[Complete] Ch 11.5 The World of Otome Game is a Second Chance for Broken Swords

The World of Otome Game

 is a Second Chance for Broken Swords

Story Starts

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Chapter 11.5 -

The Offrey

Gambit

"Master." Luxion's lens swivelled towards the viewport, its red glow reflected in the reinforced glass. "The fleet is ascending. Sixty-two per cent of their forward batteries have acquired a firing solution on our hull. Estimated time to effective range: four minutes."

A thousand vessels. Leon observed the cloud layer beneath them starting to roil, pallid grey masses expanding and fracturing as masthead points and plated bows pushed through like predatory fish rising towards prey. Draake had drilled his people well—the formation held even through the climb, wings fanning out in staggered tiers so that no single broadside could rake more than a handful of vessels at once.

'Attack from below, where the guns can't reach. Simple. Effective. Predictable.'

He turned from the viewport. Carla Fou Wayne still hung in Durga's grip, her arm pinned at the elbow, the communication crystal long since confiscated. The colour had drained from her face somewhere around the moment Draake's laughter had crackled through the link, and it hadn't returned. Her eyes kept darting between Leon and the ascending fleet as though she couldn't decide which frightened her more.

"Durga, please escort Miss Wayne to her accommodations."

Durga inclined her head, silver-white hair shifting across her shoulders. She adjusted her hold on Carla's arm—not cruel, but immovable—and steered the girl towards the bridge hatch. Carla didn't resist. Whatever fight she'd carried aboard had leaked out of her one transmission at a time.

Leon toggled his commlink to the general channel. "All hands, this is Bartfort. Battle stations and harnesses. Brad, Chris—power armour, now. Guardian spirits, standby positions on the deck. Fair warning—you'll be feeling weightless in a few minutes, so strap down anything you'd rather not wear."

A chorus of acknowledgements came back through the link. The Partner needed none of them to fight—Luxion flew her alone, and always had—but the AI's existence stayed secret even here, and so a skeleton watch borrowed from the patrol craft manned consoles that ran perfectly well by themselves. Appearances had a cost. Leon paid it. Somewhere below, he heard Brad's voice pitch upward mid-question before Chris cut across him, and then both of them were drowned out by the thunder of boots on deck plating.

Durga had one foot through the hatch when the thought caught up with him.

"Oh—Durga, I forgot."

She paused and blinked back at him over her shoulder, Carla dangling from her grip like an afterthought.

"Please secure Miss Wayne to something so she doesn't get hurt in the upcoming battle. Bunk restraints should do. If she complains, remind her the alternative is the cargo netting."

Carla's mouth opened, then shut again.

Durga acknowledged this with a nod and disappeared into the corridor, her charge stumbling to keep pace.

One by one, the remaining guardian spirits followed her out. Sella swept past with a maid's crisp economy, pausing only to straighten a chair someone had knocked askew. Leysritt drifted after her, halberd already materialised and resting against her shoulder as casually as a parasol, and offered Leon a lazy two-fingered salute at the hatch. Within thirty seconds, the bridge held only Leon, Olivia, and the hovering red eye of an AI that had been waiting four minutes for permission to enjoy himself.

"Luxion?"

"Yes, Master."

"Are you ready?"

"I have been ready since the moment sixty-seven demonic armours entered my sensor envelope," the AI replied, and there was something in the modulation of his voice—a smoothness, a satisfaction—that Leon had long ago learnt to associate with catastrophic property damage. "Firing solutions are pre-computed for the first three engagement phases. Damage projections are... favourable."

"Just remember we're not showing them our full capabilities. Side and forward batteries only. No main armament, no drone swarms, nothing that ends up in a Rachelle intelligence dossier by next week."

The lens rotated a slow quarter-turn to regard him. If the floating terminal had possessed an eyebrow, Leon was certain it would have been raised to its theoretical maximum.

"Understood, Master. I shall restrain myself to the armament of a merely exceptional warship, rather than an impossible one."

"Your sacrifice is noted."

"It had better be. I am keeping a ledger."

Leon crossed to the command console and pulled up the tactical plot. The Blackfleet bloomed across the display in tiers of red, a rising cone of hulls with the Carrion Crown nestled at its centre like a spider in the throat of a funnel web. Draake's whole doctrine rested on one assumption: that his prey would do what naval prey always did. Climb. Run for altitude, find an angle that tilts your broadside towards the ascending fleet, and trust that the pirates couldn't reach your altitude before the hooks bit home.

Every ship Draake had ever taken had climbed.

Leon had read the engagement reports twice on the flight out. Fourteen confirmed captures in three years, and in every single one, the victim had gained altitude first. The Blackfleet's gunners trained for it. Their boarding crews timed their ascents for it. Their entire formation was a mouth built to swallow things fleeing upward.

