Chapter 365: Chapter 327 – A Nuisance on the Way

“There’s always a bigger fish.” - Gloomshine Proverb.

“What are those, sir?” asked one passenger who looked to Cal to be a visitor from Ur-Teros by their complexion to the ship’s captain. The passenger pointed their finger to a distant series of waterspouts, interspersed by the occasional white shape that leapt out of the water to splash back in grandiosely on the way down. “Are they dangerous?”

 

With her sharper eyesight, Cal noticed that those white shapes looked fish-shaped at first glance, though their tail fins were horizontally set instead of vertical. Their bodies were long and roughly bottle-shaped, with small eyes set above a large, toothy maw on the underside of the trunk-like head. The thick, likely highly durable head of the beasts likely made them natural battering rams, double so with the large, pointed horn that grew on the center of their forehead region.

 

From the way those maws were filled with sharp fangs the size of swords, Cal doubted that the beasts were peaceful, vegetarian ones.

 

The lizard-like therian who served as the captain of the ship borrowed a spyglass from one of his mates. It was a slightly comical sight to see the two and a half meter tall alligator therian first mate respectfully offer the spyglass to the captain who was half their size, but Cal knew better than to judge a book by their cover.

 

Like most others, she could not tell whether the captain was male or female either. Reptilian tribes of therian were notoriously difficult to tell apart, since their kind rarely had visible secondary sexual characteristics of any kind, and even their voices generally fell in the same range regardless of gender. The prominent joke was that the only way to know the gender of one was to take them to the bedroom.

 

“Hmm… It’s just a pod of white behemoths, ma’am,” replied the captain with a calm tone as they returned the spyglass to their first mate. “They’re the top of the food chain around here, but there is no need for worry. Most of their kind knew to stay away from our ships by now, but if they get annoying we’ll just shoo them off.”

 

“Why not take-claim one down, Cap-Boss? We got-have the spare cargo for it,” asked another crewmember with a strange accent Cal thought might be local to the isle. The crewmember resembled a large rat-like rodent, probably a little taller than the captain at a meter forty or so, with coarse gray fur and large, visible incisors on display.

 

“Ah right, forgot you’re new,” nodded the Captain in a kindly manner. “In the past we nearly hunted their kind to extinction, kid, so we’ve mostly let them off these days to let them repopulate a bit. Only when some of their young who didn’t know better make themselves too much of a nuisance do we hunt one down.”

 

“So… if-maybe some of them make-turn themselves too big-large of a nuisance…”

 

“Then we’re having them for dinner, simple as that, kid,” said the Captain with a smirk on their snout.

 

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A couple hours later, as the ship continued on their way, most of the pod had disappeared from their sights, except one. A medium-sized behemoth - probably a juvenile by their standards since Cal had seen some nearly twice its size - kept a dogged pursuit of their ship even as they ignored it, and the captain of the ship frowned when he glanced at it.

 

“It’s still-kept chasing us Cap-Boss,” said the rodent-like therian sailor with their strange, stuttery accent.

 

“Stubborn dumb young ones,” said the captain in reply, with some grumbling in their voice. “We try to leave them alone so they can grow up, but some always insist on learning the hard way. Chief Shooter! Let it have a screamer bolt! See if that’d drive it off!”

 

“Aye-aye Cap!” replied another therian, this one literally looking like a bipedal lizard dressed in a sailor’s outfit, with a bandanna tied on his head. The relatively small therian - barely a meter thirty or so, smaller than many goblins - walked and manned a massive ballista of dwarven make several times larger than himself, while a couple of the larger crew members helped load a strange bolt with holes all over its shaft and no arrowhead.

 

“Please cover your ears, ladies and gentleman passengers on board! This is going to be loud!” yelled the therian man in warning. He then aimed the ballista - which was designed and mounted so that it could be moved easily even by smaller crew members like him - at the white behemoth that kept chasing the ship, and pulled the siege weapon’s trigger.

 

With an audible twang, the ballista launched the bolt, which was easily as thick as an adult human’s arm and over a meter long, at the behemoth. As it sailed through the air, the bolt emitted a wailing screech that was almost painful to listen to even from the distance, and it passed right next to the behemoth, which visibly recoiled from it.

 

“I think-feel that just made it angry-mad, Cap-Boss,” said the rodent-like crew member as he kept an eye at the Behemoth with a spyglass. Cal noticed as well with her sharp eyes that the beast had not been driven away, and had instead pursued with even greater alacrity after the screamer shot.

 

“Let’s keep our distance for now while we still have good winds,” said the Captain with a frown. The winds were blowing from behind them at the moment, and the ship traveled at a truly rapid pace over the waters, which made it hard for the beast to keep up with them. “Maybe it will tire itself out before the wind turned.”

 

Unfortunately, the Captain’s hopes had not come true, as the southern winds changed to easterly ones not half an hour later, while the beast pursued them and closed the distance. The ships still managed to keep it at bay while it relied on the sideways wind for propulsion, but not as well as before, and the behemoth loomed ever closer.

 

“That’s all the chance we can give the dummy, I guess,” said the Captain with a grim nod. “All passengers! Please remain in your cabins, or at least in the central deck! The ship will engage in combat maneuvers and we urge you to hold on to something!”

 

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