Chapter 286 – The Perinith Problem

The vampire tilts her head with a fanged grin, her displeasure washed away and replaced by a playful glint in her eyes.

“Do you plan on renaming the crew after Yorn is dead? How would that work with our current registration and reputation? Would we still be the same crew?” Emily asks, trying to sate her curiosity over The Guild’s complex inner workings before addressing the real issue. “Elwaine spoke of it as ‘joining the crew that rises from the ashes’, but it sounded like he meant that more literally than metaphorically.”

“Hahaha!” Silvia rolls back with laughter. Emily frowns as the vampire sits back up and wipes a tear from her eye. “Sorry, that’s just not what I was expecting. I’ve never seen someone so excited by the logistics of pirate crew registration; it’s cute.”

Emily ignores the twisted burst of emotions that tries to rise at Silvia’s reaction, schooling her expression and flushing her system with machina before raising a single unamused brow.

“Well, if you’re really that eager to know, Elwaine just likes being dramatic,” Silvia continues. “Yes, we’ll be renaming the crew. The heavy-blade style is Yorn’s martial discipline, and I suspect most of those he’s taught are among those you’ve been eliminating, so it simply wouldn’t fit anymore. As for what we’ll change it to, I’m still undecided, so I’ll gladly hear any suggestions you may have. Changing our registration will be simple enough as well: stability and safety are never expected among us pirates, so changes in leadership are frequent, and the established system is set up to deal with it. Once we redeclare our name, it will be spread to all those who’ve worked with us before or go looking for us anew, so don’t worry. We may take a hit to our reputation and run into a few issues with finding jobs and recruitment in the future, though, if we declare that we ousted Yorn and those loyal to him, but your mercenary group should fix that issue for us nicely.”

“You think it will be believable that Mensacus and I could take a veteran seventh phase martial artist alone?”

“I think stranger things have happened, and anyone who’s met Yorn won’t find it hard to believe that you lead him into a well-prepared deathtrap.”

“Really? He seemed pretty cautious to me when we were discussing going after the world-eater.”

“He has his moments, but he’s also a greedy bastard who can’t turn away from riches dangled in front of his face, and his caution makes him predictable. There are several methods I can think of that would almost certainly work to lure him away, and your spatial affinity lends well to the idea of isolating him regardless of the situation. You can just be honest about how we get him away from watchful eyes if you’re really that concerned.” Silvia shrugs dismissively. “I doubt anyone outside of our crew will genuinely care that much. While we are one of the larger independent pirate crews working within The Guild, we’re still mostly irrelevant to those with real power who could kick up a fuss.”

“Okay.” Emily nods, taking her lack of concern into consideration. “Moving on, then, I also wanted to know who you intend to make your vice once you take over as captain.”

Silvia gives her a strange look, silently staring at her through the video feed for a few moments before responding.

“You, of course. You may technically be a circle below Elwaine and Rotwin, but neither will complain about a dual awakened taking the post, and none who match you in level could even hope to compete.”

“But… I just joined the crew.”

“So? It’s a universal rule that strength is to be respected, and you have that in spades. No one will voice any complaints, and if they do, you simply put them in their place and move on.”

Emily can practically feel the vampire’s bloodlust seeping through the call and suppresses a shiver.

“I’m not really interested in commanding such a large force, especially when I barely know most of them.”

“You’ve been inside their heads. I’d be willing to bet that you already know most of them better than Yorn does without even trying. Besides, the role of Vice is normally more symbolic than anything. I’ll handle commanding our crew; you’ll just need to help me with logistics and putting forward a strong, pretty face when we handle other forces. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the added influence the role will give you over the direction the crew moves in as well, even if you claim not to want it.”

“You don’t seem like you’re going to take no for an answer,” Emily says with a small scowl, ignoring Silvia’s teasing smile.

“On this? Not at all. I’d have to be crazy to try and hand the role to anyone else when you’d be so perfect for it.”

“Fine,” Emily sighs, pausing to take a deep sip from her prepared brew. “I’ll accept, for now, but I reserve the right to drop the role the moment it interferes with my interests.”

“I suppose I’ll just have to make sure to keep you happy then,” Silvia beams back. “Now, I should be off. I’m meant to be meeting with the other FAF associates defending this resource band in a few minutes. Don’t be afraid to call again; there’s still no action here, and I’m bored out of my mind. It was a lovely surprise to see you again.”

“I’ll consider it.” Emily flashes her a small grin before cutting the call, plunging the room into silence within which to consider the consequences of their conversation.

***

The flight towards Perinith’s fleet takes just over a month, with Emily checking on her children’s progress in the dungeon every few days. The drab scenery in the dungeon continues to stretch on for miles, with a near-constant flood of beastly golems assaulting the large force. They run into a contingent of mechanoid soldiers a few weeks in, and Mensacus manages to keep every member of their crew alive despite the FAF and allies suffering considerable losses. Silvia has to put an end to their casual calls when a large mechanoid force finally assaults the stretch of planets she has been assigned to protect, and Emily’s left alone to plan for the last few days of the journey.

