Chương 50: Loot

Ch 50: Loot One day had passed. I was lying on the deck of the floating ship despite the fact the hull was heavily damaged on both sides, one side burned and the other heavily damaged from the crash. Lost in thought, I remained there for a while, observing the clouds, the school far away in the distance, and even Elitha's tower further away still. Suddenly, I was ejected from my thoughts as a loud creak followed by the groan of wood flexing under weight stole my attention.

With both palms pressing against the deck floor, I raised my upper body, only to find Sahirah watching me. She had just Hasted herself all the way from the ground to the deck, several meters above the tree line.

"A girl knows yesterday was stressful, but we only have one week left to fix this ship and flee. Don't you think you could find a better use for your time than sleeping?" She was right, of course, but I hadn't wasted nearly as much time as she assumed I did. In fact, I was hiding behind work so that I didn't have to think too much about how many Grey died yesterday because of all of us. And now... I knew was about to hide behind something way sweeter than work.

"I didn't sleep at all last night. I restored the paper backup to my Mind Library. I contacted Fernik at sunrise to hire professional carpenters to fix the hull. Then I met with the Granar who work for us to convince them to help carry the wood from the school entrance to here." I stood up, dusting off my clothes.

"Before lunch I annoyed Elitha enough to get her to teleport the ship outside her domain so that we can have some privacy. And I skipped lunch and fixed the runes of the damaged floating slab myself, how did you miss the fact that the ship is in the air, flying again even though it's damaged?" Sahirah looked around as if to confirm the floating was really smooth, and then her gaze landed on me, disbelief clear in her eyes.

"You did all of that?" she asked.

"I thought you had traded more knowledge in exchange for more help. How did you convince Elitha to teleport the ship here?" I laughed.

"Well, despite how broken she is, Elitha struggles a bit with math. I taught her the microwave math the hard way and then exchanged a promise to simplify the math by the end of the week if she teleported the ship where I wanted for free." Sahirah apparently believed me, and walked toward me. She immediately noticed I hadn't dusted off my clothes properly, and decided to help me.

She quickly removed the wood splinters that had attached themselves to the fabric of my T-shirt, and then she did the same to my butt, slapping it hard when she was done with the wood splinters.

"A girl still finds it hard to believe you restored the flying capability of this ship alone," she said, as though she had done nothing bad at all.

"How can you know how to fix something you've never worked on before?" I shook my head, pretending I disapproved of her bad-girl behavior. And then I ignored her question, and I suddenly grabbed her. One hand reached around the small of her back, while the other played with her ear while I kissed her intensely. I pushed her back until her head stumbled against the wall of the wheelhouse. When we were done, I said, "Sorry you have to quit the school because my plan failed."

"It's not your fault Lord Krosak took a liking to us, human."

"It's not," I said.

"But considering what a disaster the Mimic extermination plan was, and how we would be dead this time without Elitha, I can't stop thinking we all need to do much better from now on." I released Sahirah, moving to the guardrails where I could see the school.

"I regret it, you know," I said, without even checking her expression.

"I regret how I skipped every class. I regret that I won't even get a chance to fix my knowledge gaps now unless I hire a private teacher. All I wanted when I arrived on Navar was to get out of this school, but why do I miss it now that we are finally leaving?" Instead of moving to my side so that we could watch the school together, Sahirah's arms wrapped around my neck from behind. She then jumped, her legs locking around me.

With her mouth so close to my ear that I could feel the warmth of her breath, she said, "Don't forget you have someone who didn't skip the classes with you. And if you hadn't dedicated as much time as you did to your runes, would you be able to fix this ship alone?" I didn't answer her question, nor did I do anything else besides pressing my hands against hers behind my neck as we both watched the school building.

After a few minutes of this, I asked, "Would you like to see how I made this thing flight-capable again?" She replied by gently biting my ear.

"What do you think?" With Sahirah riding my back, I took us both downstairs, all the way to the orlop deck. That was the place where the ship's wooden frame connected with those two giant disk slabs that provided flotation. I ignored the bow disk that hadn't suffered any crash damage, and took us directly on top of the large stern disk. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. This was the disk whose underside runes had been destroyed by the impact against the ground.

Nearly half of them had been erased by the friction, though thankfully the large disk survived without cracking, escaping the ordeal with only surface damage. When Sahirah noticed all the fresh runes I had inscribed on the upper side of the slab, she tried to understand them. But she gave up quickly, resting her chin on my shoulder in defeat.

"A girl can't understand your runes." I smiled.

"Well, it's not like I understand all of them yet either," I said, smiling.

"But mostly I just replicated the design of the undamaged bow disk into the damaged stern disk. It just took some creativity to connect the old external module that hadn't been damaged to the new internal modules that I copied from the other disk." Sahirah's grip around my neck tightened, finally understanding how I had managed to fix the ship.

"You really are a cheater. Maybe a trickster is a better word." she said.

"And that's one of your best qualities." I was a bit surprised that, despite the disastrous way the counter adoption operation had gone, Sahirah and I still seemed to be going through one of our best moments. There was a lot we didn't know about each other. There were many secrets to share, and perhaps it would take a lifetime to truly get to know each other given our totally different backgrounds. Still, we knew the most important things about each other. I knew she was someone important to her people.

I knew that she saw herself as a princess of a fallen kingdom. And I knew about her mission to open a portal to her homeworld when she was powerful enough to do so.