'So we don't flee upward.'

"As soon as Carla Fou Wayne has been secured," Leon said, "take us into a steep dive. Straight down their throat. I want us through their upper tier before their gunners finish recalculating, and I want the forward batteries firing the moment we have targets."

There was a pause—brief, almost imperceptible, the kind Luxion produced not because he needed processing time but because he wanted the moment to breathe.

"Yes, Master." The red glow brightened by a degree. "May I say, this is the first order you have given me in six months that I have no criticisms of whatsoever."

"Frame it."

"I intend to archive it in triplicate."

"Master," he added, "Durga confirms Miss Wayne is secured to the bunk frame in cabin twelve. She has also, on her own initiative, provided Miss Wayne with a bucket."

"Thoughtful."

"Durga is nothing if not thorough."

"But isn't she strapped down? Wouldn't the bucket just eventually fly into her face?"

"…"

"…"

"I shall secure the bucket to her neck," Durga said over the comms.

Leon stepped back from the console and reached for the connection at the base of his spine—the familiar cold-water shock of the interface engaging. His power armour unfolded around him from its stowage alcove, crimson plates sliding over his limbs and locking home with a series of pneumatic snaps, the weight settling onto his frame until it stopped being weight at all and became simply him, extended.

Beside him, Olivia's white-and-turquoise suit assembled itself in a shimmer of nanomachine lattice, thread-fine filaments weaving armour out of apparently nothing. She rolled her shoulders, testing the fit, and grinned in anticipation.

Through the viewport, the first tier of pirate vessels breached the cloud layer in full—hulls patched with scavenged plate, gun ports yawning open along their upper decks, boarding gantries already extending like the legs of climbing insects. Signal lamps flashed between them in Blackfleet code. Somewhere down in that mass of timber and iron, a few hundred boarding crews were checking their grapple lines and dreaming about a year of free drinks.

Leon keyed the command channel one last time. "Thirty seconds. Art, Durga—starboard deck, watch for grapples. Brad, Chris, you're portside, and bring your own spirits up with you—they're yours to direct, just keep them clear of our firing arcs. And if either of you opens a private channel to argue about sparring during a fleet action, I will personally sign you both up to the practicum on the kingdom's waste management systems."

"Understood," Chris said, clipped and immediate.

"That's a disproportionate threat," Brad muttered.

"It's a promise. Art—with me on the foredeck once we're through the first tier. Art, after the initial attack, you may separate—you're our rover. Boarding craft first, then anything flagged with an armour signature. Olivia, you have the underside. Anything that grapples our keel—"

He didn't need to finish the sentence.

"With pleasure," Olivia purred over the link.

"Sella, Leysritt—free hunting. Within reach of your master, mind. Priorities are boarding craft and anything carrying demonic armour signatures. They'll be flagged on your displays."

"Setanta."

"Say the word."

"Boarding craft. Try to leave the prisoners breathing."

"No promises."

"Already flagged," Luxion said over the private channel. "Sixty-seven signatures, holding position beneath the Rachelle transport. The transport itself has left its concealment and is trailing the formation's rear, keeping the fleet between itself and our hull."

'They're waiting for the Offreys' mercenaries to bleed us first. Fine. Let them wait. Let them watch.'

The deck thrummed beneath his boots as the Partner's engines shifted pitch, the great ship gathering itself like a runner settling into the blocks. On the tactical plot, the red cone continued to rise, its mouth widening, so certain of the shape the battle would take that not one vessel had bothered to guard the approach from above their own formation.

Draake attacked from below because no guns could target him there.

The same, Leon reflected, was true in reverse.

He glanced sideways. Olivia stood at the viewport with her helmet tucked under one arm, watching the fleet rise to meet them, and the expression on her face belonged nowhere near a classroom. Her fingers drummed against the helmet's crown. The blue betting chit from Folkvangr, he happened to know, had bought her a great many things—but nothing she'd enjoyed half so much as the anticipation currently lighting her up from the inside.

"Ready?"

Olivia turned. Her grin spread slow and feral, all teeth, and a thin, almost transparent magical barrier wrapped around her head.

"Luxion." Leon faced the viewport as the first ranging shots bloomed orange in the clouds below, falling short, blossoming and dying in the grey. "Dive."

The Partner's bow dropped.

The horizon swung up past the viewport and vanished, replaced by a wall of cloud and the thousand ships rising through it, and then the engines fired at full military thrust and the deck fell away beneath Leon's boots. His stomach lifted. Loose styluses floated up off the command console and hung spinning in the air. Through the hull he heard the long, rising howl of the wind over the superstructure, and beneath it, distant and muffled, what was unmistakably Brad screaming.

