CHAPTER 3 THE ATTACK

It was a new day. Captain Anna woke up with the very first rays of sunlight and prepared herself for the day. She left her quarts and started to make a lot of noise to wake up her crew.

“Wake up you lazy rats! Sun is shining and there is no time to lose!” Anna shouted in her attempt to wake her sailors. The fuss was so much that everybody on the ship started to get up, including Marina who was slightly disoriented due to the sudden ruckus.

Marina started to look around her trying to understand why there was so much noise, but she could only see the bars of her cell. After doing her observation, she felt something weird happening with her body right in her lower half. She looked down to her tail and she was surprised with what she saw. The siren did not understand what was going on, but she was sure it was not normal.

On the ship’s deck, Charlotte was joining the crew who were forming a circle around the captain. The shipmaster was making an effort to stay awake as she spent most of the night talking with Marina and went to sleep a couple of hours before sunrise. To prevent her captain noticed her weariness, Charlotte stood behind another man who was on the back of the group surrounding Captain Anna.

Once everybody was present, the captain started talking. “Finally, the goddess of fortune has smiled at us, comrades! Yesterday, while two of you were fishing our dinner, a siren was caught!” All the pirates cheered with this news, loud enough to help Charlotte to stay awake.

“Now, I will ask our comrade Isaac to go and bring our special guest up here with us,” Captain Anna said while gesturing with her hand to one of the men on the crew, who immediately went down to the prison.

While they waited, the pirates started talking with each other about the stuff they would do with the money they would get with the exhibitions of the siren in the ports. The shipmaster listened to them and started to feel uneasy. The fact they were talking about Marina as if she were an object and not a living being disgusted her. After a few minutes, Isaac appeared on the deck, making all the conversations stop.

“Well, where is she?” Anna asked Isaac when she noticed he did not bring the siren.

“Captain, we have a problem,” Isaac answered and pulled on a rope he had on his hand. The girl they captured the day before appeared but she did not have a fishtail. Instead, she had two legs and was giving small, clumsy steps!

Everybody was in shock. Their siren was not siren anymore. Instead, they had just a common human girl. The captain was the most surprised of all. Her treasure; her fountain of wealth… lost… useless. Furious, Anna pulled on Marina’s hair and forced the girl to look at her into her eyes. “What have you done?!” Anna shouted on Marina’s face. “Where is your tail?!” The siren stayed silent. She was very scared with the situation and she did not understand either why she had legs instead of a fishtail. “Answer me!” Anna shouted, making Marina felt more scared.

Charlotte was seeing everything from her spot in the middle of the men. She was as surprised as everyone else with what was going on. The previous night while she was talking with Marina, she could see how the siren from time to time moved her tail to flex it, and she never mentioned having the ability to turn it into human legs; now, all this uncertainty impeded her to think clearly to know what to do.

Suddenly, the ship gave a violent shake. All the pirate crew was pulled out of their trance and immediately took their positions. The ship shook again and all the pirates went to portside and starboard to check what was happening. “What is going on?!” the captain shouted while running to the rudder.

“I think we crashed with a reef, captain,” one of the men on portside answered. Right then, the ship shook again and everybody tried to hold to whatever they had close to them. With all this agitation, one of the men fell overboard to the ocean. One of his mates noticed this and shouted “Man overboard!” catching everyone’s attention and making them gather in the point. Once all of them got together, the man on the water dived violently, as if something had pulled him under the water. All the pirates were in shock and none of them could do anything to help. Captain Anna could see what happened and started to fear for the safety of her ship and her crew.

All of a sudden, a long, giant object got out form the water and hit the mainmast. All the crew started running up and down on the deck scared for this attack, but the captain was shocked and paralyzed after seeing this. During all that time Marina stayed standing in the middle of the deck still tied up. All the chaos that had taken place since she was taken out of her cell scared her and did not let her think straight. She had checked with her sight the whole ship hoping to find Charlotte, but she did not find her; the shipmaster, just like everybody else on the ship had tried to look for the reason behind the violent shakes and forgot about the siren. Now, with the sudden attack, nor Charlotte nor Marina had any clue on about what to do.

Captain Anna tried to recover the control of her ship, so she went back to the rudder and ordered “Everybody to the cannons! We are not being taken down without a fight!” Some of the sailors went down to the gun ports and took out the cannons to fight. Once they were out, the pirates could see through the embrasures more long objects going up the sides of the ship. This time they could see them better: apart from being long, those objects were also flexible, meaty, and had a lot of suckers; all these features were hard to mistake with something else, and this made the panic grow among the pirate crew: those things were giant tentacles!

On deck, some men were trying to fight against the tentacles using any object they could find, but most of the men ended up being taken and dragged to the ocean. Thanks to their skills on sword fighting, Anna and Charlotte were capable to escape from the tentacles numerous times, but Marina was not so skilful: she had tried to move as fast as possible with her new legs, but her steps were clumsy so she crashed against the pirates who were running from one side of the deck to the other and ended up tripping with her own feet.

While she was on the floor, one of the tentacles took Marina by her ankle and tried to drag her to the ocean. She started screaming asking for help, but no one heard her. Right before she went overboard, somebody cut the tentacle with a swift movement; Marina turned her head and she felt happy to see she was saved by Charlotte.

“Charlotte!” Marina exclaimed.

“I will take you to a safe place,” the shipmaster said while cutting Marina’s ties with a knife. While she was doing that, the tentacles started rising to the sky, and the pirate crew just saw them without knowing what to do.

Charlotte was capable to cut the rope holding Marina and helped her to stand up, but right at that moment, the tentacles fell on top of the ship destroying it. One of the tentacles fell very close to Marina and Charlotte, making both girls fall in the water; but Charlotte had the worst fall as she hit her head with the edge of a broken plank right before she touched the water, making her fall unconscious.

When she was under the water, Marina tried to swim, but her swimming skills were as bad as her walking skills so she could barely move from her spot. In the middle of her attempts to swim, Marina saw Charlotte’s unconscious body sinking to the bottom, and she noticed the blood flowing from the back of her head. Marina felt horrified and helpless with that sight, and that was the moment in which something surprising happened: Marina’s legs started to fuse and get covered in scales, slowly recovering the shape of a fishtail. Marina saw this change and felt surprised, but she only lived that surprise for a brief instant as she started to swim towards her friend. The siren reached the shipmaster and took her in her arms, checking the wound. Marina did not know how to help her, but she knew time was running out, so she swam back to the surface and once out she looked her surroundings trying to find a place to take Charlotte. Everything around her was a disaster: pieces of wood and cloth everywhere, corpses floating around and a weird sensation in her body she had never felt before.

Marina was desperate for trying to help Charlotte, so without time to doubt she swam with her friend’s body to the first direction she noticed was clear. She was not sure about where she was going, but she knew quite well where she had to go: land, with people who could help her friend before she died. Marina swam fast and nonstop, even though she felt exhausted: she had barely slept and the last time she had something to eat was her breakfast from the previous day, but she would not let that stop her.

After swimming for what felt like hours, Marina could finally see the land: a desert beach. Using her last remnants of strength, the siren swam very quickly to the shore, and she arrived at it in just a couple of minutes. Marina dragged herself through the sand out of the water along with Charlotte’s body. Both girls ended up laying on the sand: Charlotte still unconscious and Marina too exhausted to try moving. Right before falling asleep, the siren got closer to the pirate girl and hugged her, right before closing her eyes. But the siren was oblivious of the fact someone had seen her and her friend on the distance, and this person would gladly help them both.