Chapter 22: The Drifting Battlefield

When I jumped onto the warship’s deck, the battle was already fiercely underway. Fred charged ahead at the front, swinging his war blade “Ink Shadow,” closely followed by Carlson and Red Flame, who had appeared from who knows where. The moment he set foot on the battlefield, Carlson dropped his usual half-asleep, dead-pig look and instantly transformed into a demon god crawling out of a hellish furnace, continuously reaping the fragile lives of his opponents.

“Everyone listen up, the retreat order is canceled. If any of you die, you’ll run laps in hell!” Carlson cut down a soldier with one swing of his sword and shouted back at us, not forgetting to use his favorite tactic to intimidate us.

“Yes, sir!” we answered loudly.

Dakla had grabbed a two-handed greatsword from somewhere and was swinging it with fierce, whistling force, leading several of the toughest sailors straight into the densest cluster of enemies at the bow, just like a pack of wolves descending on a flock of sheep. A dozen or so soldiers desperately and feebly tried to block his reckless swings. These soldiers had originally been crowded on the left side of the deck, fighting for position to board the Golden Rose, but our sudden attack had completely thrown them into disarray. Some of them were taken down before they could even draw their swords.

Right beside Dakla was his bickering friend Riley, who was holding a standard-issue short sword, guarding his friend’s flanks and back. Dakla’s fighting style meant that he left many openings in battle, especially when outnumbered, where he simply couldn’t cover every angle. But Riley’s defense was like a suit of armor on him, always appearing at the most dangerous spots to block lethal attacks for him. Riley and Dakla were usually a pair of feuding rivals who loved to trade barbs with each other for fun. But when faced with danger, their coordination was astonishingly in sync. After Carlson’s long-term training—especially the almost inhuman abuse they endured after escaping from Dragon Ridge Gorge—they had each grown considerably and become agile and outstanding warriors.

Under the attacks of Dakla and Riley, nearly fifty Winstons were pinned down on the left side of the foredeck. This was the most threatening group of enemies on the foredeck, but due to the terrain constraints, they were instead blocked by sailors and new recruits who were far fewer in number than they were.

Rodrick, following Fred’s orders, led his men charging toward the forward cabin door. Directly facing the door was a long, narrow passage where it was hard for two people to walk side by side. On both sides of the passage were mountains of piled ropes, barrels, and hatches leading to the cargo hold. In this position, no matter how many people there were, it was hard to make them effective, because the width of the passage only allowed one-on-one combat between two people. Rodrick charged at the very front. The family training of an officer’s household made him far more capable in combat than an ordinary soldier. He met head-on a Winston soldier who burst out of the forward cabin door, forcing him to steadily retreat with a series of continuous thrusts. This soldier blocked the way for the others behind him, and although those behind him cursed anxiously, they could only retreat back into the cabin with him.

Finally, the lead soldier couldn’t hold back any longer and counterattacked, recklessly slashing a sword at Rodrick, only to have a short sword thrust suddenly from behind a nearby mast pierce his throat. He looked to the side in disbelief, and saw Roll’s eyes, slightly panicked yet tinged with a hint of malice. Then he toppled backward, possibly never even realizing when this slightly shy young soldier had slipped to the side and delivered that fatal strike.

By the time Rodrick was holding the cabin door from the front, Roll had already led several veteran sailors around to the side ropes, securing part of the area on both sides of the forward cabin door. Unlike their opponents, who were experiencing naval combat for the first time, the sailors who lived on ships year after year moved nimbly among the ropes and hatches, as if walking through their own homes, launching sinister and deadly attacks from positions their opponents never expected. After his successful strike, Roll signaled Rodrick to fall back a bit. The Winston soldiers, who had been cooped up in the cabin for a long time, hadn’t seen at all how their first man had died. Seeing an opening appear up front, they scrambled to charge at the retreating Rodrick. They had only run a few steps when they suddenly heard a whistle, and from behind the masts and sails on both sides, lethal blades thrust out, taking their lives, spraying streaks of blood onto the once-pristine white sails.

The forward cabin door was sealed off. The Winstons, lacking experience in naval combat, could only enter and exit through the side and stern cabin doors, pushing their way toward the foredeck. The narrow gunwale was packed with gleaming armor, which in turn blocked their own people’s path. Carlson and Fred each led their men to timely block the passages on both sides of the gunwale. The ferocious enemies before them seemed like novices who had just learned to hold a sword, and very few could hold their ground against them for more than two exchanges. Our officer Carlson continuously roared and cursed, his face ferocious and terrifying, indulging in the pleasure of slaughter amid the blood splattering everywhere. There were no tricky maneuvers, no tactics to lure the enemy deeper—he seemed to fight purely on his own brute strength and instinct. Almost every swing of his sword claimed an enemy’s life. On this narrow gunwale, he single-handedly accomplished the task of intercepting Winston reinforcements heading for the foredeck, even pushing the large mass of charging enemies backward. The sailors behind him had almost nothing to do. Quite a few had already turned around to join battles elsewhere.

On the other side, Fred was fighting in a completely different manner. His cheeks were stained with a few smears of crimson blood, yet his expression was eerily calm, as if what came at him weren’t living opponents, but piles of already-rotting flesh. He showed not a trace of hesitation or delay when swinging his blade. For him, the brutal battle had already been simplified into a process of dodging, striking, killing, and withdrawing the blade—simple and effective, carrying a hint of bloody eeriness. In fact, he wasn’t putting much effort into the frontal combat at all. Instead, he was closely watching how the overall situation was shifting, occasionally shouting orders for us and the soldiers to strike at weakly defended positions, creating even more chaos for the Winstons.