"Weightless," Luxion observed. "As advertised."

The upper tier of the Blackfleet rushed towards them—gun crews visible now on the open decks, faces tilting upward, the first of them beginning to point. Signal lamps stuttered into frantic new patterns. Somewhere in that formation, a firing solution painstakingly calculated against a climbing target was becoming waste paper at nine hundred metres per second.

"Forward batteries," Leon said, magnetic soles locking him to the deck as the dive steepened. "Fire."

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The Carrion Crown broke through the cloud deck at full climb, shedding grey vapour from her rigging, and the evening sky opened above her—vast, amber-edged, and occupied.

Aldric Draake stood at the forward glass with his cold pipe clamped in his teeth and his hands loose at his sides, and watched the Partner's bow tilt down.

Down. Towards them.

Around the Crown, wing by wing, the Blackfleet came up out of the murk—masts first, then gun decks, then the long patched hulls, a thousand ships rising in their staggered tiers exactly as they'd drilled it. On the lattice, the wing captains called their marks. The formation was a mouth, opening. Everything was as it should be.

Except the prize was diving into it.

"Captain." Vess's voice from the crystal array, careful and flat. "The target is—"

"I can see what the target's doing, lass."

Forty years, Draake had worked these skies. Every fish he'd ever come up under had done the same thing: run shallow. Merchantman, war sloop, treasure barge—it made no difference. You rose out of a ship's blind belly and its master's spine did the thinking for him. Up. Away. Climb for the sun. The whole trade was built on that reflex, the way a net was built on the habits of herring.

And this fish was swimming down the line at him. Bow-first, engines flaring blue-white at the stern, growing in the forward glass with a speed that made the rangefinder's numbers blur.

Draake felt the grin spread around the pipe stem before he knew it was coming.

"Well," he said, to the bridge at large. "Nobody told me this one had teeth."

The Partner's bow lit up.

He didn't hear the salvo—at that range, the flashes arrived long before the sound—but he saw the results. Down the lattice, two ships of the leading tier simply stopped. No fireballs. No breaking hulls. The Grave Levy and the Bride of Coin, both wing-second cruisers, both dead in the air—engines dark, guns silent, drifting off formation like men shot cleanly through the knee. Whoever was laying those guns had picked out two engine blocks from five kilometres away, in a dive, and switched them off.

That wasn't gunnery. That was surgery.

"MAGES!" Draake's bellow filled the bridge and went out through the lattice. "Forward screens, every wing—shield the bows and keep climbing! CLIMB, you dogs, the fish is coming to you!"

Along the formation, light bloomed. Wing-mages on a hundred foredecks flung their arms skyward, and panes of pale gold flared into being ahead of the leading tiers, overlapping, hardening—a roof of shieldwork between the fleet and the diving warship.

Draake ran the arithmetic. Nine hundred and ninety-eight. The number barely noticed the loss. Arithmetic like that didn't lose to marksmanship, however pretty.

"CHARGE!"

Every gun that would bear opened up.

The sky between the fleets turned to iron. A thousand hulls' worth of shot converged on a single point, and the Partner's bow vanished—swallowed whole in smoke and shield-flare and the stacked thunder of a fleet's full throat. The cloud of it hung in the air like a second weather system. Somewhere on the gun decks below Draake's boots, a cheer started—

—and died in men's chests, because the Partner came through the smoke.

Not limping. Not burning. Unmarked. It came out of the wreck of their best broadside the way a ship comes out of weather, paint barely scorched, guns already speaking again, and it had not slowed at all.

"More speed!" Draake heard himself shout. "Close and grapple! Get boarders on her before she—"

The dive line flattened.

He saw it in the space of a breath: the Partner wasn't diving past them to run for open sky. Wasn't heeling to present a broadside for an honest gunnery duel. Wasn't doing any of the things a warship did. Her prow had settled onto a single fixed point, and the point was the Carrion Crown.

"She's ramming—" The helmsman's voice cracked. "Captain, she means to RAM us!"

"HARD A-STARBOARD! ALL ENGINES!"

The Crown heeled. The deck pitched hard over; men grabbed stanchions and gun tackles and each other; Vess's crystal array went sliding against its bolts. The Partner filled the forward glass—filled the sky—a cliff of gunmetal falling out of the heavens, close enough now that Draake could see the rivets, the gun ports, the absurd, pristine gleam of her—

—and she went past. So close her engine wash shoved the Crown over another ten degrees and blew every signal flag on the mast to rags.

Then, at the last instant, the Partner rolled.

