The kid did the talking, backed by heavy-set galley slaves. I watched via Glimpse as an argument ensued. I got the feeling the pirates were changing the deal, and the kid was doing his timid best to insist on payment. Silly boy, but no matter, he was selling the setup admirably.

One of the pirates, a tall, thin man with an impressively long moustache, lashed out and knocked the kid down. The former-slaves rallied round and put themselves between the young man and his attacker, but the lanky man just laughed and drew his curved sword. The slaves were surprisingly strong; years of pulling oars had given them solid musculature, but they weren't trained fighters, and this would go badly if I let it continue.

Slipping the loose rope from my arms, I pulled up the hood that had obscured the glowing red letters over my head. It was something I'd discovered when dealing with Gallagher. If he were hooded, the statistics floating over his head vanished for some reason. As I rose up the men turned to me and dropped into fighting stances, bodies somehow both tense and relaxed at the same time, and ready to leap in any direction.

My sword came out of one of my storage rings, and I activated Enhance at the same time as I tapped into my haste amulet and sped up far beyond what the mortals could follow. A blast of fire intercepted me halfway to my goal and knocked me back. At the same time, a series of fiery shields sprang up around them. The flames did me no damage; I had been immune to fire for a while now, but the concussion had knocked me back and bought them a moment to prepare.

The mortals among them were already running, sprinting for the woods. Glimpse turned them to cinders with blasts of fire from above, and the pirates created more shields over their heads as I closed with them. Fire would be a popular choice for this lot. Ships in this era were essentially tar-coated kindling, and a fire at sea was a terrifying prospect.

The bruisers, the ones with A-ranked body stats, moved forward to stand immediately behind the shields their wizards had thrown up. Flickering images of where they would be in the near future showed me their most likely attacks. I charged through the fire unscathed and bowled two of them over, flicking my blade to the right to slice deeply into a short, fat man who was impressively fast on his feet. He rolled backwards as the blow landed, taking a gash down a thigh that glowed green and began to knit closed as he rose back to his feet, favouring his injured leg.

One of the men before me had a knee crushed as I stamped down, a technique I was starting to get rather fond of, but he still managed to slice into my calf muscle, leaving another blue-gold line on my flesh. At the same time, the man on my right drove his straight sword at my eyes while his curved blade came round to disembowel me.

Midnight metal armour appeared over my body as I yanked it from storage and into place. The straight sword skittered off the visor while my cuirass shrugged off the stomach shot. This left him off balance and exposed, his right arm trying to go to his left while the right continued to the left across my stomach. I headbutted him, smashing his nose to pulp and sending him stumbling away, clutching at his face.

I cast Shape Earth and entombed the men at my feet immediately. The rocks and gravel of the beach swallowed them and then squeezed. In my Earth Sense, it seemed like a pair of grapes had been put in a vice that tightened until they burst.

Normalis Humano (Soulbound Servant) slain x2

Forty Souls gathered.

As my senses spread out through the dirt and stones to encompass the wizards standing a few feet away from me, I focused, and tendrils of stone wound up their bodies. First, they twisted up their legs to trap them in place. Then the stone began to flow up their torsos, trapping their arms at their sides until the three enemies were almost entombed. Terrified faces looked out from shrouds of granite, eyes rolling as they began to fire off spells desperately.

The galley slaves had all bolted for the longboat and were frantically pulling it back into the water, uncaring of the damage I had done by beaching it. The kid was nowhere to be seen. I released Wilson, and he lunged to the side, catching the short-fat warrior's arm in his jaws and bowling the man toward the sea.

A bronze tentacle rose from the waves and lifted him high as Bob emerged from the water. Another snaked out and wrapped around the struggling man's lower body. Bob's limbs began to pull in opposite directions as the man bellowed in pain, then a cocoon of ice sprang up around the pair.

"Wilson, go hunt the ones who got away." A handful of the normal men had avoided the blasts of fire from Glimpse and escaped into the thick foliage beyond the shingle. The wolf took off, disappearing among the trees as I turned back to the wizards. Their desperate spells had been largely ineffective.

A few glowed green as they attempted to heal the damage they'd done struggling against their prisons. I reached out through the earth, and new tendrils of stone stretched out. The tribes and I had long since refined our methods of taking Soulbound enemies alive for questioning. Unfortunately, it wasn't pretty.

Snakes of stone wound up from their necks and stabbed into their eyes. The screams of powerful men losing their vision are haunting. The knowledge that something so vital was now gone forever gave their breathless yells and curses a brutal, keening edge.

A shattering sound rang out behind me. A quick glance showed me that Bob had broken free of the ice and completed his self-appointed dismemberment of his victim. The two halves of the man's body splashed down into the surf as the golem surged ashore.

