Zanma heard footsteps, and felt several presences rapidly approaching. It seemed that his unintentional ego projection had waned enough for his own allies to think it safe to approach him now. Briefly, the urge of sleep washed over him, his eyes wanted to cross of their own volition, but he fought it off. As he sat, leaning against the wall, the face of a man he recognized entered his field of vision. It was a rugged, yet youthful man, with a white mustache and chin beard, and a gleaming bald head; the Boatswain, one of the Captain’s sons. Zanma had enjoyed speaking with him, yet had never learned his name, and neither had he learned Zanma’s name. Zanma thought of him merely as “the First Son.” Right behind him was the Quartermaster, who looked nearly the same, but was less muscled, had only a pencil mustache, and an eyepatch-shaped synthetic replacement for his left eye, a glorified sensor-plug for the empty socket. The Second Son.
“Puppetmaster, puppetmaster — stay awake, bastard. Are you alright? Can you still fight? I shan’t lie, I doubt my father will be able to drive off the pirates’ captain by himself,” the First Son said.
Zanma shook his head, blinking as he purposely struck his head against the wall to drive off the spectre of sleep. Stars swam through his vision, and Gunner A’s upper body fell limp, but he pulled it back and held it together.
“Ugh… I’ve lost a great deal of blood. Bring me a biogel infusion, if you would,” he said. Having cooled off their weapons, Gunner A and Gunner B approached the edge, blasting full send at the boarding craft, considering that it would reach the Etsutensoku long before the accelerator rifles could overheat even at full-output.
The rugged sailor’s eyes darted across the many splotches of blue ichor surrounding Zanma, and he simply nodded to one of his subordinates. That was enough to send the other man sprinting down the stairs. Meanwhile, Zanma glimpsed several other sailors sprinting out past the superstructure, shooting at the boarding craft while others looted the Tilters’ particle smashers, despite having their own.
“One more thing… Send two — no, three — men down to my workshop. There’s a puppet I need, but I can’t quite reach it from there. It’s the Starving Tengu. I’ll know when it’s close enough. Carter, you know where it is,” Zanma added. Carter, a diminutive and silent man, the ship’s general surgeon-technician, nodded. He was the only person besides the Captain that Zanma had allowed in his workshop. Needing no prompting from their superiors, the last two regular sailors followed after Carter, leaving only the Boatswain and Quartermaster by Zanma’s side. The puppet the sailors knew as the “Starving Tengu,” whose true name was the Wurger, was light enough for one strong man to carry, but Zanma wanted to be absolutely certain it got here in time. It was his lifeline, after all. He formed a thread, following the trio using it, as far as it would go; it reached the stair landing at the gunnery deck before he could extend it no further.
For now, until the second boarding party would make contact, silence fell over the Etsutensoku. It wouldn’t last long, not even with the crew and his Gunners firing on the boarding craft, but it bought some time. The small boat was both too nimble and too resilient to sink before it reached the Etsutensoku, doubly so with the pirate captain just standing at the prow, soaking up much of the gunfire like a living wall. Let alone whatever he had for armor, the gunfire didn’t even pierce the enormous coat that hung from his shoulders and concealed his form. His head, too, was hidden from this angle, by what looked like a wide-brimmed hat made from a blood-sea crustacean’s shell. Considering that, Zanma assigned him the nickname Shellhead, to distinguish him from the Etsutensoku’s own “Captain.” It had never occurred to him to ask the Captain’s actual name.
Soon enough, Shellhead's three bodyguards began shooting back, wielding their own accelerator rifles. Only, a sound like hammer striking anvil rang out, followed by a thunderclap, a thin trail of smoke drawing the path of the rocket-assisted bullet. Killed in a single shot, one of the bodyguards slumped over; a stream of pinkish-red liquid gore gushed from the hole in his helmet’s forehead as he fell over the edge and vanished beneath the waves. It was none other than the Captain who had killed him. Another of Shellhead’s guards leaned out to take a shot, only for Shellhead to reach out an arm, catching the next shot that would have killed the man with his own… Shell. There was a huge, long-bladed pincer in place of his right forearm, its cutting edges glistening pearlescent. It dawned on Zanma what kind of evolver Shellhead was: An Eater, one who seeks evolution through mutation and other such gradual change, named for the crudest version of that discipline, that being the direct consumption of mutagenic things — such as certain organs from blood-sea beasts. That hat was not a hat at all, it was part of his own head.
Unlike with the first killshot, the second failed to penetrate. The bullet embedded into the shell, but it clearly didn’t cause serious damage. Zanma couldn’t help but smirk to himself. Armor plating was fantastic when you had it, but a nightmare when the enemy had it, so it was natural that every side would seek means to defeat it. At the lower strata of evolver-on-evolver combat, simply being bigger, heavier, and having more effective armor mass could decide the entire battle before it even began. A weapon that worked well against both armored and unarmored targets was, therefore, the ideal.
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Zanma had been taught this, time and time again, he had been made to realize it through bouts against the other students, and had, thus, been prepared to fight near-peer adversaries long before he ever faced a real life-or-death evolver battle.
