The plan was in motion.
Whether it would hold was a different question entirely one the sea breeze wasn't answering.
"Since when did you start manipulating people, Aunt?"
"Pardon, Arlienne?" Seraphyne tilted her head with an expression of such complete innocence that it was clearly constructed.
"I believe you know exactly what I mean."
Arlienne's knuckles had gone white around the trident. Her other hand was pressed against her own palm, nails digging into the skin the sharp, specific pain of it keeping her mind anchored against the melody threading across the deck from the stage ahead.
"I'm not clever enough to decipher your vague riddles," Seraphyne replied smoothly, her eyes moving forward to where Riruka stood singing.
"Well, I'd love to enlighten you," Arlienne said, her voice carrying the particular honey-coated edge of pure sarcasm, "but it seems we've attracted some unwanted attention. Just as I expected."
She leveled her trident.
Ahead of them, a group of men had closed the gap between the stage and the open deck a grim alliance of Leviacore officers and pirates standing shoulder to shoulder, their expressions carrying the unified purpose of people who have been given one job.
"We shouldn't have let ourselves get distracted," Seraphyne muttered, shifting her stance until they stood back to back. Her eyes moved methodically around the perimeter. Each man had his ears plugged with thick cotton insulated against the song, unaffected by the happiness it was selling to everyone else on the deck.
"They would have come regardless. I knew it."
"And where do you two pretty ladies think you're going?"
The voice belonged to a face Arlienne recognized. The officer from the first day the one who had grabbed her collar, the one the Captain had dressed down in front of everyone, the one who had been carrying his wounded pride through every subsequent encounter.
The smirk on his face had the quality of something that had been waiting to come back out.
"To your mother's wedding night," Arlienne said, her voice carrying perfectly over the ambient noise of the deck. "I thought I'd give her some tips. Starting with how to avoid giving birth to a pathetic mistake like you."
The silence that followed lasted approximately one second.
Then the surrounding pirates and officers started laughing or trying not to, which produced the same effect and the officer's face went through several colors before settling on something between purple and incandescent.
He roared and lunged, blade raised, the kind of charge that runs entirely on wounded dignity and has not thought past the first three steps.
Arlienne flicked her trident.
The metal caught the hilt of his sword mid-swing, twisting it from his grip with the contemptuous ease of someone redirecting a leaf. He stumbled forward, bladeless, momentum carrying him past her without making contact. She hadn't moved her feet.
The group went very quiet.
He turned around, one trembling finger pointing at her, his face a study in humiliation.
"What are you all waiting for? Attack!"
Fifteen men moved at once, blades catching the light from the ship's lanterns.
Seraphyne's brow furrowed. The arithmetic of fifteen against two was not comfortable.
"Aunt," Arlienne said, her voice dropping to something almost conversational given the circumstances, "would you be kind enough to jump?"
It was a strange request. Seraphyne trusted her niece's tactical mind without requiring an explanation for it and leaped a clean, graceful moonsault that took her above the oncoming charge.
Arlienne gripped her trident with both hands. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"Tidal Fan."
She spun.
The high-pressure water blades that erupted from the trident traveled in a perfect circle outward from the point of rotation not a spray, not a flood, but precise curved edges of compressed water moving fast enough that the air itself seemed to part ahead of them. The fifteen men had one collective moment of registering a change in pressure before the wave reached them.
The results were comprehensive. Men scattered backward in multiple directions, some over the railings, some into the bulkheads, none of them staying upright. The deck cleared in approximately one second.
Seraphyne landed beside her niece with the unhurried grace of someone completing a familiar motion.
"So you've mastered this element already?" she said.
"Surprised? It's no big deal." Arlienne's chest heaved slightly the only visible evidence that the technique had cost anything at all. "The move just creates high pressure water blades. Simple physics."
"Still. To execute that perfectly in a single second is impressive."
"Yet I'm still not sure if we're getting out of here alive," Arlienne said.
"Trust your brother's plan," Seraphyne said, and the firmness in her voice was real. "Besides, it is far better to die fighting than to die doing nothing."
Arlienne's composure cracked by one visible degree the stress underneath showing through the gap like light through a closing door.
"He didn't even have a plan," she said, her hand pressing to her temple. "His legs were shaking. If you hadn't intervened, he wouldn't have even opened his mouth."
