Alexander leaps into the air and swings his blade at Fenrir at the same time that The Shoebill crashes into The Steel Tiger’s bow! Fenrir, still standing on the deck, almost gets knocked off his balance from the collision.

Fenrir raises Rod in front of him and blocks the sword! Rod may just be a fishing pole right now, and the wood that it is made of is nothing special, but the “veins” running through the pole’s structure are as hard as any steel and stop the blade from cutting through it. “Surprised?” Fenrir asks with a sly smile.

“How?!” Alexander shouts. This masterfully crafted blade has no reason not to cut through some fishing rod! Even a steel blade would be sliced through by this sword, yet a fishing rod is able to stop it?

A bright glow from the bottom of the pole tells Alexander why his sword can’t cut through it.

Alexander kicks off of Fenrir to jump back a few feet and ready himself for another attack.

“You alright, Rod?” Fenrir asks.

One pulse.

“Good. Don’t worry, he won’t—”

Alexander charges once more, but this time, he has used magic to imbue his blade in a swirling cyclone of flame.

The flaming blade may still not be enough to cut through Rod, but there is one distinct advantage over Fenrir that Alexander has, and it is apparent to Fenrir from Alexander’s movements.

While Fenrir’s sword fighting experience comes purely from randomly swinging around weapons in games until figuring out what works and what doesn’t, Alexander utilizes proper techniques that can only be obtained through serious training.

Fenrir tries to block Alexander’s attack after he switches the direction he is swinging from, but he then fakes Fenrir out again by tackling him rather than using his sword at all!

While Alexander pins Fenrir down and presses his flaming sword to Fenrir’s neck, a new battle is about to begin at where the two ships are joined.

Cassiel and Bonekraka look at each other and nod, but before they can jump over to the ship they’ve rammed, Tabitha jumps between them with her oversized hammer and is the first one to pick a fight!

“Come at me! I’ll show ya that the Strism name ain’t just good for smithin’!” Tabitha shouts.

The nearest man charges her with a sword and a kite shield.

Tabitha smiles at him and swings her hammer into his shield. The force of impact from her hammer is enough to smash the shield into hundreds of small fragments and completely break the bone in the arm that it was strapped to.

Cassiel cringes when she sees the man’s arm limply hanging at his side, but when Bonekraka jumps over to the ship to join Tabitha, she decides that it’s time for her to join the action herself.

It is now that she notices something. Whereas before, these men were wearing regular armor that bore no insignias nor looked noticeable in any way, they now don white and gold plate armor with a design that she is very familiar with. Even the scabbards of their shields look familiar to her, and if that’s not enough to tell her who these men are, one of them recognizes her.

“Cassiel?” the man standing in front of her asks.

Cassiel draws her blade and aims it at him. The only men wearing armor with this design that would recognize her have to be angels, or at least angel trainees, fighting for the Augus Empire. She used to have armor that looked exactly like theirs.

“That’s you, isn’t it? Hey, what’re you doing with these guys?”

The answer he gets is her blade slashing at him rather than a spoken one.

With Tabitha and Cassiel in their own fights, Bonekraka looks at the final man available for a fight and grunts as he clacks his two axes together.

“Should – should we help them?” Corwin asks Oleander and Serra.

“Nah, they’ll be fine. I can just use magic from up here if they try anything,” Oleander answers.

Rock is being held up by Serra and barks when she sees her master with a flaming blade at his neck in the distance.

As much as Fenrir wants to fight with Rod, he has to admit that Rod isn’t very useful in this situation. His legs are pinned down by Alexander’s and his arm holding Rod is pinned down by Alexander’s arm not holding the blade to his neck.

But at the same time, he knows that defeating Alexander with a fishing rod is going to really piss him off. Being defeated by a fishing rod is just so much more degrading than being beaten by a weapon or fists.

It’s time to give in to that feral desire within.

“Any last words?” Alexander asks, his blade drawing blood from Fenrir’s neck.

“Yeah, thanks for being cliché enough to give me a chance,” Fenrir says as his free hand comes up to the flaming blade and grabs onto it! He pushes the blade just far away enough from his neck to headbutt Alexander without slitting his own throat. Alexander’s grip on Fenrir’s other wrist weakens in a moment of distraction which allows the wolf to pull his arm and Rod away.

With a bleeding hand that was cut from grabbing onto Alexander’s sword, Fenrir kicks Alexander off from him and jumps back up onto his feet. His vision already going black tells him that while he may be sharing stats with Nell at the moment, his Health apparently isn’t affected as he surely hasn’t taken that much damage.

Alexander spits blood onto the deck and glares at his opponent. “Alright, wolf, you’ve taught me my lesson. I will kill you the next chance I have rather than talk,” he says.

“That’s pretty common sense when fighting somebody, you know. I thought you were supposed to be smart?” Fenrir asks.

When Alexander looks around, he sees his ship ruined, his crew being evenly engaged with more enemies that could join in at any moment, and a confident bastard in front of him wielding a fishing rod. Alexander may not be the smartest man there is, but he’s smart enough to know that he won’t be getting out of this alive. “Then I’ll be smart,” he says and jumps down to the lower deck.

Fenrir chases after him by jumping down and immediately turning around to follow Alexander into his captain’s quarters. What he sees in the quarters gets rid of his cocky, joking demeanor and replaces it with a pure and feral rage.

Nell is chained up from her ankles to her neck and her tail is nailed to the deck by a sword impaling it. Then there is Alexander standing behind her with a sword pressed against her neck in the same way that he was pressing it to Fenrir’s.

“Now that is a good expression, wolf,” Alexander says. “If my empress cannot have this thing, then I won’t allow anybody else to have it either. We will find some other way of dealing with the serpents.”

Fenrir clutches rod in one hand and his fist in the other. Even though he can feel how calm and confident Nell is, the sight of her being treated like this pisses him off beyond what he can hold back.

“Now which of us is the cliché one? Getting so upset just because your little crush here has been hurt? I wonder what sort of face you will show me after I do this,” Alexander slices his blade against the skin of Nell’s neck not covered by chains.

Well, he tries to. Instead, he finds his hand unable to press the blade close enough to her neck no matter how hard he presses his hand forward. It feels as if something has bound him and is preventing him from moving properly.

When he looks down at his wrist he sees a thin line tied around it with a fishing hook stuck inside of his gauntlet. Following the line with his eyes, they are led to the rod that Fenrir is still holding in his left hand. The spinner is reeling the line in all on its own.

“Keep his hand away from her,” Fenrir tells Rod and gets a single pulse in return.

Alexander takes his original sword out from Nell’s tail and kicks her to the side. All he has to do is cut the line with his free hand and then—

And then Fenrir charges at him and allows the second sword to impale his abdomen in exchange for latching onto Alexander’s neck with his fangs. Most of the teeth in his mouth have been replaced by sharp canines easily capable of tearing through the leather protecting Alexander’s neck.

Alexander’s left hand is trapped underneath Fenrir, holding onto the sword that is impaling him, while his right hand tries to swing his other sword down into the wolf’s back only to be stopped by the fishing rod tightening the line and keeping his hand pulled away.

Fenrir growls and snarls as he sinks his teeth into the flesh of Alexander’s neck. He is still in complete control unlike the previous times where he has gone wild, but he still finds himself driven by feral urges.

Those urges tell him to tear Alexander’s neck out.