Insistent Assistant 22 (Patreon)

Insistent Assistant

Chapter 22

-VB-

Despite the differences Illaoi and I had, we were still Servant and Master. We were still a team.

“Flagless baghlah at the bow on the horizon!” the crow’s nest shouted down to us, and everyone quickly grabbed their weapons and rushed to their stations.

A flagless ship was usually a pirate ship filled with pirates with little to no true ability. This was good.

“How does that baghlah look like?!” I shouted up at the nest.

The crewmate looking out into the horizon with his telescope didn’t respond for a second.

“It looks heavy!”

… It could be a merchant ship but why would a merchant ship not fly a flag?

“They noticed us! I see a flag going up!”

Yeah, that’s a pirate, and it was a pirate right between us and our current destination.

“Alright, I want full speed! Drop our sails and let the winds take us toward the pirates!”

As my crew climbed the shrouds up to the mainmast to undo the ropes holding the sail in a bundle, I walked over to the starboard side of the ship and looked out into the horizon with my own binoculars. I could barely make out the top sails of the pirate ship that was turning toward us.

“Can you see the entire ship?!” I shouted up to the crow’s nest.

“Aye, skippa!”

My ship’s crow’s nest was roughly twenty yards above me, and with each half yard equating roughly to eight hundred yards for distance you could see out toward the horizon, and my current position at around five yards above sea level meant I could see roughly 7 miles to the horizon…

“Eight and a half miles?” I asked Illaoi, who hummed.

“Sound about right,” she replied with a nod like a teacher half-acknowledging the answer. “And your ship can sail around nine knots, no? It’ll be at least an hour before we’ll be close enough to them to exchange cannon fire.”

“They’re coming toward us and the winds favor us.”

“Make that half of an hour.”

With a booming flutter, the sails came down, and the ship lurched forward as the winds took control of the ship with its might. The sea began to foam around us more than before, and I returned to watch the ship as they closed in on us.

Pirates of the Four Oceans had a few ways of being pirates. The weak pirates did the whole circus and pony show that pirates back in my old world used to do. Stronger pirates didn’t bother with that kind of stuff and just overpowered their victims.

“... It’s slow,” I hummed. Merchant ships would be weighed down, and if a pirate wanted to look like a merchant ship, then they would do that as well, dragging barrels filled with water behind them to stimulate weight. I couldn’t see anything behind them right now. “Nest, see anything behind them?!”

“No!”

Cannon ports below the deck remained closed, but all of the gunnery crews were standing by with the cannons already loaded with. Or they should be.

Part of the training they received was gunnery crew training, and with increased strength, even a two person group could efficiently load a cannon.

My non-Servant second-in-command was on the rear of the ship, signalling to my other ship to ready for battle with potential pirates.

As we sailed, the ship grew closer and closer, and soon, I saw signs that, yes, this was a pirate vessel.

What merchant vessel draped painted sailcloth over the port and starboard sides of their ships unless they were hiding their guns? I also saw barrels being dragged behind them.

Which meant these were the weaker pirates.

They were no more than quarter of a mile away when they cut loose the sailcloth, the barrels dragging behind them, and unfurled their sails with a new flag.

And if the skull and bones didn’t tell me before than the first cannon shot sure fucking told me that they were priates.

Unfortunately for them, I invested into long range cannons. Jeanne, former slave who’d come to become one of my crew, stood behind the steering wheel.

“To starboard!”

She spun the wheel to her left, and my ship groaned as the keel forced it to turn left. And when I was sure we were in range…!

“FIRE!” I roared.

The thunderous cacophony of two dozen cannons shooting their payload at once temporarily deafened me and the smoke cloud blinded me.

But I heard crunching woods and screams on the other side, so I knew my cannons had -.

I stumbled and only managed to stay up because I had a feet already coming down to give me balance. I looked down at my left feet, which got caught in something, and my eyes widened in surprise when I found my left feet and boots wrapped up in multiple hands.

And in this world, there was only one person with the devil fruit ability to make hands sprout out from nothing.

“Nico Robin…!”

She was on that boat, and we had to be fighting the Baroque Works.