"He just needed a push." Seraphyne's eyes found hers with the specific attention of someone who sees more than they comment on. "Besides I can see you're either disappointed in yourself for not having a plan, or because things aren't going exactly as you choreographed them."
Arlienne looked away.
She neither confirmed nor denied. The moment held between them and then the sound of boots broke it.
Four more officers arrived from the side corridor, blades drawn. But Arlienne's attention had already moved past them, further ahead, to two familiar blonde heads.
"I'll handle these four," Seraphyne said. She dropped into a low stance, her hands beginning to glow the familiar emerald green of her mana the color that Arlienne now knew meant considerably more than it looked like it meant.
"It seems I don't have much of a choice tonight," Arlienne muttered.
She launched herself from the deck, bypassing the officers entirely, ascending and descending in one fluid arc a hawk finding its angle. Her trident came down aimed at Riruka.
Both sisters moved at the last possible moment. The weapon struck the deck boards with a deafening impact, the wood splintering around it.
Arlienne extracted it and straightened. She looked at Ririyen standing between her and Riruka, two serrated daggers drawn, her expression carrying something that went considerably past hostility.
"So you have some reflexes after all, Ririyen," Arlienne said.
"So you know," Ririyen hissed.
"I'm surprised that you're surprised." The smirk returned to its usual position. "I've known the truth about your abilities since the day I met you on this ship. I've already prepared countermeasures though I admit, I wanted to see a live demonstration with my own eyes."
Behind them, across the deck and over the gangplank, the atmosphere had shifted entirely. Riruka had stopped singing for the duration of the dodge, and in that gap even those few seconds the illusion of happiness had shattered for the passengers on the pirate ship. Sixty people had walked across those planks smiling. Now the screams reached the deck in waves, the sound of people who have just understood where they are and what was happening to them.
Ririyen glanced back at her sister.
Something passed between them not words, just the compressed communication of two people who share the particular history of having protected each other for a long time and know what the other's fear looks like.
They understood the stakes. If the passengers revolted, the pirates would be overwhelmed. The Captain would not forgive failure.
"Don't come any closer," Ririyen said.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart," Arlienne said, "but I'm going to have to break your heart."
She moved. Ririyen met her head-on.
Arlienne struck with the predatory precision of someone who has assessed the gap between their capability and their opponent's and found it comfortable and Ririyen was faster than that assessment had accounted for. The girl slid under the trident's arc and swung both daggers at Arlienne's legs, the angle forcing Arlienne to take flight again rather than take the hit.
She hovered above the deck.
"Hey! Don't run away! What's the matter scared?"
"I believe the term you're looking for is 'tactical retreat,'" Arlienne said. She regained her angle and redirected her assault not at Ririyen, but past her, at Riruka.
"Hey! Your fight is with me!"
Ririyen scrambled. The water blasts she moved to intercept hit her blades with the force of iron hammers, the steel vibrating under each impact, her arms absorbing the energy until they were shaking with it. Her teeth were together. She didn't step back.
Arlienne paused her assault and observed.
"You aren't counter-attacking with spells," she said. "So you can't use mana at all."
Ririyen's body went rigid.
Riruka's breath caught audibly.
"Let's see where that confidence goes after I beat you into the deck!" Ririyen charged again.
Arlienne sighed. She fired one more water blast not at Ririyen, at Riruka.
Ririyen was in the gap between them. She had exactly one option and she knew it before the blast arrived. She took the hit on her left shoulder. No blood. No break. But the pain moved through her arm like liquid nitrogen finding every nerve simultaneously, her fingers going numb before she had finished deciding to hold on.
Their weapons locked. Arlienne pressed forward with the ease of someone who doesn't need to try hard to win and knows it. Ririyen's feet dragged back across the deck boards, inch by inch.
"Why not surrender?" Arlienne asked, her voice entirely conversational given the circumstances. "Work with us. It would be an honor to be on the right side of history for once."
"The right side?" Ririyen panted, her arms trembling with the effort of not being pushed over. "What is the right side? Because from where I'm standing, you aren't winning."
"Then you need to see a doctor about your eyesight," Arlienne said.
She prepared the final blow. She didn't need Ririyen alive only Riruka.
