The Pirate's Legacy: New Identities

Chapter 38: Fury Unleashed

The men on Leo's ship gave triumphant shouts as they watched another Draconian ship sink from the might of their flashing cannon.

The Hawks' lieutenant stood in the helm's balcony, surveying the damage of his ship. The topsails of the main and mizzen masts had been burned up by a cannon fireball or were torn to shred by claws, but their loss didn't hinder his ship's sailing abilities. Leo turned to the left, where miles off the portside lay Peralta. Behind his shoulder, Leo ordered to his first mate, "Make way to the capital at full speed."

"It'll be a suicide mission!" Em's voice called from the right side of the helm. She stood at the top step of the staircase. A bullet had grazed her upper right arm. Her face was dirty from gunpowder smoke and her lower lip bled, but that was more from biting it in anger at the trap in which they had fallen. Em marched up to Leo. "We have no one to give us cover from the Guard stationed in the city," she argued. "They have the gun towers ready to blow us out of the water if we come within a bloody mile of the shore."

Leo growled in frustration. He had a shallow cut over his left eye and a deeper one across his cheek, but otherwise, he hadn't sustained any grave injuries. "Where's Cecil?" he demanded when he noticed that the former Tarymian advisor wasn't with the princess.

"I sent him down below," Em explained. "He hurt his ankle after taking a nasty slip, but he'll be fine. But you have to listen to me, Leo! We cannot go near the shore!"

"What do you suggest we do, then?" Leo demanded. "We're sitting ducks at the moment, but we cannot keep fighting all these Draconians and still hope to keep intact, or alive! We must act now—"

"Wait for Dread Robin!" Em persisted, but Leo was having none of it.

"We can't afford to wait for a miracle to show up, Emelia!" he bellowed.

As if the gods themselves had answered him, a gigantic explosion erupted from the Draconian fleet that had snuck up on them at the start of the battle. Near the rear of the fleet, the burning remains of a ship sank while those in the wreckage's proximity either had caught on fire by its explosive aftermath or were blowing up as well. As more blasts erupted from separate areas in the fleet's rear, the Draconians' formation broke just like the Politickans' did. Then a low roar in the distance behind the burning Draconian fleet began. The howls grew louder quickly until the latecomers' battle cries drowned out all other noises.

Em shouted in sheer relief when the pirates appeared through the curtain of fire and smoke to attack the remaining disorderly Draconian warships. She spotted the Pirate King's signature skull and robin flag flapped above the sinking vessels around it. Em turned to her cousin once more, but this time with her composure regained. "Regroup the ships," she commanded Leo. "We have our opening to launch the attack!"

Leo ordered the summoning horn to be blown, calling the Politickan ranks together as everyone on his ship heard another explosion. This time the eruption came from the side of the Draconian blockade. More pirates had taken the second fleet by surprise, and the arrivals were on their way to crumbling the blockade's defense.

Under the chaos of the scattered Draconian warships fighting against the Pirate King's small armada, the Hawks' lieutenant divided the remaining sixty Politickan vessels into groups of twenty. He sent one group to each side to bolster the pirates' numbers while his group turned to Peralta to invade the capital.

A dozen ships manned by the Queen's Guard had sailed out from Peralta's harbor during the first pirate attack. By the time Leo led his twenty Politickan warships toward the city, the Queen's Guard were ready to meet them in battle. Within minutes, the dark red, blue, and black dragon pennants of the navy vessels were lost among the yellow and green belonging to the Politickan warships until even those were obscured by the rising smoke from cannon fire.