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Bloody Revelations     Not much has changed since locating Bluehaver a few days back. In this strange corner of the western ocean, where the wind never seems to blow and the algal weeds are thicker than the water, no traffic that comes through isn't the Lintha, and the fleet (that has argued over the past few days mostly to stay occupied, and decided to call itself the black-gold sea dragon fleet) has already located itself far from where it'll be seen by those. Since one ship is crewed by zombies and ghosts, and two are tied to one that is essentially a carrier barely halfway through its tour, supplies aren't an issue. Given only one sorcerer, they can only perform reconnaissance twice a day or so, so the information on the Lintha's activity isn't completely up to date, but it also isn't terribly exciting either.

    As assessed before, only the south and east sides of Bluehaven's perimeter accept ships. The safe paths they take are incredibly difficult to plot out, even with demon birds lucky enough to follow the largest of ships, expressed to be slave galleys coming fresh from the southwest shores. The fleet believes they might have something of an idea, but they're still waiting for the last of the reinforcements, which should supposedly arrive in the morning, not long from now. Moving a battlefleet through those narrow passages in single file would be ridiculous anyways, so they plan on heavy, long distance bombardment, and a wall of triremes to plough the path wider, so far.

    The number of ships docked at Bluehaven hasn't changed much. The last two days have never seen the same ship twice, making for some worry about the true size of the Family's total assets, but the idea is to burn their nest to the ground while the bulk are away anyways. As predicted, the sea demons penned up are for towing the ships in and out, hitched and exchanged like horses for carriages. It's in a lull of general activity, when the current band of lookouts is due to be swapped out in an hour (and thus most tired), that the Elite specialists who offered to go inside are told to get on with it.

    Nobody has any clue /how/ exactly they plan on it, but they've had several days to scope the place out by now, and there isn't time enough to be deliberating over it. Morning won't hold off forever, and both captains are eager to get it over with.
Ryu     Naturally, this means Ryu approaches from the air, and invisibly. He isn't a great planner or team player, but he isn't about to fight the whole of the Lintha on his lonesome. So he descends into the mass of ships at a decent clip and comes to a landing without smashing through the ship itself. Then he begins hopping from spot to spot, taking advantage of his general strength and his incredible speed to quickly scout out key targets. This makes his easy to spot even with his invisibility, as the air friction makes a strange warping effect around him when he moves too fast, or when he stops too abruptly.

    Ryu is seeking one thing: Key assets the Lintha have in storage, such as prisoners they have locked up. His secondary goal is to see how they respond to unusual invaders poking around their home, for the purpose of a main assault later on. He's got a handheld device with him to help map out and take pictures of anything he finds. He is explicitly avoiding getting into any fights, and he may be fast enough to avoid even the most tricky Lintha. He knows they like capture nets, now, so he's taking zig-zagging, chaotic paths.
Ryouma Sakamoto     In the darkness of night, it would be hard to notice that the waters grow darker, and shift from murky green to black. Perhaps, entirely too late, the more perceptive of the Lintha would notice the stars no longer reflect on the water, moments before waves grow hostile.

    There was no chant - no hamfisted display of his ability to activate a Noble Phantasm, as it had already been activated.

    All there was, was an enormous black and red sea serpent, with front and rear limbs more reminiscent of a dragon with no wings to show for it. It breaks the surface of the water from deep below, attempting to swallow the contents of one of the demon pens whole as it does so.

    There's a man attached to the sea serpent, in a white Japanese navy uniform. Ryouma clings to Oryou's... fur? Hair? Shadow tentacles? It's hard to tell, but he seems pretty comfortable on the beast. He has his revolver out in his free hand.

    "Well, I hope that's enough of a distraction for them," Ryouma muses, all the while Oryou... chomps, at anything she can get her maw around.

    What's more, the dark waters start corroding the ships and structures away. On the living, and on the demons and the elementals, the effect seems to be trying to burn away their Essence reserves.
Finna     The Jubilant Gale, presumably an archer, has decided to be one of those scouts. The only trouble is, she's gone missing instead of making any obvious dives or attempting to sneak over the flotsam and jetsam in the tainted waters.

    Well. Somehow, the Jubilant Gale has departed, and it's highly unlikely anyone saw her do said departing.

    It's even more unlikely that anyone's going to see her arriving either. A Northern Pygmy Owl - certainly not a local bird, but so dark against the night sky that it will be hard as hell to spot anyways - soars silently over the waves. This isn't its proper environment at all. Either way, it's soaring in a somewhat zigzaggy fashion towards and over Bluehaven.

    Very few people ever LOOK UP, and even fewer can make out DETAILS of dark things against the night sky, and she's hoping that camouflage is in her favor until she can find a place to land and shift into something more typical. Like a common rat.
Empty Tidings Empty Tidings has no problem with getting her feet wet in the interests of murdering the everloving crap out of some Lintha. She's overboard the instant the team is ready and the bargain is struck. The Realm gets treated to rumors of a watery swirl rising up when she makes an oath with those who need to be able to traverse the sea, and the 'lost egg' theory gains more traction moments after she leaves the ship. So it goes.

The water isn't a problem for her. She travels in clothes of deep blue and black, and none of it seems to get wet while she silently jets along through the perimeter. She's not aiming to go in closest to that spit of land the Lintha have, but somewhere in the vicinity; she wants to inspect that before they go into the city-that-floats and scour the place for their targets. If she and Eye can catch a couple Lintha unawares, so much the better. He's /very/ good at extracting information, after all.

Wreckage is something she can navigate with ease. All she has to do is keep her eyes and ears open for things that might be lurking in it. It's a good thing the gloom of the depths don't seem to trouble her sight at all, either.
Gawain Gawain is among the group. When Empty Tidings makes her oath, he promises to help slay the Lintha, because he needs her advantage. And when Gawain makes a promise, he keeps it. Leaping into the water and swimming through it at high-speeds thanks to Tiding's boon, Gawain sticks close towards the others moving through the water at first, trying to scout ahead. He's looking for belltowers, so he can take out alarms before they can sound the entire fleet, and be a big distraction himself.

