I feel very weird at this moment. Like, I am both prepared and not one bit prepared at the same time. It would have been fine for the elder to warn me about how I might be killed. I barely understand the duel here. How am I supposed to find places where they can kill me?
Well, it is too late for me to back out now. At the moment I am inside a sledder, waiting for a storm. About a kilometer away from me is Laufen on his sledder. According to Cloak, the man is supposed to be average at piloting a sledder.
The man can run a sledder, but he can barely be considered to have any finesse with it. Thus, my duel with him is actually considered pretty fair. After all, I am pretty skilled at running an airship. They hope that it will translate to this as well.
I am reasonably confident that I can run a sledder with the limited practice that I have with it. I don't know if I am skilled enough to charge into a storm with the sledders, though.
Just how crazy is this storm even going to be? Just a sunny day here feels like a storm to me. If I were to leave the protection of my room, I would be frozen within minutes and blown away within moments. The storm is supposedly a hundred times worse than this.
Well, I guess that I should properly explain what exactly the rules of a winter loop are.
Well, simply put, the winter loop is a race between two participants through a storm of the truelands. We will be provided with sledders by the council. They have to make sure that the two ships are working properly and are similar to each other. Then we will have to race through a storm, and the person who is the first to leave it will be the victor. Quite a simple set of rules, and nobody needs to die.
The council has been quite busy in the last couple of weeks, as they prepare for the winter loop. I understand now why this punishment is very rarely used. It needs two sledders to be sacrificed so that the duel can happen. Even with much better pilots than us, it is more than likely that the ship will become a pile of scraps.
To these people who can only make use of sledders to travel the truelands, this must be a pretty heavy expense. Incidentally, the cost of these two sledders is being paid by the tattoo tribe. They did this to make sure that they could put a nasty little surprise on our ships.
The two ships given to us have a reinforced bow that can be used like a battering ram. That means the goal of this fight has changed from surviving the storm to surviving the enemy's ship. This is technically illegal, but who will question the tattoo tribe? Just getting me to this ship can be considered a victory for Cloak.
The only way that I could escape this duel was if my master had come here before the storm. That is why the tattoo tribe has been looking for a storm as quickly as possible. To prevent exactly that from happening.
For the winter loop, they have to find a storm that will last a specific amount of time. This time depends on the strength of the two parties involved. In our case, we come at the lower end of the time limit, which is about five minutes. So the storm has to last for roughly five minutes for our duel. Any time beyond that, and both ships will likely sink anyway, and then it would not be a duel. It would just be an execution.
Storms are very common here, but ones that can last for five minutes are very rare, it seems. Normally, there tends to be only one such storm every four to five months. As my luck would have it, that storm was only two weeks away from the trial, so I didn't even get practice. Not that I would have been able to practice much in those mountains anyway. It would have bought enough time for my master to make it here at least. The man should already be on his way. If I just had another week.
Before the storm strikes, I want to make a point about the snow tribe. It is their knowledge of the weather of the truelands. I am no weather mage, but even I know that such precise weather prediction is not easy to achieve. They say it requires centuries of study to get anywhere with weather prediction.
"Prepare for the storm", Cloak's voice appears in my ear.
As I link myself to the formations, I can see the storm approaching us. It is not physically visible, but to those with a mana sense, it looks like a massive wall.
That is no wall, though, as the ice mana in that "wall" is flowing even faster and deadlier than a whirlpool. Beyond the wall, you shall find the storm, though the storm wall itself is the first threat in this duel. I need to breach the wall, which is built of ice mana so packed that from here it appears solid. Entering it, I am sure that riding it will feel like riding in a cyclone.
Even as the wall approaches, I can feel my mana sense being blinded by the mana moving inside that storm. Well, I had expected that. I can feel my vital mana being drained as my mana sense gets sharper. (It is a bit of a risk, but I am going to need this.) I can feel the storm even more now as I feel like vomiting.
It takes me a couple of moments to control my nausea as the world begins to lose all direction. I can feel the sledder groaning as ice mana-laden winds buffet it from all directions. If I keep allowing the ship to move like this, soon enough it will split into many pieces.