Ririyen's expression went blank. Something settled in it not peace exactly, but the specific stillness of someone who has stopped fighting the calculation. She dropped her daggers.
The trident moved.
A figure stepped between them.
The sound of impact specific and final. Riruka had moved. The trident's point had found her chest rather than Ririyen. She stood there, the wound bleeding freely, and she kept singing forced the melody out through the pain and the blood, her voice steady when everything else about her wasn't.
"Death is an escape you don't deserve yet, Riruka," Arlienne said. The genuine annoyance in her voice was mostly at herself.
"Sister!"
Ririyen's voice broke completely. She caught Riruka as she began to fall, both of them going to the deck together, Ririyen's hands pressing against the wound, blood finding the gaps between her fingers.
"That bastard captain that son of a bitch!" Her voice fractured further, grief and rage occupying the same register. "Because of that coward, you always have to suffer!"
Her hands felt the tears on Riruka's face even as Riruka kept singing, the melody continuing past the pain because the melody was the only thing she had left to give.
"That liar-- if there is a God, or an Old Great Sage,why don't they punish a man like him?"
She punched the deck. Once. Twice. Her knuckles split.
"Why do people like us always suffer? Why?" The scream came from somewhere past the point of composure, past the point of managing how it sounded to anyone listening. "What did we do to deserve this? Why-- why-- why us?"
The deck absorbed the sound of it. The pirates nearby had gone still. Even the screaming from the pirate ship across the gangplank had quieted slightly, as though the question demanded a response the universe wasn't providing.
"Hey." Arlienne's voice had lost its edge not soft exactly, but different. "I get it. You have a grudge against him. Then why not fight against him?"
"You think we don't want to?" Ririyen sobbed, not looking up. "If I had my fate in my own hands, I would have sliced my blade into his throat. But he took an Oath of Echoes from our parents."
She laughed a broken, dry sound that had nothing in common with laughter except the shape of it.
"They sold us. Like animals. And to make it worse, that man used our abilities and made us do things we never wanted to do."
Arlienne was quiet for a moment.
"It's interesting," she said. "You said he took the Oath of Echoes from your parents not from you yourselves. Which means if you betray him, your parents face the consequences. Not you." A pause. "Am I correct?"
Ririyen chuckled dryly the sound of someone finding the irony of something too dark to be funny and laughing at it anyway. "They will die. My sister believes they sold us out of hunger. She still holds sympathy for those butchers who call themselves our parents."
Riruka's hand came up and covered Ririyen's mouth. Gently but completely.
Arlienne looked at them both.
"I see," she said. "The captain knew this from the beginning." She raised her trident. "But you will have to cooperate, Riruka. Otherwise, your sister will face the consequences."
"Of course she will."
The voice came from behind her.
Arlienne turned.
A man in his mid-thirties stepped forward from the shadows near the railing. He wore a loose white shirt under a long crimson coat, brown trousers, black boots the silhouette of someone who had made deliberate choices about how they looked and was comfortable with the result. An eyepatch over his left eye. Long black hair moving at his shoulders. A smirk that had the particular quality of someone who has been listening for a while and has chosen now as his moment.
"Who the hell are you?" Arlienne asked.
Behind her, she heard two sharp intakes of breath. Ririyen and Riruka had gone rigid simultaneously.
"R-Rikel," Ririyen whispered. The shiver that moved through her had nothing to do with the sea air.
"I heard everything," the man said pleasantly, his eyes moving to Ririyen with the specific warmth of a threat delivered as an observation. "After I finish with this girl, I'll give you a piece of my mind. You're not getting smacked right now only because of the goodwill of your big sister."
His gaze drifted to the blood on Riruka's chest. He looked at it briefly not with horror, not with guilt, just with the mild acknowledgment of a fact and then turned to Arlienne.
"How rude of me." He dropped to one knee, the bow practiced and elaborate, the kind that exists to mock the thing it's imitating. "I am Rikel Holfbot. Captain of the pirate ship." He produced a rose from his coat with the ease of a man who keeps roses specifically for this purpose. "It's a pleasure making your acquaintance, pretty lady."
He extended it toward her.
Arlienne looked at the rose.
Her trident moved barely, a single precise flick and the rose disintegrated. Red petals fell between them like the punchline to a joke that had been set up wrong.