A sailor sprinted up the stairs, hauling two objects. A tall canister of what Zanma had requested, and a second, much smaller canister of something he hadn’t. The first was a liter of “biogel,” a pale orange, viscous liquid, while the second was around 200ml of shimmering royal blue, nothing other than the Etsutensoku’s own ichor.
Considering the biogel's hue, it was likely the best they had onboard. Not the best Zanma had had by far, but good enough to help counter his blood loss. Once consumed, the biogel would take orders from his body as soldiers would from their general, rapidly absorbing into the body and self-transmuting into whatever was necessary, within the limits of its capability. Though it had numerous limitations, biogel was exceedingly effective at replacing lost blood and other bodily fluids.
The ichor was another story. He looked at it, then at the man who had brought it, and flatly said: “Why did you bring this? I am not one of the crew, it’s poison to me."
“Why would my noble vessel poison one who has put up his life to defend it, pray tell? An honored passenger whom we ought to protect, no less?!” came the Captain’s booming voice from above. Ah. Zanma had forgotten that this was the Captain’s turf, and even unplugged, he retained some awareness of the goings-on aboard the vessel. Overhearing Zanma and then issuing orders through the speaking-tubes was nothing.
This substance, the ichor of a shipbeast, was effectively “still alive.” Despite not coursing through the creature, the shipbeast retained some control over it, just as the Captain retained a connection with the ship even when not plugged in. Were the ichor to be taken off the ship altogether, it would simply decompose into corrosive slurry, indistinguishable from the waters of the blood-sea. Zanma had intended to simply inject himself with the biogel, seeing as he didn’t have the time to drink it and wait for it to absorb through the stomach, but this shipbeast-blood changed things. Depending on the age, health, and other characteristics of a shipbeast, consuming its ichor in the long-term could extend one’s lifespan, enhance one’s natural abilities, and even induce evolutionary mutations. For Zanma, with this one-time usage, he wagered it would just enhance the biogel’s restorative properties, allowing it to take effect faster.
“Alright, mix it,” he nodded to the sailor who had brought the canisters. He had no reason to not trust the Captain. With just a few shakes, the blue and orange transformed into a maroon, glittering liquid. Upturning the canister and swirling it to form a vortex, Zanma downed its contents in the span of a few seconds. The effects were nearly instantaneous, taking hold in the form of a pleasant cooling sensation that spread from his stomach and into his extremities, washing away the soreness and exhaustion that had taken hold of him. While his use of Castigate had lessened the effects of his poisoning, it had left him drained, perhaps at 30% of his usual capabilities. With this, he instantly felt restored to around 50%. Still not great, but not terrible. Not outright crippled, like he had been thus far.
The young puppetmaster stood up, surveying his surroundings. For the second time today, he rolled his neck and stretched his hands, popping the joints of his fingers. The boarding craft was out of sight, obscured by the Etsutensoku’s hull. The crewmen had backed off from the edge, leaving only his Gunners to continue firing on the small boat. Through the Gunners’ sensors, Zanma could see that, while he had been distracted, the Captain had drawn a small constellation of embedded bullets on Shellhead’s head. He willed the Gunners to back off as well, and just in time, as Gunner A nearly lost its head to a smasher gun shot from below. It was hard for him not to sense Shellhead’s ascent along the side of the vessel; the man’s bioenergy boiled and bubbled inside him with the threat of imminent destruction, but it was, at the same time, not quite dense enough.
Shellhead dragged himself aboard with unreasonable dexterity for his huge frame. His bodyguards followed closely behind him, but, somewhat pathetically, they just hid behind his bulk. Perhaps realizing that they wouldn’t be able to support him, and would just end up meeting their own ends sooner rather than later, the enormous pirate showed a surprisingly reasonable side, ordering them to return to the pirate ship and wait for him.
Finally, Zanma got a good look at Shellhead. The giant man was in fact shorter than the Captain, but much, much wider, carrying a body mass equal to two, if not three of the Etsutensoku’s Captain. He wore a heavy and thick armored coat, but he pulled it from himself in a single motion, casting it aside in some sort of display, a display that… Wasn’t aimed at Zanma, as far as he could tell. Under the coat, there was no other clothing, armor, or human skin. Just interlocking plates of crustacean shell and strange, fibrous tissue binding it together. The only resemblance to the human form that persisted was the fact his plates were shaped and arranged in a rough approximation of a human, that is to say he had distinct “pec plates” and “ab plates” and so on. While his right arm possessed long, sword-like pincer claws, his left arm was a burnished, dull metal from the elbow down, heavy and disproportionate, but very much human-shaped. Zanma wondered if Shellhead had to get someone to chop the left pincer off to replace it with something functional, or if his forearm had been replaced before his crustacean mutations.
Six crab-legs protruded from the sides of his torso, forming a shape like a ribcage, but otherwise useless. His head was the strangest, because it was more like two heads — he had the head of a man, armored in chitin, but very much the head of a man, including a mouth with crab-like appendages on the sides, a nose, and eyes with strange patterns in place of irises. But the top half of his head, what Zanma had mistaken for a hat, was the head of a crab, stacked on top, with its own crab-like mouth and eyes on stalks. It was a truly bizarre sight, bizarre enough that Zanma found it a bit difficult to take him seriously.
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