Amazon Apocalypse 8: Chapter 6 (Patreon)

"There's our target. Straight ahead," I declared as Seraphyne pointed the ship toward a sleek, black vessel in the void.

Behind us, our entire crew huddled in anxious anticipation. The Orraculum appeared small compared to the dark ship speeding through empty space, though size was deceptive with the spatial compression going on aboard our own vessel.

"We're raiding... that thing?" Jalen asked, face pale. Others seemed far more nervous.

"Yes, we're raiding that thing. We're going to board it, storm the place, and kick the asses of everyone who's trying to stop us. Just watch out. I doubt the people on the ship will go down without a fight. But if we pull this one raid off, it'll be the start of something big."

I looked over the crew. It was a close thing, but for most, their greed was rapidly winning out over good sense. Jalen was one of the few exceptions who likely would have stayed aboard the ship if I allowed it.

I did not.

"Alright then. Let's get the suits," Jalen said with shoulders slumping.

"No need for that. Just use the teleporters." Seraphyne waved her hands and people disappeared before they could realize that all the spaceside training they'd done under me had had no practical purpose given this ship's capabilities.

Soon, it was just me and Seraphyne.

"Are we standing back and letting them handle this? Or are we going to step in and blow up that ship?" Seraphyne asked.

"The former for you. I need you to keep an eye on the crew. The people on board that ship are going to kill all of them, which is where I come in. Unfortunately, I'll be hogging all the fun for myself today." I cracked my knuckles.

"You're sure we should take out this ship? While I don't mind picking a fight, I'd rather not mess with things too much unless it leads me to my goals." Seraphyne frowned.

"Don't worry, we need to clean up your backyard anyway. And from the rumors I heard in port, these guys are real weeds. We'd be dealing with them sooner or later. I took a little walk last night onboard that ship, and the crew signed up to die when they chose their cargo." I jerked a thumb at our target.

Our ship's crew had taken a single cargo hold. I suspected that was all they would take without my swift intervention, so I gave Seraphyne one last wave before teleporting myself a single compartment away from the crew.

The people on the other side were black-armored figures. The only splotches of color they had on them were bits of dried blood here and there. They drew sinister-looking knives slick with an oily poison and were approaching the cargo hold where my crew had landed.

They were mostly C-Grades with a B-Grade leader, which meant that my people would be cut to pieces the moment the two groups met. That was why I was here.

I waved to them as I appeared in the midst of their group.

"Hello, gentlemen. I bet you've been told this before, but you all really chose the wrong line of work."

They reacted with the speed and skill of professionals as they turned from the door toward me.

"One of the intruders! Kill him!" the B-Grade shouted.

Knives came for me from all directions... and promptly bounced right off my skin. I grabbed one poking at my eye and bent the blade backward on itself. I watched the eyes of the man who'd tried to stab me widen in horror as I twisted the blade around and drove it into his own skull instead.

One sweep of my leg broke shins and femurs, and soon most of them were on the ground. I turned to the B-Grade, who was the only one who survived my low kick. He was stumbling backward and trying to run.

I made a finger gun and pointed it at his fleeing back and shot out one leg, then the other. He tumbled to the ground and died a moment later to another Mana Bolt to the back of the head.

A quick cast of Disassemble took care of the whole mess and made it look like little more than a pile of gear that had been left out in the hallway for no reason in particular.

The only one I left alive was a C-Grade with a broken leg and a messy uniform. I put the bent knife in his hands and pushed him toward the exit.

"There's a bunch of D-Grades on the other side. If you can take them all, you might get to live," I promised. Then I sent my crew their first challenger.

After that, I walked through the ship and took care of the rest of the fighters in like fashion. It wasn't that I was merciless or cruel, but these people truly deserved to be put down.

I started surveying the other cargo holds, besides the one my crew had seized. The contents were as I'd seen from afar.

"Narcotics. Let's keep that sealed." I shook my head to clear it. I was feeling lightheaded from breathing it in, which meant that whatever was in there was extraordinarily potent. Most drugs couldn't affect an A-Grade at all, even if there was an entire cargo hold full of the stuff.

I manually deactivated the enchantments keeping the cargo hold in place, which jettisoned all the drugs into space. Good riddance.

The next cargo hold was full of more traditional goods, albeit of a more unsavory nature. There were swords, spears, and knives all glowing with sinister enchantments. A few reminded me of my Lifesteal ability. Others stole more than just life.

I pocketed these, since they might come in handy at some point. All the gear was too low-level to be useful to me, and too low-quality and too innately evil to be sold in Crownhill. But I might have a use for it sometime soon.

The next cargo hold was particularly nasty. It was full to the brim with barrels of blood from sapient beings. It needed to be, since it was intended as fuel for some sort of dark ritual. Theoretically, the hundreds of barrels of blood could have been obtained voluntarily. But the barrels of severed hands, eyes, and tongues in the next room suggested a much less humane harvesting method.

Finally, of course, the last cargo hold was full of slaves. Maybe they would be laborers, though they were likely slated as living sacrifices. If it were just the manacles, I would have called them prisoners, but the manifest listing prices corresponded to the serial codes branded on each prisoner's forehead.

I didn't really care if the people who ran this ship were buying, selling, or just transporting. As an A-Grade, I was supposed to be a leader of the Arcadia Multiverse, and the least I could do was a little good here and there.

I stuck a fist through the steel door leading to the slave pens and ripped it aside.

"Attention, everyone! My name is Carter, and I'm here to rescue you."

I looked over the bleary-eyed, hopeless gazes. A few of them raised their heads, mostly to block the light shining through from behind me. Few met my eyes. I made note of each of them. Those were probably the strong-willed ones.

