Starting from Zero

"Since when did they build something like that??"

"They\'ve had it for months." Someone said from behind. It\'s Silver.

"Wait, you can speak our language too?"

"My grandpa’s...grandpa, grew up in China, and loved there. Then they made a tradition that all children in our family should learn to speak Chinese."

Now this intelligent girl looks nothing like that crying kid I saw moment ago.

"And what do you mean, they had it months ago?"

"Most Japanese warships lurk around the Tsushima Strait and fight with us, since, you know, it\'s more convenient for them to reach us than to reach China. The ones attacking your land are either those already fought with us, or those slipped past our ships. Every time they got their hands on something new, they test them on us. These metal ships appeared way before then. Though I\'d never expect to see them again."

"What do you mean by that? Did you wipe them all out or something?"

"They\'re out of date." She walked to the edge and pointed at the metal monster. "They are slower than the cheapest fishing boats because they can’t have any sails. They even need other ships to give them a pull to start moving. Besides, those armors aren’t so good. You can still hit through them if you concentrate your fire on one spot. So all in all, the Japanese ceased manufacturing the ship because it\'s not worth it. I didn’t think they still have remains."

"Hey king, let’s go take a look at this thing!"

Now I’m interested. Their weakness, as Silver said, is their extremely low mobility. However if we can modify Bi-Lin in the same way...it doesn\'t hurt to lose some speed.

I ordered the pirates to loot the other enemy ships clean before I jumped to the one beside us with King. My boots created a loud "clang" when I landed on the ship. Man this thing\'s hard.

We reached the main door leading towards under the decks...or the remains of it, since the door is made of wood. There are no survivors hiding inside the ship. The cannon shots that went through caused fire and burned out anything that can catch fire.

After some close inspection I realized that the metal ship\'s structure is not as simple as we thought. Apart from covering the ship with metal, there are numerous support beams on the inside which can pass any impact force onto a large area so the attacked spot doesn’t get destroyed easily.

We returned to Bi-Lin after enough look-around. Rhona\'s men are still working. Our deck is now filled with all kinds of items taken from the enemies. I told some pirates to patch up the metal ship so we can pull it back as one of our trophies. Even if we can\'t replicate their design, at least we can add another layer of metal protection outside Bi-Lin.

The pirates brought back loads of equipment, fresh water, food and...some companion eggs? Someone must be rich. They carried unused eggs on them!

When we\'re done, I sent Silver to the Korean fleet nearby since they can well escape on their own now. Then we moved towards our next target.

The second Japanese team doesn’t even have any crystal cannons. Guess they focused their asset onto one fleet as main attack force and we happened to knock them out first.

However I saw something strange among their units. It\'s a...no. Two ships connected together?

"Uh, King? Do you see that twin ship?" I pointed to that direction.

"Not very clear... Twin ship you say?"

"You know about it?"

"No. Guess another new invention. They are pretty good at this. Hey wait a second. What are those small spots?" He suddenly pointed upwards.

"Spots?" I used my Star Gaze and looked at the strange ship again.

The "twin ship" actually has two ships lined up together. They’re not very long so the entire vessel appears as if it\'s advancing sideways. The masts are located between the two ships, and the decks on both sides are empty. They’re just two big flat planks.

A creature with a terrible head and a pair of giant wings came into my view. The reptilian creature standing on its hind legs looks a lot like Lucky...But it\'s way smaller, and not as cool.

"A wyvern?"

I think I recognized it. Unlike dragons, these lesser beasts don\'t have very good flying abilities and many of their species need a certain running distance to take off.

So that\'s what those flat decks are used for! The wyvern in my view confirmed my idea by running along the deck when the rider on its back jerked his reins. They ran to the tip of the ship and finally soared into the air.

"F*ck me. That thing\'s a goddamned aircraft carrier!!"

"Aircraft what??" King jumped away at my sudden outburst.

"The twin ship! They use the flat decks as runways so their wyverns can take off! The Japanese are freaking genius!"

"What-what do we do?" Zirai looks nervous.

