End Online: Volume 5 by D. Wolfin

the deck of the ship.
    CaptainGordon emerges from the bowels of the vessel with the
other three and a huge grin on his face, “Now that be a battle! Ye
guys be better than the last weak-kneed bunch I recruited! Only one of ye died
too! Wish I could o’ been ‘ere to see the action!”
    The captain pulls out a rope and excitedly starts hoisting the
severed tentacle out of everyone’s way while maneuvering around the holes in
the deck. He then recruits Mikhail’s help in dissecting the tentacle into
smaller, more manageable pieces. I take this opportunity to approach the
pirate.
    “CaptainGordon,” I ask as I help carry the tentacle segments
down into the food cargo hold below deck, “would you mind continuing on with
the answer to the earlier question? I cannot seem to get it off my mind.”
    We descend along a wooden staircase that creaks with every step.
There is no safety rail, so I have to be extra careful not to fall off as the
ship rides the ocean swells. The interior of the ship has a lot of the black
cast iron as well, with nearly every single major structural support or beam
being made out of the iron. There are numerous doors leading off into the
unknown, but I do not have the time to investigate them all.
    “Ah, that.” He suddenly seems nervous, almost unsure as to
whether he wants to say it or not, and that only makes me want to know more.
“It be a class skill.”
    “A class skill?”
    “Yeah, to be precise. It be called ‘Class Skill: Combustion
Engineer’. Strangely, it require an item to be gotten for this ‘ere class
skill. Follow me down further ‘nd you get it. Also, nobody else can be knowin’
’bout this ‘ere, so don’t go blabbin’.”
    “Of course.”
    I follow the captain down to the end of the corridor and descend
a second staircase very similar to the first. I feel that we have now entered
the true heart of the vessel. There are only three rooms down here, and
CaptainGordon takes the right hand one seemingly at random.
    Inside the room are innumerable copper pipes extending from a
single furnace and into the walls and ceiling. The vessel ‘Bastion’ is clearly
hosting countless mysteries and secrets.
    The pirate opens the grate to the furnace and black, billowing
smoke comes pouring out like an overflowing cauldron. Inside the near-darkness,
I see a black lump in the center of the cauldron, but cannot make out what it
is.
    “This ‘ere be the item I mentioned. A fist-sized god stone of
combustanite. It be excreting an endless supply o’ flammable gas. I harness
this ‘ere with me class skill to make these items. I still be an engineer,
after all!”
    I spend a few moments staring at the vague rock in the center of
the furnace before finally moving on. The class skill seems to align with
everything the captain has said, so I have no desire to doubt him, but I still
get the impression that there is a vital piece of information I am missing. I
briefly consider pushing for more information, but decide it isn’t worth
upsetting our host and soon forget about it as we continue on with our voyage
atop the ocean waves.  
    Our food for the next three days, breakfast, lunch, and dinner,
is roast squid. It tastes good at first, but everyone quickly tires of eating
it constantly. CaptainGordon is the only one that seems to have no aversion to
the same single-ingredient dish every meal.
    The captain brings up a large amount of wood from below deck and
starts to work on replacing the flooring of the deck. There is no shortage of
damage to other sections of the vessel, but CaptainGordon is the only one with
the game skills to repair any of it. He starts whistling an incredibly
irritating tune while working that makes everyone apart from Fen frown. At
first I think she is impervious to it, but then I see the small ear plugs, made
of ice, in her ears.
    Three days gradually turn into a week, or two and a half days in
real life, before we finally encounter our second sea monster. By