Yumo-Rezu picked two out of the sky, which I hastily turned into undead creatures, and to my surprise Anna-Lucielle plugged a cool, well-timed arrow right into another harpy’s heart, while I shot down another three in quick succession. It was too late though, for the harpies’ dive was so fast that they looked like a blur of blue; gigantic crossbow bolts fired directly at us from the sky.
“Abandon ship!” I roared, forgetting that neither of the goddesses could hear my voice over the roar of the Death-Wind helms.
The order was unnecessary, though; both of them had seen that a catastrophic impact was imminent, and they leaped out of the boat into the ocean when I did, just in time to avoid being turned into splatters of tenderized meat and splintered bone by the immense momentum of the harpies.
Now, floundering in the water, we were sitting ducks for the harpies, whose dive had taken them a few yards down underwater after plowing through our boat. I wasn’t about to let them take us, though, and gripping the bow in my left hand, I drew my Dragon Sword with my right. The moment one of the harpies’ heads broke the surface of the waves, I lopped it off. I swung around and decapitated another harpy as it tried to surface, and then waited for the others to come up so I could hack their heads off too.
My sixth sense buzzed, however, telling me that something was up behind me, and I spun around just in time to see one of the surfacing harpies pluck Anna-Lucielle out of the water. The snarling beast beat her huge wings and raced upward, with Anna-Lucielle gripped firmly in her claws. Neither I nor Yumo-Rezu could shoot the harpy down, because we couldn’t use our bows while treading water.
I’d heard that harpies often used a method similar to eagles when it came to killing larger prey—they would drop them from a great height onto rocks. The harpy holding Anna-Lucielle was flying higher and higher, and heading straight for the rock-strewn Castle Island, and a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach told me that this was exactly what the harpy intended to do with Anna-Lucielle.
Nobody could take a shot at the harpy without risking hitting Anna-Lucielle either, so I knew it was up to me to save her, and to do this I would have to get up into the air to battle the beast. I called down Talon, who’d been fighting harpies in the skies, and she swooped down and plucked me out of the water. I sent another undead harpy to pick up Yumo-Rezu too.
Now, gripped in Talon’s claws, while Yumo-Rezu was likewise gripped by her armored shoulders by an undead harpy, the two of us soared upward in pursuit of Anna-Lucielle, getting hundreds of feet above the ocean in mere seconds. As we flew through the sky, wheeling harpies screamed and dived at us, like eagles fighting in mid-flight, but we dropped them from the skies with well-placed arrows, and I used my growing force of undead harpies to fight them off as they dived at us with claws outstretched.
Controlling Talon directly, I felt as if I was the one flying rather than her. I’d had plenty of practice with flight over the long time in which Talon had been one of my creatures, and ducking, rising, diving, and swooping came as naturally to me as jumping, ducking, vaulting, and rolling on a land-based obstacle course.
Even so, racing through the huge flock of harpies in pursuit of Anna-Lucielle was unlike any battle I’d ever fought. Even in the most chaotic battles on land, you only had opponents coming at you from the sides—all sides, from 360 degrees sometimes, but from the sides nonetheless. Now, in this aerial battle, enemies were not only diving and charging me from all sides, they were coming from above and below too.
Yumo-Rezu and me were both expert archers, and we could loose multiple arrows at multiple targets in a matter of seconds, but even so, the rate at which we were being attacked by the harpies was overwhelming. I shot left, then right, then would have to aim directly above my head the next second. Before that arrow even slammed into its target, I would be taking hasty aim at a shrieking harpy coming at me from directly below.
I had to think fast, and keep the attacking harpies at bay with not only my arrows, but also other harpies; the instant I killed one I would turn it, sending it wheeling through the air to smash into one of the harpies on our tail and wrangle mid-air with its enemy in mortal combat. In addition to the harpies coming at us from all angles, arrows, crossbow bolts and ballista spears from below were streaking through the air in a reverse rain from below. My comrades were trying to keep their missiles from coming near us, but our erratic flight path and the speed at which we were tearing through the sky meant that often the friendly fire from below would zip dangerously close past us.
Finally, we broke through the flock, and now it was just me and Yumo-Rezu pursuing the harpy that had Anna-Lucielle in its clutches. The ocean was racing by at a tremendous speed far below us, and the wind resistance was battering my body like a hurricane wind as I pushed Talon to her full flying speed.
The harpy was climbing higher, and had almost reached Castle Island. The unyielding gray rocks seemed to cry out with silent hunger for a victim, and with the lead the harpy had on us, it looked like they were going to get one.
The harpy circled the island once, easily two miles up in the air, and then, positioned directly over the most jagged rocks, released Anna-Lucielle from its claws. She dropped like a stone, and I knew that I had to dive at once to
