NOVEL NEXT Book 4, Chapter 14
It really said something about my life that jumping from an airship nearing its service ceiling in the middle of a pitched battle wasn't quite the most stupidly dangerous thing I'd ever done. How did I get here? Just six months ago, I was a high school student who'd been in maybe two or three fights ever, and studied martial arts more as a bonding exercise with my dad. And now here I was, acting like the protagonist of one of Uncle Frederick's stories, throwing myself overboard to rescue a woman who didn't even like me very much, simply because it was the right thing to do, and also I was too impulsive to not do something like that.
"Haste," I murmured under my breath, casting a time dilation spell on myself as I fell, to give me more time to think and act. Adrenaline had its uses, but it was the mind-killer; if I was going to be useful as a Wizard, then I needed time to slow down and think.
First priority: catch Erica. She didn't have much of a lead on me, and was less aerodynamic, so I caught up to her and latched on after barely a second of freefall.
Next priority: survive long enough to get back onto the deck.
I looked around, and spotted a corvette gunner slowly aiming his flamethrower at us. Before he could pull the trigger, though, I drew my gun, lined up the shot carefully, and popped his head like a rotten tomato.
Now, to get back onto the ship. I had options, but... None of them were good options.
Teleportation was something I could theoretically do, although I'd only learned the simpler variant that worked on objects, and Erica, who could teleport people, was currently out cold. (I cast a quick healing spell on her, and winced at the cost; already, I could feel the first warnings of burnout.)
I knew how to levitate people with telekinesis, but already, we were going fast enough that using telekinesis on us had an unacceptably high risk of jerking us to a sudden stop, probably breaking bones and tearing ligaments.
I was a Dragonblood Sorcerer, and I had been walked through a few fundamental so-called 'Dragon's Form' spells. Dragons were winged creatures that could fly, and I could really, really use that right now. Unfortunately, the only spells I knew were Dragon's Skin, Dragon's Claw, and Dragon's Maw, which could be interesting in a fight, but were useless to me right now.
Then, a flash of inspiration struck me like a lightning bolt.
---
"Huh," Summer had said, after I walked her through the basics of how airships work- she'd read about them in one of Uncle Frederick's books, and asked if they were real here. "Well, where I'm from, we mostly do our flying with these things called airplanes, which use fixed wings and either propellers or jets to generate thrust and lift."
"Oh, you guys figured out how wings work?" I asked.
"Is that not a solved problem, here?"
"Not a lot of people care about it. We've already got a commercially viable way to fly, after all."
"Huh. Well, it's got something to do with Bernoulli's principle- faster airflow exerts less pressure, so if the top surface of the wing has more of a curve than the bottom of the wing, the air flows faster over it and creates a low-pressure suction-like force that we call lift."
"Huh. Interesting. Do you happen to know any particulars, or...?"
"Nah, I'm no engineer. I just know the basics that everyone learns in school. I think there's also some Third Law stuff in there? Equal and opposite reaction, and all that? If the wing's angled, it pushes down on the incoming air, and the air pushes the wing back up? I really am not sure, though. You're gonna wanna do actual research and testing before you trust your life with this."
---
I sure wish I could, Summer. Fortunately, with ectoplasm, I didn't have to. After all, ectoplasm was solidified ideas; if you poured in enough magicka, you could make it work how you thought it should work, which got easier the closer your idea was to reality- such as, say, knowing the basic working principles, if not necessarily the exact mathematical theory.
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It'd have to be enough.
From my back, and attached to my safety harness, I conjured and formed a pair of ectoplasmic wings, long and broad and thin, and then attached a simple enchanted motor with a propeller- making sure the motor was sticking out far enough that the propeller wasn't about to hit me in the back.
The wings and the propeller had the same ectoplasmic property, the fundamental idea of "forward movement becomes lift," and as the propeller spun up, I arched my back, angling the wings to pull me through a pendulum-swing, until I was flying straight up, back towards The Harpy, where I landed on my feet, and handed Erica off to Emily for healing.
