I woke up alone the next morning, but the smells coming out of the galley told me precisely where Mable had gone. I was itching to rank up my Shapes, but I also knew that once I Unshaped the Sailor, I’d have a relatively short window of opportunity in which to use the vim before everything over my capacity either started to dissipate or Warp me, which meant that It would be far better to wait until we were after breakfast and underway before I started anything.

We still had some time before the porridge Mable was making would be ready, which let me set the Ship back on course to the dwarven mountains. The sky around us was eerily silent. The Blast Beetles had cleared out just about every living being within at least a day’s sailing, and with their droning wings gone, nothing remained to make even the slightest of sounds.

Things started to feel a little more normal once I had the Deckhands hoist the sails, and the flapping sound of the canvas catching the wind filled the silent air. I had enough time to find a favorable wind and set the new course before I had the Sailor take over the wheel when Mable called us all to breakfast.

Breakfast was considerably less strained than any meal we’d had on the Swift since the ruins of Gerald’s Rest. Doreen was finally finding her place on board and in her new body, and Mable was slowly coming to terms with losing her place in the world, and it showed in both of their outlooks.

“So what can we expect on the rest of the way?” Doreen asked towards the end of the meal.

“No idea, really.” Marjory shrugged. “This area doesn’t exactly make for comfortable travel, even without accounting for the blasted bugs. The road between my home and yours goes around this place, where you can actually find water and game on the way. Not everyone has a flying ship that can carry enough supplies to last the whole trip.”

“We can probably expect fairly big Warped though,” I added. This is for enough away from both of our kingdoms that people rarely pass here, so there isn’t much to cull them like there is near our border.

“Yeah, you don’t get much traffic between the kingdoms,” Marjory agreed. “Too far away and too dangerous for anyone other than the really large caravans.”

“And some crazy dwarven would be mercenaries, right?” I couldn’t resist adding, to Marjory’s exaggerated indignant huff. “Either way, if we want to be ready for whatever else is out there, I need to go do some Shaping. I’ll need about an hour to get everything done, so you’re on wheel duty, Doreen. We shouldn’t run into anything for at least a day, since the beetles kept everything away, but I still want Marjory on cannon duty, and we won’t actually have a Sailor for a while.”

“Aye aye, captain!” The dragon girl laughingly saluted, and headed off to take her station.

We’d left the whitesteel door and the new Pattern on deck after Mable’s little breakdown the previous evening, and I sent my Deckhands to take the former down to the hold, and brought the latter with me to my cabin. I hung it next to the Deckhand Pattern on the cabinet, and braced myself for what I knew was coming.

When I was Unshaping tier I Shapes, holding twice as much vim as my body could handle safely was painful. Unshaping the Sailor and holding ten times as much was excruciating. It felt like every single nerve ending I had was on fire, and I half expected to see my skin burning up from the heat, even though I knew the pain was just an overload of vim, and that it would take hours for it to do any real damage. Nevertheless, I wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible. Sending vim to existing Shapes was faster than using a Pattern, so I started by sending it along the connections to my three Archers, and starting their rank up. Next came the two Deckhands I was ranking up. By then, I was down to just double my capacity, which meant a far more manageable pain.

I decided to make two new Deckhands, which would get me back to a full complement of four, plus my two Sailors, and then turned to the new Pattern. Left with twenty vim, I turned to the new Pattern. It was the same size as most of the Patterns I’d seen, and I’d estimated that it’d take ten vim to activate. In fact, the only one I’d ever seen which was larger was the Ship Pattern, though I’d heard that the Ogre and Elephant Patterns were also bigger and required more vim.

My estimation proved to be correct, and I poured the required vim into the pattern. The fog cloud that came from the Pattern was much smaller than usual, about the size of my palm, but it took as much time to form as the Deckhands, and at the end of ten minutes I was left with a black beetle the size of my palm. It was, as I’d expected, the same Blast Beetle as the ones that assaulted us before, and now that I could actually look at a resting one, I could see that it was virtually indistinguishable from a large stag beetle.

Another Blast Beetle took the rest of my vim, and I came out of my cabin to see that nothing had changed in the time I was Shaping.I was pretty wrung out from the vim overload, and decided to invoke my privileges as captain to take a few hours of rest while the girls ran the Swift, but I wanted to test out my new Shapes first.

I had the Hawks locate a large boulder, and sent the Beetle to attack it. The large bug droned its way to the target, and blew apart as soon as it made contact with the rock, leaving behind a crater with a ten centimeter diameter. I’d already been impressed with the Beetles’ ability to take out a tier II Shape in one hit, and seeing its effect on a hard target made them even more appealing. We’d been struggling when fighting armored opponents before, and I was very glad to finally have a counter to them. I was also very pleasantly surprised five minutes later when the Beetle reformed a lot sooner than I’d expected.

Overall, I was very happy with the new Pattern, and would be reluctant to sell it and split the profits with my crew. I’d definitely want to Shape some more of them before that happened, if I could get the vim for it. Especially since I had a feeling they’ll rank up into the Needle Beetles at tier II, and I wasn’t sure those would actually be an improvement. Of course, they’d be a necessary step on the way to that monstrosity we fought to get the Pattern, and if that thing made Blast Beetles as Ephemera, it would be more than worth the investment.

***

As we’d expected, the first couple of days after leaving the beetle cave were peaceful, with nothing living in sight. The volcanically bare ground started to change during the second day, and by the afternoon we were flying over grass so tall it probably hadn’t seen a grazing animal in hundreds of years. Towards evening, we landed near a small river to fill up our water barrels and see if we could find any game to hunt, but we must have still been within the beetles’ former exclusion zone, and nothing showed up to take advantage of the convenient water and abundant grass.

