Hitting the water after jumping from the ship’s deck hurt, especially considering that she hadn’t done a very good dive, simply throwing herself off the ship. What hurt worse than the slap of the water however, was that the impact forcefully ripped the knife out of her back. In pain, she surfaced slowly, taking a deep breath through her gritted teeth as she looked around. She knew one of the ithrax fell in earlier, but she couldn’t find him. Maybe he had managed to climb back up into his ship? With that thought, she looked up at the ship, forcing her to see a new horrifying development.

  When the gangplank collapsed from fire, it remained burning. The fire had then climbed up the fallen gangplank and onto the ropes, which quickly spread it through The Academy ship as well. The insane and frankly stupid fire thrower had sentenced both ships to a fiery end.

  Realizing both ships were doomed, she looked around in the water, searching for the other half of the gangplank. She didn’t see it and she resigned herself to waiting, treading water. She knew she had poor chances of swimming back to shore and was hoping she could use a piece of the dying ships to stay afloat.

  After a moment’s thought, she abandoned waiting and swam towards The Academy ship. Fortunately, the ships were barely moving, so swimming up to them wasn’t too difficult for her. However, she needed to climb aboard, where she would try to find something to float with. She would then push it overboard, hopefully before everybody else realized what she was doing. Besides, Sylas and Lesin were on that ship. They were likely fighting for their lives and she could help if necessary. That’s assuming she could successfully climb the ship.

  Fortunately for her, there were plenty of protrusions from the ship, most of which she had no idea what they did, enabling her to climb. That didn’t change the fact that most were wet and the shifting of the ocean made it all the more difficult. She only fell back into the ocean a few times. By the time she finally made it on deck, any fighting that had been happening was on pause, everyone more focused on the fire that was consuming the ship. It took several long seconds of frantically looking around the ship to find Sylas and Lesin.

  When she spotted them, Helianna instinctively ran towards them, doing her best to ignore the pain from her own wound. Because they were injured. A horrible horrible cracking erupted from behind her, causing her to duck on instinct and turn around briefly. On the other ship, the masts were falling.

  “Sylas! Are you two alright?!” she yelled, trying to make herself heard over the din around them.

  “Not really!”

  “As long as you’re not dying, we have a bigger problem! I don’t think they’re going to manage the fire! We need a way to get to land!”

  “This ship,” Lesin coughed out. “The runes haven’t been ruined so once the ship reaches a critical point, it should start separating by itself. The pieces will be even more buoyant than normal wood. We can use it.”

  “What? This should shouldn’t have that! It’s not standard practice yet,” Helianna countered. “That’s emerging technology.”

  “Made by The Academy. They’ll have it. Better to get off the ship before they realize it’s unsalvageable. We don’t want them attacking us.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “When I’m not injured. I may need your help right now.”

  “How about you, Sylas?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Alright, let’s get off the ship.”

  A quick look around showed that nobody was paying attention to them, more preoccupied with the fire on the ship. It was becoming increasingly hopeless and she was certain that the crew was going to start accepting that soon. Helping Lesin to the edge, she noticed that Sylas was limping as well. It seemed none of them were getting out of this unscathed.

  “We’re going to have to jump,” Helianna stated as they got to the edge.

  “Let’s go,” Sylas said anxiously, stepping forward without hesitation.

  “Wait a mome-” Lesin’s protests were interrupted as Sylas and Helianna pulled him over the edge as they both jumped. Contact with the water was once again painful for all three of them, their injuries making the impact worse. Then they had to tread water, and with Helianna having the least debilitating injuries, she was forced to take on the brunt of Lesin’s weight thanks to Sylas’ hurting leg.

  “So, are we just treading water till the ship hits critical condition? And what if it doesn’t?” Sylas asked.

  “Yes. We wait. And even if it doesn’t hit critical condition, hopefully we’ll be able to use something to help us float anyways. Now let’s stop talking. We don’t know how long it’ll take and we should waste as little energy as possible,” Lesin explained.

  They went silent, focusing on staying afloat and listening to the hellishly loud soundscape around them. The water was still slapping against the ships, people were yelling, and above all, the collapsing of the passenger ship could already be heard, even from the other side of The Academy ship. They spent several minutes waiting and Helianna’s breaths started to grow heavy. Lesin had tried to help keep them up initially, but now was barely helping due to the pain.

  She wasn’t sure what his injuries were, but keeping them both above the water was quickly exhausting her. If it took too long for the ship to destabilize, she was afraid she’d have to let him go just to keep herself above the water. And if she waited too long to release him and tired herself out, she could end up killing herself as well. As these thoughts wormed through her mind, it finally happened, although not in the way any of them had expected.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  As Helianna had mentioned earlier, the ship was an emerging technology, but it was created by The Academy and in use by their ithrax. Due to the undying nature of ithrax, this often allowed The Academy to become lax in their safety and testing protocols as deaths incurred from poor testing were typically reversible.

  In this case, the threshold for the separation of ship parts was too low. The ice ithrax that had been pushed into the water at the beginning of the fight had managed to climb back on eventually, and was attempting to cool down the ship. Some of the runes at the top of the ship were affected and were partially burned and then warped by the insane cold she tried to suffocate the flames with. This broke the rune that served as a lock, which normally prevented the rest of the runes from receiving more magic beyond the required amount. Despite this phenomena being incredibly rare, it normally came up in testing, but the full effects of contradicting magic entering the runes hadn’t been tested.

  Ice magic flooded into the runes near the top of the ship, followed by fire as the flame ithrax tried to suffuse the fire with his own magic to give him control. When the runes activated shortly after, the portions of the ship tried to separate as normal. However, there was extra ice magic within the runes and the cold drastically reduced the pressure between the sections, pulling them back together with enough momentum to create small pressurized air pockets between the materials. A wonderful recipe for lots of miniature explosions, the fire magic that followed created a cacophony of explosions throughout the ship as it started to separate once more.

