Log 001

Hello, hello is this thing working. I am not actually sure if now is the best time for me to be doing this, but one shouldn't look a gift horse in its mouth, I guess.

Right now, there are strings of mana that is linking me to every formation in this room, giving almost absolute control over this airship. Not that I am sure if there will remain a ship though the way things have been going.

Behind me are at the moment, three pirate ships that are trying to board onto our ships. If I were to go on the basis of general estimate, each ship behind me should have atleast fifty soldiers.

Thankfully they seem to be much slower than us. Granted I am not sure if I can maintain our speed for much longer. any second now, the propulsion formation will start failing and we all will plummet to the ground. From this high, even If the suspension formation is working (which is a big if, trust me) it won't be enough to stop the ship from being shattered.

This ship does not have any useful defences at this point, making me feel quite defenseless. Thankfully the enemy ships also do not have any method of attack. It seems to be a boarding ship which is quite the lucky thing. Any pirate with a better ship would have boarded us already.

These are very cheap ships which barely have a propulsion system. Most pirates tend to use this as a battering ram to charge into the opposite ship essentially destroying both the ships.

Their presence doesn't actually make too much sense to me. Pirates are bad for business and the people that do business on this path would be hunting guys like this for sport.

Well, I am not one to worry about the thoughts of the snowwinders, for now I have to outrun these bunch of boarders while making sure that my ship does not end up destroyed in the process. With an standard ship this would have not been a problem, but with this ship the chances are slim.

As I said, Right now I am linked to every formation in this ship and i can feel the ship literally break apart in my hands. Any moment now the propulsion formation will fail and we will fall to the ground without the pirates even needing to do anything. Can you imagine the scenario, us losing to pirate because our ships failed before theirs.

It is only my skillful usage of the formation and a lot of luck that we are still running. Even now, I am weaving through the sky trying to make sure that the damn ships do not get their hooks into us.

What is called as a hook is nothing but a harpoon enchanted to make sure that once it entered into the opposite ship it will not be easy to remove with enchanted chains to connect the two ships. All ships have them due to their many and diverse uses but the pirates make sure that their hooks have a nasty bite to them. I angle down the ship to dodge another hook flying above us.

Once the hook enters into the ship the enemy will be trying to board us, individually they are not very strong but once the other side has like fifty people per ship, and you have a crew that can be counted on a single hand, you do not fight, you run regardless of how strong you are. Even if you can take on ten of these soldiers for sport, you do not want a fight to the death with a hundred of them.

Fuck, pirates are not supposed to be this persistent. We have been stuck being chased for nearly half an hour and that is leading to very serious worries about the durability of my ship. I can't even slow down to let the ship cool because then these guys won't even need to use hooks to board us then.

Thankfully at the very least i don't think that they will be doing this for a very long time, and if they are well i am seriously doubting their self esteem. Our ship is quite crappy, even if i do not like to admit it. Now that things are slowing down a bit, it is Time to get this log started properly.

Honestly, I should have gotten started on this particular log nearly a month ago at the beginning of our mission the instant that I had entered the bloody arrow, but this is my first time taking on a commanding position.( It is my first mission outside after being made a captain if I am honest.)

Another thing to be noted is the nearly legendary incompetence that I tend to have with mental magic, so I am hoping that the folks at the head office can be a bit forgiving about the time at which i am sending this log in. I would also like to point out that this delay does not exist for a lack of trying. I have been trying to do this for a week now. I cannot help it if I have succeeded to this the moment that we seem to be about to die. (As if to annoy me more, the ships behind us have accelerated again, and I am forced to accelerate myself to keep ahead of them. Not sure how many more times I can do that. I can literally feel the propulsion formation burn up.)

At the very least I am sure that I do not have to deal with a defective thought logger. The thought logger is a device that is meant to fuse our thoughts into strings of mana and then broadcast it to the thought crystal at the home base. It is a combination of earth magic( specifically crystal magic) and mind magic melded together in a way that I barely understand. Yet for some reason I have not managed to make that device work for me normally until now.

Well it is working now and the very first thing that i will do with this is to complain to the head office, why the fuck do they make the captain of an expedition be the one that has to maintain the records. I know why, they mention it so many times that my ears will fall of but why.

I know the head office was particularly insistent that the captain has a working broadcast of their memory logs. After all those guys cannot send reinforcements to us if they do not know if the captain is not broadcasting a log because he is imprisoned or because he is not able to send a message. Also it will not help that the person that they have to send reinforcements for is me. While they certainly have no reason to cause me any active harm, it is also true that they do not wish to see me prosper too much, but why do i have to handle logging while dealing with pirates and you want my opinion, i don't know which is harder.

Well, there goes my peace, as one of the ships seems to have overloaded it's propulsion formation to get a burst of speed. It's now faster than us, which means i have to focus on task. Okay, it seems to be trying to crash into us as i twist the ship to the left as much as i dare, to prevent that. It takes me five heart pounding seconds as the two ships almost hit each other by hairs breadth. Driving this ship feels like being stuck in water. The speed at which the thing moves.

I am sure that this is giving the other ships quite the opportunity to hook us, but that i will have to leave to the other people of my crew. Let them struggle a bit. Meanwhile, i am going to be using one of my aces, which would be our only aces, our hooks. Turns out the formation on the hook can be overloaded such that once they activate they will explode, which would be when they link up with the other ship.

Well, i am not sure of its effectiveness but i have spent nearly a week supplying it with mana so it better work. Thankfully, the ships are close enough that there is no way for us to miss. The hook get planted into the enemies ship, not doing anything. For a second my heart failed, as we had essentially give them four new points of entry, until a massive boom nearly threw me to the ground.

Okay, there was no way In hell that my hooks were that effective. If that were the case, it would be quite easy to earn a decent profit. Well, my hopes of becoming an enterprising businessman are dashed as I see what has caused the explosion. Their fucking propulsion formation was of the fire element. These formations are risky in general use especially without a good enough way to manage all that heat generated. Once that much fire mana has entered the thing, giving a gap for it leak will cause things to heat up.

Fuck, i had assumed fire based propulsion formations were banned in most places. It has almost been two centuries since such type of airships have even be used. Well, maybe i shouldn't have destroyed that ship, it could have been sold as an antique. You would be surprised just how many people like to collect this type of junk.

The explosion was enough to rattle a few of the sensory formation that were on the outside, causing my view of the outside to be affected quite the bit. Thankfully my mana sense is enough to atleast approximate the location of the remaining ships of this area. I can't say for certain but the blobs of mana seem to be getting farther and farther. They appear to be slowing down, though i can't say for certain.( Airships are massive mana consumers. It is kind of hard to ignore the presence of a airship. It looks about as bright as the sun for those with the sight.)

At the moment though i have an more immediate worry which would be the falling ship. At the moment there are a indefinite amount of hooks binding us. (I can't really tell without the sensory formations but let's hope they are less than five) which is something that i will have to leave for my crew to worry about.

At the moment i have a more immediate worry which would be the fact that at the moment we are inches away from a burning piece of wood. I would not be surprised if many parts of our ship has caught fire due to this damn thing. Another thing is that I have to essentially steer this ship almost blind and hope that I am skilled enough that this ship will not collide with a ship close enough that spit from one ship will reach the other. This is a fine art.

Even if I succeed, success is not guaranteed until the three people that are in patrol at the top of the formation remove all of those damn pesky hooks. (People tend to forget, that hooks are often also used to tow ships, which means that if the hooks are still there as this thing falls, well we let's just say that we are in no condition to tow a perfectly working ship let alone this wreck.)