The machine skittered towards my entombed wizards, still weeping from empty sockets, and its tentacles shifted into what I thought of as their anglegrinder formation, the pincers blurring round to serve as circular saws.

"Hang on. We need to have a chat with these blokes before we knock them. Just keep an eye on them for now."

The blurring metal slowed and shifted back into pincers, and if they could still see each of my prisoners would have been horrified at the gore-covered metal that hovered inches from their faces. Bob spoke to them in their language, and they all went very quiet.

"Kid, you still alive?" I called out, and the boy emerged from behind the former-slaves who were still battling to drag the longboat back into the swells. He was soaked and looked utterly terrified. He didn't want to show himself, but the fear of not obeying me left him no option.

"L-lord?" he stuttered.

"It's ok, kid. What's your name?"

"Prender, Lord." His fingers twirled around each other as he held his hands in front of his stomach. I put my armour back into storage and gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile.

"Get them to stop trying to take the boat. They're safe for now." He barked something in guttural Juntian, and a couple of the slaves snapped back at him. Glimpse landed on the boy's shoulder and cawed loudly enough to force them all to turn to the kid. Prender repeated what he'd said before, more or less. A few words had shifted, and there was more confidence in his voice.

The slaves stopped. One moment, they were frantically pulling at the heavy boat; the next, they waded slowly ashore. Then the bastards all got down on their knees and pressed their foreheads into the wet sand in my direction.

"What the hell did you say?" I asked as I pulled the boat back out of the waves. The slaves shuffled sideways to make space for me, keeping their faces aimed at the sand and watching me in the corners of their eyes.

"That the godling had commanded it. Is– is that alright, Lord?"

"I'm not a–" I bloody was, wasn't I? Mortals were beneath me. I'd started seeing and, in some ways, treating them as less than. This path of the divine was fucking with my head just as much as Aresk's mark had!

Fuck you, Aresk!

Come now, my son. It's not everyone who gets adopted by a god. You will forge your identity as you rise to your full power. It has been more than a thousand years since a true champion rose to join our ranks. The god's voice was warm and smug in my mind. A brief flicker of his aura rang out around me, shields locking together, making the slaves glance up and the boy drop to his knees.

I reached inside myself, and a flicker of that strange aura from the ship spread out like an echo of Aresk's power. Knives finding flesh in the dark, the subtle hiss of skin and muscle parting.

Path of Divinity. Patron: Aresk Foeslayer

Divine Ichor: level 2

Divine Physique: Level 3

Divine Intellect: Level 2

Huh. I'd gained a level in Divine Intellect. The aura had felt a little stronger as well; more complex, more full. I tried to spend Souls to raise Ichor to level three, but it didn't work. I had over thirty thousand Souls on hand; either that wasn't enough, or I had to improve these statistics through direct action. Well, that was fine. I was good at direct action.

I stopped dragging the boat and heaved it up over my head; the wood creaked, and I had to use Shape Earth to prevent myself from sinking up to my thighs in the sand beneath the rocky beach, but I was able to walk up onto the shore with the boat, shocked gasps coming from the slaves.

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As I set the boat down, I checked my stats again, but nothing had changed. Hmm, not enough of a challenge? A quiet chant came from the slaves to serve as a counterpoint to the quiet whimpers from my prisoners.

"What are they saying?" I asked Prender as I stared at the men rocking back and forth while they muttered and mumbled the same phrases over and over again.

"They are praying for your mercy, Lord."

"Oh, get up, Prender. You can't just talk to the stones, it's not as though I'll smite you for looking me in the eye!" The boy rose slowly, shivering slightly, and managed to briefly look me in the face before fixing his gaze on my bare feet. "Better, I guess. Let's have a chat with our new friends and find out where their ships are."

Prender trailed along behind me as I approached my captives. Fear and pain mixed with rage and disbelief on their faces. The occasional glow of magic surrounded them, but without the sight to target their spells, they were reduced to the ones that affected their own bodies.

Glimpse hopped to my shoulder and rubbed his beak against my cheek, and I patted his head as I worked out what I wanted to say to these assholes.

I will scout. Their ships cannot be far. He took to his wings and circled upward before peeling off to the east and following the shore.

"Bob, ask them how many ships they've got, please." I'd need to remember my manners; this pervasive sense of viewing others as lesser than me would lead me down a dark road if I didn't.

Bob asked, and they snapped back at him.

"They are not being particularly helpful. This one–" he poked one of the men in the face with a pincer, "–says that the ten thousand masts will take their revenge. That one is begging for his mother. And this one told me to fuck myself, which is not physically possible as I lack genitals."