  This was followed by the heat of the fire magic, drastically expanding it and coupled with a slight amount of fire, creating a small explosion. This explosion chained, the pressure indicating enough stress to activate the other runes.

  This kicked off a chain reaction that overloaded the other runes, compounding the mistake. The walls and floors of the entire ship blew apart at tremendous speeds. From everybody else’s view, the ship was on fire, but intact, when the ship suddenly burst explosively, wood flying in every direction. Screams resounded for a brief moment as all on deck were caught by the shrapnel. The screams quieted however, as the people either died on landed in the water, creating a brief moment of silence, before screams started to ring out over the ocean.

  The three of them were not far enough to be free from the shrapnel, and a large piece several times the size of a person had hurtled towards them. Helianna and Sylas saw it coming, but due to its speed were barely able to even flinch in time. It slapped against the water a split second before hitting them, reducing its speed slightly. It hardly mattered however, and the force was enough to injure all three of them. Thanks to her body position and small reaction, the initial impact struck Helianna in the shoulder first, while being spread across much of Sylas upper torso. Lesin however, was only saved from death by being slightly lower in the water already. It struck him directly in the head and shoulders, instantly knocking him unconscious and making him even more dead-weight than before.

  Helianna lost her grip on Lesin as all three were shoved underwater by the impact, and it took her a few moments to regain her bearings. The bubbles created by the impact on the water’s surface blocked her sight at first, but she eventually was able to see. Sylas was already back up on the surface and she looked around for Lesin, adrenaline racing through her veins. She saw him a bit lower in the water and swam down to grab him. Pulling him back up to the surface was excruciatingly difficult, especially with the pain lancing through her body even through the adrenaline. She let out a massive gasp as she broke the surface, barely making it in time. After a few moments to breathe, she noticed Sylas swimming over to her.

  “Let’s go! We’ve got something to float on,” Sylas called out.

  Helianna looked around, still a little disoriented from the hit. Sylas grabbed Lesin from and started swimming. He was barely able to generate enough force to move them, but it was enough to guide Helianna into action and to one of the pieces of driftwood floating nearby.They heaved Lesin aboard and then collapsed, the piece easily large enough for all three. Several more could probably even fit on if they came by. Helianna simply lay there on the massive piece of the ship’s hull, panting. Sylas wasn’t done though and immediately started to look around.

  “What are you doing?!” he demanded. “Don’t lay down! There were a lot of people on that ship! We have to save them!”

  “They were our enemies. Let them.”

  “Fucking dammit, Helianna! Why don’t you care?! What are you? Are all Wulvinians this way?! If you’re all like this, then it explains why you people are constantly at war with yourselves. You don’t give a damn about human life! You haven’t this whole fucking time! There are people in the water!” he panted for a few moments, before continuing his tirade.

  “They may be our enemies, but they are not all ithrax. That was a ship. A ship takes crew! They didn’t come here to slaughter our ship. They didn’t even come for us! They were going to leave everyone alone except for him until we got involved. These are people, Helianna! People! Are you really that barbaric?! Do lives mean nothing to you?!”

  By the end, he had flipped over on his stomach and was holding himself up with his hands, already unconsciously aware that standing would likely make him fall off their flimsy platform. His body heaved with breaths as he partially lay, eyes burning as he glared at Helianna.

  “We care for our own,” Helianna quietly stated. She didn’t know what else to say. She accomplished what she needed to, collateral damage be damned. She didn’t know how to make him understand, so she remained silent. When she didn’t explain any further, Sylas scoffed.

  “I’m going to help someone. You can keep your psychopathic self here.”

  Helianna didn’t move, simply laying on the boat and staring up into the sky as she thought. Sylas slid back into the water, the raft shifting slightly. It wasn’t night yet, the sun still beating down on them and Helianna closed her eyes, feeling the warmth. It wasn’t a comfortable warmth, her skin was already burnt from earlier and she knew it would get worse. Her adrenaline started fading and her injuries made themselves clear. She had been stabbed in the back and now she could tell that she had broken her shoulder.

  She groaned, the quiet sound adding to the horrifying cacophony of people screaming and the crashing of the passenger ship slowly sinking. She didn’t even know what caused it to start sinking aside from fire. Thanks to the screaming, she couldn’t hear Sylas as he splashed around, struggling to find someone he could save. After several minutes, she slowly sat up, pushing through the pain. She took off her shirt, immediately seeing the blood soaking the bottom portion of it. Knowing it would hurt, she braced herself and pushed the shirt into her back, trying to stop the bleeding, which had already slowed slightly. She grit her teeth through the pain, but knew the pressure wasn’t much thanks to the angle and her shoulder. She slowly lay down, purposely putting as much of her body weight on the shirt pressed into her wound, hoping her body weight could apply more pressure than she could.

  She lay there, panting through the pain as her thoughts whirled. Sylas’ words repeated in her head. Regardless of his prejudice, she knew he was right. She didn’t care about people’s lives. She probably couldn’t help anyone at this point, but even if she could, she wouldn’t. The likelihood of them hampering her survival was too high. She knew it was self-centered and her thoughts would likely bring scorn from those who considered themselves good, but she was pragmatic. It would keep her alive. And if she could stay alive long enough to evade The Academy, maybe even help push back against them, it would be worth it.

  At that moment, she resolved herself. No matter the cost, she wouldn’t just survive. She would fight. A few lives lost in the present would be worth it, as long as people could get out from the suppression of The Academy. If she had to become a villain to allow progress to happen once more, she would be.