"Do you want to see the power core?" I asked her. She demonstrated agreement through the way she held me tightly, clearly demanding to be carried again to another location even though she was perfectly capable of walking without help. I sighed, and kept walking, until we reached a large iron door. It took me some effort to open it, though thankfully that was the only place in the ship with such a strong reinforcement.

What awaited us inside was a floating crystal, not that different from the one on the first floor of Elitha's tower, though this one was smaller, and the runes covering it weren't as complex.

"The mana radiation is dangerous for someone with as much mana as I have," I said.

"But I bet you could stay here all day and nothing bad would happen." She didn't say anything, perhaps afraid that any comment would give me a reason to mention that the crystal should be afraid of her rather than the other way around. After observing it a little longer, she said, "Knowing you the way a girl does, she must ask. What crazy modification does she have to prepare herself mentally for this time?"

"Uh..." When I took too long to respond, she pulled my hair playfully and said, "Speak up, human, I don't have all day."

"Actually, I just want to create my version of the area translation spell so that everyone can talk freely on the ship without carrying the orbs. And, of course, we need a large area Presence Erasure spell to keep this ship safe." Before I knew it, I was already excited, and I kept going with my monologue, "Well, maybe a light-bending spell that can make this ship camouflaged even to people capable of resisting illusion is also necessary, and a few weapons are obviously needed to defend the ship.

Also a sphere that can act as the central node of the system with all other spheres connected to it would be nice to have, and..." I kept going, and Sahirah got bored at some point, releasing my back voluntarily so that I could see the boredom on her face. Well, not that it stopped me from talking more, and a few more minutes went by just like that. When I was done, she made sure to cut off my passionate flow of ideas with a question I couldn't ignore.

"What about Lord Krosak, what have you done with him?" That question truly erased my passion, killing my excitement about the modifications to the core. I said nothing for a while. Then I sighed.

"Follow me," I said. Sahirah nodded, and soon enough, we left the core room, climbing the stairs until we reached the cabins. There, I stopped in front of a locked door, and retrieved a key from my pocket. Sahirah watched as I unlocked the room, watching me with a trace of worry clouding her face. When I opened the door, her eyes widened at the sight of the chained Grey man.

His legs were chained to a thick wooden beam that was part of the ship's structure, and there wasn't a trace of anything but fear in his eyes now that I'd taken every single ring from his fingers.

"Please," he said, "the two of you are too young to go through the punishment for those who hold a noble in captivity. I beg you, release me and I swear–" I locked the door before he could finish, deliberately avoiding the thought I had become a kidnapper. Sahirah said nothing, and I simply placed an arm around her, guiding her away from that door so that Lord Krosak wouldn't hear our conversation. When I stopped, Sahirah walked in front of me, her eyes of green and amber connecting with mine.

"He... he's still missing that finger." Of course he was, the Greys didn't recover lost limbs without the help of those rare and powerful healers. Still, I didn't say that. I reached into my pocket and retrieved two rings.

"I took the other two life-saving rings from him while he was knocked out," I said.

"I want you to have one." Her attention moved to the ring. It was heavy, made of thick gold and covered with runes so tiny that I couldn't see them individually without a magnifying glass.

"We are thieves now?" she asked, not taking the ring from my hand.

"Thieves?" I said, "That's just our loot, it's just like the ship. We get to keep our loot after winning a battle. That's the universal rule, and it will be official when my system becomes a central piece of infrastructure in this world." Sahirah was still reluctant to take the ring.

"A girl is certain her people wouldn't approve of her actions if she took that ring." I was caught by surprise. Was that a culture clash? Sahirah seemed very much okay with the fact that the sales representatives and I had taken a few lives during the previous battle, but she didn't like the idea of taking a ring?

"What exactly does the Nadiri do with the items they get from their enemies?"

"Bury them with their bodies," she replied flatly. That explained everything! But now what? Should I give up the idea of giving her that life saving ring? Hell no. I would convince her to take it.

"Uh..." I asked reluctantly, "Do your people have... you know... any tradition of gifting each other rings or some cultural trait involving rings?"

"No." She replied flatly. Well, that was unexpected.

"On Earth we have such a tradition," I said. And then leaned closer to her, whispering a long string of words in her ear, explaining to her what it meant when a man gifted a ring to a woman on Earth. When I was done with my explanation, I smiled at her, and asked again.

"Are you sure you don't want the ring?" She looked at me. She looked at the ring. And she suddenly grabbed it from my hand, wearing it on the exact finger I had mentioned. I burst out laughing.

"What?" she pouted, and crossed her arms.

"You said it was loot, why are you laughing now?"

"Nothing," I said.

"I'm just happy you are wearing a life saving item." With that, our discussion was over, and I was technically engaged with the girl I had already decided to spend the rest of my life with. I knew that in practice nothing would change between us with that ring, but if it made her happy and safer, that counted as a victory in my book. In the end, we walked to the guardrails and saw Kip and Kap arriving with a group of Granar carrying piles and piles of wood, noticing a few Greys behind them.

They certainly were the carpenters Fernik had hired on my behalf. I waved at them, pretending everything was fine.

"Come here!" I said.

"We have a lot of work to do in just a week. Please avoid the locked cabin and the power core room, the rest of the ship is ready for the repair crew." Lord Krosak was a problem I couldn't avoid for much longer, and Principal Dickhead was no different.