When they finally reach Perinith’s location, another asteroid field full of combatants from both sides of the territory war, Emily immediately begins setting up a Temporal Shield, pouring her mana into the spell and filling her private room with runes. When she steps out, she has a timer ticking down in her mind, telling her how long she has to act.

She starts by giving her squadron’s pilots the command to halt their flight and sending out a machina-charged signal to pinpoint Perinith’s ships, following the same process she used with Rotwin’s fleet. She checks them one by one, starting with those further from the gnomish commander and marking everyone due for elimination. By the time only the main command ship is left, her list already contains nearly half the awakened present.

It makes my job easier, but it’s disappointing we’re losing so many bodies. If there are this many loyalists among Yorn’s fleet, I may need to man some ships with robots.

The moment she teleports into the bowels of the command ship, appearing beside its quantum relay, she feels a wave of foreign mana sweep over her.

“Fuck.”

She immediately floods her mental focus with mana, casting out her net and targeting every consciousness on board except the one rapidly approaching her position. Perinith notices her threads, and she feels several of those closest to him ignite, burning away before they can reach their targets. She sends out a set of replacements that she weaves around him, avoiding the dead zone of pure heat that consumes any of her mana that strays too close.

“Who’s invading my ship!” she hears the gnome cry moments before the wall before her turns molten, peeling away to reveal the short man glaring at her balefully, wreathed in curling tongues of crimson flame. “You! Aren’t you meant to be with us? What the fuck are you doing?”

Emily meets his questioning with silence, focusing most of her processing power on screening his shipmates and watching his eyes scan over her. His rage gives way to shock for a fraction of a second before hardening into cold resolve.

“A dual awakened… Have you been honest about anything since joining us? Been planning on planting a knife in our backs the whole time?”

She stays silent, pouring more and more mana into her mental threads to keep them stable as the heat around Perinith slowly spreads towards her.

“Playing mute now, are we? Fine, we’ll have plenty of time to beat the answers out of you when I drag you to Yorn’s feet!”

The gnome raises his hands, conjuring a swirling torrent of pure heat that tears towards Emily. Harriet flows to her legs faster than Emily can react with her focus still on her mental threads, and they guide her in a sudden dash to the side, narrowly avoiding Perinith’s opening attack at the cost of nearly half her mental threads.

This may take another rewind…

Emily diverts a single core to join Harriet in focusing on the fight and casts several overlapping acceleration spells of wind and lightning. Perinith’s torrent of flames bends to follow her, but she kicks off the ground before it can catch her, landing on the chamber’s roof and sticking fast thanks to the magnetic enchantment on her boots. She dashes towards the furthest wall from the gnome as he conjures several gaping mouths full of flaming teeth and sends them after her. Emily sends out a lightning-charged kick, caving in the wall blocking her and speeding off down the hallway it opens into as Harriet leaps from her skin to tangle with the chasing attacks, slowing them down.

Perinith’s fire tears after her, powering through her familiar’s attempts to restrain them and nearly matching her speed despite her physique and boosting enchantments. The walls turn to molten slag as the gnome’s attacks pass, and Emily feels the metal armour beneath her skin start to heat up through her innate barrier, despite never taking a hit.

Damn, I’ll lose mobility and get caught at this rate.

She recalls Harriet and has them focus on reinforcing her subdermal armour while she pours out another chunk of her mana, moulding it into a wall of water and ice that blocks off the hallway behind her as she takes a sharp turn. The flaming mouths and solid pillar of fire slam into the wall with a harsh hiss, only pausing for a fraction of a second before eating through and continuing after her. She senses from afar as Perinith forms several other conjurations, but instead of chasing her, they charge away in the opposite direction.

Looks like Elwaine’s warning was right: he’s trying to send out word despite claiming he was confident in beating me.

Emily feels the pillar of fire chasing her split as the mouths continue their pursuit, spreading out in an attempt to block off over half of the ship, burning away several more mental threads in the process. She ignores his efforts, winding a circuitous path away from him and finishing her checks on the crewmembers she’s still linked to.

When she finally runs out of options and turns down a dead end, she’s added nearly a third of the onboard crew to her elimination list, not a single soul she’s successfully screened proving willing to turn traitor.

She activates The Clock.

Her mind is pulled backwards through time to the moment she cast Temporal Shield, and this time she heads straight for Perinith’s ship. She follows the same process, missing out those she’s already confirmed the loyalties of in her initial web of threads. She manages to completely avoid Perinith’s initial attack this time and checks nearly all the remaining crew. A second rewind and she completes her screening, confirming that not a single soul on board needs to be saved.

Perfect. That makes this a whole lot easier.

Emily rewinds a third time, feeling her Temporal Shield drain a little more mana than at the start of the last loop, and doesn’t order her pilots to stop. Instead, she directs them to a quiet cluster of asteroids in the path of Perinith’s fleet.