The next day finally got us far enough from the cave that life started to get back to normal. The birds appeared first, sparrows, crows and even the occasional hawk. I brought the Swift lower to the ground to see if you could find anything worth hunting, for either vim or food, but nothing large enough to be worth landing presented itself, though I did manage to send out the Hawks to catch a couple of rabbits for Mable to prepare for dinner.

The grasslands below us were almost entirely featureless, making any change to them extremely easy to spot, and somewhere around noon Marjory spotted a large gray hill in the distance. As we got closer, we noticed that the hill didn’t seem to be completely solid, but instead seemed to be made of some sort of quivering, black and white striped overgrowth.

The quivering increased the closer we got, and before long the hill seemed to inflate as a lout chittering sounds started to reach us. I sent the Hawks to get a closer look at it, and barely had the time to shout at Marjory to duck before a veritable storm of black and white striped spears covered the sky.

Loud thunk! sounds indicated numerous hits on the Swift’s hull, and large holes appeared in her sails, but luckily no one was hit. As soon as the attack was over, I took the Ship up high, hopefully out of range of any further attacks.

“What in the Shattering was that?” Marjory gasped.

“Giant porcupine. And apparently one that can launch its quills when it gets angry.”

The dwarf’s eyes lighted up in excitement. “So that’s a fun fight, lots of vim for you and dinner in one!”

“Assuming we want to fight it,” I answered. “One of those quills would be more than enough to kill any one of us if it hits.”

“I thought that this is what you did for a living, Shaper.”

“It is, but I can still be careful and not get in fights that are too big for me. And I do have crew members I need to think off. This isn’t something Mable can just stay out of, for example.”

The two of us went down to the galley to find Mable and Doreen, and I brought up the question of fighting the giant Warped.

“We need to kill it,” Doreen stated immediately. “The beetles are probably the only thing that kept it from moving towards the kingdom, and now that they’re gone there’s nothing in its way.”

“I… I don’t think I should have a say in it,” Mable said. “I’ll just be hiding in here while you’re out there risking getting hit anyway.”

“I’m going to need you out on the deck for this,” I told the purser gently. “We’re going to need that lightning staff, and you’re the only one who can use it.”

“I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not an adventurer like the three of you.”

“You can do it Mable,” Doreen encouraged her. “It would just take a couple of minutes. You’ll use the staff until you’ve exhausted your vim, and then you can go back to the galley.”

It took some more assurances, but in the end Mable agreed to use the lightning staff, and with a unanimous agreement from my crew, I decided to go ahead with the attack.

Having prepared as much as possible, I took the Swift down to within range of the giant rodent, and all of us immediately went on the attack.

The Longbowmen fired arrow after arrow at the large animal, every single one of them hitting the huge target. Marjory’s steam cannon and the Swift’s arbalest, which was manned by the Marine, were much slower to fire, but the porcupine’s squeals whenever one hit told us that they were having a far bigger impact.

The Blast Beetles were even better, each one smashing into the Warped and leaving large, bleeding wounds behind them. Unfortunately, I’d have to wait for them to reform before they could be used again.

Mable looked scared, yet defiant, standing right outside the entrance to the galley. It took a while to channel her vim into the staff, and the more she poured into the artifact, the higher the hair stood on her head. I could see her wincing at the feeling of all that static electricity, but she held the staff steady and pointed at the porcupine.

I didn’t dare look at her for long, since I had no idea how much time the staff would take to charge, and the last thing I wanted was to look directly at the bolt. Besides, I had to navigate the Swift and evade the barrages of quills I knew had to be coming.

I had enough warning from the Hawks that the Warped was raising its tail that I could take the Ship up and avoid most of the first attack. I still heard the sound of quills thunking into the hull, but none of them hit high enough to threaten us.

Mable’s lightning bolt retaliated soon after, and even looking away from her, the flash of light was enough to temporarily blind me, even as the clash of thunder made hearing anything at all impossible. But when my sight cleared up enough, I could see a large scorch mark on the Warped’s flank, evidence that the potent attack hit its mark.

A second quill barrage hit the Swift while I was stunned by the lightning, and this time the needles managed to take out a couple of Deckhands and one of the Longbowmen. Even worse, Marjory’s savage swearing informed me that one of the quills had pierced her cannon’s steam tank. The spray of steam didn’t actually hurt the fire aligned dwarf, but the cannon was going to be out of commission for the rest of the fight.

“Take my arquebus!” I yelled. “We don’t have a lot of ammunition left for it, but this looks like the kind of fight where we should be using it!”

The dwarf grunted and rushed towards my cabin to retrieve the weapon, and I turned back to the battle in time to send the reformed Beetles on another attack. The porcupine was bleeding rather heavily from numerous small wounds and four larger ones, and looked a little worst to wear, but it obviously still had a lot of fight to it, and I moved the Swift again just in time to avoid most of another quill storm.

The loud booming sound of the arquebus joined the twanging of arrows and the deeper sound of the arbalest, and I could hear the electrical hum that told me Mable was charging her second, and last, lightning bolt.

This time, I closed my eyes when I judged the staff to be fully charged, hoping to avoid being blinded by the flash. Thunder deafened me yet again, and I opened my eyes as soon as the attack was over, only to see the porcupine rushing towards us. I immediately tried to bring the Swift above the attack, but the huge animal still managed to slam its tail at her hull.

The attack was strong enough to send the Swift flying away from the porcupine, and I could hear a loud crushing sound as her keel snapped in two. Almost in a panic, I managed to bring the Ship down to ground level mere seconds before the overwhelming damage caused her to dissipate into a cloud of vim.