While moving, Gawain looks for an entry point, trying to find the positions of one of the bell towers. When he does, he moves to bound out of the water, summoning Excalibur Galatine and lifting it into the air, setting off the jet boosters. They'll give him a short amount of air, long enough to try and reach a belltower and slice through any guards in the way. Though if he gets close enough, he does speak to them, because that is who he.

"I am Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun. Prepare yourself!"
Tomoe So the time has come to go for Bluehaver, she knows the plan she's going to help bust the demons lose so they can rampage she has to, however, sneak in which could be somewhat of a problem but well this is a commando raid after all. She's moved aid Ryouma and Oryou with the whole demon thing. It was direct she could make a lot of noise and she was standing there looking like some Elf Crusader standing there, she spreads out her wings and will take flight and will start to train down both fire and light spells on the demons or anything that looks too valuable. This is just the opening diversion as she shouts out.

"Come and face your Kharma!"

She hopes to try and get their attention to distract them for everyone else. she's also happy to be working with Ryouma and Oryou. She keeps her focus as she rains the spells down on demons also on anything that might be holding them in place and hopefully help the ones who have not been eaten freak out and stampede.
All-Seeing Eye      Eye follows along with Tidings, as was the plan. Naturally, he requires very little cajoling to promise to kill the Lintha. He sheds his longcoat, letting it fall upon the deck and revealing the utilitarian grey fatigues beneath. Every once in a while, he does choose form over function. Remember this day, for another might not come for a long time.

     He shares Tidings' interest in the island, and thanks to her abilities, he also shares her ease of motion through the water. As the two of them draw nearer to the island, he removes his Mobile Sensory Drone and sends it through the water. The artificial optic nerves of the eye drone flex like the tendrils of a squid in motion, carrying it to the shore one coordinated pulse at a time. In the darkness, its tiny form eventually peeks above the water before crawling ashore.

     The place had the appearance of a demesne from afar, and the demon's findings on their last visit seemed to show cargo moving between the city and the small island. If he can, Eye will have the drone try and see the reason for those frequent transfers, while he waits beneath the water's surface. He's hoping the island will be home to some important part of Bluehaven's chain of command.
Bloody Revelations     Scooting under the water, the two Exalted find that the labyrinth of broken ships extends almost all the way to the sea floor. The wicked wreckage that floats at the surface is only a small fraction of the ships that have once been a part of it, long since rotted through and slowly sunk to the bottom, such that they are nearly a solid wall top to bottom, plastered together with strange coral They have to swim between the two halves, dead ships looming from above and menacing from below, avoiding the occasional roaming giant shark. On their way, they pass at a distance by a massive underwater structure of some sort that appears to have been built deliberately, not in Bluehaving proper, but in a dead end in the labyrinth surrounding it.

    When they arrive at the island itself, they find it barely touched by night. A ring of ships is moored around it, but not many. Two vessels as old as the First Age, gleaming with hulls of the magical materials, are beached upon it. The island itself is far too small to use as any sort of base, however. They could swim around it in an hour, even at normal speed. Its sands are oddly bleached, more grey and over-exposed than white, and all the vegetation atop it is some shade of blue or purple, though most of it seems to be withering and covering the ground with dead vegetable matter. Maybe it's seasonal?

    The boats that haven't come back are loaded down mostly with what appears to be fruits, gourds, fibres, bones, shells, and similar resources that would be a waste not to harvest with an island right there, but one peak under the water makes it look as if a lot more of the island was once above the water; there are layers of wooden docks like markers along the submerged beach, each abandoned in sequence over many decades.

    The thought of it being a demesne, especially one that's starting to dry up, mostly checks out, except there's no trace of water or earth Essence to be read from it. The Essence to be found is faint. Rotten. Poisonous. Like the gas escaping the bloated carcass of a beached whale. It seems no Lintha attends the island by night, though there are some scattered torches still left on.
Bloody Revelations     With no ships having crossed the horizon, and within the safe haven of their nearly impossible to find floating city, the Lintha are understandably underprepared for suddenly being assaulted. It is an eventuality that they had obviously prepared for at some point in the past, being far from stupid, but a handful of effectively Exalted all appearing at once, without even one vessel, is not a well-rehearsed contingency plan. Not since before the Usurpation.

    Gawain leaps the side with ease, cutting down a quartet of lookouts the instant they confusedly draw their swords. One makes for -exactly as Ryouma had predicted- a heavy brass bell hung off a wooden scaffold, immediately leading Gawain to it. He can do whatever he likes with it, though 'disabling it for the sake of staying quiet' is obviously pointless when the others start.

    Ryu barely has time to scout the place even at his absurd speed, thankfully taken as a trick of the eye by tired lookouts (as Captain Darktide had predicted) until they bring out a sorcerer under suspicion of it being a dematerialized sea spirit. By the time they start shooting arrows at him on principle, even not being sure what they're aiming at in the dark, Ryu has ascertained something relieving, but quite odd: there are no prisoners or slaves -at least not obvious ones- to be seen. Whether they're all being held somewhere else, or whether it's merely security not to let people you plan to sell across the world lay eyes upon your secret base, it works out about the same.

    Oryou is of course when things get really serious really fast. A massive, ocean-going dragon-serpent is something that is impossible not to note, especially when one of the demon pens turns into a boiling cauldron of thrashing teeth and fins, swiftly bubbling with thick, green blood. The hideous aquatic beasts are all conveniently bottled up like fish in a barrel for Oryou to bust through the gate below, swim up from underneath, and rip into like a hunting orca, making the job of chomping most of them at once extremely easy. When she rears out of the water, that's when the huge alarm bells start spreading their awful clanging, and watch fires blaze to life to illuminate the maze-like walkways of the floating city to combat spec.