Our sudden attack stunned the Winstons. Originally, even the combined number of us and the pirates was less than half of the Winston soldiers on the warship. But when they had moved to intercept the Golden Rose, they had completely thrown their own formation into chaos, and we had established our local advantages right from the start, squeezing the enemy’s superior numbers into the aft deck and the cabins, leaving them unable to mount an effective counterattack, allowing us to smoothly take control of the foredeck. But nothing was set in stone yet. This sudden naval battle still had a major unpredictable variable—the nearly one hundred Winston soldiers who had already boarded the Golden Rose.

After a valiant resistance, the pirates were probably down to only thirty or forty people, and all of them were covered in wounds. They would likely be wiped out before long. Seeing that their warship was under attack, the Winston soldiers on the Golden Rose had already begun to turn back to help. Although we had now completely controlled the foredeck, once this group of soldiers—nearly twice our number—launched a counterattack, we would be unable to hold.

The pirates had clearly also noticed this. Among them, a young woman shouted orders: “Fall back to the cabin door! Defense formation! Wait for rescue!” She wore a tight-fitting sailor’s outfit and held a slender rapier, moving back and forth across the rocking deck, helping her comrades break free from the Winston soldiers’ encirclement, occasionally viciously running an enemy through. Her head was wrapped in a pink scarf that gleamed in the sunlight, radiating a tenderness utterly out of place amid the bloody scene. Thanks to her efforts, the pirates who had been scattered across the deck gradually gathered in front of the cabin door, forming a semicircular defensive circle. Behind them, dozens of small faces peered through the gaps in the cabin door’s railing—they were all children. The children stared in terror at the slaughter on the deck, letting out frightened screams from time to time.

“A beauty! Jeff, do you see that? The pirate leader is actually a beauty!” Red Flame beside me immediately perked up, his eyes shining, hacking away at the enemy with even more effort, and in no time, many mutilated corpses piled up at our feet.

“Red Flame, Jeff, take ten people onto the Golden Rose and hold them off! You must hold them off!” Fred hacked off an enemy’s head with one swing and turned to shout.

Without waiting for Fred to say more, Red Flame shouted loudly: “Good lads, follow me!” He turned, cut down a sail rope, grabbed half of it, and swung himself over to the Golden Rose. At the highest point of the swing, he let go, did a backward flip, and landed on the deck with exceptional flair. He then grabbed his blade, twirled it, let out a long shout, and announced a title that left people dizzy: “I am the legendary Ranger with a fiery passion and boldness, the fabled champion of justice, the steadfast defender of life and freedom, the handsome and brave Elf Red Flame! I have come to rescue the beautiful lady in distress. You coarse and vulgar lowly beings had better lay down your weapons. I will permit you to leave safely. Otherwise…”

Before Red Flame could finish, a group of Winston soldiers had already swung their swords at him, cutting off his grand and foolish entrance, making him shout in fury: “You lot have no warrior spirit or sense of honor! Don’t you know that interrupting someone is rude? I can responsibly tell you that those who disturb my pursuit of a pretty miss always end up miserably.”

His words and actions reminded me of some self-important, unscrupulous Mage, and a wave of helplessness rose in my heart. It even made me feel a hint of embarrassment facing the opponents I was about to fight for my life. Under these circumstances, I’d better pretend not to know him and just keep fighting on my own, because otherwise, even if the enemy didn’t cut me down, I’d die of shame.

To be honest, on a ship, the Winstons were not the invincible iron cavalry they were on land. Their knightly longswords, far longer and heavier than ordinary blades, were indeed deadly weapons in cavalry and infantry combat, but on a cluttered, narrow, and crowded ship, they were hard-pressed to display their full power. Especially since they had no concept of naval combat whatsoever, still adhering to the traditions of land warfare and charging onto the deck in a swarm without hesitation, without considering the limited space on the ship. As a result, they repeatedly blocked, hindered, and even accidentally wounded one another. They also didn’t dare to swing their blades with full force when attacking, afraid that they might accidentally hit their own allies. In most cases, they could only thrust aimlessly, unable to bring out even half of their weapon’s full potential. And when facing our attacks, they found it hard to dodge because of the crowding. Even more fortunately for us, they refused to give up the honor and dignity of being cavalry, and actually all wore heavy full-body knight armor, which greatly reduced their speed in both attack and defense. In front of the lightly equipped, nimble bandits and sailors, they were practically like slow-moving logs. This made it easy to understand why the pirates, numbering fewer than fifty, could still barely hold on for so long against an attack with such a huge numerical disparity.

I was no longer that battlefield rookie who had been driven to break down and go mad by death, blood, and fear. My long time spent with Fred had, without my realizing it, broadened my knowledge and thinking far beyond what an ordinary soldier—who only knew how to follow orders to advance and retreat—should have possessed. Facing many tall and strong opponents, I already knew how to analyze calmly, how to feint and lure the enemy, how to retreat in a planned manner, and how to deliver a fatal blow at the right moment and then withdraw safely. The results of Carlson’s brutal training showed in me: my movements were swifter and more agile than any opponent before me, so much so that I could face the attacks of three or four enemies at once, evading freely and counterattacking from time to time. The cluttered, chaotic deck and my small stature were my most advantageous weapons, giving me a more favorable position than my opponents. In a short span of time, I had already pulled my short sword from an enemy’s chest for the fifth time.

Yes—no nausea, no panic, no unease. I had already killed five people. It was only my third time on the battlefield, yet I had already adapted to this life of either killing or being killed. Perhaps this was simply the fate that a soldier in these chaotic times deserved.

The situation on the warship had become even clearer. Fred and his men, having seized advantageous positions, had completely suppressed the Winstons to the rear half of the warship, preventing their numerical advantage from being fully brought into play. More sailors jumped onto the Golden Rose to support us. The battle had entered its most critical stage.