Stormy Overhead

Rain battered Haruki as he flew the Kenichi Modern through the storm, winds blowing against him—but not as strong as he thought it would.

Water blurred his sight, his goggles a wet, foggy mess from the incoming torrents of rain. His lips shivered from the icy cold of wind and water alike. Below him, waves crashed against each other, the sounds of it drowning out the roar of the plane’s engine.

He felt insecure—unsafe. Normally the wind would be his friend right now, but fact was, the wind wasn’t on his side. Anemone wasn’t sitting behind him.

Another did.

“Your machine’s almost pure magic,” Flare said from the co-pilot seat. “I’d say that fer sure, but I understand the science behind it. Somewhat.”

“Do you, now?” Haruki pulled the controls up, compensating for the very slight weight added to the base of the machine. “Then you should’ve known putting these damn floats under the plane would mess up the counterbalance!”

Right after Flare had taken Haruki out of their ship’s brig, he had seen the Kenichi Modern floating behind the boat, only tugged along by a long chain link. Apparently, Flare and her merry men had removed the plane’s traditional, wheeled landing gear and replaced them with a pair of pontoons—”sealegs”, as she called it.

“It’s not that bad, is it? You seem to be doing perfectly fine.”

“It’s a little unresponsive in a few places I’m not used to.”

“But it flies,” she said, then guffawed. “Dwarven engineering at its finest. Our tamed griffons can’t even compare, sadly.”

“Dwarven?” Haruki’s head snapped back.

Flare prodded his cheek with a finger and pushed his head to look back front. “Focus. We’re near.”

“What exactly are we looking for?”

From below, low clouds parted, and an island came to view. It was about the size of a small island village back in Japan, and warm lights glowed from the wooden huts scattered throughout. However, a much larger, red-orange light seemed to blaze further into the heart of the island.

“That.”

“A village island?” Haruki focused his eyes on the giant glow sitting a distance away from what looked to be the village. “And what is that?”

Flare cleared her throat, as if to evade the question. “Okay, Haruki. You’re gonna do as I say, or people are gonna get hurt.”

“You said you won’t—”

“Not the princess,” she said, voice low. “The people in the village.”

Though he had no personal stake in the lives of people he didn’t know and didn’t even share solidarity with, he would prefer not to spill the blood of the innocent.

“What do you mean?”

“On that island, there are good people, and there are bad people. The way they run things, they draw that line very clearly. All the bad people stay in one place, and that’s also where they’re most vulnerable.”

“I see. So?”

“You fly to the points I tell you to, and don’t fly in any other direction I don’t tell you to.”

“Why?”

Flare conjured a ball of fire almost as big as her head. The fire sizzled in the rain, evaporating any drop of water that touched it. “You don’t want me burning good people into ash because you didn’t fly properly, do you?”

“You’re taking them hostage for me?”

“No.” Flare got up from her seat, swaying the plane with her weight. She clambered to the front seat, stepped on the side of the cockpit and climbed onto where the plane’s wings met in the middle. She hung tight and spoke to Haruki while looking between her legs. Her derriere blessed the pilot with an eyeful. “I’m gonna be shooting blind and fast. This whole thing hinges on you following my instructions.”

Haruki refocused on the island and slowly pitched the plane down. “This is crazy. How are you so sure you’re gonna hit your target in the first place?”

“Because I’ve done this before,” she said, adjusting her own goggles. “Just not in the middle of a storm, and not this fast. But all these encampments are built and run the same.”

Shaking away hesitation and skepticism, Haruki swallowed the lump in his throat. “We’re approaching.”

“Got that. First,” Flare’s voice climbed, assuming authority. “See that tower with four light sources? Fly us over that.”

Recalling how he piloted bombers back in the video game Ace Fighting, he slowed the plane to accommodate Flare and flew up and beside the target point.

Flare shouted, and when she did, the fireball in her hand grew thrice its size. She vaulted it over her head and tossed it down onto the four-torched watchtower.

The fireball ignited on impact and covered the tower in a blazing conflagration. Screams sounded from the blaze, and tenfold more outside of it.

“Oh shit!”

“Jackpot!” Flare grinned, her hands gripping onto the plane’s wings again. Her fingers sizzled on the wet surface.

“W-We just killed those p-people!” Haruki couldn’t speak without stuttering.

“No, I did,” Flare insisted. “And let your nerves rest knowing I killed bad people. We’re doing this for justice.”

He couldn’t tell if she was just comforting him with a sweet lie, or she was telling the truth. But for Haruki, there was no denying it—he was becoming an accessory to slaughter. Even if it wasn’t innocent blood being spilled, he was still killing them. What crime were these “bad people” even guilty of to deserve this bombing?

“Next one,” Flare commanded. She directed Haruki towards another set of towers and told him to fly through them in sequence. He complied. Each pass they made, Flare tossed a firebomb at the towers, engulfing them in a deadly blaze.

“Next!” Haruki had all but shaken off nerves. Arrows and magic bolts began flying from the island’s surface. He rolled the plane to evade. Yes, he was accessory to slaughter—

—But now that they’ve gone this far, it was him—or them.

“See that really long row of lights by the hill? That’s an entire manor.”

Haruki focused on the long, connected houses shrouded in stormy mist by the hill. “I see it,” he said, angling the plane horizontally against it.

“Now you’re getting it.” Flare raised two hands, growing a fireball in each.

The KM traced the length of the manor, and Flare threw down one firebomb after another. Boom, boom, boom. Explosion after explosion. Screams echoed from within, the “bad people” incinerated.

More arrows and bolts followed the plane’s path, inching closer to their mark the longer this entire bombing took. These defenders seemed more competent—and less understaffed than the fortress at Ka’Ilyah.