    Lintha stay to pick up harpoons, slings, and wicked, laminated bows from the nearest handy racks, lobbing spears and knives as well as arrows and barbs at the rearing sea serpent, but they're quickly forced to flee as the docks rot and burn away beneath them spreading shadows like an oil slick through the waves that start to cause the ships moored nearby to crumble and sink. Spreading outwards like a ripple, actual Lintha soldiers/pirates (there isn't really a difference) swarm in. Several crew the mounted weapons that were left intact on the surrounding anchored ship-structures, firing more significant ballista bolts and stone grapeshot. A couple of spikes of magical energy flare up elsewhere, as the sorcerers are roused.
Bloody Revelations     The Lintha are just about fully armed when Tomoe flies over the edge, albeit focused entirely inward, as the obvious intruder is a beast from below, rather than an assault from without. Light blasts stand out extremely well in the dark, immediately making her the target of scores of archers, having ample numbers of massively over-target just this one flier. Though they're individually quite accurate and speedy, that doesn't matter quite so much in the face of just how many shafts are flying at her, creating an aerial carpet of pointed arrowheads, many poisoned, which she will be hard pressed not to fly into. She does at least have a vantage point from which she can shoot just about any given alarm, signal fire, or weapon emplacement, for as long as she can stay there.

    By comparison, Finna is invisible. Nobody is looking for birds with all of this happening, and especially not one they can barely see. An owl also has the benefit of essentially silent flying, and she has her pick of places to settle down and morph into a rat. Sure, it's the middle of the ocean, but ships are notorious for rats, and there's clearly plenty of food to eat here. She'll run into other rats before she does her first Lintha.
Ryouma Sakamoto     It's a lot of punishment to be taking all at once, even for Oryou. Countless axes, knives and harpoons fly - some are swatted away from her hair-like tentacles, some bounce off her body like it's made of impenetrable steel, but the occasional aim of an experienced Lintha can pierce Oryou's hide, drawing hints of black and red blood that taints the water like the shadows she'd produced already have.

    Oryou opens her mouth wide, and gathering blue and black flames start being visible, interrupted momentarily by bolts of magic that slam into her and cause her to pause.

    Ryouma squints, trying to find the sorcerers. When the next volley comes, he puts himself between the bolts and Oryou. They strike against a field around him, like transparent blue glass that almost shatters under fire. The bolts hit him, but seem to cause him much less knockback than they did Oryou.

    "How troublesome. Oryou, you can handle the beasts and the pirates, I'll handle the spellcasters," Ryouma tells her, as he hops off his mount and onto the wooden planks below.

    "Sure, but don't blame Oryou if she scores higher than Ryouma," the dragon answers, as she suddenly unleashes a cone of blue-black fire on one of the decks with those nasty ballistas on them, intending to burn weapons and crew together.

    "Of course, of course," Ryouma smiles.

    His own approach is a bit less showy, but his revolver lets off a single, shining blue shot towards the source of one of the energy bolts. He needs to close the distance to be effective, but a few magical shots should keep the sorcerers on their toes while he runs.
Ryu     With a lack of innocents to worry about, Ryu breathes a sigh of relief. He carefully avoids getting struck directly by the variety of ranged weapons fired at his indistinct silhouette while he confirms that this is the case, but once he does, and he can see and hear the chaos building elsewhere... Well, that means he's done being sneaky. He takes to the sky, flying high, high, high up into the air.

    Then he flits his wings, a distant point of light on the night sky. A thin line of light would mark his trajectory as he aims for a fragile wooden structure and just tries to slam into it at several times the speed of sound. They would see it several seconds before they heard it. First, a spray of debris like cannon shot fired straight down through the crashed ships, a spray of water from the structure being shoved downward with titanic force-- then a blastwave would go outward as the sonic boom further shattered the target he was aiming at with his rather foolhardy tackle. He can regenerate the consequential damage, so he isn't worried!!
Finna     Since nobody's around, Finna stays in bird form for longer than anticipated, deciding to land on one of the ships nearest the walkways. When she does finally land... she instead becomes a cat instead of a rat. A black cat. A cat with claws that gleam oddly when the moonlight reaches them...

    And with this, she goes on a hunt for anything she can just sabotage. Zip lines, weapon racks, anything that can be quietly tossed into the drink or cut down might be a target of opportunity. She doesn't cut loose the ships that make up Bluehaven - that would be way too obvious and time-consuming. The more ropes she can cut that people will NEED later, the better. The more Nice Things that end up falling into the sea, the better! (or just Stolen...)
Gawain As Gawain slashes through the Lintha, he realizes disabling the bell is pointless, and ringing it would just draw attention to him meaninglessly. At the very least, some of the lookout, able-bodied Lintha, are down and unable to spy on Tidings and their stealthier allies. For now, though, Gawain sees a different issue - Tomoe's being focused down on by archers. As a melee type, he can wade into their crowds while they're distracted with her and slice them down. Gawain fires up the booster again, and moves to leap off the bell tower and dash for their position, setting Galatine alight in the process. The blazing holy fire moves to try and slice straight into the first archers Gawain can see. They're probably going to start shooting at him...so he speaks up over radio, too.

<"Tomoe! Assist me with these archers! We should be able to thin their numbers a fair amount!">
Empty Tidings Empty Tidings finds navigating the place more troublesome than she thought. Eventually, she finds a path, and then only has to manhandle a little bit of huge debris to get through. She helpfully holds the 'door' for Eye, who might be marginally less deft at this swimming through the air-like water thing than she is.

