"I'm going to be completely honest with you!" the Admiral shouted in answer to Greg's question, sprinting like a crazed and desperate man for the cover of the treeline and the safety of some caves. The ballista continued to fire down upon them, apparently tracking the two retreating figures rather than firing upon the pirate mob; no doubt distinguishing friend from foe with a looking glass telescope and ordering the ship to stay aimed on them. Still, the farther they got the less accurate the shots seemed to become. But that wouldn't dissuade him from running like a madman, sometimes dashing to the side suddenly, just to throw their aim off even more. Besides. They had to have a finite supply of those things! He hoped. "Yes!" he panted, skidding to a halt in the sand as a large wooden pole with a razor metal tip exploded into the ground right in front of him. He ran around it, huffing his way far from shore, not even bothering to see if Greg was keeping up with him. Yet despite all his running, he still had the breath to talk. A lot. As always. "It may seem as though this has all gone tits up, but that's because I always allow for an element of chaos in all of my missions! You see this began three years ago when King Theo assigned me to a special branch of the army known as the Royal Rangers. Tasked with the deadliest undercover assignments in all the land, we infiltrate cults and criminal organizations in order to bring them down, from the inside. I've been tracking a deadly pirate by the name of John to this island. But this island has a lot of Johns on it. I was close to uncovering something when you stumbled in and botched things up big, kid! But I couldn't let a civvie like you get hurt. Not on my watch. NOT ON MY WAAAAAAAATCH!" Falling to his knees, the Admiral began to grab sand in each hand and raise it up to the sky, letting it sift through his fingers and blow away in the wind. "FRANKIE! Frankie just hold on! Oh god Frankie it's all spilling out of you. Oh, oh, where's the healer! I'm not gonna let you die Frankie! NOT ON MY WATCH!" The sudden assault of three more shots from the ship, all within ten feet of him, sent the Admiral scampering towards the trees once more and vanishing behind their safe and obscuring presence. Whatever his dramatic 'flashback' had been, hadn't been worth continuing after almost becoming a splattered pincushion. Ballista spears poured in from overhead every few moments, with brief intervals of reloading, but when they came they smashed right through the trees on the island and sent them tumbling down to the ground. "We should probably find a cave to hide in," he stated as he gestured to a spear that had landed between them and embedded itself into, and through, a log. "Those things hit pretty hard... One hit, and BANG! It's goodbye. Hasta lasagna, don't get any on ya..."
He was listening to the bunch of horseshit that Admiral was saying. He made zero points. He couldn't know if he was actually a civvie, not to mention it was rare if ever that royals would stoop that low. They'd stoop lower, and make sure the shit got done by advancing with armies. Greg wasn't sure where this whole facade of Admirals started, ended, or where the fucking left most corner was. He was following the admiral without much care. Sure. Sure. There was ballistas being fired at them. and Sure. There may have been various stories being told. That, however, did not change the fact that they were getting shot at with ballistas, who in that mans words were, 'one hit and band' which was rather accurate. This was just simply a fact of the matter, that they had to find a cave to hide in. Greg started looking around and saw a cave about a good 250 feet away and started running towards it. God, this was some good excersise. If only his body IRL were getting this. "Cave, 250 feet. Follow." Sure there was still massive spears, but shh.