"What are the ten thousand masts?" Bob grunted and barked in perfect Juntian for a minute or more as I waited patiently. At one point, he drew the edge of one pincer down the cheek of the talkative one, leaving a trail of red and causing the babble from the man to go from angry to terrified.

"It would seem that your contemporaries' fleet is called the Bone Fleet, and they number some five thousand ships. Half are Kentanii-made and crewed; these are the ten thousand masts." He poked the talker in the face again and babbled some more questions. "Yes. I suspect the number is an exaggeration, but their newer ships are built differently from the galley-style vessels of the Helipokyn that dominate sea trade. They are much larger and have multiple masts versus the single-mast designs of the triremes like the Windspite. Seventy-eight percent probability that Amir has passed the secrets of more advanced vessels from your world to the pirate-nation he has taken control of."

"Well, I kind of did the same with saddles and stirrups for the tribes. Turn around is fair play. So we should expect galleons, rather than galleys?"

"Something like that, Raymond. And they will all have some form of magical artillery. He speaks of the Battery-Mages like they are a serious threat to you."

"Soulbound or trinket-users?" I ruminated for a moment. "Probably a mix of both. A handful of Soulbound per vessel, supported by multiple people with enchanted gear. More than that would be too much in terms of Souls. It's the same compromise I had to make with the tribes and the Legion."

"There are a number of uncertain variables in your assumption, Raymond. We do not know how Amir harvests Souls, thus we have no way to estimate his potential number of Soulbound servants. It is possible he isn't working alone against you. The rest have had more time on Urth and could have forged alliances."

"We were sent here to kill each other. I don't know if that's very likely, Bob."

"Nonetheless, it cannot be ruled out as a possibility. In fact, there is a forty-three percent probability that the ones who are left will ally against you after the notifications of your killing of Gallagher and Mortimer were sent out." The machine shrugged metallic shoulders in a disturbingly human gesture. Fuck you, system! I snarled in my head.

I couldn't refute the machine's logic, and like Kirk with Spock, I was starting to find the habit deeply irritating. I reached out with my mind to the glowing beacons that represented the others from Earth. Amir was still sailing to the southeast of me, moving towards what I hoped was his home port. The other two were so far away, but I could almost convince myself they had moved slightly closer together.

"You think you can get anything else out of these blokes?" I asked, drawing my sword. Sixty Souls was peanuts, but it was better than nothing.

Raymond, there are four ships anchored in a natural harbour a mile or so to the west. They are much larger than the Windspite.

Thanks, Glimpse. We had sailed right past them. Perhaps Jasper and the lookouts had seen them, but I had been at the oar or down in the guts of the ship working the crude pump. Now that I knew where I was going, I didn't need these men anymore. My blade flicked out, slicing through necks and the stone around them with ease.

Normalis Humano (Soulbound Servant) slain x3

Sixty Souls gathered.

As their stone-encased heads thudded to the ground, bouts of arterial blood sprayed upward, creating a trio of short-lived macabre fountains. A sense of anger and panic flooded me from my link with Wilson as canine snarls mixed with human screams from the shadows under the treeline.

"Bob, guard the slaves!"

Bolts of magic flew towards me and the slaves, still in full proskenisis by the boat. I threw up a fire shield to protect the slaves and scooped Prender up in one arm as I charged for a section of the trees that weren't spitting fire, ice, and lightning at the beach. I covered the ground fast, using another charge of the haste amulet that Kril had enchanted for me, and dumped the kid behind a sturdy tree.

"Stay here until I've dealt with this," I snapped.

"What can one man do against so much magic?" I glanced over and saw that my shield was still a glowing disc of fire, having taken all the damage from those attacks without breaking, and the former slaves had begun to retreat towards the sea. If they were stupid enough to try and swim away, there wasn't much I could do for them. The sea offered no safety, and I couldn't, wouldn't save stupid.

"Oh, plenty." I grinned like a shark scenting blood in the water and shot away through the trees towards the angry shouts and curses. I slowed down as a blast of lightning hit me and arced across my skin, causing me to stumble. It had come from a patch of… nothing. Just a shadow beneath the heavy boughs of a large tree, a place the moonlight couldn't reach. A fireball flew from one of my rings and the base of the tree, and everything within sixteen metres of it just vanished. Smoke and fine ash floated in the turbulent winds the intense heat had left behind.

Normalis Humano slain x4

Forty Souls gathered.

I threw myself towards another shifting patch of darkness as the upper reaches of the once-mighty tree began to fall. My sword flicked out in well-drilled patterns, mostly striking nothing but air. But every third cut or so, a limb would appear and fall to the ground, spurting blood into the grass.