The island is another matter. "Smells like the underworld," Tidings murmurs. "Perhaps a place for their ancestors. The ghosts and the dead we encountered." She sees the stuff left there. "Offerings," she says, hazarding a guess. "Which means that we should move on." Back into the water. She's heading for Bluehaven proper. That underwater structure looked promising, but she's pretty sure she's going to be looking for the most 'Lintha-y' place: the most richly appointed, in the nicest shape, maybe the highest up. If she sees any hurrying Lintha near their path, Tidings will snake the rearmost of them off dry land and hold them still for Eye to forcibly interrogate. A map of the place would be nice.
Bloody Revelations     Giant sea monsters are one thing, but overtly extremely powerful ones are something worthy of an even further escalated response. Considering this area is supposedly completely free of divine interference, the question of /what Oryou is/ exactly must be on many, many minds right now, but it's one they have little luxury to contemplate.

    When the first and second rounds don't do all that much to the 'dragon' with scales of steel, the Lintha smart enough to run do so the moment she unleashes her breath weapon. As impressive as Bluehaven is, most of it is made of wood. It burns. A jet of magical fire from an ancient sea beast is certainly more than enough to overcome fireproofing laquers and basic dampness, and turning her head like a flamethrower is sufficient to turn every ship around her, both moored and permanently anchored, into a flaming, sinking wreck. The space around Oryou for a quarter kilometer now is so much advancing fire, crumbling ash, and water exposed by burning weeds.

    Ryouma can get a good idea of where the blasts came from just by eye. When he fires back, the distance is still sufficient enough to make it difficult to tell whether he'd hit, but a subsequence round immediately causes a bright flare of emerald magic --a defensive flash of countermagic to disperse the power of his magical gunshot. It may have saved a sorcerer temporarily, but it tells him exactly where to close in. Unsteady planks, swinging ropes, and hooked chains are his fastest approach, where he will begin to run into the field where archers and slingers are more concerned with shooting him than just Oryou, still further away.

    He arrives to find a conclave of heavily tattooed and pierced, shirtless swordsmen escorting who appears to be a middle aged woman (difficult to tell, given the features of the entire group tend towards silver hair, greenish skin, pointed ears and gills) dressed in thick layers of ritual robes and shell ornaments. They form a protective screen around her as she outright closes her eyes in his presence, focusing her energies as the waters swell up around her, and an advanced guard of scarred veteran men split up and rush him from multiple planks and scaffolds, wielding paired hook-ended blades.

    The ships that actually make up Bluehaven may be flammable, but they're also not especially fragile; pretty much every ship that isn't particularly sturdy has been abandoned to the labyrinth rather than made a building, or else repurposed for piracy if it happens to be very fast. Still, they're not exactly artifact hulls. Ryu hits a lot of wooden surfaces, occasionally shod with iron, that are harder than he'd expect face first, but a dragon/fairie-shaped railgun isn't something they're built to handle, especially from above deck. A choice target punches all the way through an armoury boat, loaded with heavy metal weapons and ammunition, which begins to sink immediately without the Lintha aboard even bothering with the lost cause of trying to bail it, only carrying out what they can.
All-Seeing Eye      "As you say," Eye says. He trusts the woman holding the lifelong grudge against the Lintha to be an expert in matters concerning them. The drone is on its way back to him promptly, replacing the obvious prosthetic which rolled into the socket to take its place. He then follows Tidings towards the 'city' itself. Even when one has the remarkable vision he does, it helps to have an idea of where to go. He seems to have the same idea she does.

     "We need a map," he quietly suggests. "I can get us one, if you can get us a volunteer." The Alchemical's brow momentarily furrows, his golden eyes darkening. "Just... try to avoid the filthy ones, if you can." The memory of being... invaded is still fresh in his mind, and his patience thus far has only been to ensure that his vengeance is suitably thorough. It won't be long, now.

     The Personality Override Spike is in his hand soon enough. With the chaos currently going on abovedecks, he's hoping Tidings will find someone soon. If she's able to do that, he'll drive the spike into the unwilling informant's body as soon as she does, and search their mind for the whereabouts of Bluehaven's presiding authority. Hopefully, the one she gets won't be one of those tainted by this place's warped matron deity.
Bloody Revelations     It's a point of note that none of the bells /adjacent/ to Gawain are ringing either. Either he's hit a main relay, or they use their network in a highly locational way, focusing on the precise location the bells had come from rather than rousing an entire city of probably 10,000 people to full alert, even if only a fraction of those are combat personnel. This happens to be fortuitous when he dives into the fray himself, as he can basically make laps of round circuit decks and platforms, blitzing into each archer group before they even recognize his presence, and mow them down in the order Tomoe circles around drawing their fire. Occasionally, one has the wherewithal to pull a one-shot pistol on him, or get a knife out, but it's basically shooting fish in a barrel at his speed, their distractedness, the time of night, and total chaos.

    It's also beneficial for Finna sneaking around. A cat is more likely to be noticed, but less likely to be stepped on, and better able to climb and jump and balance around the already thoroughly unsteady architecture. Bluehaven is far too large to make a sabotage job of in one night; it would probably take weeks of concerted hit and run efforts to soften it as a whole, but just in the immediate combat area, she has her pick. Ballista strings, cargo ropes, cords holding bundles of ammo or racks of weapons, rigging, safety nets, ziplines and tightropes across high levels; there's no shortage of things to cut. If she plans to be particularly sadistic, she can cut them when Lintha are already using them, sending them toppling many levels down through a lot of criss-crossing planks and chains.

    Doing so close to the advancing line of fire takes a lot of pressure off of Oryou, as reinforcements struggle to get quickly into the fray, and weapons and ammo start to become hard to find. If she feels particularly ambitious, another demon pen is coming up, but it's secured by hard metal locks rather than just tied with ropes.
Ryu     An armory ship? Perfect. Ryu sinks a boatload of ammo and powder, and comes to a halt, woodchips falling from his scales, bruises and scrapes quickly healing themselves. He turns to squint through the water, wings fluttering as the structure begins to sink, then he reaches out a hand and speaks, surprisingly loud and clear, as he casts a spell toward the armory.

    Thanks to Empty Tidings, he can simply ignore the water. And because he can ignore the water, he can abuse the physics water undergoes when something explodes in it.

    "Simoon."