"Lucky!" I summoned Lucky and hopped on. "King, take the command. Whoever has flying companions come with me!"

Bi-Lin has completely no anti-air deployment. It\'s be really bad if we let the flying enemies approach!

I summoned Loong\'er, Phiona, Tank and Aldeina when I took off (*). Thank god I have my own flyers. Behind me, Red Moon followed by floating on herself, Zirai has her Skyfire, and Merciless came on his black panther. The flying feline is still young but is strong enough to carry a man now.

Further behind there are Elfy and Passerby. I also saw our new crew, Blue Wind. Passerby\'s cockroach can fly just well, no surprises here. Blue Wind however, as I saw before, had a companion I didn\'t quite recognize. I only knew it had a giant horn on top of its forehead, maybe a beetle.

The "beetle" moved onto Blue Wind\'s own back, when a pair of transparent insect wings suddenly spread open behind him. Good god. He merged with his companion!

My makeshift air force quickly moved close to the enemies. Now I think about it, we never had a real boarding fight before, and our first melee combat is in the air!

The Japanese already spotted us. The two runways now have two lines of wyverns taking off one after one. Where the hell did they find so many wyvern mounts?

No matter. We have to deal with them anyhow.

Being the only two "genuine" dragons, Lucky and Skyfire charged ahead, leaving the rest of the team behind. I guess dragons still have the speed advantage--

Whoosh!

A shadow went past us before we can realize what just happened. It’s Blue Wind. He dashed towards the enemies while yelling like a madman. The air current he brought up even shook Lucky a little.

I knew he wanted to play cool but...the guy got into trouble just as fast as how he went to them. He rammed into one of the wyvern riders face-first, which didn’t stop him in the least. Blue Wind carried the unfortunate wyvern plus his master and kept going, until they knocked five more wyverns into a tight hugging group.

When they finally stopped, the six pairs of enemies, including Blue Wind himself, lost altitude and dropped towards the water. Before soaking himself, Blue Wind regained flight and charged back to Bi-Lin in the same speed as before. I guess his flying has a time limit? He did a good job though, by taking six enemies off our list.

Me and Zirai began our show. We charged into the enemy formation, attracting a lot of hate. Skyfire bumped into his first target, stunning the wyvern on the spot using his bigger size. A following claw swipe sent the dazed wyvern into the sea, swift and clean.

Maybe because our lower level, Lucky\'s body is a bit smaller than Skyfire. Most of the enemies went to fight Skyfire, leaving only three of them engaging me.

A wyvern sank its teeth into Lucky\'s wing, when a golden aura spread open from Lucky’s head and washed us over. The attacking wyvern is driven off by some sparks. I then heard a system notice:

"Your companion has been attacked by a sub dragon species. The effect of dragon crown activated. Companion Lucky is now having the effect of ‘Lordship’."

With another flash, Lucky\'s dark scales all turned golden yellow. I looked at Lucky\'s status window. All statuses now have a "x2" indicator after them. So the wyverns are considered as dragons too, which can also trigger the crown.

Lucky swung his tail at the wyvern which just hurt his wing, tearing it in half. Then he charged into the other wyverns before they can realize what just happened. Lucky locked his maw into the thin neck of a wyvern. With a snap, the poor thing bid farewell to its own head, leaving its rider sitting on the broken body dumbfounded.

Lucky didn’t spare his life though. He caught the rider, tossed him into his jaw and chewed. After some brief screaming, body pieces and some items dropped out.

Next, Lucky looked at the remaining wyvern rider in an "oh there\'s still food" expression.

The rider made a wise decision and pulled his wyvern to retreat. Too slow though. Lucky slammed the bottom-half of the wyvern into potato mash and treated the falling rider in the same manner. I don’t really care how he killed them, as the fight gave me some decent EXP.

The other wyvern riders attacking Zirai haven’t realized their teammates have become snack, until Lucky reached them and snapped a wyvern’s wing away.

One of the wyverns unleashed a fireball at Lucky. Lucky just took the hit without much thinking, while taking the chance to grab two other riders and ate them. I checked my battle log window and found a message:

"Draconic spells are ineffective against the dark dragon lord."

