Chapter 80: Sky-Captain Drake’s Arrival

The golden light of sunset bathed the Mistveil Mountains in warm amber.

Across the outer spires of Radiant Dawn Academy, thirty thousand disciples walked softly on stone paths. Teachers spoke in whispers, and couriers glided on silent updrafts.

Every cultivator understood the golden rule: Never make loud noises near Solitude Spire.

Then, the sky began to rumble.

It started as a deep, metallic thrum that rattled the teacups in the dining halls.

Within thirty seconds, the rumble swelled into a mechanical roar that tore through the evening clouds.

ROOOOOAAAR!

From the northern horizon, the clouds split wide open.

Emerging into the sky was a four-hundred-foot floating warship of blackened iron and brass.

It was the Iron Gale, the legendary flagship of the Cloud Sea corsairs.

Its dark-iron hull was pitted with cannon scars from a hundred void battles. Thick steam billowed from massive stern exhaust pipes, filling the crisp mountain air with the smell of soot and burnt spirit oil.

Along its armored flanks, sixty heavy broadside cannons rested behind iron gunports like bared teeth.

High atop the main mast fluttered the ragged banner of Sky-Captain Drake.

Down on the grand terrace of the First Spire, Vice-Chancellor Alistair nearly choked on his blue antacid potion.

"The Iron Gale!" Alistair gasped, clutching the balcony rail until his knuckles turned white. "Sky-Captain Drake is here!"

Beside him, Inquisitor Valen turned pale as skim milk.

"Drake?" Valen wheezed, his silver sword rattling in its scabbard. "The pirate lord of the outer cloud sea? Why would that madman fly his warship into academy airspace?"

"He tracked the midnight sun!" Alistair shouted, his voice cracking with sheer panic. "Drake runs on stolen fuel cells! He saw the solar pillar and came to loot the power source!"

Valen’s heart nearly stopped beating.

"He is heading straight for the Seventh Spire!" Valen cried out in horror. "If that greedy pirate makes a racket, he will wake the Sovereign! The entire mountain range will be flattened!"

"Stop him!" Alistair screamed, waving his arms. "Fly out there and tell him to be quiet!"

Valen and twenty senior elders leaped onto their flying swords, racing across the chasm in a desperate intercept vector.

As they flew, Valen frantically held up a giant wooden sign painted with red letters: QUIET ZONE! NO SHOUTING!

Before the elders could reach the gorge, the massive pirate warship began its rough descent.

The four-hundred-foot iron vessel dropped below the cloud deck. Its heavy lift-rotors groaned under reverse thrust, kicking up a mighty gale across the valley.

Yet as the flagship neared Solitude Spire, its roaring engines suddenly sputtered.

Cough-clank-sputter... hiss.

The blue reactor lights along the ship’s keel flickered and died. The great iron vessel ran completely out of fuel, drifting the final fifty yards on sheer inertia.

With a heavy, rattling shudder, the iron hull settled directly onto the wide clover lawn beside Felix’s cottage.

The landing struts dug into the soft earth with a deep THUD.

The steam hissed out of the side exhaust valves, leaving the mountain in sudden, stunned silence.

Up in the warship’s rigging, fifty weary pirate deckhands poked their heads out from the gunports. Every single pirate was skin and bones, their eyes hollow with exhaustion and their stomachs rumbling in chorus.

A heavy iron gangway dropped from the flagship’s main deck, slamming onto the grass with a loud metallic clang.

Heavy bootsteps echoed down the metal ramp.

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Walking down the gangway alone was Sky-Captain Drake.

Drake was forty-eight years old, with a weathered face lined by decades of high-altitude storms. His hair was a rough, unruly mop of salt-and-pepper gray, tied back loosely with a faded leather cord.

He wore a battered brown duster coat stained with engine grease and soot. A notched steel cutlass hung at his hip, and a pair of brass sky-goggles rested around his neck.

Drake took a deep breath of the mountain air and coughed softly.

His stomach let out an enormous, thunderous growl.

GRRRRRR-ROAR.

The sound was louder than his broken engines.

Drake pressed a calloused hand against his ribs, grimacing in pain.

"Three weeks on hardtack and dirty rainwater," Drake grumbled to himself. "The fuel cells are burnt out, the crew is eating leather boots, and the ship is a flying brick. If there isn't any fuel or food on this rock, we are finished."

Drake had steered his dying flagship toward the southern mountains after seeing the impossible pillar of midnight noon. He had expected to find an imperial military fortress or an ancient grandmaster surrounded by flying swords.

Instead, as he stepped onto the clover lawn, Drake stopped dead in his tracks.