    A great conflagaration explodes in the armory ship, aimed from the point of Ryu's claw from a healthy distance, flames licking over the volatile materials as if it were simply open air, burning wood and staining metal black, blowing debris out of the water at speeds that shouldn't be possible. And because of all of that heat and pressure... well, there's likely to be a very large explosion in a second.
Tomoe The Lintha are fully armed now and Tomoe is well aware she will be a target soon, yet she's going to make sure of what she can before she's now getting shot at by archers. She knows it's coming she pips her own defence spells and will put her shield to use blocking the attacks she can deflect some and avoid others but she is going to get hit she is going to take damage and she's likely going to end up poisoned before this is over too.

She will put a focus on taking out a fires alarm or anyone going after them she'll keep on the move but she's taking hits and she'll get a sign of a poison debuff, oh this is going according to plan. She's not feeling so good but she keeps going, she's a target she's drawing fire and will try to take out what archers she can but she's always going to keep the alarm under wraps as long as possible.
Ryouma Sakamoto     Oryou sinks back into the depths, having run out of targets to either set ablaze or devour. She slithers under the surface, her approach heralded only by darkening water and unsteady waves. Her next target is another set pen full of demons, one of the ones that haven't been released either by the Lintha or Tomoe yet.

    This is a buffet, and she intends to take advantage of it.

    There's nothing new to discover about her. When she breaks the water like an angry, divine orca, it's to sweep as many of the things into her body as she can manage, and to crash back down onto a ship and its unfortunate occupants while at it.

    That sickly green water might have made her sick, but good food can take care of that!

    Ryouma is a far less flashy force, and makes note that the sorcerers seem to be able to counterspell well enough to make magical revolver shots the lesser option. His katana comes out, a flash of steel to cut the arrows coming for him, though one still burrows in his shoulder. He snaps it off, after reholstering his revolver.

    Reaching the sorcerer, and her bodyguards, he barely has time to offer a smile and a greeting before they're upon him. His blade expertly navigates from one hooked blade to another, slicing whenever he gets a chance to - for limbs and grazes, not for necks and heads. That soft heart is always going to be his weakness.

    "I'm terribly sorry, but could I please ask you to just run away? I'm not much in the business of murdred, and I'd really like to think even pirates with your infamy can make the right choice and turn over a new leaf!"

    They probably won't. He just has to try, though.
Bloody Revelations     The underwater mass in the odd corner of the Labyrinth, far from the comings and goings of Bluehaven proper, seems promising, in that it is especially secret and quiet. It doesn't take a genius, much less someone with All-Seeing Eye's titular vision, however, to figure out it's bad news when they get closer. The island may be giving off intense vibes of dying, if not capital D Death Essence, but the huge underwater column turns out to be the true spook zone. Though it isn't radiating power in the same way, even from the outside, the duo can see the mountain of skulls staring back at them, with huge portions of the walls appearing to be fused together bones of countless thousands of dead. It's some kind of submerged sepulchre, no doubt for 'burying' the remains of the dead at sea, at least pure-blooded ones, instead of digging up the island for . . . whatever reason the Lintha would decline to dig holes on an island.

    Snatching a Brother according to the Alchemical's specifications isn't hard though. Those who've pledged their souls to the demonic things beyond are very obvious, dressed and ornamented to fit their station as a symbol of status in this environment fueled by family politics. A generic pirate captain is easy enough for Empty Tidings to leap up and snatch from the walkway, arm-around-throat, and drag him to a depth where he'll just so happen to drown shortly after the mind spike is done with him.

    Empty Tidings' information proves to be legitimate. The Lintha Brother is concerned with the Family's 'great grandmother', the apparently by the long and complicated name Lei Kiangi Lintha Gajui Wari Fan. All of their names are that bad. Considering the scale of chaos happening, the procedure seems to be to obtain orders pertaining to grand strategy from her, considering she supposedly has the authority to order any fleet the Lintha possess, and is tasked with defense of Bluehaven. Apparently, he and the group he was just a part of expect to find her in a midnight meeting with some 'Septian Council' aboard that largest and most heavily networked of ships a mile or so from the current battle line. He gets a good idea of her appearance too: far too tall for being far too old, with a much deeper green hue of skin and frost white hair than the others.
All-Seeing Eye      Eye retracts the mindspike. Just for good measure, he fires a crossbow bolt through the submerged pirate's throat. It wouldn't do to leave loose ends this close to his goal. He then offers Tidings a small smile. "I have a visual reference for the target," he pleasantly informs her. "As you predicted, elimination will deprive them of a valuable strategic resource."

     He points a shock white finger in the direction of the largest ship. "She, and the Septian Council, are in a meeting aboard that ship." He doesn't bother putting any special emphasis on the words--he figures she'll know what he means. "We should head there now--there's nothing here but death." He motions with a hand to the structure with walls formed of the bones of countless dead Lintha.

     If Tidings knows an expedient way to get to the great grandmother's ship, he has no problems following her. Otherwise, he swims, somewhat inexpertly, towards it, using both his vision and his hearing to map out the path most free of debris, booby traps, and undersea predators, to the best of his ability. He's hoping she does have some expedient way of getting there--a mile is a long way to swim, even for someone with no need to breathe air.
Finna     Shenanigans! Cattastic results! Finna is pleased when Lintha surge out, responding to the mess and end up in all sorts of a bind. She's not going to go after them and assault them directly though, no! Instead she takes a gander at where they burst out FROM and decides to go have a look at their living spaces that are now going unoccupied and presumably less guarded.

    Might be something great down there after all!
Gawain As the archers are getting thinned down, Gawain will leave the rest to Tomoe, trying to move towards Ryouma's position if it's nearby. There's archers and slingers harassing him, and Gawain wants to take the pressure off of him and the rest of their allies. He leaps /again/ for distance, which does make him a bit of a target to incoming arrows and bolts, and he's already wounded by single-shot pistols from before, holes in his armor.