“Take us to these coordinates and hide us as much as you can,” she says, broadcasting her voice to all her squadron’s ships. “It’s time to set a trap.”

They follow her orders without question, and the moment their landing gears lock to the floating rocks, Emily releases a dozen of her spatial marker birds, conjuring winds beneath their wings to help them spread quickly through the vacuum. She carefully places them around the asteroid field, creating a narrow sphere of influence.

She leaves the ship as well, taking up position beside one of her birds with her hand between its wings and waiting patiently for her target to fall into place.

It only takes a few minutes for Perinith’s fleet to approach, chasing a small pack of unmanned mechanoid spacecraft. Emily lets the mechanoids pass, but the moment Perinith’s ship flies through the centre of her birds’ formation, she floods her creations with spatial mana and machina, overdriving them to the max and using nearly eighty per cent of her remaining energy to rapidly form a complex array that perfectly surrounds her target.

The ship’s thrusters cut out immediately, thanks to a spear of machina no mechanic on board is strong enough to hold back striking its main controls, and the array pulses with mana, locking the craft in place.

The ships following it all begin spreading out immediately, reacting admirably to the ambush, but Emily uses most of her remaining machina to cripple their communication relays and broadcast a message to all of them.

“Do not open fire. This is Emily of your crew speaking. I’m here on Silvia’s behalf, and I mean the crew no harm. Ignore my actions and continue the pursuit of the mechanoid forces you were assigned to deal with: I shall explain what’s going on once I’ve dealt with Perinith here.”

The pilots of the fleet take her orders in their stride, and most of the ships immediately take off after the fleeting mechanoids, only a few hesitating before joining the pack.

With that dealt with, Emily pulls a recording crystal from her belt with her free hand and activates it before pouring mana through her tattoos and tearing open several holes in space around her. Her mechanical army pours out, most carried by thrusters built into their limbs and the rest clinging to modified aircraft reinforced to survive in the void. They surround the spatial barrier, turning their weapons on the command ship that has deployed its hardpoints to fire on the birds acting as anchor points for the array, but not a single one of her troops pulls the trigger.

The ship’s attacks slam into the barrier, sending ripples across its nearly-invisible surface and draining some of the mana Emily put into it, but the barrier holds.

Emily activates the second stage of the barrier, using most of her cores to twist the runes forming it and carving away the isolated chunk of space from the asteroid field. The mana forming the barrier is rapidly consumed, but she feels its influence spreading into the ship like a parasite, slowly taking hold of everything within.

A burst of mana strong enough to be felt through the barrier erupts from the ship’s bridge, and she watches its glass canopy shatter outwards as a pillar of scorching hot magma erupts from within.

Fire and earth? He wasn’t going all out before, but that won’t matter.

Perinith’s mana slams into the barrier, and Emily pours more energy into it, feeling her reserves nearing empty as the barrier shakes violently.

“Open fire!” Emily calls, dumping the last of her machina into the command and giving her army a small boost.

Rockets, beams of plasma, several low-level spells, and a wall of kinetic rounds cut through the spatial barrier without meeting resistance, slamming into Perinith’s pillar of magma and slowly pushing it back, easing the pressure on Emily. A few of the metal soldiers target the ship’s hardpoints that have no shields left to protect them, thanks to Perinith’s overconfident strike, shattering the weapons in seconds and punching holes in the craft’s reinforced hull.

Emily keeps pushing her influence into the ship, soon covering everything but Perinith himself.

“Come on, come on,” she mutters as exhaustion starts to take hold, her mana levels less than a minute away from matching her machina. “He shouldn’t be able to resist for long with no spatial affinity…”

She feels the moment her parasitic barrier begins trying to bind itself to the sixth circle mage, as a sudden torrent of pressure slams into her mind. She grits her teeth at his resistance and calls for Harriet’s help, focusing her familiar and every single one of her threads on overwhelming the gnome’s will, letting the outside world fade away into the background.

It feels like they lock mental blades for an eternity, fighting an invisible war that no one else in the fleet can even sense, but after less than ten seconds, Emily snaps back to awareness with a gasp. She can barely feel the remaining drops of mana circulating through her, and Harriet’s near-constant presence has faded to a sleepy hum in the back of her mind. Her body feels heavy as she raises her head to fix her target with a wild grin.

“Sorry, my babies.”

Her army’s attacks stop colliding with Perinith’s resistance as the final stage of the barrier activates, and the robots begin striking against the isolated space itself. The ship appears to quiver and distort as the wave of attacks bursts against the outside of the barrier, and the machina overcharging Emily’s birds pulses in a final screeching cry.

The birds detonate as one, and the entire isolated space collapses, folding in on itself and erupting outwards in the same instant. Space itself is shredded, and a wave of pure pressure sweeps out, spreading past the bounds of the asteroid field and alerting everyone within to the destruction that just occurred.

Nothing is left of Perinith and his ship but dust and unrecognisable scraps of blended matter: both organic and not.