Chương 84: Chapter Eighty Four

Eleanor sighed as she watched out one of the Brimstone's portholes. Her fellow Duchess had argued strenuously against meeting here, but had ultimately relented that in wake of recent events, the Brimstone was the safest location in the fleet. The skies outside were abuzz with Shards on constant patrol, in addition to a mixture of cruisers and frigates. Better yet, the skies were now clear, which meant that any 'Super-Shards' attempting to get the drop on them would be seen well in advance.

Though whether or not we'll be able to do anything about it if we do remains to be seen, she thought tiredly. Slowly, she turned her attention from the war outside to the one taking place in her meeting room.

"For what possible reason are you delaying!? We need to strike now!" Duchess Faline argued, the Elven woman's fist pounding the table in time with her words.

"The same reason I gave you last time you insisted on a full push into the South. This latest development is unpleasant indeed, but it changes little for us."

"Changes little!?" the woman scoffed.

"We've lost seven ships! Seven! Nearly a tenth of our combined power."

"Yes, because we were taken off guard. Our forces were spread too thin and we were punished for it. And I accept some responsibility for that. It was my strategy that left our forces vulnerable to this new weapon, because I underestimated how effective Yelena's new shard-based ship killers were. And in doing so I played right into her hands." And that was the key detail here.

These new Super-Shards were dangerous, yes, but they'd have been little more than a minor annoyance without the 'fire-lances' that allowed two Shards to reliably bring down an entire airship in a single pass. The stories from the Lunite attack on the capital had suggested to her that they'd needed to deploy those same weapons en masse for that kind of effect. That they were simply an alternative weapon system for Redwater's new artificial-shards.

After all, without any aether supply, they'd need some method to replicate a javelin's armour piercing effects. Now, she wasn't so sure. The Lunite attack had been unexpected, and it was by all accounts the first time those weapons had been deployed in combat. Was it possible it was the first time they'd been deployed at all though? If that was the case, it was plausible that Yelena hadn't known how effective they'd be and erred on the side of caution with liberal applications?

Or perhaps the relative greenness of the pilots involved had them overusing them? The tales from the awards ceremony had painted the 'plebian pilots' as little more than a band of fresh farm girls. Or perhaps the fire-lances were made more effective by being deployed from a Super-Shard? She thought. Personally, she leaned towards that latter theory, as conventional aether-javelins operated off the same system.

The faster the launching craft was going at the time of the javelin's release the more likely it would penetrate into the hull of the craft – and thus deploy its alchemical payload - rather than glance off. … Either way, it was definitely the Super-Shards' speed that had allowed them to slip right through her airship's Shard escorts as if they weren't even there.

"You're entirely correct. This is your fault. We could have avoided this if we'd gone with my strategy," Faline said.

"We'd be floating over Summerfield right now." Eleanor didn't let herself be riled.

"And most of our fleet would be cratering the ground beneath it. Along with the entirety of the Southern fleets. With a Solite or Lunite invasion fleet headed our way within the week. Nothing has changed on that front." Faline frowned, but didn't argue. Not because she didn't want to, but because she knew she was wasting her breath. Eleanor wouldn't budge on this.

"The strategy to force a surrender by targeting Yelena's support can still work," she murmured.

"How?"

"They didn't hit any flotillas with five or more ships. Assumedly, at that point the Shard cover becomes sufficient that even with the Super-Shards' capabilities, losses are expected. And given each Super-Shard contains a full ship-sized core, that's a loss she cannot replace." Neither Faline or Yelena had any real idea how big the stockpile was of cores Yelena had recovered from kraken nests – but only so many ships had gone down over open water over the years.

Between expanding the Royal Navy and now fielding fourteen Super-Shards, that stockpile had to be practically spent. Faline hummed, though only enough to show she was listening. Which Eleanor would take.

"So, we reorganize our flotillas into groups of seven. It's not foolproof if she chooses to group her Super-Shards for another strike, but it won't be a bloodless victory for her if she goes that route. More to the point, we won't simply retreat this time to allow her to recover the hulls and her downed Shards." And that had been the true loss they'd suffered last time.

She couldn't fault either her people or Faline's prioritizing their intact ships and recovering the cores of the downed, but by doing so they'd ceded seven ship hulls to Yelena. This time, if Yelena managed to down a ship, the North would fight for it. And hard. And not only would Yelena lose that fight, she also wanted to avoid a stand-up engagement that would see a mainland invasion. Neither side could fully commit and any fight would quickly turn into a game of who would blink first.

"So we're going to force this war to drag out even longer?" Faline asked.