I wasn't entirely selfless in recruiting this lot. After all, we wanted loyal people. I would not recruit all of Seraphyne's future staff from a pirate's den.

***

A few minutes later I had the crew from the Orraculum distributing food and clothes to the newly freed slaves.

"Congratulations on your first victory," I told Jalen and the others. He was wiping his sweat-covered brow. Several of the others looked shaken by what they'd just done. We'd even taken a few casualties, though all of them were from the bottom of my list. Seraphyne must have tweaked things to make sure the only ones who died were those who were a bad influence on the others.

"We... we killed a C-Grade..." Jalen shook his head. "That shouldn't have been possible."

"We kicked his ass! Don't look so grim." One of the other crewmates clapped Jalen on the back.

"It shouldn't have been so easy. It's like the ship had a skeleton crew." Jalen glanced briefly toward me.

I gave him a tiny wink. He gulped a moment later and looked away.

I turned to Seraphyne, who was flipping through the cargo manifest.

"Your plan has some merit to it. The slaves aboard this ship would need to have been freed eventually. Some of them are even of noble lineage, or at least what passes for it in the modern era." Seraphyne frowned as she flipped through the pages.

I frowned. "If they're nobles, someone will be looking for them, won't they?"

Seraphyne shook her head. "Likely on one side only. I imagine there is a high-end brothel somewhere catering to nobles. Or perhaps the nobles commissioned a dark ritual without realizing what it entailed. As far as I can tell, none of these young men and women were captured. They're all too low-level for that. They were bred to be sacrifices. The organization we raided is likely affiliated with dark cultists of some sort."

"Lovely," I replied with a sarcastic grimace. "Is this sort of thing common in the Arcadia Multiverse?"

"It was not in my time. Unfortunately, I have awoken in a grim and dark future." Seraphyne hung her head a moment.

When I said we needed to clean up Seraphyne's backyard, I hadn't imagined just how bad things had gotten. Given the dire state of things, I felt obliged to step in and bash some heads in even if I wasn't here helping Seraphyne.

"Alright, crew." I clapped my hands and turned to our people. "This ship and everything on it besides the people is pirate booty. Let's get some chains and hitch it behind the Orraculum. We'll tow this beast somewhere quiet, regroup, and then add it to our fleet!"

The Orraculum looked ridiculous pulling a ship many times its size. The luxury space vessel was built for speed rather than power, so it wasn't as easy as I'd been hoping. It might have been easier to figure out the controls for the other ship and pilot it manually, but my time was better spent going through the newly freed slaves and figuring out who was willing to join us.

As I had hoped, the actual number of volunteers was high, even after I assured everyone I would drop them off somewhere comfortable, with money in their pockets and the promise of steady work.

I added them to the evening drills and soon had several promising recruits worth watching. I even knew all of their names. Mostly because I was the one to give them their names. They'd been born labeled only by the numbers on their foreheads, but that changed today.

"You look like an Arthur," I told a large and dependable fellow who had taken well to both mopping the floors and wielding a sword. I liked to think he'd make a decent cowboy, but I didn't want to hand him a gun until I taught him how to avoid shooting himself in the foot.

"Hmm... how about Sadie for you?" I looked at a bashful, dirty-blonde-haired woman with spots on her cheeks. She might have been cute if she weren't as thin as a rake, hadn't dressed herself in men's clothes, and didn't constantly wear a fierce scowl.

"And you will be John." I pointed to the third, who was leaner than Arthur with a narrow face and scars on his cheeks.

The three of them were my most dependable trio. There were others, but those were the three that I thought would go far in Seraphyne's service.

***

My plan for the next week was to run drills with the new crew. Seraphyne reluctantly agreed. She only had five months with me and hated to spend a full week of them just dealing with low-grade people, but I reminded her that building a core group of people was crucial to our plan to take over her family's old space station.

In total, I felt like we had about fifty potential recruits from the freed slaves, which was a lot more than the ten I'd been willing to take from our previous batch of recruits.

I was satisfied with the way things were going and had no plans for anything else. But time passed, and not just for me. And in that time, somebody had realized I'd taken what they considered theirs. And they planned to teach us a lesson.

"Carter, the long-range sensors have picked up several ships approaching us. They think they're camouflaged, but the Orraculum's sensors are better than what they're used to going up against. Do you want to slip away?"

I thought about it a moment.

"I suppose we can give them a little chase. It might give the crew some excitement." I stroked my chin and smiled.

"We might need to cut the other ship we're towing loose. The Orraculum could easily lose them without the dead weight we're pulling. We could let them almost catch us a dozen times without danger," Seraphyne suggested hopefully. She'd been eager to cut loose the other ship for days.

Towing something with the Orraculum was a bit like hooking up a trailer to a sports car. It could be done, but it wouldn't do it well and it was an incredible waste of resources. And Seraphyne was about as happy with needing to tow another ship as any sports car owner would be.

"Don't worry, the Orraculum can take it. And I don't want to fly around and give the crew any ideas about getting away. I'm looking forward to giving an inspiring speech about a glorious last stand. You can take the helm. I'm going to take a peek at our new training dummies."

<Note>

I might change/remove the names of the trio in this section later on. I just wanted some names to reference a few more crew members, since right now Jalen is the only one I've noted. Sadie, Arthur, and John are just easy for me to remember... for reasons some of you might be able to guess, haha.

Anyway, sorry for going silent again. I really hoped to pick up the pace by now, but I came down with a cold at the worst possible time and it's really slowed me down.