Combat had started before Kana even made it over the rail. He had a brief moment of introspection about the convenience of not actually having to carry his weapon while going up a rope ladder that flopped around, but having it instantly in hand when he needed it. And he did need it within seconds of putting his feet on the deck.

Spiral was already fighting two marauders and he’d obviously made some kind of mistake because he was missing half of his HP. Kana rushed in to help, but before he got there, Valit fired off a frost beam. The slowing effect didn’t seem to be hampering them as much as it had on the other monsters he’d seen affected by it, but it was enough to give him an opening.

Kana unloaded a full combo onto the closest marauder. Between his attacks and a second frost beam from Valit, it went down in seconds. Before they could take out the second one, another two appeared on deck. They ran in to attack, but Spiral was in no condition to pick them up. One slipped past him completely to get in Valit’s face, and the other swung wide to flank Kana.

Keeping it at the edge of his radius was impossible in the cramped quarters of the desk. He was forced all the way to the back of the far rail, and then nearly lost his spear into the water before he managed to slide around the pig-faced monster.

There was no getting away from it though. It was inside his range and refused to give him the space he needed to fight. Spiral was still pinned down, and Kana didn’t even see Valit anymore. Best case, she’d gone back over the side. Worst case, she had a long walk back from the resurrection shrine. They’d barely been fighting for thirty seconds and the whole thing had gone belly up.

“Maybe we should retreat,” he called out. He managed to drive the marauder back with a one-two kick using both feet and a leap. That gave him a split second to spin his spear through a melee swing and chain it to clipping sweep. The marauder went down and Kana pivoted in place to lunge forward and strike the orcen fighting Spiral with arc lance. With Spiral holding its attention and locking it in place, it was much easier to carve it up.

Between the two of them, they managed to finish both of the marauders still on deck. The XP window popped up, telling him he’d gained another 40 XP and 28 drol, so he knew the fight was over for the moment. Valit and the orcen that had charged her were nowhere to be seen, but it wasn’t hard to find them. Kana poked his head over the rails to find her in the rowboat, soaking wet and huffing. The orcen was floating face-down in the water, covered in frost.

Her HP bar was a bare sliver of red, but she was still alive. With a grimace, she made her way back up the ladder. “Not that I’m complaining,” she said, “but that was not two marauders.”

“Yeah, that’s what worries me,” Spiral said. “If there’s really eight more below decks, I’m not even sure how they all fit down there. We’re going to get swarmed.”

“Two on top and four below was what I was fighting by myself,” Valit added. “I beat the ones on top by shooting them with frost beams from the row boat, but once I got into the cargo hold, there just wasn’t enough room. I could only get one of them before the other three ganged up on me. There’s no way there could be even more down there.”

“But if the pattern holds, the game should spawn twice as many,” Kana said. “Maybe we can use that to our advantage. Can we get them to come at us in a doorway where they can’t all get to us, but we can attack around Spiral while he holds the door.”

“I’m not sure how the game handles that, but it’s worth a try. I don’t think you’ll be able to do much beyond basic attacks, but if it works, we can drop the marauders one at a time until there are none left.”

Considering Spiral’s HP was deep in the yellow and Valit was red, neither of them were in good shape to keep fighting. They decided to take a few more minutes to recover, but they couldn’t wait for too long or else the marauders on deck would respawn on top of them. For the moment, they ducked into the captain’s cabin to rest.

“Oh, hey, look,” Valit said. “There’s a treasure chest over there.”

“Might be trapped. There was a poison dart thrower on the deck I stumbled into as soon as I got up there,” Spiral told her.

But Valit wasn’t listening. She’d already crossed the room and opened the lid. A loot window popped up in front of her. She tapped a button on it, and Kana saw a notification that he’d received 50 drol. “Hmm. There’s a dagger that boosts agility and reduces the recharge time of a skill called blackout. I’m thinking it’s for the assassin class.”

