Chapter 676: Elowynn Embershade [I / Bonus - ]
It was a small vessel, a single-masted sloop with dark weathered oak planking and salt-stained sails that looked as though they had weathered a hundred tempests.
It lacked the grand imposing bulk of an imperial war galleon, but for her, it was more than enough.
It was fast, it was silent, and it carried everything she needed to outrun the ghosts of a broken sea.
Standing at the port railing, leaning heavily against the damp wood, was a woman.
She possessed a striking and dangerously seductive frame looking tall, full-hipped, and gifted with a remarkably heavy, generous bust that strained against the unbuttoned collar of her salt-crusted leather corset.
A wild untamed cascade of deep crimson hair spilled over her bare shoulders, glowing like smoldering embers in the darkness.
She stared down into the churning black foam below.
"Ugh..."
A sick miserable retch caught in her throat.
She gripped the railing with one calloused hand, squeezing her eyes shut as the motion of the waves threatened to turn her stomach inside out.
"Fuck..."
Cursing under her breath, she reached to her hip, unhooked an iron flask, and took a long burning swig of cheap fiery rum.
The alcohol scorched her throat, forcing the bile back down, but it did nothing to soothe the cold ache behind her ribs.
She rested her forehead against the damp wood of the rail, her eyelids drifting closed as the rhythmic sloshing of the sea began to blur.
’I miss the past...’ she thought with the memory washing over her like a warm tide.
...
The smell of black powder, burning canvas, and boiling brine filled the air.
Cannon fire roared across the churning reef as two pirate vessels ground their hulls together in a screeching spray of splinters.
"Morwenna!"
The crimson-haired woman had roared the name at the top of her lungs, leaping from the rigging with twin curved cutlasses blazing with violent volcanic fire.
Mid-air, a dark-haired woman met her blow for blow.
KRA-SHING!
Their blades collided with the concussive shriek of tearing iron with the shockwave peeling the foam off the waves for fifty paces in every direction.
Through the blinding spray of water and sparks, both women bared their teeth, grinning at each other like two feral sea wolves reunited on the blood-soaked deck.
The recoil threw them apart for half a heartbeat.
The crimson-haired woman landed on the pitching deck in a skid of smoking boot-soles, and before the planks stopped shaking she had already spun with both cutlasses whipping around in a pair of crossing arcs that left curtains of flame hanging in the air.
Morwenna did not back away however.
"This is good..."
She drew Tidebringer in a flash of blue, let the tide-water coiled in the runes along its fuller surge up the blade in a hissing sheet and swept it through both fire arcs at once.
PSSSSSHHH!
The flames died in a blast of white steam that swallowed half the deck, and out of the steam came her boot, aimed squarely at Morwenna’s jaw.
Morwenna ducked it by a hair and drove Tidebringer up under both blades, and the weapons locked again in a shower of sparks.
"Still swinging wild, Big Breasts?!" Morwenna had laughed through the spray, Tidebringer locking against the glowing cutlasses with raw insolent joy.
"Still swinging like a washerwoman, Morwenna?" the crimson-haired woman shot back, and leaned in.
The cutlasses flared white-hot as the steel of Tidebringer began to steam where it touched them and the wrap of the hilt smoked under Morwenna’s grip.
’Hotter than last time,’ Morwenna thought, grinning through her teeth. ’Good.’
Around them, both crews had stopped to watch.
A cannon went unfired and somebody dropped a rope.
"Washerwoman? Nice going, Big Breasts."
Morwenna let Tidebringer slide down the glowing blades, set her shoulder, and shoved with everything she had as the water in the blade roared up in a spiral and slammed into the fire, and the whole deck vanished in white steam.
BOOM!
The crimson-haired warrior vaulted backward off the flat of the saber, doing a graceful arrogant flip mid-air before landing boots-first on the narrow wooden tip of the main flagpole with her cloak billowing in the gale.
She drove her blazing cutlass into the wood, her eyes flashing with wicked defiant pride as she sneered down at the black-haired captain.
"It’s Embershade, you fool... Elowynn Embershade!"
"Didn’t hear you, Big Breasts!"