"Because going by your strategy, we can only besiege six counties at a time. Nine or ten if you're disbanding the reserve fleet."

"Perhaps," Eleanor said, before grimacing.

"Perhaps not." Faline rolled her eyes.

"Don't be coy, woman. If you've got a way to speed up this shitshow of yours, out with it." Eleanor frowned, warring with herself before she spoke.

"There's other ways to apply pressure to Yelena and her vassals without taking their ancestral homes."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense." Eleanor breathed – before damning herself.

"We burn the fields. We burn the villages. We burn the food stores. And then we force the survivors to head south." Faline quirked an eye at her.

"The same as you do to the Orcs? Hmm, I could see it working. Will you be going through with the customary maiming as well?" Eleanor hated the way her fellow noble sounded amused, as if the Human woman's inner turmoil was entertainment. Then again, it probably was to the Elf. Their two houses had little love for each other, and the recent war had done little to change that.

"No, any benefit we might derive from removing fingers wouldn't be… worth the damage to our reputations." She also wasn't entirely sure her people would go through with it. House Blackstone stood for Humanity. Maiming and scattering a few Orcs to put more pressure on the other savages to either help them or leave them to starve was one thing… … But fellow Humans were something else altogether.

And while the populace in the South consisted of a number of races – including Orcs – the majority of the villages were made up of Humans.

"Hmm, I could see it working," Faline mused.

"Not immediately." No, not immediately, but eventually it would force the woman to either make a move – or her vassals to remove her and sue for peace. Faline eyed her.

"Still, that could take months. If not a year or more. And in the meantime, we'll be dealing with ongoing Super-Shard attacks. Against which we have no guarantee that your seven-ship strategy will prove an adequate defence."

"We shot one down when two of our ships were taken off-guard and protected by just four Shards," she pointed out.

"A lucky strike, by all accounts," Faline dismissed. Elanor acknowledged the point.

"Then we let it happen." Faline's eye twitched.

"Excuse me?" Perhaps it was the weight of the previous plan she'd just settled on affecting her, because by contrast, the notion of letting her own fleet be destroyed seemed strangely easy to handle.

"We let them down our ships. And we fight to recover the hulls when we do. We repair those we can, and we move those we can't back to the capital."

"And let our fleet be whittled to nothing?" Eleanor shook her head.

"Nothing of the sort. With this recent move, Yelena's put us in a position where every victory she achieves only serves to weaken her ability to attain the next."

"If this is some Human idiom you're building towards, please save me and just speak plainly." It was funny, Eleanor didn't even feel the usual irritation she would at the barb.

"Super-Shards. Yelena deployed them because she had an excess of cores and not enough hulls to house them. And with this recent attack, we're suddenly down seven hulls and have an excess of eight cores." You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Faline stared.

"You're not seriously suggesting we build our own? My vassals will be up in arms if I choose to risk their familial cores like that." Elanor laughed.

"Then promise them new ones if they get lost. We either win this war or we'll all be facing the keel. If we win, we'll have more cores than we know what to do with. Any vassal who's without a core can take their pick from them." Faline went to argue, before hesitating.

"That's… not a terrible idea." Eleanor almost mocked the Elf for not thinking of it herself. She held back though. Barely.

"We'd have to design our own Super-Shards," the New Haven Duchess eventually said.

"Do we?" Eleanor laughed.

"I've already got a design below deck here on the Brimstone. Sure, it's a little banged up, but my people have assured me they can get it functioning again." Faline perked up.

"Does it have…"

"It doesn't have any fire-lances. It fired them all before it went down," Elanor said.

"But it doesn't matter. We don't need something capable of downing enemy airships. We just need something to protect our own." And if their new Super-Shards happened to down an enemy one before it could fire off its payload? Well, then it wouldn't be long before they had fire-lances of their own too. Eleanor smiled. Tala was right. It didn't matter how many tricks Yelena – or William Ashfield – threw at her people. The North would endure. And then it'd throw them right back. Harder.

That was how they'd held off the Elves back when they'd been little more than mountain tribeswomen. By ambushing overconfident airships astride the backs of wyverns. And they'd do the same now.

"I'll want to see this craft," Faline said finally. It wasn't an agreement, but both of them knew it was good enough. They might not be ready next time there was a Super-Shard attack – but the one after that? She'd take those weapons and use them better than the South ever could.

William mused that the former Blackstone cruiser he was looking at had definitely seen better days. The propellers had been stripped or bent, scorch marks blackened large sections of the hull, and a crude mass of discoloured metal covered large sections of the starboard ballast tanks, looking for all the world like ugly scar tissue.

