It seemed that Shin had conducted his test flights while I was still bedridden on account of the poison. I’d spent most of that period barely conscious, if at all, so I couldn’t remember much of anything about it. Rietz, meanwhile, had been forced to take on such an outrageous workload, it was no wonder that an event like that had slipped past him.
“Oh, well, glad to hear it,” said Shin. “But, yeah─the tests were all wrapped up ages ago, so we know for a fact that she’ll fly. How do you like that? Really something, ain’t she?” he added with a triumphant smirk.
It was certainly something, I had to give him that. It felt like I’d only just agreed to fund his project, and he’d already made his design into a reality. As far as airships were concerned, Shin was a genius, through and through─though I knew that Enan’s help may have made a considerable difference as well.
“She’ll move people or goods just fine. Whatever you want her to. Load her up with weapons and she’ll make for a hell of a warship, too. She can fly up high enough that the enemy’s spells and arrows won’t be able to reach her, but you’ll sure be able to hit them! Use her right and she’ll be a real asset, I’m tellin’ you!” Shin explained.
“Oh, I get it. Spells and bows both have longer effective ranges when you’re higher up than your opponent,” Rosell agreed with a nod. “Not to mention that the spellcaster’s skill plays a factor in a spell’s range. If we put Charlotte or Musia on the ship, they could rain magic down on an enemy army from way outside of the enemy’s range! I can’t think of anything that could be more dangerous, from our enemies’ perspective.”
“How long can the vessel stay in the air?” asked Rietz.
“Depends on how fast you’re flyin’ her, but if you treat her right, she’ll keep going for three days straight. You’ll cut that down to about twelve hours if you’re flyin’ fast, though.”
Three days?
That meant the ship could fly far greater distances than I’d been anticipating─and flying, of course, meant that we could ignore the terrain below when plotting out our route. It was starting to hit me just how much ground Shin’s airship might be able to cover. Furthermore, as long as we were traveling within Missian, we’d be able to procure fuel at our destination.
Shin’s airship was powered by wind-aspected magic, which meant that wind-aspected aqua magia effectively functioned as its fuel. Wind-aspected magistones, the material needed to refine that aqua magia, weren’t mined in any significant quantities within Missian’s borders. Deposits of them could be found here and there all across Summerforth, but wind magic wasn’t particularly useful in battle and didn’t have a plethora of other common uses, so for the time being, it wasn’t mined much of anywhere. The upside to that was that the magistones were sold on the cheap, but the downside was that it was difficult to buy them in bulk, and very few were found in circulation within Missian itself.
I guess that shouldn’t be a problem if its fuel efficiency’s as good as Shin says, but still, we might want to look into buying up as many magistones as we can get our hands on. We should be able to get at least a small stock of them from Semplar and Arcantez, considering how big those cities are.
“I would love to try riding the ship. Would that be possible?” asked Licia.
“You bet it would!” said Shin. “It seats fifteen people, but around ten of those are gonna have to be the crew, so we’ve got capacity for ’bout five passengers or so.”
“All of us can join you, then? Wonderful! Let’s all try it, everyone!” Licia exclaimed with an ecstatic smile.
“Yeah, I’m in. I wanna see how high up this thing can go,” Charlotte eagerly agreed.
Rietz was willing to tag along as well, but just the thought of riding the airship had left one of us a quivering mess.
“U-Umm, d-do I have to come along? It’s going to fly, like, really high up, right? I think I’d be happy just watching from the ground, personally,” Rosell stammered. He looked downright terrified.
I could understand his apprehensions about flying that far up into the sky. I was a little scared too. I’d flown on airplanes a number of times in my past life, but I’d had a lot fewer doubts about their skyworthiness than I did about Shin’s airship. I had a feeling that its odds of crashing were way higher than those of the airplanes back home, at the very least. The difference between me and Rosell, however, was that my curiosity was winning out against my terror. I wanted to give it a go.
“Aww, is widdle Rosell scared? Weren’t you supposed to be a man?” Charlotte jabbed with a malicious smirk.
“Wha─L-Look, anyone would be scared of being that high up off the ground!” Rosell shouted back. Her provocation had scored a direct hit on his ego.
“We’ve ironed out all the safety features, so nothing to be scared about, trust me!” Shin declared. “Even if worse comes to worst and she ends up going down, we’ve got fail-safes in place to slow the fall with wind magic. And luckily enough, we’ve got Charlotte, House Louvent’s best mage, along for the ride! Nobody’s dyin’ on this trip, for sure.”
“Right. If things go bad, I’ll whip up some wind magic and save everyone before you know it,” Charlotte agreed, pivoting to reassure Rosell.
“In that case…I guess I could come along,” Rosell finally agreed. He still seemed scared, but I had a feeling that the airship was rather intriguing to him as well.
“Great! In that case, I’ll start getting her ready to fly. Give us just a minute!” Shin said before hurrying off to prepare the airship for departure.
After what felt like almost no time at all spent waiting in the workshop, Shin called out to us from the airship’s deck. “All right, we’re all set! Climb aboard, everyone!”
It had only taken about thirty minutes for him to get ready, from start to finish. It seemed the airship could be deployed much quicker than I’d anticipated.
Everyone made their way up onto the vessel’s deck.
“We’re taking off from here? But we’re indoors! What about the ceiling…?” Licia muttered, sounding a little mystified.
Actually, that’s true. What are they going to do about the ceiling? I wondered─but my doubts were quickly dispelled.
“Open ’er up!”
Shin let out a shout, and a moment later, the ceiling itself began to slowly move. It split open, revealing the blue sky above us.
Oh, I get it! That would do the trick, yeah.
“Okay, we’re starting our ascent!”
At Shin’s signal, the airship began slowly drifting upward. Its rate of ascent gradually picked up, and before I knew it, the ground was dwindling away beneath us. I assumed that some sort of magic was being used to help us climb faster. Shin had asked for a few of Canarre’s mages to be dispatched to help him with his project, and they were most likely the ones handling that side of the ship’s workings.
“O-Oh, god, we’re so high up… I n-never should’ve come along…” Rosell moaned. He was trembling like a leaf.
“Th-This is incredible! I can’t believe how tiny Castle Canarre looks from here!” said Licia. She seemed more impressed than scared as she watched our home from afar.
“That’s enough! Keep her level here!” Shin shouted. The ship’s ascent came to a halt. “Really something, ain’t she? Bet’cha didn’t think she could fly this high!” he added with a very proud smirk.
“It truly is remarkable… Our enemies’ attacks could never reach us at this altitude,” Rietz muttered as he peered down at the surface.
“Right? Bet it’d feel real nice to blow an enemy castle to smithereens from up here,” Charlotte noted. She had a way of saying some pretty unsettling things, from time to time.
“We could go a bit higher than this, by the way, but that’s where it starts gettin’ dangerous. Practically speaking, this is our limit,” Shin noted.
“Dangerous? How so?” I asked.
“Well, y’know how we’re floatin’ thanks to a device that’s powered by wind magistones, right? Well, if you use it to take you up too high, it’ll stop working, lose its lift, and you’ll end up falling again. I figure we’ll be able to improve on that upper limit once I’ve made some tweaks to the design, but for now, goin’ up any further than this risks goin’ down again, and in an awful hurry.”
It’ll “lose its lift”?
I didn’t understand the reasoning behind his explanation, but I imagined it could have something to do with how air pressure lessened as you went up in altitude. Maybe wind-aspected magistones lost their distinctive characteristics in a low air-pressure environment? That was just blind speculation, of course.