"My name," she said, leveling the trident at him, "is not something someone like you deserves to know. And I'm not kind enough to give it freely regardless."
Something shifted.
Not in Rikel's expression that stayed exactly where it was. But in the ship itself. A shudder moved through the hull, deep and structural, as though something very large had decided to change position. Riruka's singing lost two notes. Ririyen's shivering intensified.
"Have you awakened new powers because of rejection, pirate?" Arlienne frowned.
"I wish," Rikel said, and his eyes moved past her.
The shadow appeared before the man did six feet tall, cast by the lantern light on the deck boards ahead of Arlienne. Then the source of it stepped forward from the darkness at the ship's far end, the shadow catching up to the reality of him as he moved into the light.
Long red hair, wild and unorganized, moving at his back like something untamed. A physique that communicated an entire life's singular dedication made visible in muscle and proportion.
A massive sword resting on one shoulder with the ease of something he had been carrying so long it had become part of his posture. His jaw could have been carved from the same material as the ship's hull. His eyes moved across the deck with the specific quality of someone looking for something worth their attention and finding the question genuinely interesting rather than urgent.
"V-Veryn--"
Ririyen's voice had lost its shape entirely.
"Why are you here?" Rikel's voice had found a sharper edge despite the sweat visible at his temple. "I told you to wait on the ship."
Veryn looked at him. The look lasted a moment and contained something between amusement and the comfortable authority of someone who has never once done what they were told and has never found the experience troubling.
"What are you staring at? Go back and wait. There's nobody here for you to fight."
"Who are you to tell me that?" Veryn asked. The tone was casual not aggressive, not defiant. Just genuinely puzzled by the premise of the question.
"What do you mean, who am I? I am your captain. You must obey me!"
"Hmm. Captain." Veryn considered the word with the focus of someone turning an object over in their hands to see all its sides. "Yes, you are. But I am my own master." He slammed his sword onto the deck.
The ship shook again not from waves, from impact.
"I will do what I want. And right now--" his eyes moved slowly across the deck, taking inventory with a patience that suggested he was in no hurry and had never been "I want to fight."
"Are you kidding me?" Rikel's teeth were together. "There is nobody here who can match your strength!"
"No, no, no." Veryn's voice carried a gentle correction, the tone of someone explaining something obvious to someone who should understand it better. "Your ordinary eyes can't see the extraordinary things."
He continued looking. His gaze moved upward to the broken wall above, to the corridor beyond it, to wherever Emerion and Anathema were.
He began walking.
"Make it quick, then," Rikel said, pinching the bridge of his nose with the exhausted resignation of a man who has had this argument before. "Whoever you're fighting."
"No guarantees," Veryn said, without looking back. "You can't see the art of battle with ordinary eyes. Only great people can and pour their heart and soul into it."
He disappeared from the deck, his footsteps unhurried and deliberate, moving toward whatever extraordinary thing his ordinary-eye-deficient captain had failed to perceive.
"Fufu," Arlienne said, into the silence he left. "You got scolded."
"Just watch." Rikel's smirk returned with a different quality to it something sharper. He raised the weapon in his hand and Arlienne registered it properly for the first time: an Aethercaster, a magical firearm, its barrel leveled at her chest. "I am going to wipe that smirk off your face."
"You have so much confidence for someone who is going to fight me alone," Arlienne said.
"Alone?" Rikel laughed. The sound was light and genuinely amused. "You are mistaken, pretty lady." His eyes moved past her. "Am I right, Ririyen?"
Arlienne turned.
Ririyen had gone still not the stillness of someone preparing to fight, but the stillness of someone fighting themselves. Her hands were near her blades and not touching them. Her expression was the expression of someone standing in the gap between two things they couldn't have at the same time.
Then Riruka's hand moved.
Bleeding, trembling, still producing notes through a wound that should have silenced her entirely Riruka pressed one of Ririyen's blades into her sister's hand and pushed her forward.
Arlienne looked at the blade in Ririyen's hand. At Riruka's face. At the blood still finding new paths down Riruka's chest.
She tightened her grip on the trident.
Two opponents now. One with a firearm.
One with nothing to lose in the specific way of someone who has already decided their sister's safety outweighs their own.
"Shall we begin?" Rikel asked, his finger finding the trigger of the Aethercaster with the ease of a man who is comfortable with what comes next.