The message repeated several times as more fireballs hit Lucky dealing absolutely no damage.

More enemies approached but no one went near us. They all witnessed what happened just now. I also realized that I can’t control Lucky anymore. Triggering the crown effect also put him into a berserk status. Besides Lucky doesn’t have any riding gear like those ropes on the other wyverns. This is not a problem however, as Lucky is doing his job as I hoped.

Phiona, Tank and Loong\'er joined the fight at this point. Phiona rushed into the middle of enemies with her signature dark flames, scaring the wyverns away no matter how their riders try to control them.

Loong’er cast a giant spell pentagram towards Lucky, which made him even "madder". Some smaller wyverns began to fell into the sea out of horror.

I noticed another creature coming up from the carrier ship. It\'s another dragon like Lucky. A real one. Also, a small white dot moved away from the ship at the same time.

I immediately yelled to Elfy: "Shoot it down! That\'s a message pigeon!"

"Huh? Oh!" She quickly chased behind the bird on her pegasus.

I have no time to watch over that pigeon now because the enemy dragon is here. Lucky is still enjoying five corpses at the same time when I shouted into his ear, or where I think his ear is:

"To the left! Take out the big one before you serve your stomach!"

He glanced at the target, threw the remains of the corpses away and charged. Two dragons soon slammed into each other. It\'s a brown poison dragon we’re facing, and bigger. It must be higher leveled then Lucky.

The collision caused Lucky to tumble backwards for some distance, while the enemy dragon also fell down a bit, almost crashing onto their carrier. So our first strength competition is a tie.

This means the enemy is a threat to us, and I must take care of it while I have the chance.

Through Phantom\'s telepathy, I told Tank to approach the dragon. It was rammed away by Tank just after it recovered from the previous collision. Tank may not be as strong as these mighty monsters but one of his talent is bumping stuff. The enemy dragon wasn\'t prepared this time so it rolled in the air for quite some time.

Following my command, Tank moved behind Lucky to hide, while Lucky unleashed his fire breath at the enemy. The color of the fire beam looks a bit weird though. The golden flame is mixed with some blackish substance. Some armor pieces and bones also fell out of his mouth.

The poison dragon regained balance just in time to see the incoming attack but couldn’t dodge it. It shrieked and flapped its wings quickly to get out of the way. When it did, however, the chest and belly of the creature are already badly roasted.

Its rider cursed loudly in anger. Well I can’t understand a single word of it, so let him curse. He’s going to be another snack anyway.

The enemy charged again. Lucky took the challenge head-on. Before they connect though, Lucky suddenly lowered himself, revealing Tank who has been hiding behind us. Tank followed us when Lucky began the charge. Now he has enough speed and power.

With a muffled "bump!", the two creatures finally hit each other. They\'re all knocked away by the force. But I can see Tank was almost unharmed with those carapace as hard as plate armor.

As for the poison dragon...ouch. I gave Tank that name because he IS one. Surely it won’t feel good if you run into a tank at full speed.

Lucky was already waiting behind the enemy. He used his tail spike to send the other dragon into another direction, while Phiona appeared and threw a dozen fireballs at the stunned dragon, roasting it further.

My team has been taking care of the other wyverns. Two of them managed to slip past their defense when they saw their boss getting bounced around.

"Watch out!!" Merciless called from behind.

When I turned and saw the situation it\'s already too late to do anything. The two wyverns came aiming at me, since they know they can’t take down Lucky.

I felt a strong pinching force on my waist. The next second, I was taken off Lucky. Lucky turned around and torn the other wyvern into blood and pieces. He then came to save me. But there’s no way he’s making it when I saw an open maw full of sharp teeth coming at me--the enemy decided to use the same tactic to finish me off.

I struggled without much success. I have neither the strength nor the time to break free of the wyvern claw. The creature threw the now helpless me into its mouth. I still tried reaching out...but the sudden darkness engulfed me faster.

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(*) The author didn’t explain why he sent Aldeina the mermaid too. Maybe she can fly?