I needed an unenchanted weapon for this demonstration. Percy drew his cutlass and tossed it over to me. “As you can all see,” I said, hacking the cutlass against one of Talon’s scale-covered arms, “the harpy’s scales work pretty effectively as armor.” The sharp steel blade simply glanced off the scales, doing no damage. I repeated a similar cut on Talon’s scaled thigh, and her scaled head. “Their torsos are weaker, since they don’t have the armored scales there, but even so, their skin is as tough as cured leather,” I continued, driving a weak thrust into Talon’s abdomen. This half-hearted effort would have nonetheless been strong enough to gut a bare-chested man, but the blade didn’t pierce her flesh. I repeated the move, putting more power into it this time, and then the tip of the weapon did slide in.
“Okay, so we hit harpy chest, kill harpy easy!” Drok said enthusiastically.
“With your Death-enchanted weapons,” I said, “you’ll be able to take a harpy’s arm or leg off in one blow, regardless of their armored scales, but I don’t intend to let them get close enough for hand-to-hand combat. We’re going to pick them out of the sky with ranged weapons.”
“What about their screams?” Elyse asked, looking doubtful. “I remember well this beast’s terrible shrieks,” she continued, wrinkling her nose with distaste as she stared at Talon. “They don’t have to get anywhere near us to cripple us with that sound.”
“We’re not going to hear a damn thing, not with the enchanted helms Rami-Xayon and I are creating. You’ll see when you put ‘em on. Because of this, though, we’re going to have to communicate during the fight with colored flags. And Ji-Ko, you and your monks are going to have to sit this one out.”
“Of course, God of Death,” Ji-Ko said humbly. “This is for the best, anyway. Because my monks and I have no eyes our sense of hearing is especially sensitive, and the screams of those horrible harpies would be even more debilitating to us than they are to you.”
“Yes. So you guys will be down in the hold, Percy’s pirates will be manning the ballistae here on deck, and the rest of us will be in rowing boats in the water, with bows and crossbows—all enhanced with Death magic, of course. One well-placed Death arrow or crossbow bolt will knock a harpy right out of the sky.”
“Why do we need to be out there on the water in flimsy little boats when we could all be much safer here on the warship?” Anna-Lucielle asked, looking worried.
“To split their numbers up,” I answered. “If we’re all in one place, they’ll surround and swarm us, and even with our soundproof helms and enchanted weapons, it’ll be a dangerous situation for us. If they have to split their numbers to go for separate targets, they can’t concentrate a mass attack all in one spot.”
I explained the rest of the strategy to my party, and then we prepared to fight. There was a lot of spare armor and helms left over from the Church of Light Navy, to whom this ship had previously belonged, so Rami-Xayon and I picked out enough full-face helms for every person on board, and then we got to work enchanting them. I’d previously only been able to enchant armor and weapons with Death magic, but now, with the Dragon Sword’s powers, I was able to enchant items with whatever forms of magic were available to me. Rami-Xayon provided a generous dose of Wind magic, and I blended it with Death magic to create some rather nifty looking helms. The steel turned from the burnished silver hue of standard Church of Light armor to a glossy black streaked with blueish white. The Death magic added strength to the steel, while the Wind magic provided something that would be perfect for fighting harpies.
I tested out the first helm myself. I slipped it on, and the moment my head was enclosed in its stuffy confines, all I could hear was the roar of a furious hurricane wind in my ears.
“Say something to me!” I yelled at Rami-Xayon. Not hearing my own voice was a little disconcerting at first, as well as hearing the monotonous roar of wind in my ears, despite not being able to feel even the slightest ripple of a breeze on my body.
Rami-Xayon’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I repeated my request, bellowing at full volume. From the movement of her lips, I could tell she was yelling, but I could still hear nothing but the howl of the wind in my ears. Grinning, I pulled the helm off, only to have my eardrums split by Rami-Xayon’s full-volume shriek.
“I said I’m not deaf, Vance, stop yelling at me!” she screamed.
“Okay, okay, the test is over and the results are in,” I said, chuckling. “These helms work perfectly. The harpy shrieks won’t sound like anything more than annoying flies buzzing around our heads.”
Once everyone was outfitted with a Death-Wind helm and a Death enchanted bow or crossbow, we split up into small groups, with three people to a boat. Percy and his crew wished us luck as they lowered the boats down onto the choppy sea. The swirling cloud of harpies was closer now, and Castle Island was in view. I saw that plenty of harpies were perched on the rocks of Castle Island, and I realized that whether we wanted to or not, we would have had to fight the harpies to even get onto the island anyway.
With me on my boat were Yumo-Rezu and Anna-Lucielle. Because of the whole sibling-goddess rivalry thing, Yumo-Rezu hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near Rami-Xayon. I still had to try and get to the bottom of
