...inally the damn thing is working. Why does my thought logger have to activate only now? Well, I guess I should be happy that it finally activated. It would be amazing if I recorded all of this and did not manage to record it now, of all times. Fuck, I should focus back on the matter at hand. As I think this, I tip the ship downwards.

  At the moment, I just want to punch through something. I know that I will be the person who will have to patch it up in the end. Still, I want to do it. That is just how frustrated I am at this moment. I actually would have done it too.

  The only reason that I can't do that right now is that there are just so many things I am having to juggle at this moment. Even losing focus for a few moments would be enough to screw me over. The ship is going to crash in the next five minutes, and there is nothing that I can do to stop it from doing so.

  This is not for a lack of trying, of course. I am trying everything that I can to ensure that the ship will not crash. None of my attempts is working at this moment. That is why I have shifted my focus to damage reduction. The plan that I have will work in that regard, but it requires me to be at full focus. Already, I have enough stuff distracting me as it is. Maybe I shouldn't have started the log now.

  Right now, controlling the ship is like trying to control a puppet from a kilometer away. It is a wonder that I can keep the ship in control at all. Everything is just a bit too delayed. It feels like the ship is moving a few moments after I have given it the command to. Ironically, there is only one reason that I can control this ship right now. That is because of my journey to the Snowwind Empire. That ship had even more laggy controls than right now.

  Controlling the ship is still somewhat manageable. There are presently five eagles that are following after my ship. These five eagles are the reason that we are in our present state. I could have landed the ship and let it recharge if I didn't need to keep it from the birds.

  The damn birds have been following me since the morning. They are just following my ship like a horde of ghosts. They dash towards the ship whenever I slow the ship down. (Or even tip it downwards to land.) I cannot dodge them anymore with how laggy my controls have gotten. Whenever I accelerate the ship, the creatures just hang back. Just enough that I can't hit them with my cannons.

  It almost feels like the creatures are guiding me. It is almost like these creatures know that my mana reserves are on the verge of being finished. So they are taunting me into wasting my mana. These creatures should not be smart enough to make use of a strategy like that. Well, I honestly don't know anymore. Maybe these undead are special.

  If I could just figure out how to get rid of these creatures. If I had more mana in my reserves. If we were right next to a bone fort. All of these what-ifs exist in the corner of my thoughts, like a bunch of flies around a trash pit.

  I am trying to bring my thoughts into order while I somehow deal with this trash fire. That's part of the reason that I have started this record. I guess I have to explain to you how I even ended up in such a position in the first place. Things were going well today. (I guess that should have tipped me off. Things never go well for me.) Today morning, Anthony finally told me where the bone fort was.

  I had imprisoned John and his troop in their rooms yesterday. The man took an entire day to just confirm that they had been imprisoned properly in their room. Anybody else would have been insulted by this, I guess. In my case, I was struggling to keep myself from laughing. The man was wasting time doing something pointless. I had forgotten that we all were in this land on borrowed time.

  My mana reserves are too low right now because I decided to humor Anthony. I guess I will have to blame myself for that as well. I had forgotten to keep an eye on the mana reserves while dealing with Anthony.

  Before you go about blaming me for it, try to be a mediator between the legion and the guard corps. The damn bastards had managed to raise an issue on everything. Both the legion and the guards are like that.

  I had to be physically present there to make the two factions focus. If I had not been there, I still wouldn't have gotten the location. Still, I do admit it would have been better if I had focused more on my mana reserves.

  I will be honest, I thought that Anthony would be more reasonable. I have worked enough with the guards to know that they have the sharpest instinct for survival. It is pretty clear that right now, there is only one way to survive.

  Anthony is doing the exact opposite of that. He is doing something that would waste his and my time. You have to be careful about that with the guards. If they don't want to do anything, they won't do it. Even if not doing it could lead to their death.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  No, I think it would be more precise to say that the man is pretty unaware of his mortality. He seems to think that we are immortal.

  Here I am getting off track again. To get back to the point, the bone fort was only half a week away from us, even at the speed that we are going at right now. That means that I didn't need to worry about recharging my ship. (Well, I would have been forced to land at least once. I would have dealt with that as it happened, though.)

  Around the time I got the location from Anthony, a horde of ten eagles began following us. I did not think too much about it. The creatures have not stopped following us.

