The two ships collided with a splintering, groaning lurch that shot all of them off their feet. Marco twisted in the air to try and maximize for a safe landing. A few seconds before they hit, it had been clear to all of them that there was nobody to actually save in the water near the ship. There couldn’t have been. Between the waterlogged boards and the obvious rot and decay in the sails hanging from the mast beneath the water, it was clear the ship had been there quite a long time. Now they had to worry about themselves.

The collision was almost obviously something the system was controlling, a scripted dance of sorts that left them flying with perfect aim towards the now exposed interior of the ship. They all landed with varying degrees of gracefulness, but nobody was injured. They stood, taking a look around the slightly shaded space. They were standing on the underside of what was probably a good-sized deck, a flat, empty wooden space that was dotted here and there with collapsed staircases and not much else.

Marco looked back to their own ship. It was nestled next to the wrecked ship and seemed for all purposes like it would stay there.

“Should we explore it?” Elisa reached out thumped the side of the rotted hull. “It seems real enough. Nothing is shooting out of it.”

“I think we have to, unless we want to take our chances floating around and hoping that the wind picks up.”

“I could duck down one of those staircases. It would be a jump, but if there’s wood down there, we could have more space.” Riv touched his chest with a flattened palm. “I can take the most damage, so I should go first. Just keep a rope on me in case I need to be yanked out fast.”

“Oh, don’t think you have to convince me.” Elisa crossed over to where Riv was struggling with the knot and cinched it twice. “I’m team ‘pull you out of trouble’ all the way. Have fun in there.”

Riv tied a rope in a loop, hiked it up under his armpits where he could control it a little better, then handed it off to the other two. Safety tether in place, he hopped through a nearby staircase hole and deeper into the bowels of the ship. Marco and Elisa were both light-handed on the rope as he jumped, enough so that the strands whipped through their hands as he took more and more of the slack.

Then, without warning or notice, that stopped. The rope suddenly stopped pulling and went completely limp in their hands.

“Could he have hit water?” Elisa looked at the rope in her hands, semi-shocked. “Or deck?”

“No slap and no thump.” Marco yanked the rope hard, pulling it back far enough that the empty, still dry loop launched towards his head. He caught it out of the air and shook his head at it before yelling. “Riv? You in there?”

“Yeah,” Riv yelled. “There’s light on this side of it, somehow. Follow me in.”

“Right behind you.” Marco said. “It’s safe?”

“Not exactly.”

“On our way faster then.”

Elisa didn’t argue. As one, they ran and jumped towards the lower deck. Every second counted, and when they cut through the shadow of the deck below to the light, Marco knew he was right to hurry. It was on boards, just as he expected in any case. These were not waterlogged, rotten boards from a derelict ship though. They were fresh, well-maintained, and comprised a deck several times as big as one they had been on before.

“Ghost ship. Never thought I’d see one.”

“Me either.”

They were also home to far more pirate skeletons than they thought they would see that day, and most of them were moving in on Riv. Marco’s quartermaster was already backed up against a distant wall, swinging the lid of a large barrel to ward them off life his life depended on it.

As he read, Marco was able to drive three skeletons to the floor with pistol fire. The first of them was rising back to its feet when he speared his rapier through its skull entirely, pinning it to the ground. Flipping the gun backwards, he pistol-whipped another approaching skeleton before it could get its scimitar up, then flipped the gun again and put a magical bullet through its eye.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The other two members of his party made good of the space he created. Riv’s grip on the barrel lid changed slightly as he slipped from defense to offense, bringing it down edge-first on a skeleton and flooring it with a blow hard enough that it destroyed the better part of the lid in the process.

Elisa had opted for ice instead of fire or lightning, and a single palm slap to one of the skeleton’s heads covered the entire skull with ice. This didn’t seem to do anything at all until she jumped back, and got Riv swinging what was left of his lid at the now frozen head. The impact splintered the skull into countless fragments, marking the first sure and certain kill of the day.

“Back up!” Marco raised his gun into position and fired again as he deflected a skeleton’s saber with his rapier. The skeleton pressing the offense against him found itself with a new hole in its skull and fell down. The other skeletons, getting wise, mimicked the human fighters by withdrawing and trying to re-establish their own formations.

“Thanks.” Riv was holding his side with his arm now, and Marco could see blood seeping from a shallow cut there. “I didn’t have that much longer. Appreciate the quick response.”

“They are tough. And there are tons of them.”