His grey eyes went wide as saucers.

Directly in front of him sat a peaceful, slightly messy garden.

Curled up next to a giant, glowing white cabbage was an eight-ton Celestial Thunder Gryphon. The legendary apex predator had its wings tucked in like a lazy chicken, snoring softly in the grass with its tongue poking out.

Over by the turnip patch stood a seven-foot shadowy figure in dark funeral silks.

The figure was wearing a floppy farmer’s straw hat and diligently pulling weeds with a tiny wooden hand trowel.

Drake rubbed his eyes, convinced he was hallucinating from starvation.

"Is that... Lord Nether-Bane?" Drake whispered, his blood running cold. "The ancient Ghost King of the First Epoch? The terror who devoured three mortal dynasties? Gardening?"

The Ghost King slowly looked up from the soil. His hollow eye sockets burned with blue nether-fire.

Nether-Bane pressed a bony finger against his skeletal lips.

"Shhh," the Ghost King hissed softly, pointing a warning trowel toward the cottage. "Tread lightly, pirate. If you wake the Master from his evening doze, you will be pulling crabgrass until the next epoch."

Drake swallowed hard, feeling cold sweat soak through his leather duster.

He slowly turned his gaze toward the covered cedar porch.

Resting on a comfortable, floating recliner chair was a young man in a loose hemp tunic and faded straw slippers.

A frayed straw hat was tilted over the young man’s nose. His bare feet were propped up on the polished railing, and he held a steaming white jade cup loosely in his right hand.

Perched on the wooden railing beside him was a plump brass clockwork owl.

The owl had a hand-carved oak bottle cork stuck firmly between its mandibles, clamping down on a shiny copper penny. The owl’s glass lens eyes blinked once, staring at Drake with utter indifference.

The young man didn’t reach for a weapon. He didn’t summon defensive wards.

He didn’t even bother to open both eyes.

Felix Vance simply tilted his straw hat up by half an inch, squinting through one sleepy hazel eye at the four-hundred-foot warship parked across his clover.

A pair of translucent blue HUD brackets hovered over the pirate:

Felix let out a low, weary sigh.

"Hey," Felix called out, his voice flat and groggy. "You can’t park that thing on the grass. You’re blocking the afternoon sun."

Drake stood frozen on the lawn, his hand glued to the hilt of his cutlass.

His seasoned pirate instincts screamed at him that danger lurked beneath the lazy surface.

The air around the young man smelled peaceful, like toasted bread and sweet mountain tea.

Yet deep beneath that cozy scent, Drake’s spiritual senses detected something horrifying.

Inside the young man’s chest burned a colossal, incomprehensible sphere of pure thermonuclear fury. It hummed with the weight of an active star, radiating a gravitational pulse that made Drake’s iron cutlass vibrate in its sheath!

A star... Drake’s throat tightened into a knot. There is an active, burning sun sitting inside that kid’s belly!

Drake had fought imperial armadas, plundered void vaults, and wrestled lightning drakes in the outer skies.

He had never felt so completely powerless.

Standing before this boy was like standing an inch away from the surface of a blazing star. One casual flick of the kid’s wrist could turn his entire four-hundred-foot warship into molten slag.

And right at that exact moment, Drake’s stomach decided to announce itself again.

GURRRRRGLE!

The noise echoed across the quiet porch like a dying diesel engine.

Drake’s weathered face flushed bright red under his salt-and-pepper beard. He stood rigid, his calloused hands trembling slightly as he braced for the young sovereign to incinerate him for the noise.

Over by the gorge, Inquisitor Valen and the elders landed softly on the grass, shaking with terror.

"Spare him, Great Sovereign!" Valen whispered in a frantic, desperate prayer. "He is merely an ignorant pirate who knows not the Dao of Slumber!"

On the porch, Felix didn't incinerate anyone.

Instead, he lowered his straw hat back over his eyes and took another soothing sip from his Never-Cold Jade Teacup.

"Man, that is a loud stomach," Felix murmured, his tone completely calm. "Sounds like your hunger meter is in the red zone. Did your ship's commissary run out of rations?"

Drake blinked, completely disarmed by the casual question.

"Aye," Drake rasped, his voice rough from days of dry wind. "Three weeks without fresh grain. My crew is half-dead, and our lift-crystals are drained."

Felix shook his head with mild disapproval.

"Terrible resource management," Felix said. "Never let your stamina bar hit zero. Hang on a second. Lyra should be finishing up in the kitchen."

He leaned back into the soft ergonomic mesh of his recliner, letting the warm mountain breeze rock him gently as Drake watched in stunned, bewildered silence.