Morwenna’s laughter boomed across the churning black swells of the Abyssal Reach, cutting through the screech of tearing rigging and the concussive boom of broadside batteries.
Standing balanced upon the shuddering spar of the main mast, Elowynn Embershade gritted her teeth so hard she felt the enamel creak.
Yet, even as her jaw locked, the wicked feline tilt of her lips never wavered.
"Once again, My name," Elowynn purred, her voice dripping like poison honey over the roar of the gale, "is Elowynn but I suppose asking a sea-dog with salt-water for brains to remember three syllables is an exercise in futility, isn’t it, Dread Queen?"
Beneath her boots, the deck of the Cinder Maiden groaned under the rhythmic violent surge of mana.
Across the narrow gulf of foam, where the two sloops ground their ironwood bulwarks together in a storm of orange sparks, Morwenna stood tall.
Her long ink-black hair whipped wild against her broad shoulders with her leather arming coat open to the spray, and Tidebringer was already spinning in her grip in a lazy terrifying arc while the serpent-jawed guard flashed blue-green in the storm light.
To the rest of the fractured seas, Morwenna was similar to an extinction-level event, the nightmare that prowled the deep trade lanes, sinking galleons and leaving only floating charcoal in her wake.
To Elowynn, she was... well, what were they?
’Friends?’ Elowynn mused, her amethyst-purple eyes narrowing behind the stray strands of her glowing ember-red fringe. ’Can people in this trade even use that word?’
When your life is measured in the powder burn of an over-primed cannon and the fickle grace of an unmapped reef, tomorrow was never promised.
In a profession where your own quartermaster might slit your throat for a chest of unrefined mana-gold, having someone who locked eyes with you on the open water without instantly calling for your head was a miracle.
To Elowynn, they were friends.
...The closest thing to a sister she had ever known across three centuries of drifting.
The only problem was the woman’s intolerable habit of never, ever using her actual name.
"Quit preening on the timber like a gilded parrot, Embershade!" Morwenna barked, her scarred face splitting into a ferocious grin. "Let’s see if that third-rate crew of yours learned how to steer since the storm at Kraken’s Maw!"
"They steer well enough to board your carcass!" Elowynn hissed.
FWOOSH!
The twin curved cutlasses sheathed at her hips cleared their scabbards with a high-pitched metallic shriek.
The moment her palms locked around the ray-skin grips, her class identity roared to life.
[Class: Ember Corsair]
Deep within her pathways, her mana didn’t circulate like basic elemental flame.
"Haah!"
It surged and boiled releasing a torrent of pure liquid solar fire that rolled along the fullers of her blades like molten lava.
’I can produce much hotter flames than before...’
The rain touching her steel detonated into violent clouds of scalding white steam as Elowynn kicked off the spar.
The wood beneath her boots shattered into splinters under the sudden kinetic discharge.
She dropped like a falling meteor with her twin cutlasses tracing two blinding arcs of liquid crimson across the dark sky.
KRA-SHING!
Morwenna met her mid-fall, Tidebringer rising in an unyielding diagonal guard with the sea-serpent crossguard snarling over her knuckles.
The collision of oceanic alloy and molten liquid fire tore the air open.
BANGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!
A concussive shockwave ripped across the decks, peeling the canvas from the stays and sending a sheet of atomized brine fifty yards into the black water.
Across the gap, the ten girls on the Cinder Maiden’s deck stopped hauling lines to watch, and a few of them started trading coins.
"Ha! Weak!" Morwenna roared, her forearm muscles knotting under the strain as she pushed upward, using her raw physical leverage to throw Elowynn off her balance. "You’re still leading with your right shoulder, girl! How many times do I have to kick you in the ribs before you fix that pivot?!"
Elowynn flipped through the air with her boots grazing the rail, and hit the wet planks of Morwenna’s deck in a low feline slide.
"I don’t need to fix it when I’m aiming for your neck!" Elowynn countered, spinning on her heel.
’Liquid Lash!’
Her right blade whipped outward with a lash of molten crimson fire peeling off the tip.
WHOOSH!
The fire flowed like molten tar, bubbling through the salt-crust and snapping straight toward Morwenna’s knees but Morwenna didn’t even drop her guard.