"Take this, Lintha! Your reign of terror is now over!" The knight shouts as his flaming sword comes down. Hopefully he can cut through some of the bolts in the process to thin out getting shot head-on in the night.
Bloody Revelations     Were they fighting out in open water, Oryou might actually have a challenge taking on this many hideous, slimy, green, boggle-eyed, amphibious sea demons (which coincidentally taste sort of like frogs) at once, but since they're bound not to smash out of their pens, while she certainly is not, her presence pretty much becomes a running trail of rot and fire, punctuated by the occasional demonic bloodbath. The Lintha don't seem to be certain what to do about her. While she's under the water, they can't hit her (unless they want to jump in too, which is a patently ridiculous idea), and when she pops back out, it's only to torch everything around her. Though they continue to blast her as best she can, it quickly becomes a kaiju issue, and soon they're falling back almost entirely, hopping into personal boats and rowing as fast as possible towards the sad little dying island, saying a lot about a 'Dukantha' or something.

    The Lintha Ryouma has to deal with are skilled and savage, but their mixed bloodline might as well be human in performance. He easily outspeeds them, having the luxury of chopping off hands like a it's a 1980s space opera, mostly menaced by the number of sharp objects flying at him every which way as they attempt to hem him in. Unfortunately, they aren't quite as sensible as human pirates, seemingly more motivated by spite and some urge to protect the robed woman than they are surviving. Even swordsmen he dismembers come at him with their other hands, or settle for pistols and thrown knives, doing everything in their power to slow him down.

    It becomes most transparently obvious he isn't dealing with 'just pirates' when he engages talking distance. One of the Lintha who is lucky to get the hook of his blade around Ryouma's katana for a second outright spits in his face, grinning through a mouth full of filed teeth now that he thinks he has the advantage. "Well, sorry to hear that you aren't! As an experienced businessman myself, I'll take over for you! Squeal nicely when you die; it's the least you can do to make up for causing this much trouble! You and your entire race, when the last of you is a Lintha slave! Don't think I'll let you die quick!"

    It's at that point a stream of flying insects of black volcanic glass comes surging at him from the side, putting him on blast from a pressure hose of winged obsidian knives. This also roughly coincides when Gawain comes aerially ploughing through the buzzing swarm of arrows that the night sky is rapidly becoming, crashing right into the remaining scatter of burly swordsmen and the sorceress channelling the wave of magically conjured glass. Considering he's timed his run with Tomoe, by the time the localized archers and gunners can turn on him, Tomoe is already overhead, and the fire spells are considered a more immediate priority. The only good thing about flying under this kind of fire is that it all comes from essentially one direction -underneath- which makes it easy to stay behind her tower shield and soak up chip damage and poison ticks, rather than turn into a pincushion.
Empty Tidings Tidings is pleased that her information is good. She's even more pleased that she gets to help drag a Lintha to his death, and that he in turn gets to help them orchestrate the destruction of their filthy home. Eye only very slightly puts a damper on her good mood, but it isn't much of one. The crossbow shot is practical, even if it's a little disappointing.

She follows Eye's eye, nodding. The bones... "Agreed. Please, allow me." Tidings swims up alongside Eye, motioning for him to hold onto her. Once she's sure he's not about to fall off, she dives deeper... and then shoots forwards like a rocket. The sudden speed is much greater than what she was using on the way in; she's damned fast, and retains all the skillful maneuvering she was doing even at that speed. A dark trail of some kind of ichor trails behind her in the water where they pass, but it won't be seen so deeply and in the dark.

The price of clearing a mile in a minute or two. At least Eye isn't going to have to touch it.
Tomoe She's glad to not be alone, with this she knows Ryouma and Oryou are out there still backing her up in some way which is good. In the worst event, Tomoe can fall back to them if needed. Or so Tomoe hopes. The fight continues and keeps on going and she's still taking some fire here. Gawain has his own job to do and she's all right with that, hopefully, through her allies can move to cut down the arrow fire a bit, but she's not banking on it. There are so many of these half demons here it's going to be a hell of a fight one way or another.

The Lintha are not a joke and worse than arrows come for them now.

They are assailed now by bugs? She may be mistaken in the pitch of battle but the mourning wall is being put through its paces as she keeps up there keeping her vital protected even as she keeps flying, but this prevents here from attacking as much, yet? Diversion successful Gawain is on his way. Still, the damage is adding up and she's starting to feel more of the effect of the poison.
Ryouma Sakamoto     Oryou wouldn't know what a Dukantha is, but it sounds edible. And to be fair to the Lintha, it's not like they're doing squat to her! Granted, it's hard to tell whether or not a sea serpent that's entirely black and red is wounded, especially when it taints the water around it pitch black, so they might certainly get the impression they're doing nothing.

    "Don't spread out in every direction like that, you're making it hard for Oryou to eat you," the dragon-serpent complains.

    Well, if she can't feat, she can still maim.

    Her hair lances about, like dark tendrils or spears meant to rend and impale as many of the fleeing Lintha as can be reached. Her talons rake the closest ones, while a smash from her tail tries to sink a few boats.

    Ryouma is having way worse luck. Not only are these pirates refusing to back down, but they fight with missing limbs as zealously as before! One of them even makes it a point to show him just how monstrous it is.

    And then there's a rain of obsidian, insect-shaped knives. Knives with wings. Wasps, let's be real. His resistance to magic doesn't help much against that one - it might dampen it a bit, but the cuts add up, and unlike Oryou, he wears bright white. His wounds are much more obvious.

    At least Gawain and Tomoe are there, now.

    "Ah, thank you very much, Sir Gawain, miss Tomoe."

    This allows him to focus on the unending wave of hooked blades and other weapons. His katana flashes a bright blue and black, similar to Oryou's flames.

    "I'm afraid I'll have to say no, murder is a business for no one." Nevermind slavery. These guys really are awful. No wonder so many different forces agreed to work together to stop them.