As it stood, the thing was less a warship and more the world's ugliest, most expensive balloon – the only thing keeping it from being carried off on the wind was the long chain anchoring it to the ground just outside the city. William watched the Shrieker come around again, a high-pitched whine filling the air as it moved to strike. With a burst of pressurized aether, the javelin that had been mounted to the underside of the craft launched through the air.

As the Shrieker pulled off, the launched projectile struck the ship and pierced clean through the reinforced armour, embedding itself to the haft. Under normal circumstances, that'd be the moment where flames would start spilling out of the impact point as the oversized syringe-like device injected its alchemically charged flammable payload deep into the ship. As it was, the javelin just sat there.

"It works," he muttered into the radio, eager to get this farce over with.

"How are things on your end?" He ignored the overly eager response he got in return from the pilot. Honestly, he'd rather be anywhere else right now. Unfortunately for him, Yelena had all but demanded he be on site for this test given he was the Shrieker's 'inventor'. She wanted to be absolutely sure there wouldn't be any issues if they needed to sortie the Shrieker's again in a hurry.

Because for all that they'd been incredibly effective in their first outing, the fact remained that William only had so many rockets ready to go. They'd used a lot during the Lunite attack and the most recent one had depleted his stockpile further. Work was already being done to rectify that state of affairs, but in the interim Yelena wanted to know that her newest and most deadly weapons would be able to do their jobs if the North decided to make a concerted push. Which was far from unlikely.

Hence why he was out here watching the craft poke holes in one of the captured cruisers.

"Seems a bit wasteful," Verity murmured from over his shoulder.

"I thought the Queen needed all the ships we could get?" Fortunately, Marline responded before William could.

"It's just a few extra holes. It'll take like two seconds to fix, even if you're not a mage-smith." William nodded.

"And given it's the last in the queue for a full set of repairs, we might as well use it to get some testing done."

"Oh, ok then." Verity said as the Shrieker made another pass, at a more oblique angle this time. This time though, the point failed to catch and the weapon skittered off the hull. William noted it down, just before the pilot's voice crackled over the radio a moment later.

"Let me try that last one again, I can go faster this time," she chirped. William pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I'm sure you can. Unfortunately, the frame cannot. If you attempt to go faster, it'll come apart around you. As I've stated repeatedly. If a javelin can't stick at that angle, then it just can't stick." A groan came back over the channel, but the pilot didn't argue further. The Shrieker leveled out and got ready to do a repeat of its last attack on a different section of hull. William was thankful for that. And that Yelena had given him one of her more 'level-headed' hotshots for this test.

A decent part of the success of the last attack had come down to just who was in the pilot seats of the Shriekers as much as the Shriekers themselves. Unfortunately, that expertise came with ego. The kind of ego that meant that a lot of the pilots had initially briefed on the crafts' capabilities were entirely sure they knew more about it than he did after the first few flights. Hence why a few were… sceptical about his claims of what would happen if they pushed the frame 'to the limit'.

And he had little doubt that eventually one of them would try to prove him wrong. And they were welcome to. He just wanted to be far away when they were scraping the woman and her craft off five kilometres of open field. Still, the day took a turn for the better as he turned to see Griffith walking toward him across the grass, weaving about the many servants, pilots and mechanics that made up the small tent city that was their testing area.

"Griffith," William said, genuinely pleased to see the Dark Elf.

"Come to rescue me from this tedium?" Griffith smiled, though a faint blush touched her cheeks.

"One wouldn't normally consider overseeing a brand new weapon system boring." William shrugged as his test pilot's last javelin struck home – sticking fast this time.

"The Shrieker doesn't do much for me, unfortunately. Nor does testing a weapon system as outdated as the javelin." Griffith tilted her head slightly but didn't press. Instead, she got to the point.

"Well, unfortunately, while I'm not here to rescue you, I am here on business. The Duchess Summerfield and her sister have asked me to ask your opinion on your upcoming nuptials. Specifically, if you have any specific desires regarding any of the details? Decorations? Ceremony? Guests? That sort of thing." William blinked. Right. The wedding. That was happening soon, wasn't it?

He was pretty sure he'd already been asked about that, but the girls still seemed a little skeptical of his claims that he really didn't mind. After all, what boy didn't want to be in charge of planning his 'big day'? As it stood, given how busy the twins themselves were, he was pretty sure the wedding was being planned almost entirely by a rather confused third party. He shook his head.

"I'm not particular. Whatever they decide is fine." Griffith nodded, though he could still see a hint of confusion in her eyes.