“Anything else?” Kana asked.

“Bracers that… hmm. I’m not sure I understand what this means. It says it grants flashburn to ice based spells.”

“I think that’s a sorcerer skill that twists the elemental properties of spells. In addition to the slowing effect of your frost beam, you could scorch an enemy with it as well.”

“You think so? That’s so cool!”

Valit fiddled with her radial menu for a second, and a pair of red cloth wristbands appeared on her. They had alternating patterns stitched in of an open flame and a snowflake. If Kana was being honest, he thought they looked ugly. He didn’t have to wear them though, and Valit seemed to like them.

“Ok,” Spiral said. “I’m up to 90%. Let’s get going.”

Valit was only about half way recovered, but as she wasn’t going to be the one taking the hits, they opted to risk that over chancing having more marauders respawn on top of them. Spiral exited the cabin first and made his way across the deck to the hatch leading down. Rather than climb down the ladder, he jumped feet first into the hole. Kana followed closely, so close that he almost landed on Spiral.

“Hey, watch it.”

“Sorry.”

Valit took the ladder. She rolled her eyes when she got to the bottom. “Boys,” she muttered.

“What’s the point if you’re not having fun?” Spiral asked her.

She just rolled her eyes again.

“It’s weird. Shouldn’t there be marauders here?” Spiral said, looking around.

“From what I read, one of them patrols this area and the other three are in the cargo hold. Common strategy is to blitz the patroller down so it can’t call for reinforcements, but if you can’t muster that kind of burst, you wait until its at the far end of its route and try to take the ones in the hold before it comes back.”

“Which strategy did you go with?” Kana asked.

“Tried both. Couldn’t kill the patroller fast enough to keep it from alerting the other ones. Couldn’t take three at once. I stopped for a bit to grind levels thinking I could increase my damage output enough to knock out the patroller at least. No luck with that either.”

“I wonder where the patrolling marauder is. With three of us, we should be able to overpower it quickly enough.”

“Unless there’s two on the patrol,” Kana pointed out.

“Right, that. Unless there’s- oh shit, there’s two!”

A pair of marauders rounded a corner and stopped. One of them let out a hoarse bellow and charged the group, while the other turned on its heel and disappeared. Spiral leaped forward to meet it half way and promptly put his shield in its piggy face. “Boom, stunned,” he crowed.

Valit got off the next attack, only instead of the blue beam Kana had gotten used to, it glowed white and was ragged. Little licks of light danced around it and when it struck the stunned marauder, the monster’s ragged tunic burst into flames. Its HP bar lost a chunk from the initial hit, then started slowing draining from the fire damage.

“Oooooooh. That is so cool,” she said.

Kana had to admit it. “It kind of is.” The bracers were still ugly though.

The marauder came out of Spiral’s stun and hacked its sword down. Spiral tried to deflect its attack, but it pushed his shield aside and then leaned in to slam its porcine head into his face. The knight staggered back, now affected by a stun debuff of his own.

Before the marauder could follow up, Kana got between them. He had limited room to fight, but he managed to force the marauder back with a few short thrusts and a well-placed kick. A second flashburn-infused frost beam struck it, and Kana used the opening to start a chain of attacks.

The marauder dropped, its HP bar depleted, but no XP notification popped up. That meant they were still considered to be in combat with the second marauder, and probably that it was following its AI script to alert its companions in the cargo hold. Spiral started to chase after it, but Kana said, “Wait. Let’s hold out here. This isn’t wide enough for them to come in more than two at a time. I’ll fight next to you and Valit can be ranged offense.”

“You sure? Dragoons aren’t really suited for close range fighting.”

“I’m planning on holding a defense position. It’s mostly a stalling tactic to keep them from overwhelming us with numbers while we whittle them down.”

There wasn’t any more time to discuss tactics after that. The sound of the marauders approaching was followed almost immediately by the pig-faced monsters turning the corner. As they’d predicted, there were seven of them left, but Kana’s guess about using the narrow passage as a choke point was more or less accurate.