She stamped one boot down on the planks.
THUD!
A pressurized wave of heavy ocean water surged from the seams of the ship, crashing into the molten fire with an ear-splitting hiss.
TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Steam boiled up in a white wall, and inside it Elowynn heard what she could not see... the thin hiss of a curved blade parting the air a heartbeat before it arrived.
She threw herself sideways.
SHING!
Tidebringer’s edge sliced a lock of ember-red hair off her fringe, and the severed strand flared once like a tiny star and fell as ash.
White vapor blinded the space between them, but Morwenna moved through the fog like a shark in dark water.
Tidebringer’s curved edge hooked through the mist with a blue-green gleam aimed squarely at Elowynn’s hip.
CLANG! CLANG! SHING!
In the span of three heartbeats, they traded twenty blows as cutlass meeting saber...
Elowynn danced with grace, using her lithe curvaceous frame and natural feline agility to twist through Morwenna’s overwhelming reach.
Her hair, flickering like live coals in the dark, trailed arcs of heat through the mist while Morwenna stood like an immovable iron buoy with her heavy footwork anchoring her to the rolling deck as she parried every strike with minimal efficiency.
’What a monster...’
It didn’t matter what Elowyn did...
WHOOSH! SLASH! SLASH!
Tidebringer batted all of her attacks aside with the flat of the blade as shoulder check that rattled Elowynn’s teeth.
BANG!
"Ugh—!"
She tried to counter by whipping her blade forward however a boot heel stamped on her instep that made her hiss.
BANG!
"Stop moving bitc—"
BOOM!
"Ugh..."
She was hit in the stomach by a strong kick, knocking most of the saliva out of her mouth.
"I took down four Corporate galleons off the coast of the Iron Spire last season!" Morwenna laughed through her teeth, driving the pommel of her weapon toward Elowynn’s sternum. "Stripped their holds bare! Sixty barrels of refined mana-rum and a vault full of rune plating! What have you taken, Embershade? A rowboat of salt-fish?!"
"I raided the Governor’s personal supply transport at the Twin Atolls, you overgrown ape!" Elowynn spat, rolling under the strike with her boots sliding along the wet wood. "Took thirty crates of celestial silk and forty gold chests!"
"That was once!" Morwenna bellowed, pivoting with a devastating roundhouse sweep that forced Elowynn into a desperate high jump.
"One lucky haul six decades ago! Since then, all your girls do is run from the privateer cutters!"
’Damn her...’ Elowynn’s chest heaved with her corseted ribs burning as she landed on the gunwale.
It was true. She hated it, but it was true.
In all their years of crossing paths, in every skirmish, every boarding action, every drunken spar, Elowynn had never won against Morwenna.
...Not once.
Her crew of ten seasoned girls on the Cinder Maiden worked like an oiled machine, but whenever they tangled with Morwenna’s monsters, they were outmaneuvered, out-muscled, and run down at every single turn.
Elowynn was convinced the pirate queen deliberately dragged out their fights just to show off, just to flaunt that raw insurmountable gap in their combat foundation right in her face.
’You always look down on me,’ Elowynn thought with a spark of pure petty spite igniting behind her amethyst eyes.
She wasn’t going to win with pure martial power as she knew her physical stats couldn’t overpower Morwenna’s monstrous vitality but there were other ways to draw blood.
Elowynn’s eyes flashed.
’Ember Domain... Converging Flares!’
Eight distinct globes of liquid fire separated from her blades, floating in the humid air like burning lanterns.
With a flick of her wrists, the spheres converged on Morwenna from all directions, high, low, flank, and rear, trapping her in a cage of molten light.
The air screamed as sparks rained across the planks and every sailor on both ships dived behind a barrel.
"Ohoh, new trick?!"
Morwenna grunted, spinning Tidebringer into a high-speed wheel of water-mana to deflect the barrage.
CLANG-BOOM! CLANG-BOOM!
The liquid fire splattered against the rotating water barrier, throwing blinding light across the deck.
’Now,’ Elowynn thought, and her pulse thundered in her ears. ’Right now!’