I suspected whatever spell they were using to hide was something from the Darkness affinity. As they took an injury, the spell would break, and the rest of their bodies would appear. The barrage of spells that had been splashing against my faltering shield on the beach dropped to nothing as they began to shift their focus to the threat in their midst.

They weren't the only ones who could play in the shadows. I had a long career of lurking unobserved amidst violence, and I put that professionalism to good use now. Ducking behind a thick bush, I chugged a mana potion to top myself off and then slipped quietly into their midst. Not knowing precisely where they were wasn't as much of a hindrance as I'd expected.

Hiding is something people learn as children. Small places, limited lines of sight, in amongst the shadows. The magic seemed to require them to lurk in pre-existing shadows; it didn't create new ones. It let them fold themselves fully out of the light, but only where it was already weak. Hiding in plain sight was the real trick, one that had taken me a lot longer to master than skulking in the dark.

I slipped quietly among them, throwing out firewalls and shaping the incandescent lines to cover the most likely hidey-holes. Men screamed if they were lucky. The fortunate ones merely had a limb turned to ash or suffered third-degree burns from a near miss. The unlucky simply vanished into smoke and drifting particulate.

Normalis Humano slain x17

One hundred and seventy Souls gathered.

I ended up just using my blade in the end. Confusion reigned among the attackers, and their shouts and screams were as often as not a result of them accidentally attacking each other. Numbers are not always an advantage in a fight.

"Enough, savage! Commander Hate Gust challenges you, mage of savages! Show yourself! Bonemen, fall back now!"

It was yelled in Sykareskyn, then parts were repeated in the guttural language of the Junt. His orders had been intended to tell me his troops were falling back, and sure enough, the surviving patches of wavering shadows seemed to quietly drift back into the woods. I sent a command-thought to Wilson: hunt them! A howl rang up nearby, and suddenly more men broke from their shadowy safety. They started sprinting along the coast to the west, uncaring of the danger. Clearly, Wilson had already made an impression.

The Commander was about my own height, and he wore a bright red tunic tied around his waist with a thick black belt. His imperious air lasted even as I approached him, stepping out from behind a tree and shaking the blood of his men from my blade.

"Savage!" he gasped and started to back away. "How are you so strong?" He was S-ranked in Body and Mind. This man represented a huge investment of Souls by Amir. He held up a cane in one hand as though it would ward me off. A ring of shiny stones glittered around the collar that lined the bulbous handle of the gnarled length of wood.

A blast of wind threw me off my feet, and as I rolled, a barrage of Ice slammed down around me. None of them hit me directly, fortunately, but the icy cocoons they spawned meant that I was soon encased and unable to move. I flexed and heard the ice creak in response. This seemed as good a time as any to try to boost my Divine Physique. I could always melt my way out in moments if it didn't work, and he couldn't hurt me without breaking the ice either.

My muscles strained. I tried to contract into a ball, trying to curl my body up within my frozen prison. More creaks and a few ominous groans sounded out around me, and I redoubled my efforts. Faint splintering noises prompted me to switch, and now I fought to straighten out completely. Something shifted again, and I switched to curling up again.

A shape moved through the murky glass of the ice, a man in red pacing up and down outside, waving a thin stick around. Faint sounds of yells, of the man trying to reestablish order among his routed troops, reached me as I flexed back and forth.

With a loud crack, I finally broke free, and three metres of ice fell away from me in all directions.

Path of Divinity. Patron: Aresk Foeslayer

Divine Ichor: level 2

Divine Physique: Level 4

Divine Intellect: Level 2

"Well, that worked," I muttered as the man spun to face me, primal terror painted on his face. He raised his arm, the cane pointed at my head, but a bronze tentacle shot out of the dirt beneath him and took the man in the groin, heaving him off his feet to dangle and clutch at himself. Blood began to drip from his crotch as Bob emerged fully from the dirt and shook off the clinging muck.

"I told you to guard the oarsmen?"

"When the danger dropped to a non-significant chance of death among their number, I chose to relocate and provide assistance." The machine said as he wafted the whimpering mage between us as though the man weighed almost nothing. He turned his victim so the man was held in front of the array of mismatched blue lenses that served the war golem for eyes. I rolled my shoulders.

"Define non-significant?" I asked. The chill from the ice was clinging to me, and my sweaty and blood-soaked clothes were brittle as they slowly thawed from my body heat.

"Four percent."

"That's still pretty high!"

"Less than one in twenty is non-significant. What do you want to do with this one?"

"You know the drill. Take his eyes and I'll heal him up. Then we can have a bit of a chinwag, can't we, bloke?" I smiled up at the man, and he somehow went even paler.

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