“It’s a weird balance,” Elisa said. The skeletons had reached the other side of the room by then, and were falling into a line before beginning to advance. “I have a plan, if you want it.”

“Go for it.” Marco started shooting his gun at any of the skeletons he could hit, but at that distance, the first couple of shots had either been dodged or deflected. “I don’t think my sword is good here. I’ll take anything you can give.”

“Bone enemies are bad news for your sword. So my idea is, let’s not use you that way. I figure you can take out a skeleton once every couple of shots with your gun, right?” Elisa said.

“Right.”

“And your sword is going to get stuck if you try to use it to kill them, and it won’t do that much damage anyway. So what I’ll have you do is like this.”

Elisa laid out her plan quickly and cleanly as the skeletons finally got into a range where Marco could hit them with gunfire. He managed to focus on one particular unlucky pile of bones, taking it down before it got close enough to spring into melee. To the credit of the skeletons, they didn’t break rank even when their brother in arms fell.

It took more than that to make them scatter. One thing they had learned from the initial clash with the skeleton was that they were a strength in numbers type of threat. Each individual monster was much slower and weaker than Marco, which meant he could launch himself at their lines, disorient a skeleton with a shot from his gun, poke a couple more skeletons lightly, then pull away. Doing so again and again threw every single monster in the room into general disarray.

Following after him, Elisa was calmly picking targets that were maximally distracted, icing up their heads, then leaving them for Riv to shatter with a quick blow from his fist.

“Got a live one!” Riv would occasionally yell when one of the skeletons managed to get enough of its wits gathered to turn and attack the actual threat to its own un-life. Marco would hold fire long enough to steady himself, aim, and put a bullet in its head. Sometimes, this didn’t hurt them much, but it did invariably knock them senseless for a few seconds. That was more than long enough for Elisa to calmly freeze them, stomp their head, and move onto the next target.

“One more.” Marco was glad he had spent his entire childhood putting his body to the test. This kind of fighting was even worse than running laps in the sand had been, cardio-wise. If he hadn’t, he could only imagine how much it would have hurt to keep up this much effort for as long as he had. He took a deep breath and held it, stilling his heaving for just long enough to fire one last shot. “And that’s it. Lucky this was an easy fight.”

“It isn’t. Or at least it probably isn’t. This is more than twice as hard as the Palmer dungeon was.”

“Really? That would make it… I don’t know. Level ten, at least?”

“Something like that.”

“Then why is it so easy?” Marco asked.

Riv head’s jerked up from examining the cut to his ribs so he could make eye contact with his captain.

“You call this easy? I know you got nicked in that fight a little, Marco. I would have died if you didn’t show. What’s easy about this?”

“It is easy, though. I got scratched but only when I had to make the strategy work. I was never really in much danger overall. And you weren’t ever in any serious danger after we got here, either. What’s not easy about that?”

“I think I see the problem.” Elisa put her hand on Riv’s arm. “He doesn’t know what he’s like. He probably never paid attention to what was happening. Marco, when was the last time someone on the island beat you in a race. Another kid, not someone who was cheating with a class.”

“Never? It’s been years, at least. I think I was… ten?” Marco answered.

“And how old was the kid who beat you?”

“Fourteen, I think. But he wasn’t very fast, I caught up to him the next summer.”

Elisa lit up her finger and lightly singed a cut on her arm, created by a skeleton who wasn’t quite as distracted as they had assumed it was. Her robes had done a lot to stop the damage, but not so much as nullify it completely.

“That’s sort of the point I’m making, Marco. Neither me nor Riv would be surviving this right now if you couldn’t run straight into a pack of probably level ten monsters and keep them confused for the five minutes it took us to take them down, all while protecting us when things started to get out of hand. I hate to admit it, but you are good at this.”

“Well, maybe a little.”

“Not a little.” Riv shook his head. “I’ve seen people with new classes fight. That friend of mine you took down back on that island? He was considered a little good. Perfectly acceptable, maybe more than that. And you made him look stupid at a lower level than he was at. That’s not a little good. That’s pretty dang good.”

“Fine. Well, I think we should still…”

Marco was interrupted from his own deflection by a much better level of distraction as a clumping noise came from below them. On the other side of the room, a hatch in the floor swung open, clanking on the planks of the floor as it reached the extremes of its hinges.

From the hole came a green sort of aura, something that could have only meant bad things even before Marco saw what was putting it out. As the monster climbed, he got a good look at it, and it wasn’t a skeleton at all. This was a beefier problem.