Chương 21: Chapter 98: Float On

Anna lay sprawled against the rigging, leaning up against the piles of thick ropes. Just getting her bearings She'd been terrified the first few moments as sharks had swirled down from the sky, seeking to snatch them up and tear them into chunks with their razor-sharp teeth. The way that Reese had been lifted into the darkness with barely a scream had shocked her to her core. But then… Then a few of her copies got bit.

And she had to say, it was like getting bit by that little dog her mother's friend had in the tailor shop across the street. A little pinch. Despite their size, these monsters had all the strength and penetrating power of an inbred dog roughly the size of a soccer ball and just as kickable. Despite being fifteen to twenty feet on average, a little bop on the top of their heads while they were trying to gnaw on her would mush their brain or snap their spine, invariably rendering them a shivering corpse. Anna sighed.

She didn't want to be a living weapon, but that seemed to be all her Class was capable of. You know that's not right, Anna admonished herself. She was the Queen of manpower. She could bake the bread, wash the clothes, mop the deck, make the beds, clean the halls, wash the dishes, all that and more in less than an hour. Honestly she had a lot of free time. Being able to beat giant sharks to death with her bare hands was just kind of a bonus.

It brought a nostalgic smile to her face, remembering Mom killing rats that her father was too softhearted to dispose of. On higher Floors, the rats are just bigger. Should call it Anna-power rather than Manpower, She thought, scanning the deck where over a hundred copies of herself filled the ship, making themselves busy mopping the blood, stashing the Relics and and polishing the scuff marks away.

Over the night, she and her copies had each been able to split two more times, allowing them to finally send the sharks packing after over eight hours of fighting. Thankfully the ship was extraordinarily sturdy. If anything had been broken, Anna wasn't sure she would be able to fix it. I need to learn more trades, Anna thought to herself, realizing that knowing carpentry and tanning and any number of other trades would expand her value to W- To the Party. Anna took a deep breath and shoved the thought aside.

She was a monster posing as a bubbly young girl. A bleeding chunk of someone's hopes and dreams for the future isolated into a monstrous container. Not even the real one. It was best for everyone if she kept her feelings to herself and did her job. The feelings weren't real: The job was. The more pressing concern was rejoining with The Flotilla. She didn't know how to sail. She didn't know where they had ended up. She didn't even know what latitude was.

Just as Anna was considering what to do, a grunting noise attracted the attention of all Anna's aboard, who snapped their heads towards the sound. A moment later, a bony hand reached up and grabbed the railing, followed by another, struggling to pull Reese's head up to the deck. By then two of her had already made it to him and lifted him the rest of the way up, carrying him over to some shade.

"Reese, are you okay?" The emaciated man's clothes were shredded, and he seemed to have some sun damage, but other than that, he looked completely unharmed.

"Reese? I always liked that N-Oh right!" He seemed to snap to attention, gazing straight into her eyes.

"Emily, I have been floating for MONTHS!"

"Hours." Anna corrected.

"And my name's Anna."

"Hours. Anna." Reese muttered, his lips quivering as he seemed to repeat the words to himself over and over again.

"Reese, you know how to sail, right?"

"Eh?" He grunted, levering himself to his feet and scanning the horizon.

"I do, don't I? Hah. Wait until the folks back home hear about this."

"Can you get us back to The Flotilla?" Anna asked.

"Sure, which direction is it?" Reese asked.

"I was…hoping you could tell me?" Anna said with a shrug.

"Although…Jean is that way." She mused, pointing.

"That might lead us to them?"

"Oh. OH! Okay, let me see what I can do." Reese clambered down into the ship and emerged a few minutes later with one of Loth's notebooks and a strange triangle thing that she'd seen Loth pointing at the sky. Now's your chance to learn how to sail! Anna thought, the thought prodding her into movement.

"Umm…can you show me how to use that?" The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Sure. We should probably see what they want first, though," Reese said, pointing at the longboat filled with Climbers that was rowing it's way towards them. Meanwhile, on the Floating Church of Granesh, Will was equal amounts tense and bored.

"Bacon Bits Added to the roster!" the spotter called down. Tense because he expected to get a bag thrown over his head any second, waking up strapped to a crucifix. Bored because rebuilding The Flotilla was a week-long ordeal. Three days to find all the ship, four days to fit them back together into an actual 'city'.

"Elmo's Funnel Added to the roster!" Warehouses wanted to go on the outside, where they could attach to the docks, bars and brothels wanted to cluster together, city hall wanted to have the best access to businesses, restaurants preferred to be far away from bathhouses, but both of them wanted to be near the distillers. Will even learned that there were aqueducts, of a fashion.

Most of the stationary ships that had been converted to buildings for public use had pipes aboard that they could use to connect to distiller ships and each other to pipe water in and shit out. Naturally they had to have some sort of decision about where to put waste, because if everyone just tossed it overboard, the ocean would teem with life and monsters directly under The Flotilla, and their water would be tainted. They figured out the prevailing current and piped it downstream.

"Mike's Meats added to the roster!" the spotter called.

"Admiring the plumbing?" Jairus's voice called from behind Will, prompting him to straighten.

"Yes, actually," Will said, turning away from the stub of steel tubing in the deck. It wasn't set up because the church hadn't found it's place in the Flotilla yet, but Will found the idea of inter-ship pluming on rocking oceans fascinating.