    "Mutsunokami Yoshiyuki!" A single slash from his katana releases a wave of blue-black fire, a slicing blast meant to cripple and badly damage mundane weapons, while knocking his foes away.
Gawain Gawain is in pain. Even with his healing and superhumanity helping, he's still covered in arrows and bleeding. He grips Galatine tight, cleaving through more of the warriors down near Ryouma, but eventually, he has to pull back. He moves to find somewhere without constant attacking pressure, so he can pull out a healing poultice and apply it to his wounds.

This is only the first stage of the battle. He can't fall here, not before the ships have made their move!
Bloody Revelations     Half drowned and stunned from a mental invasion, putting a crossbow bolt through the unfortunate Lintha Brother is child's play. With a direction in mind, Empty Tidings accelerates them there are disgusting speed, zooming under and through the warzone before most can even tell she's there, never mind draw a bead. Though the Lintha's 'command post' isn't quite as far ahead of the front lines as they'd find comfortable, they're still not so antsy as to be ready for a non-flying invader in ninety seconds.

    The ship in question is defended of course. It is even in the middle of a peaceful day. No doubt it is frequently host to many important elders. Even above the water, the structure is several decks high, supporting multiple levels of sprawling platforms and rope cables, easily enough to have guards approaching the triple digits swarming around it. Below the water, that obviously isn't the case, but that'd entail punching through the hull in a choice place and not making too much noise doing it.

    Of course if All-Seeing Eye just wants to X-Ray vision through the hull, he can get a good idea of where everyone is located inside. Predictably, it is less defended from the bottom than the top, though the inner chambers are still clustered with armed men and even women, and largely more defensible for being the inner decks of a former warship, further reinforced and bottlenecked for life as a floating fort. The council couldn't be any more obvious, for being a perfectly circular arrangement of bodies with an Essence wielder amongst them. There's quite a lot of crap in the way of his looking and listening though; it's not intentional baffling, but a result of multiple holds being filled with scattered heirlooms and looted artifacts in inconvenient places.

    As far as he can make out, they were just talking about their dead in some hushed and urgent tones. No doubt it has to do with the ghostly survivors of the battle on the shadowland not long ago having reported back, but the subject matter seems to be far more ominous than reports of ghostly sea monsters. They have some reason to be gathering up the ghost side of the Family and keeping them away from Bluehaven. Weird. The conversation quickly sidetracks when a suitably high ranking sword brother enters and starts delivering a full report, in less of a panic than should be expected. The one he is addressing makes it fairly clear which signature the Lei Kiangi is.
Bloody Revelations     Finna raiding the 'buildings' that are abandoned turns up a little less than she might like. The dwellings are well appointed, with highly varying states of ostensible wealth, but all of it a far sight better than the average mainland farmer of the Realm or its satrapies, never mind the frontier. It seems like most family valuables aren't kept in individual houses, but tools and weapons are, as well as a common trend of brass heirlooms of make that ranges from weapons to pieces of unknown machines. Artwork is oddly common, as are extensive genealogy charts that are frequently framed, and the make of almost anything she can find, she can pin down to some other location in Creation. It seems they make absolutely nothing themselves; everything of value is stolen.

    The one exception appears to be a book she finds in every building. Some 'Book of the Utz Semivir'. It's like the obligatory King James Bible one tends to find in a lot of hotels, though the content is no doubt nothing alike.

    Certain ships appear to be designated for certain stashes, as seems to be the case with Ryu finding an almost identical vessel dedicated almost entirely to weapons and ammunition yet again. This one even has a few things aboard that actually explode, but once again there is a disappointing lack of powder cookoff sending anything sky high. Come to think of it, has an actual cannon been used on them yet? Do the Lintha just not do that? Though, if he's looking for dedicated 'holds, it turns out that entire ships used solely to be stuffed with treasure are almost as heavily armed as the ships the weapons actually come from.

    By this point, the Lintha are just outright fleeing Oryou. Whether or not they are actually wounding her, they have the impression they aren't, and are calling for bigger guns. Most of them in her path are running back towards that island as well, seeing it as some form of safety, perhaps because because it isn't made of wood and they assume she can't climb onto land. Even so, her tendrils stab and cut down at least the slower half of them. One desperate Lintha in the process of bleeding out lifts one of the gates on the sea demons of his own volition, and unleashes a trio of grotesque sea serpents on him without any heed paid to the slave galley they smash through to come at her, attempting to bite into her and coil her body like vicious, predatory lampreys.

    Ryouma's fortune is conversely changing. Gawain flying drops the warriors around him in heaps of screaming, holy flame. When he has that moment to withdraw his katana, the wave of flame passes through the entire formation, and leads a daisy chain of swords, knives, and fire weapons popping off like firecrackers, shedding shards of jagged metal everywhere. The sorceress is hurled from her platform and into the burning, sinking wreck adjacent to it. With Oryou close by, the immediate area is under enough heat that the Lintha won't charge in to press a counter attack, so Gawain has some space to heal, and Tomoe some time to land before she's shot up any further.
All-Seeing Eye      Eye holds on, though not as fearfully as one might imagine. He's used to traveling this fast--at least, through more peaceful environments. The inky blackness behind them goes unnoticed only for the darkness of the sea--were it earlier in the day, the Alchemical would certainly have something to say about it.

     Naturally, when they arrive, he gets right to the X-Ray Vision. That's one of the reasons he has the name he does! What he sees draws a smile to his face. He pulls Empty Tidings close, pointing towards the Lei Kiangi's meeting room--it's quite high up on the structure. "She's right in there, darling, but... if I may..." His finger moves further down the towering collection of ships, down to those below the water. "I'd like to beg your patience just a little longer. If there's some way you can quietly get us in there," he says, nodding to one of the less populated levels, "We can sweep from the bottom up and eliminate her reinforcements before she can call them."

