off from Iffenguard and returning to their airship.

Once they were back on its deck, she said, "I recognised several of those islands. Only one of them are visible on our map, but if we head towards the White Flags' settlement in the southwest corner of our map, then we should be able to get to see another map of the area nearby, allowing us to plot out the course that the Golden Slug will take, making it possible for us to find a way to get on board."

"Should we bring the airship?" Adam asked. "Seems like it'd get shot down before we could even get close enough."

"We can maybe use it as a distraction," she replied. "At any rate, the Golden Slug won't reach those islands until nightfall, so we should at least use the airship to get there."

"Got it," he said, sending his barriers around the back of Thunder Rider and turning them south-westward before engaging the propellers and pushing the barriers.

Before they could make it to the settlement, they picked up a tail of a medium-sized airship and a small one after passing a tropical island shaped like a horseshoe. Although their ship was faster than their pursuers, who were from the Treasure Hunters faction, Emelia told Adam to try his trick with the quadruple fusion again while she manoeuvred around a series of small islands to escape the barrage of enemy ballista bolts.

"Are you sure it's a good idea?" he asked. "What if I accidentally blow up our airship?"

"Then you'll just catch us with your barriers like last time," she replied cheerfully.

"When I did this last time, I passed out for a second and my legs turned to jelly."

"It'll be fine!" she told him.

Wouldn't it be stupid if this is how I die in this loop?

Adam quickly ran into an annoying complication with the setup for his attack.

The barriers created with his wand through crafting the spherical spell construct was rigidly-defiant towards their momentum.

No sooner had he summoned the barrier in front of himself than it shoved his shoulder with enough force to spin him around, scraping along the side of the hull and remaining in the exact spot where he'd summoned it.

It ended up working out in their favour though, as the medium-sized ship smashed its foremast right into the immovable barrier. As expected, the spell cracked and broke, but not before destroying most of the wooden beam, sending it toppling over the side of the airship, hooking onto one of the trees of an island they were narrowly skimming past. A loud crack came as the mast wedged between the island's trees was pulled free of the airship as it continued forward, tearing up a large portion of the bow and hull in the process.

Since it clearly wouldn't be possible to do his quadruple-fusion trick while they were moving, Adam stuck with the triple-fusion, which he used the Mana Infusion skill on, before firing it at the injured airship. His barrier projectile shot right through the ship's hull, exploding out the back and striking the small airship trailing the bigger one, shearing off two of its three fins.

[Medium airship defeated,] announced their cubes as the Treasure Hunters' ship dipped below the floating point and quickly went into freefall.

The smaller ship quickly took evasive manoeuvres, but Adam already had a second triple-fused barrier ready, firing it through their broadside in the shape of a cannonball. It flew slower than the usual spike-shapes he relied on, but the damage was much broader since its flight pattern wobbled slightly and it pinged around inside the enemy hull after entering, meaning its exit hole was actually up through the deck next to the main mast.

Before he could spin up another projectile, Emelia had gone down below deck and fired both of their broadside ballistae at the enemy, dealing the final blow to sink it.

[Small airship defeated.]

Emelia quickly went back to the helm to save them from a head-on collision with an island that had a small pond and a wooden hut on it. A couple of spiky red-and-blue slugs frolicked in its grass.

An hour or two later, they reached the White Flags' settlement. It was a balloon tethered in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped island, with five long metal cables dug into the sand-covered ground. Like Windtop Cove, the settlement sprouted out beneath the balloon. The port was smaller, but the place was quite popular it seemed, since the ships that couldn't fit inside had anchored into the island's edge.

Emelia brought Thunder Rider over to an available space of the island, and Adam hooked two of their anchor tethers to a few palm trees placed conveniently close to the edge. They hopped over the side of their ship and onto the sand.

< < Settlement Discovered > >

< Lenny's Landing >

Instead of trudging through the sand to the nearest walkway leading from the island and onto the settlement proper, Adam brought his barriers out and they got one each before he sent them skating a few centimetres above the ground.

"It is going to be tough to go without this in the next Stage," Emelia said wistfully as she got off the barrier.

"Better enjoy it as much as you can then," Adam told her with a grin.

Much like Windtop, Lenny's Landing had a house at the top of the settlement for its leader. The interior was almost styled exactly like Captain Drew's quarters, except the trophies were less impressive.

The guy in charge of the settlement was, confusingly, not called Lenny. His name was Shiff, and Emelia told Adam that he was the old quartermaster of the White Flags. He was a big ogre of a man, his thick arms wrapped with chains like sleeves, and his head covered in a thick black beard, bushy eyebrows, and a wild mane of hair.

There's no way those chains are comfortable…

After Emelia told him their objective, Shiff heartily agreed to lend them his map to look over, although they obviously couldn't leave the building with it. Adam understood why the settlement leaders' maps were so highly valued, since they were chockful of useful information, handwritten notes, and hints about potential treasure and hideouts.

Emelia placed her finger on a place called Fallow's Glory, which was a large island. In the visions that Iffen had shown them, it had been an island with a volcano and heavy vegetation on it. Another one she recognised was shaped like a thick S on the map and called the Depth-Scouter's Folly. Like Iffenguard, it lay a fair bit below the floating point, but that was besides the point, since they weren't actually planning on going there. They were only trying to figure out the route that the Golden Slug was taking, after all. Although, given that Shiff's map showed the Drakes' suspected headquarters and a placed labelled as Mast-Chewer's Nest, it was pretty clear once they had those points on the map to find the likely path that the enormous airship would take.

Quartermaster Shiff tried to rope them into some kind of quest, but Emelia was able to deflect him with a promise that they'd return tomorrow.

With that, the pair left Lenny's Landing and returned to their stolen airship, before taking off towards Fallow's Glory to prepare their ambush of the Golden Slug.

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