Chapter Eighty-Eight: Lin Qi’s First Naval Battle

“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Lin Qi stood on the stern deck with a crowd of sailors, pointing at the Odin dragon boats that were chasing them and hurling curses at the top of his lungs. Cold sweat kept beading on his forehead; he was truly tense to the limit.

Even with Long Cheng on board, he had only barely escaped from the encirclement of the Odin Sacred Guard. These religious madmen from the Five Great Island Chains and the Odin Icefield were even more fanatical, more extreme, and more deranged than the churches of the western continent. To fight them was a nightmare for anyone.

Especially since there were four temple mages aboard those four ships.

No one knew how Long Cheng had managed to kill a temple mage under the protection of the Odin Sacred Guard, but only the people of the western continent understood how terrifying these temple mages were. Though physically frail, they could command wind and rain, unleash earthfire and thunder, bring down plagues and viruses, create all manner of vicious poisons, and control countless venomous insects and savage beasts. They called themselves the incarnations of all living things; they were beings suspended between human and ghost.

They were a race of inhuman beings. A single temple mage might still be killed by force, but four of them working in concert? Unless an army was sent to wipe them out, there was no way to eradicate them.

Yet Long Cheng stood at the stern rail with boundless boldness, a pure-steel spear in hand, pointing at the approaching dragon boats and shouting, “Come then! Today I will let you see the might of Long Cheng, the Blood Spirit who slaughtered a city! Hahaha, a bunch of worthless mongrels, come on, come on!”

He laughed with such delight, so brilliantly, that Lin Qi was grinding his eyes in exasperation, wondering whether he should kick Long Cheng in the back and send him into the water so the Odin Sacred Guard could swarm him, buying time to shield their own retreat. But after careful thought, he concluded Long Cheng was far too strong; if he kicked him overboard, he might end up taking the backlash first. Too risky.

With a bitter smile, Lin Qi looked up at the black pirate flag on the mast and waved his hand, shouting, “Prepare the catapults! Lower the black flag, raise the Durnulk Fisheries Guild banner, raise the imperial flag, raise the distress signal! Send it out and see whether there are any imperial naval patrol ships nearby. Best case, a few scapegoats will be here to help us block these bastards!”

The sailors moved with astonishing speed. The huge pirate flag was lowered, and the Durnulk Fisheries Guild banner, white with blue wave patterns and bearing a fishhook and a giant tuna, along with the tricolor rooster-and-thistle flag of the Gallic Empire, flew high atop the mast.

Below the two great flags hung a long string of blood-red maritime warning distress pennants, the highest-level alert signal used on the western continent. If there were any regular naval vessels of a western country nearby, then once they saw this distress signal, they were obliged to render all possible assistance.

Lucky Joe Arjan even stepped out of the bridge himself and aimed an iron tube as thick as a human arm at the sky. With three dull booms, three blood-red fire beads, each the size of a human head, shot into the air, tore through a patch of pale gray cloud high above, and burst into three red fireballs dozens of meters across. The muffled explosions spread far into the distance, and the blood-red light was clearly visible for hundreds of miles.

This was also an extremely high-level distress signal. In western military signaling, three consecutive blood-red flares of this kind meant an invasion by an enemy force of ten thousand or more; all nearby naval vessels had to rush to the scene immediately to intercept, and all land forces had to prepare for battle. Although there were only a little over a thousand foreigners aboard the four dragon boats before them, they were Odin Sacred Guards, and their fighting strength was far beyond that of an ordinary army of ten thousand.

As the great sea wheel kept flying signal flags and sending out emergency signals, the four dragon boats behind them drew closer still. With a long cry, countless narrow oars suddenly extended from both sides of the boats. Amid the rhythmic chanting, the rowers inside moved in perfect unison, and the four dragon boats gained another threefold burst of speed.

In just a few breaths, the largest dragon boat was less than fifty meters from the great sea wheel.

Standing at the center of the big dragon boat was the drummer: a giant three meters tall with blue-gray skin. He set down his bone mallet and walked slowly toward the prow. At such close range, everyone could see clearly that he wore nothing but a strip of beast hide around his loins, with vast expanses of skin exposed. Beneath that blue-gray skin lay slabs of muscle so powerful they seemed almost inhuman—those were not muscles a human body could possess, but lines and planes as hard and exact as granite weathered by tens of thousands of years of wind and rain.

“Damn it, a stone titan!” Lin Qi groaned. Then he barked sharply, “Catapults, smash this bastard to death!”

Six small catapults, each as tall as a man, had their long arms hauled back by the sailors with all their strength, their sinew winches groaning and creaking. Six red-hot iron balls, each the size of a human head, were set into the metal cradles at the ends of the throwing arms. After a slight adjustment of angle, and with Lin Qi’s order, the catapult arms snapped upward with a series of thuds, hurling the six glowing iron spheres through the air at searing speed.

From fifty meters away, the standard-issue catapults taken directly from the imperial armory were remarkably accurate. Three of the iron balls veered off by more than a meter, skimming the dragon boat’s hull and plunging into the sea, where they kicked up three pillars of white steam. Of the remaining three, one smashed into the prow of the great dragon boat and shattered the lifelike carved dragon head to pieces. The other two struck, one into the cabin and the other into the stone titan’s chest.

The iron ball that flew into the cabin smashed a large chunk of the deck apart, then quickly burned away a great section of the planking before dropping into the lower hold. But the Odin Sacred Guard truly lived up to the name of religious madmen: a burly rower howled and leaped into the cabin, and after a short while he crawled back out clutching the red-hot iron ball, then jumped headfirst into the seawater. The iron ball had burned open his chest in a bloody mess, and even from fifty meters away everyone could hear the horrifying sizzle of flesh and fat.

“You idiots, why don’t they just douse the iron ball with seawater?” Long Cheng shouted, cursing loudly.

Lin Qi’s expression, however, was dark as night. Dousing a red-hot iron ball with seawater was the proper method of sea battle in the western continent. But if they chose proper methods, how could they still be called the Odin Sacred Guard? For this bunch of religious lunatics, the only fitting thing was for a living man to grab the red-hot iron ball and leap into the sea. That was the conduct befitting the Odin Sacred Guard.

The iron ball that struck the stone titan’s chest had likewise failed to do much damage. That powerful body merely swept a great hand and smashed the heavy, red-hot iron sphere into the water. When the ball struck his arm, it even sparked.

Even Long Cheng could not help drawing in a sharp breath, his face changing in shock as he shook his head.

Lin Qi tightened his grip on the cleaver and muttered, “Fine, fine. There’s no getting away. We’ll have to fight you bastards after all.”

He raised the blade and shouted, “Brothers, get ready to kill men! The imperial military is offering a bounty: five hundred gold coins for one Odin Sacred Guard head! There are hundreds of thousands of gold coins waiting for us here!”

The sailors roared in unison, and their morale surged at once.