     He giggles. "Then we can kill her!" He snaps his finger beneath the water. "As slowly as you like."
Ryouma Sakamoto     Demons who aren't devoured wholesale before they can even do anything do in fact stand a much better chance against Oryou than the ones she'd eaten so far. The sea serpents coil around her, and for a moment it looks like a hot mess and a free for all between one very large water snake and three slightly smaller ones.

    "Oryou isn't that kind of woman," she bellows out, adding briefly, "Oryou is already taken."

    A demon bites at her tail; one bites at her neck, one bites at one of her legs. She thrashes angrily. Her hair lances out again, trying to skewer the one holding her leg hostage. Her tail smashes into several ships, trying to shake the demon off or flatten it into one of the the vessels. As for the one biting her neck, she returns the favor, her head twisting to try to snap the demon's body and pluck it off her, then chew it right down.

    Ryouma sheathes his katana, finally catching a breather. "Ah... I sure hope the fleet isn't too far out now. I think we have the upper hand right this moment, but we shouldn't assume the wind won't blow against our sails at a moment's notice. If a handful of heroes could dismantle this place so easily, it'd have been done already... so... there must be something else here. Their sleeves are still full of aces."

    Or maybe they're not. It'd be nice to be wrong.

    "I'm going to regroup with Oryou!" he says to Tomoe and Gawain, so they don't ask why he suddenly leaps away and back towards his partner.
Ryu     As the Lintha flee toward the island, they meet a response of silver claws belonging to a silvery dragon. Ryu's wings cut streaks of light rapidly through the air as he divebombs targets in vicious slicing curves. He dives through the water to hammer the ones that think they can sneak through the surf to avoid him, and generally he acts as a draconic blender to any unlucky demon-blooded pirate that tries to escape the veritable massacre that Oryou is perpetrating against the great ship graveyard.

    He's pretty thorough, even going so far as to set as many of the ships on fire as he can. Thanks to Empty Tidings, this means wooden ships burn even when submerged underwater... which is going to rapidly become a problem for the Lintha residents, even those he isn't specifically targeting.
Empty Tidings Empty Tidings is glad Eye doesn't hold on too tightly. She'd have to crack wise about the potential location of his hands, and that would just ruin all the gravitas of the situation.

They slow to a halt under the ship. Tidings has excellent control of her own speed. She lets Eye direct her, and fixes the spot in her line of sight and in her mind's eye. That high, eh? She follows where he gestures, and then nods faintly, her dark hair a billowing cloud around her. Despite this all being the equivalent of empty air to her, she's actually happy to have the dramatic effect of it sometimes. It still isn't wet, of course, but it behaves like it is. Blame Essence.

A grin slowly spreads on Tidings' face. "I have just the thing. Let's see..." She moves up to the side of the ship. Her hand brushes the surface, finding a place where a Malfean iron plate has been affixed to the hull. She presses her left hand to the exterior, taking in the sensation of her skin brushing the submerged hull. Tidings leans close, whispering something in an obscure form of Old Realm to it. Snippets translate with the cadence: she's telling it a story.

"...but it didn't have to be locked away," she's saying, her voice rising a little to almost conversational tones. "It knew the secret words it dare'n't speak. If it wanted freedom, all it had to do was ask, and it would be so." She strokes the wood, Essence pulsing through her body, poured into the world with subtle tendrils of inky darkness made manifest. "It knew freedom was all it needed, and a whispered name was a small thing indeed. And so it gasped once, then breathed a second, stronger breath. And it said --"

Empty Tidings says... something. It's a word. Words? Words. It's words. It's several. Three? Four? A sentence at most. Less, probably. It doesn't translate. It's just a ringing in the ears. It's like she broadcast momentary deafness, blanking out all sound in her immediate vicinity for the span of syllables. The world shivers almost imperceptibly, reacting to her voice and her infernal will.

The hull... /bends/. Just a little. A trickle of water flows in, into the bilges. Empty Tidings smiles warmly, then reaches out and takes Eye by the hand. The two of them flow through the gap with nary a whisper, momentarily transformed into shadows playing on a wall. They become whole again on the other side, within the ship. The world shivers a second time, and the hull settles back into its normal position. It's as if the fear had left it, and it no longer had no need to flee the one who struck it with such impossible terror.

Empty Tidings brushes a finger across the wall. It leaves a transparent residue where she touches, nearly invisible to the naked eye, but clearly visible on Eye's X-ray vision as a strange oily patch. "I will mark your quarry as I ascend." She takes a step away, seeming to shift from her normal guise into the appearance of one of the Lintha demon-marked in the blink of an eye, taking on the body of a fierce-looking woman with a demeanor that brooks no argument or questioning. She winks.

Then, she starts her ascent, and begins to paint doors and hatches with a mark that will soon come to mean death.
Tomoe Tomoe gets the breather she's been so badly needing as her allies just managed to drive the Lintha back for the moment. She will act quickly to regroup with her allies, her wings flare out as she will move to land when she can and she calls back.

"Right we won't have long before they surge again."

She'll pop her inventory open grab a potion, down it.

"I have been poisoned and it's still eating away at me."

If there's one thing she lacks is a reliable self-cleanse which she really needs. For the moment she'll do what she can to keep herself going int his short respite they have at the moment. The poison worried her though it's creation her strange nature it could be waiting away at her core self as much as her avatar.
Gawain As they get the breather, Gawain takes his healing poultice and applies it to his wounds, helping sooth them and stitch them up. Noticing that Tomoe's having some problems, he grabs one and moves to offer it to this. "This should heal any of the nasty stuff they have on those arrows, Tomoe. Please take it."

Afterwards, Gawain's going to start moving for a high point, somewhere he can get an advantage for clearing the wreckage later. Or at least, somewhere he can scout out where to move to best fire off his massive flame beam later.
Tomoe Tomoe will happily take the offered poultice and will down it quickly as she can before replying.

"Thank you I'm going to need it. These guys are vicous I see why they surived here for so long." This was with a lot of planning, suprise and some serious heavy hitters on the team...