  These small groups are not even a threat. If I used my cannons, they would have been destroyed quickly. I didn't do that, though. That would have meant that I would have to land and recharge the ships more frequently. Most of the airborne ones tend to just leave us when they realize that we won't be good prey. (All except the eagles.) After all, they certainly won't gain enough death mana to justify the mana that they will lose in hunting us.

  This group of eagles just kept following me. Even when I shot five of them, they kept following after me. Now my mana is at a critical level, and I certainly can't use my cannons on them. Well, I have something of a plan in place to deal with them. Well, calling it a plan is an insult to plans. You can say that right now I am preparing to crash the ship.

  I mean, crashing makes it sound badder than it actually will be. The landing will be rough, but not disastrous. The suspension formations of this ship are solid. They should be able to protect the ship.

  There is going to be damage on my ship, but it should be something that I can fix. (As long as the suspension formation works correctly.) Let's just hope Eric is ready. The man will have to take care of the eagles while I am landing the ship. They will have to charge close to my ship to attack me when I land. Then Eric can aim at them and get rid of them.

  The eagles are nothing compared to the undead that will be attacking us down there. Just as I am recording this thought, the door to my room bangs open. The sound is enough to cause me to jump out of my bones. I almost throw my sword at the man.

  "What are you doing here, Trevor?" I snap at the man. He should know better than to interrupt my work.

  "I have come here to see if you need my help, captain." Trevor replies as coolly as ever. "Anyway, I have been sent here."

  Looking at the man, you wouldn't think that we are a couple of minutes from crashing to the ground. (Sorry, landing the ship.)

  "I don't need you help, man. I just need you to make sure that the scholars are safely kept in their rooms." I tell him.

  "The scholars are why I am here, cap....", he speaks, before I gesture for him to be quiet.

  The critical moment has finally occurred. The propulsion formation is going to run out of mana in ten seconds. I can hear my heart pounding in my chest as I tip the ship downwards. I don't stop giving power to the propulsion formation, though..

  That means that we will reach the ground in a couple of moments. Before that happens, though, I level the ship. Right now, we are pretty close to the ground, though running out here would still mean a crash.

  I tip the ship downwards as the ship finally begins to slow down. The propulsion formation has finally run out of mana. We are still going too fast for a safe landing, though, as I level my ship again. The ship is still falling even after I have leveled it. It is just falling a bit slower. I wait for a few moments as the ship reaches the optimal speed.

  Finally, I tip my ship downwards one last time. As we hit the ground. The force of us hitting the ground is enough for me to fly in the air. I only stop when my head hits the ceiling. As soon as I hit the ground (Which I don't feel the pain of, oddly.), I extend control strings into my formations.

  Most of the formations are not powered right now. I ignore them, though, as I focus on the formations that are still active. These are the formations that will absorb the surrounding mana and send it into my mana reserves. If they were to get damaged in any way, then there is simply no way that the ship would be flying anymore.

  Once I confirm that mana is going into my mana reserves, I check up on Trevor. The man is unconscious right now. Other than that, the only major injury that he has is on his head.

  It is a small gash, though it is gushing like a fountain. I guess that I should hurry the man towards the searchers. Right now, they are the only people among us with any idea of healing magic.

  Well, the man has himself to blame for this. All of their rooms were fitted with formations to cushion people in case of a crash. The formation is there to prevent their inhabitants from bouncing around their room. (And shatter all their bones in the process.)

  Now, Trevor is not one to break orders like that without reason. There must be a reason that he has come here. Well, I will have to leave that to when the man finally wakes up. Right now, I have more immediate worries.

  After all, the entire ship is going to be besieged by undead from all sides. While I am sure that all the other factions are already creating battle lines. After they have fought the undead here quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. The one thing that I have learned with landing the ship is that this strikeforce knows how to take care of itself.

  I have to try and help out where I can, though. The first thing is that my sensory formation is still not active. Those formations tend to require too much mana to work. There is no way that I will be able to activate it with the meager amount of mana entering into the reserves right now.

  Well, I still have my mana sense. While it is nothing precise, I should be able to sense anything powerful entering our lands. I don't know what we will do with that information. At the very least, I will feel like I am doing something at least.