"Holy shit!" Talia yelled. "What happened?!"
"She fell overboard," I said, before casting another quick ectoplasm spell to fill in the hole in the engine room wall. "I got her-"
The air was full of sound; rattling engines, whirring propellers, banging cannons, the works. And yet, somehow, clear and bright above the noise, came the roar of a goddamn dragon.
I turned to look towards the source, and saw, rising up above The Fire Breath, a half-dragon on the wing. He was still, under the draconic features, a man, but he'd grown the wings, the tail, the claws, and the maw of the dragon, fire gathering between his teeth as he flew towards The Harpy.
"...I'm gonna have to fight that guy," I said, almost to myself, feeling... honestly, defeated. Yeah, sure. Of course. I'd made a reasonable plan and worked hard towards executing it- equip The Harpy with the best engines and guns available, so that we could pick off the pirates at range without getting surrounded and destroyed. But I was a hero, and as was written in The Book Of Mnemosyne, 'hero' is a polite euphemism for 'narrative chewtoy,' and so nothing I did to avoid personal suffering and unnecessary risk could be allowed to work completely. Frankly, it was stupid of me to not account for that. Still...
I would likely survive this.
I likely would not enjoy surviving this.
Such is the path of the hero.
I spun up the motor again, then took a running leap off the port side once again, taking wing and putting myself on an intercept course with the half-dragon. His draconic snout formed a cruel, toothy grin, but as he realized I was still getting faster, his eyes went wide, and he tried to dodge out of the way.
Unfortunately for him, I still caught him in a mid-air tackle, before pitching down and driving him into the deck of The Breath of Fire at full speed.
It was a testament to his toughness, as well as my own, that the result of that was only a painful thump and some skidding and rolling, with my ectoplasmic wings breaking and dispersing back into magicka- only some of which I managed to recapture. If we'd been ordinary, baseline mortals with no conditioning whatsoever, we'd likely both be tangles of broken bones, or outright dead.
"...Hello, Cousin," the half-dragon said in perfect, Rosewood Standard High Elven as he got to his feet. Around us, sailors fled, fully aware that anyone who stuck around for this fight was likely to end up crispy-fried. "It doesn't have to end in violence between us. We're both civilized people. We can talk this out. Tell me, what is your name?"
"Catherine," I said, summoning my duster onto my shoulders, over my safety harness- unfortunately, if the harness was going to do anything useful, it had to be exposed, and wearing the safety harness over a longcoat simply wasn't an option. "Catherine Ironheart."
As I said my full name, his face twisted, and the anger I'd expect from a man who I'd just orphaned- at least, I assumed this guy was Mario Bowser Junior, the rumored Dragonblood Sorcerer of Clan Bowser- emerged.
"Liar!" he all but screamed, his face contorting into an ugly mess of wrinkles and bare teeth. "Filthy Rosewood scum, stealing the valor of Artorias' line! I am Silas, son of Rebecca, and I am the last son of House Ironheart!"
"Napoleon-" I began.
"YOU KEEP MY UNCLE'S NAME OUT OF YOUR FILTHY WHORE MOUTH!"
He launched himself at me, a whirlwind of claws fit to rend steel, and I scrambled back, drawing forth my shotgun- Summer had given me the idea to make a gun that fired a bunch of smaller bullets at once, and I'd found it to be pleasantly aiming-agnostic in close quarters testing- and firing off a few shells into his chest, sending him stumbling back.
"He's alive, goddamnit!" I yelled. "He's been living in Redwater for three hundred years! People know him! Cousin, you are not the last son of Artorias' bloodline-"
"Liar!" Silas accused again. "Even if you do somehow speak the truth, even if, somehow, my own mother lied to me..." Silas took a deep breath. "...I will become the last of Artorias' bloodline!"
He released his breath, and with it, a thick plume of white-hot dragonfire.
One thing was now clear: Peaceful negotiation was now off the table.