“We’re really taking fire here,” Haruki shouted. “Next target now, please!”

“We just have one more,” Flare said with firm conviction. She pointed towards the unthinkable large glow at the heart of the island, on top of the tallest hill. “Remember that thing?”

“We’re bombing that too?”

Flare laughed. “Especially that,” she said. “Think you can dive towards it so I can drop the bombs at top speed?”

“How are you so sure I can pull that off?” Haruki asked, fearing for his safety.

“I don’t. But it’s my style, you see. So you’re gonna have to improvise for me.”

Haruki clicked his tongue. He pulled the plane up, scrambled towards the massive glow, and prepared to dive. “At this point, you better be paying me to do this. Survival just ain’t gonna cut it anymore.”

“You get a cut of the booty.”

It was as he heard: when you flip a coin, that’s the moment you learn what you truly want between two things.

Looking up at Flare clambering on the wing, he didn’t know if he wanted whatever booty they were gonna dredge up from the ruins of this raid. He had no sense of scale on the value of items in this world. But he wouldn’t refuse the “other booty”, if offered.

Flare quipped. “Pervert.”

Oh. She’s on to me. Haruki chuckled once, then pocketed the thought. There was no way that would happen.

The KM dove towards the giant glow. The glow blinked, as if it were the giant eye of a living creature. Haruki pinched himself to see if he was dreaming. The closer they got, the more visible the contents of the mysterious glow became:

It looked to be a deep mine shaft, emptied of people but with downward scaffolding descending for what looked like eternity.

Flare roared as she conjured three fireballs, raised them behind her, and formed what appeared to be a miniature sun the size of the KM itself.

She hurled the fireball into the mine shaft. Right on cue, Haruki pulled the plane upright and raced away from the hole. Flare spilled from the wings and flew backwards, but caught herself into the co-pilot seat.

The island croaked, like a starving beast having just awoken. A groan echoed from the center of the island. Moments later, a pillar of fire shot from the mine shaft, evaporating into smoke as it met rain and cloud. The booming sound of an explosion followed after.

Haruki looked back, catching the last of the firestorm, like watching the wake of a volcanic eruption.

####

When the eye of the storm passed overhead, some Redwing Pirates flew in, axes in hand, riding smaller tamed griffons into the island and seized the remaining armed soldiers within. There were no additional casualties on either side, but the soldiers didn’t stand a fighting chance anyway.

According to Flare, this island was just one of many slave-driven mining facilities run in secret by some unsavory factions from the Federacy of Aquantis.

These mining facilities were used to dig up a rare mineral called Titanseye. An apt name, since these islands were supposedly made of the fragmented corpses of ancient titans eons ago. Titanseye was made from—well, the grey matter of titans—which could have explained the “blinking” earlier. Haruki wasn’t sure if that was illusory, or if the mine shaft blinked for real. Flare didn’t have an answer to that, either.

She said that the Titanseye minerals were used to create weapons and technology capable of combating the Sky Legion. The mining of these had already been underway for a long time now, but the more frequent appearance of the Legion had expedited this process.

After the battle, Flare took Haruki to the now burned down manor alongside some other pirates. The pirates began looting what they could from the ruined structure. Shockingly, many valuables were still intact. It seemed that Flare’s firebombs destroy on impact, but their fires don’t spread over a long period of time.

Flare upturned broken stone and uncovered scratched paintings and open boxes of jewelry.

“Hmm. The paintings aren’t pristine, but they’re still pretty intact,” she said, sifting through the artworks like they were a deck of cards. “A collector might buy these for a hefty fraction still.”

She looked at Haruki, who was standing at a distance expectantly. She gestured him to come over. “Come over.”

He pointed at himself as if to say “Me?”

“Yes, you,” she said with a smile. Haruki joined her in looking through the loot. “I did say you could share in the booty. See anything you like?”

“Uh, you?” Haruki said in jest. He knew he didn’t stand a chance.

“From anything we actually pilfered from the raid, pervert,” she replied with a smolder. “If we find a wench here that looks exactly like me, she’s free game for you.”

“I’m not interested in taking in hostages or slaves.”

“Good lad. You better not be.”

Haruki looked through the paintings Flare had set aside, studying them one by one. The lot of them depicted men and women that radiated degenerate opulence, almost like paintings of fictional nobles at expensive western-style hotels, except these people were real.

“These are all Federacy nobles?”

“Not all,” Flare said. “Some are passing businessmen. Some dwarven, some halflings propped up by boxes for the painter. Most are Sapias, affiliated with the Federacy or otherwise.”

“I see.”

Continuing to sift through the loot, Haruki began to overturn stone to assist Flare with her treasure hunting. He pulled a hand-size painting from under heated rubble, its sharp, torn cement scratching its surface. He winced.

When he finally scanned it, he froze, like some wizard had just chilled him in place.

“F-Flare. Do you know any of these nobles?”

“Some, maybe. Why?” She turned towards him. “What’s wrong? You’re pale. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“C-Can you identify this o-one?”

The painting bore the image of a woman who looked to be in her early-forties, if not a little older. Her dark hair draped past her shoulders, and though age had begun to show on her face, Haruki described the woman’s features as “cute” and “charming”. But the most striking point of the painting was the discolored scar peeking below the woman’s collarbone through her open-chested dress.

“Hmm?” Flare leaned in, eyes narrowing and studying a painting’s features.

“So… can you?”

Flare snapped her fingers in recognition.

“Oh, of course. Now I remember!” she said, self-satisfied. “That has to be Marquis Ako del Alfons, mother of Marina del Alfons—that lass who contracted us to catch the Ka-Ilyan princess!”