This is something that one needs to be wary of with an airship, too. The trick to surviving such a thing is to go with the flow. Moving the sledder in whichever direction it is supposed to be going, and not going against the wind. The only problem is that the wind is constantly changing in this case. Only a sensitive enough mana sense will be able to detect all these changes. I should be able to do so barely with my enhanced mana sense.
I can finally understand why Cloak has been saying to me that I would be able to do this. All I need is a sensitive enough mana sense and a passable skill at driving a sledder to attempt such a thing.
I can feel the wind buffet the ship in all directions. The winds are coming at me randomly, pushing the ship in all directions. I begin to move the sledder. Before, the ground had a level of stability that made it easy to orient myself. Now the ground itself is like water in a storm, moving about like waves that threaten to capsize me.
I begin to move the ship, first left, then immediately to the right. Then I suddenly slope it downwards as I try to go with the flow. Now the battle between me and the giant is one of speed. Right now, both of us are like leaves in a storm. Whoever stabilizes first and breaches the wall will have the upper hand. Beyond the storm wall, while it will still be hard to move, at least the wind will move only in one direction. That is towards the storm wall.
So I get busy and try to move the ship with the flow of the storm. Here, I feel the limitation of being stuck to the ground. In an airship, you can simply go up whenever there is an updraft. With the sledder, whenever there is an updraft, I have to angle the ship upwards and hope that I won't end up taking off. The crash that would happen if we were to take off now would not be pretty to witness.
After all, the two stumps at the bottom are playing a pretty important role in the sledder. Any damage to them will drastically reduce my speed. Still, the process of adapting is taking longer than expected. The other side might have already done it too and is waiting to steer the ship towards my direction. He will ambush me the moment that I breach the wall.
(A couple of minutes later)
I finally break through the wall into the storm beyond it. Here, the winds are still very strong, enough to overturn the ship but not capsize it. There is a decent chance of the ship being overturned if we were to turn left or right now, though.
I am lost in my thoughts as the other side finally appears. I am barely able to set the ship backward, even as I notice him. The other party is perpendicular to the wind as he crashes against my ship. Thankfully, I had reversed direction. The other side still hit, but it is closer to the armored part of the ship. There is damage, but nothing that can get me killed in the short term.
The enemy ship quickly backtracks, turning as soon as possible. A few more moments perpendicular like that, and he would have been dragged back into the storm wall. I make use of this moment to reverse the ship's direction again. A few more moments in this direction, and I would have been back inside the storm wall.
Sadly, the wind is in the direction opposite to me, slowing me down quite significantly. Still, I managed to widen the gap between us. It is following after me headfirst now, with its armored section aimed at me.
The wind is also slowing the other ship down, so it will take a while for it to catch up with me. When it does, though, I will have no option left. The other party will annihilate my ship in a direct collision.
For a few seconds, my brain becomes completely blank as I don't know what to do. Almost like a miracle, an idea pops up in my head. Fuck, that is going to be pretty risky. If I pull this off, though, I will completely wreck the other party's ship in the best case. Even the worst case would be mutual destruction.
I quickly reverse the ship (another nice thing about the sledder is that they do not have a front or back, so they can move forward or backward at equal speeds.). You can tell the ship is moving at incredible speeds, boosted by the outside winds. The ship is being cradled like a baby's crib. It feels like the ship will be carried away by the wind at any second. Now I am scared that this thought will become the truth.
That means that right now I am charging at the other party. He doesn't need to do anything except keep moving forward for this collision to happen. Even if I want to back out now, it is not possible. I either succeed or die.
Just as soon as the ship comes within the range of my sight. (Sense enhancement formations don't have a lot of range in this chaotic place.) I turn the ship directly perpendicular to its present position. I can see the other ship coming closer and closer as the ship doesn't turn. I will be screwed if he moves out of the way now.
Thankfully, Laufen is not able to stop his ship as it punches into my ship, somewhere to the right of me. His ship acts as my anchor as the wind begins to shake the ship. The world becomes black as this collision destroys the sensory formations. (or whatever is the equivalent in this ship). Thankfully, I still have my mana sense.
Before either of us can do anything, though, the world around us begins to spin. It feels like we are standing on a spinning top. I begin to lose all sense of direction as our two ships begin to spin. Right towards the fucking storm wall.
fuck, fuck that wasn't supposed to happen. I try to push the ship away from the storm wall as I feel myself enter the storm wa....