She heeled onto her side mid-plunge and swung her whole flank—half a kilometre of armoured hull—like a club through the Third Wing, which had held its tight boarding spacing one fatal second too long. Draake watched ten ships die in less time than it took to say so. Corvettes folded around her bow-quarter like paper lanterns. A frigate broke its back across her keel line and came apart in two turning halves. The rest were simply swatted—flung out of formation trailing rigging and men and burning air, crashing into their own neighbours as the wing dissolved into a panicked, shoaling scatter.

From the Crown's tilted bridge it looked like nothing men built and sailed. It looked like a pike hitting a bait shoal—one long grey shape gliding through a burst of scattering silver, unhurried, already turning for the next pass.

The lattice had become one continuous scream.

"Grave Levy, Bride of Coin, all of Third Wing—" Vess was reading the tally with both hands braced against her station, voice gone thin. "Captain, that's—we're at nine hundred and eighty-eight—"

The arithmetic still favoured him. Nine hundred and eighty-eight against one. Draake told himself the number, twice, the way a man checks a knot he's tied ten thousand times.

The pipe stem cracked between his teeth.

He was still grinning. He could no longer have said what the grin was for.

But he knew this was going to be fun.

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The impact rang through the Partner's hull for a long three seconds, a deep bronze-bell note that Leon felt in his molars, in the deck, in the magnetic soles clamping him to the foredeck plating. Somewhere below the horizon of the bow, ten ships' worth of debris was still falling.

Then: silence.

Not just on the deck. The entire command channel had gone quiet—crew, knights, spirits, everyone. Even the wind seemed to be waiting. Art stood at the rail with one hand on her sword hilt, staring at the scattering wing below. Ria had frozen mid-crouch. On the portside deck, Brad's mouth was open and had, apparently, opted to stay that way.

Leon closed his eyes. Counted to two.

Sighed.

He keyed the private channel. "Luxion."

"Master." The AI's voice had a texture Leon had never heard from him before. It took a moment to place it.

Contentment.

"Have fun. Not too much fun."

"I do not know what you mean, Master. The manoeuvre was tactically optimal."

"You rolled the ship so you could hit more of them."

"Tactically," Luxion said, "optimal."

Leon pinched the bridge of his nose through the helmet, achieving nothing. "No main guns. Nothing that leaves the atmosphere. And leave enough hulls floating for the tribunals—Erica needs defendants, not debris, plus we could repurpose a lot of these hulls and floating stones."

"Understood. I shall remain merely exceptional." A pause. "The ledger, Master, is becoming a volume."

Leon switched to the command channel. "All units, change of plan. Weapons free—boarding craft, gun platforms, anything flagged with an armour signature. Guarding the Partner is now your second priority."

A beat.

"Second to what?" Brad asked.

"Everything."

Setanta's laughter came rolling down the starboard deck, huge and delighted, and then the spirit simply stepped off the rail into five kilometres of open sky. Art breathed "Mn," and vaulted after him.

Leon walked to the bow rail, unlocked his soles, and jumped.

The wind took him. For three long seconds he simply fell, the battle opening up beneath and around him like a map unrolling—and from outside, at last, he could see what the enemy saw.

The Blackfleet's tiers had broken. What had been a rising cone of disciplined wings was now a vast, disordered shoal, hundreds of hulls turning and re-turning in unison, every ship trying to keep every other ship between itself and the thing in the middle. And in the middle: an empty sphere of air, half a kilometre wide, that no pirate vessel would enter for any bounty ever minted, because the Partner was in it.

She stalked. There was no other word. She drifted through the gap she'd made, engines banked low, deceptively idle—then the drives flared, and she charged, and her batteries spoke in short precise sentences, and another knot of hulls that had bunched together in their panic learnt why bunching was a mistake. She put her shoulder through them and came out the other side turning, unhurried, choosing.

A shark in a school of helpless fish. Far below, along her keel line, a white-and-turquoise spark wove between the grapple craft that were still, gamely, suicidally, attempting the underside approach—Olivia, harvesting.

Leon sighed inside his helmet, and this time let it out slowly.

'Seventeen months building a body I won't let him use. Months of border rotation on suppression fire only. Several thousand offers of orbital bombardment, all declined.' Every intelligence needed a hobby. If tonight burned off even a tenth of the accumulated bloodlust, it would be worth the paperwork.

'Maybe he'll go a whole fortnight without offering to bombard something.'

Probably not.

The fleet wheeled beneath him. Somewhere at its rear, behind the screen of a thousand terrified hulls, a transport full of nightmares was still waiting for its moment, and the moment was coming whether it liked the shape of the battle or not.

Leon spread his arms into the fall. His circuits opened, one after another, heat threading down his spine and out along his limbs, and the prana came flooding up to meet it. The first line was already waiting on his tongue.

"I am the bone of my sword."

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End

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