"Right, well they also wanted me to let you know they'll be borrowing your team for dress fittings tomorrow morning. And that you're expected to be present for suit fittings as well in the afternoon." Marline made a quiet sound of displeasure behind him. Verity, by contrast, looked quietly thrilled at the prospect. Griffith glanced at both of them in amusement. William just sighed.

"Right, I'll be there." He might be a little late, but he'd be there. Griffith seemed to pick up on it, but continued with a smile.

"On the bright side, given your aversion to taking time out for a big event, they said they're also going to be hosting Bonnlyn's ascension ceremony on the same day as the wedding. To save time."

"That's good." That did actually make William smile and he made a note to thank the twins for that. He doubted as many women would be as understanding as the two were being. Of course, it helped that they were just as busy as he was and likely struggling to find time for the… well, ceremony. He was also glad he wasn't getting too much pushback on the whole Bonnlyn thing. At the time, it had been a bit of a whim, but he'd be lying if he said he wasn't entirely ignorant to the amount of fuss it would cause.

Xela had not been pleased. Nor Piper. Fortunately, they'd accepted it. He imagined it helped that Redwater was currently in enemy hands and arguments about who 'owned' it were currently rather theoretical. Griffith gave him a small pat on the shoulder before excusing herself, her messages complete, and walking back toward the manse. William watched her go with a quiet sense of regret – even if he could feel Verity glaring at the woman as well as Marline's amusement.

Honestly, if he had to be 'wasting time' he'd much rather spent the afternoon with the Dark Elf than standing here watching test pilots try to break his aircraft. Sighing, he turned his attention back to the Shrieker as it came in for a vertical landing. So many distractions. Between the wedding, Bonnlyn's ceremony, the ongoing production of the Corsairs, and now these weapon trials, he felt like he was being pulled in a dozen different directions at once.

When he had exactly one project he really wanted to be working on. I can only hope North also has people holding them back, he thought.

It had taken the Brimstone's mage-smiths all of three days for them to repair the Super-Shard. A testament to the skill and experience of the North when it came to battlefield repair. And while another Super-Shard attack had occurred in that time, it wasn't nearly as dangerous as the first. Six Super-Shards attacked a flotilla of seven ships laying siege to an outlying castle and were driven off.

None of them were downed, and they downed a ship and three Shards, but that was a significant improvement over that first surprise attack. It helped they'd not had any of the same fire-lances the second time, which gave credence to the rumours that the weapons required some manner of expensive alchemy or enchantment. Of course, none of that mattered to Querrin now. What did matter was that the craft beneath her felt alive in a way no normal Shard ever had. It wasn't smooth.

The controls were heavy, almost stubborn, and the entire frame had a constant low vibration that traveled up through the seat and into her bones. But none of that mattered. Because of the speed. The countryside below was already a smear of green and brown. She had never flown this fast in level flight before. Even in a vertical dive, most Shards eventually hit a wall of resistance. This thing didn't seem to care.

The ship-sized core behind her was pumping out more aether than she had ever felt in a single frame, and it still had power to spare. She adjusted her grip on the control stick as another tremor ran through the craft.

"Just confirming, ma'am?" she asked into the orb.

"I'm already getting a lot of shake in the frame as it is." Duchess Eleanor's voice came back steady and calm.

"Push that craft to the limits, pilot. We need to know exactly what it's capable of if we're going to field our own and counter our enemy's." Querrin grinned, sharp and hungry.

"Confirmed, ma'am." She didn't need to be told a third time. Slowly, she eased the throttle forward another notch. The Super-Shard surged, pressing her back into the seat with real force. The core behind her howled as the craft tore through the sky, the ground becoming little more than a blur of color beneath her. For a moment, she felt almost weightless, the sheer power of the thing making her blood sing. This wasn't like flying a Shard. This was something else entirely.

It lacked the smooth gliding elegance of a proper prop-frame, but it made up for it with raw, brutal acceleration. And she could feel that the core had more to give.

"Whoever came up with you might have been the lapdog of a tyrant, but void-damn would I love to shake her hand," she grunted through gritted teeth. She pushed the throttle further. The vibration in the frame grew stronger. It wasn't violent yet, but it was there, a constant shudder running through the stick and pedals. The control surfaces felt heavier, fighting her a little more with every passing second. Querrin refused to back off. She had her orders. More importantly, she wanted to see where the edge was.

She wanted to feel it. The speed kept climbing. The world outside the canopy had become a rushing wall of air and color. Her harness dug into her shoulders as the craft continued to accelerate, and for the first time she felt a small flicker of doubt. Yes, the frame was really shaking now, the stick fighting her, but that wasn't a big-