If they’d been able to find something narrow enough that only one of them could get at them, that would have been better. As it was, he fought defensively to avoid attacks or deflect them, and made basically no effort to counter. With all of his energy focused on that, he did alright keeping his HP up, though it was still draining faster than Spiral’s.

Valit supported him with flashburn beams that kept the marauder moving marginally slower, but they could all tell it was a losing battle. They were forcing a stalemate and would probably kill three or four of the marauders, but eventually they’d be worn down to nothing and killed. They needed to increase their damage output without sacrificing defense if they were going to win the fight.

Kana wasn’t the only one to figure it out, but unlike him, it looked like Valit had a solution. She used that spell he’d seen her cast before that struck enemies with glistening shards of ice. Combined with the flashburn skill her new bracers gave her, it rained down a veritable firestorm. The two in front of Kana and Spiral went down for the count, and the damage splashed onto three more of them, causing each to lose over a third of their health.

“Holy shit,” Spiral said. He shot a look at Kana. “Er, I mean… holy… shoot?”

“I’m not your mother. I don’t care if you swear.”

“Right, yeah. I knew that. Soooo… what’s the recharge time on that?”

Valit fired off another flashburn beam. “Thirty seconds.”

“We can hold for thirty seconds,” Spiral said.

By the time she got off another firestorm of ice shards, Kana’s HP was in the red. The spell killed off another two of the marauders and left the rest injured, but Kana still wasn’t sure he was going to outlast the remaining three. Two of them were also in the red, but the last one was just barely into the yellow.

“Back up,” Spiral told him. “I got this.”

Kana retreated, leaving Spiral to hold the center. The knight worked double time to keep both of the orcen marauders in front of him from getting past, a feat that his stamina reserves would probably only support for a minute at most. It was enough to let Kana and Valit finish off the two near-dead marauders and let the three of them gang up on the last one still standing.

The resulting 80 XP was enough to push Kana up to level 5, which came with a significant HP boost and unlocked his first skill choice. There were only three choices at the moment: vigor, which reduced the recharge time of his abilities, shock lance, which allowed arc lance’s electrical damage to hit three targets instead of two, and bladed boots, which passively increased the damage of his kick attacks.

All three sounded viable, but when he considered that he was planning to continue playing with Spiral, and that having a larger group seemed to cause the game to spawn extra enemies to throw at them, shock lance seemed like the obvious choice. Spiral made his own choice while Kana reviewed his options, and then all three of them moved into the cargo hold together.

From there, it was as easy as looting the quest item, which was a metal toolbox containing all the NPC’s missing tools. They picked it up, then took some time to poke around the cargo hold for other valuables. All said and done, they found four chests.

The first one had nothing but drol, which they split three ways. The second contained an earring that increased casting speed by 1%, which went to Valit. The third had a berserker’s heavy sword in it, with no special qualities that any of them could see. All in all, it wasn’t a very exciting haul.

Kana was doing one last sweep when he spotted the fourth chest. The others were already out of the hold and climbing back up the ladder when he opened it. There was the standard token amount of drol, but then…

“Uh, guys. I think I found something unusual.”

“What?” Spiral asked.

Kana made his way out of the hold to stand before the other two and held up his find. It was a spear, but unlike the plain wooden shaft with a leaf-bladed metal head he was currently using, this one was made of dark, glimmering metal. It had some sort of misty ribbon hanging just below the head that twined itself around the haft, and the business end swirled with colors like thunderclouds overhead. Every now and then, little blue arcs of electricity flickered around it.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Spiral said, his mouth hanging open as he stared. “You are the luckiest son of a bitch I have ever seen.”

“Unbelievable,” Valit added. “I hate you.”

“So… what is a Nibelus, and why does it say ‘the Stormbringer’ in its description?”