"How do they not break when the ships move?"

"A clever bit of joinery that turns a pipe into a ball and socket joint without spilling." The saint said, his eyes lingering on the pipe, probably wondering if Will was planning on sabotaging it. The short answer was that Will didn't know if he was or not. Will left the sabotaging to Loth. She was the expert. The thing that really tore Will up was the casualties he was pursuing with his current strategy. Him and the church would never be friends.

Ever since he'd discovered an innocent boy tortured to death in one of their basements, he knew that finding a peaceful solution wasn't an option. The logical option was to kill them all. Wipe the board clean so they never troubled him again. The problem was the execution of that solution. Will knew the best thing to do would be for Bee and Ria to kill and replace a portion of their menial crewmembers, using her shapeshifting Abilities to pretend to be them.

When things got heats, the crew would turn against the saint in dramatic fashion. … Except Bee and Ria weren't heartless killers, and neither was Will. Asking them to do something he wasn't sure he could do… Loth could probably do it, but she can't steal people's faces. So instead the Tangled girls had discretely replaced a few nonbelievers that Loth had snuck out on a stolen boat. … So when things go sour, we'll have to fight the combined might of their entire crew, Will thought.

In the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter the manner in which they died, but he just couldn't bring himself to ask Brianna to do it that way. The girl already had enough weighing on her shoulders. She would be much better served protecting her Party from an irrationally hostile force of zealots rather than stabbing sleeping men and women in their bunks. Even if it is FAR riskier to me. Will turned his attention back to the conversation with the saint.

Only a fraction of a second had passed since he'd mentioned the ball and socket plumbing.

"Since I'm not planning on staying on this Floor forever, I've got to consider what my ship's life is going to look like after we move on." Will explained to the zealot standing beside him.

"It's not fast, but it's big, so it's probably got value as a stationary part of The Flotilla once we're gone. I figured some plumbing would be just the thing."

"Plumbing is expensive, but you're not wrong. I suppose you could lease it while you're away."

"Would that work?" Will asked, frowning. He assumed he'd have to sell it outright.

"Eh." The saint said with a shrug.

"We try our hand at civilization out here. If the debt is registered at city hall, and your vessel remains in The Flotilla, you've got a…decent shot at collecting. Provided it doesn't sink. Otherwise, money that leaves a man's line of sight has a funny way of making itself scarce."

"I wouldn't put all your hopes in your ship making it, though," Saint Jairus said sympathetically.

"Empty vessels caught during a Scramble will often drift aw-""Shimmer added to the roster!" The spotter in the the crow's nest bellowed down at them, where another man with a ledger jotted down the ship's specifications. If Saint Jairus was upset, he didn't show it. The grizzled sailor simply had the raised brow of a craftsman approaching a particularly stubborn bit of work. Will had been counting the number of boats that had gone out against the number that had come back. One was missing.

Will would bet that it was the missionary boat sent to sink Shimmer.

"Last Chance Inn added to the roster!" That gives me an idea about who I could lease Shimmer to. The headcrabs need more space, and they could run a legitimate business rather than a brothel. Housing complex? It also occurred to Will that he could've had Bee replace all of them with offshoots of herself, fled on that stolen boat and simply gone up a floor before the confusion of the Scramble cleared. They'd passed the acclimation period already. That probably would've been the smartest move, Will thought wryly.

Avoid a fight and just head up, grind, and come back when the Saint no longer has a commanding lead of 25 – or more – levels. That was just kicking the problem down the line, though. Who was to say that Jairus couldn't set up a trap for Will while he was on the Seventh Floor and beyond that negated any advantage he might gain from extra levels? Best excise the mold before it had a chance to spread. First I gotta check in on Anna and see how she dealt with the Scramble.

"I suppose you're eager to get back to your ship, Mr. Oh." Jairus said. Will stiffened a bit before nodding. It was public knowledge that William Oh owned Shimmer, and he and the saint were apparently past the point in their relationship where they played coy about who Will was. Will lowered his voice.

"So is this the part where we…"

'fight each other to the death' went unsaid. It seemed uncouth to speak about it directly, even though that's exactly what they were both thinking. Will was considering whether to try to put a cannonball through the saint himself, or the row of sailors beyond him, crippling his manpower at the beginning of the fight.

"Have some patience," Jairus interrupted Will's thoughts with a cold smile.

"These things take time." Is that code for 'I'm going to attack you the instant the sun goes down' or 'I need time to turn the Flotilla against you first'? Will thought with narrowed eyes as the weathered saint didn't give a hint of his thoughts away. Shimmer approached over the course of the afternoon, eventually growing close enough to see Anna standing at the prow, waving to them with an excited bounce. Tied to the railing with Loth's rope were no less than half a dozen Climbers with bruised faces.

Would it have been better if the zealots disappeared? Will wondered to himself. It would have been easier to pretend they had simply missed each other. Less of a splash, since Will could easily imagine holding six allies of the Church of Granesh prisoner adding fuel to the conflict. But again, Brianna was not a cold-blooded killer, so Will had to deal with the politics, messy as it was. And I mean… I really don't want her to become a cold-blooded killer, anyway, Will thought, watching Anna wave. Will waved back.

Anna gestured to the tied-up bodies in front of her, as if to say 'look what I caught!' Will gave her a thumb's-up.