When Frost meets Ice (Jelsa)

The Dive

The Muffling quality of the headphones silenced the raw power of the humming cannon, and the loud ear-shattering crack of its firing. They didn't hear the creaking of the wooden ship as the engines angled it unnaturally downward at little dots that were most likely the barricade that Blackbeard had mentioned.

It didn't escape Jack's notice that he and Merida were manning cannons named Rapture and Armageddon and were about to rain Hell on the Navy's barricade, he laughed to himself at that. Even Keyes got a good chuckle out of the connection, he'd been pretty dormant since Jack had taken over, most of his hosts were usually pretty quiet starting out especially recently as he had gained so much subconscious control over his host body. It might be another day or two before Keyes found a voice but by then he would have soaked up enough of Jack's memories to know the protocol of dealing with the invader.

"You ready for this, Bonnie?" Jack flicked the switch that left open the private channel with the other gunner.

"I'm always ready for a fight Keyes, you know that, and this is me specialty." Merida responded

"I know. I didn't get breakfast because of you. I'm still hungry which means you owe me."

"I don't owe you a pile o' dung if you can't hit naught today."

"Ha, you know that I'm just as good a shot as you if not better, Bon."

"HA! Now yer makin' a funny Keyes. I guarantee I can fire and sink a Navy Clanker before you can."

"I'll take that, Ten pieces against yours."

Bonnie snouted proudly, "HEH! Yer on pretty boy."

The elevated city below them stood hundreds of feet above the ground below it. The city was on a large floating platform that hung above the ruins of an old world destroyed by a war nobody remembered. Clouds of dust and debris hung just outside the walls of the city, magnetized to forever hang above the haunted world. The top layer hung with puffy white clouds but that didn't fool anyone who'd been below the smog, it only got dirtier and more perilous with larger and larger chunks of debris the lower you traveled. Anyone who'd made it passed the smog will tell you of the floating islands of electrified rocks and deteriorating ancient buildings that dotted the landscape.

The airship began to fall, propelled by the forward thrusters. The Queen Anne's Revenge sung a banshee wail as it dove at the blockade.

Information flashed in the back of Jack's mind as the memories of Keyes dripped into his mind despite his concentration. Jack tightened a leather and brass gas mask to his face, a long tube hooked to a filtered air tank in the rig. It was used for prolonged battles, or being at the higher altitudes. There was even a button on it in case he vomited that would cycle oxygen in through a secondary hose while the main one created a vacuum for exactly one second every time the button was pressed and funnel the vomit into a spare tank that the crewman responsible would later have to empty.

"On mey mark..." Rafiki's voice came over the headset, and the two gunners tightened their grips on the controls and aimed.

The Platform was about the size of small country by Jacks reckoning, Belgium maybe. The platforms weren't usually much bigger than ten thousand square miles with about half of that dedicated to farms or organic life. One known platform was completely dedicated to being a forest with only a couple garrisons of rangers allowed on it to protect against poaching. All in all, there were ten platforms owned by the crown and one royal navy ready to shoot them out of the sky.

A few dozen corvette class vessels lined around the perimeter of the platform while half as many destroyers sat behind them, what scared Jack and Keyes alike were the two Dreadnaughts in edged of view. Luckily, they weren't close enough to do anything. While the Corvettes varied little in size and shape due to mass production, some of the largest had the potential to peer of the Queen Anne's Revenge. Destroyers were about twice the size of most of the Corvettes and had just as much firepower but they were also half as fast.

The Dreadnaughts were in a class all their own at three times the size of a destroyer in length and twice the girth. They carried cannons that could not only decimate a Destroyer and its shields in a single volley, but could blow sizeable holes in the platforms themselves. Their sizes weren't just for their impressive cannons, but they also carried two garrisons of goliaths ready to deploy, four active garrisons of soldiers on top of the necessary crew, and most fearsome of all was the full load of their unique fast flying airborne Fighters that could be deployed in air battle. They could harass and tear apart a foe almost as fast as their cannons could, or would disable a foe so their cannons could rip through them like tissue paper.

These were the odds they faced if they wanted to escape the city, Jack could feel the captains smile at the fame he would gain from escaping such blockade. Jack knew what would give Blackbeard the most infamy, the Dreadnaughts, the most infamous of the lot, the Flying Dutchman, and the Iron Mountain.

"Fire!" Rafiki's voice shouted into Jack's ears. Merida was a second faster than Jack and more accurate. Jack felt the entire rig lurch backward as the cannon fired one of three rotating cannons. The entire rig shook as the second already primed cannon rotated into position. The cannons fired a mid-sized orb of compressed electricity that looked like a lightning riddled comet for only a split second before it slammed into one of the Corvettes shields making the ship tilt and a second blast erased a hole in the deck. The Captain had been right they weren't expecting an attack from above so most of the power to their upper shields had been diverted.

Jack fired again at the hole he made and hit the antigravity engine, the front end of the Corvette jumped twenty feet in the air making the Corrvette stand vertically in the air before it ripped in half and sent both halves into the mist. Merida had done the same but in half the time to another Corvette and then began opening fire on the Destroyer angling to open fire on the Pirate vessel that had just sunk two of its friends and was opening a hole in the barricade.

Jack aimed for the angling airship and then the Destroyer lurched upward as three giant black tentacle emerged from the mist, one empty, one carried half of the ship Jack had shot down, and one wrapped it's inky blackness around the destroyer.

Keyes called it the Kraken,

Jack called it what it really was, a Fearling, only larger and more terrible, it was a class above Fearling known to Jack as a Terror.

Jack cursed in French when five more tentacles rose from the mist along with one monsterous bulbous fanged maw, in a single heartbeat the maw swallowed the Destroyer whole. He now hoped the Navy had more Dreadnoughts on stand-by.