Avast, ye salty dogs and digital deckhands! Cast your eyes—the good one and the glass one alike—toward the horizon, for the heavens have been hijacked by a plague of glowing locusts. The word has trickled down from the high-altitude counting houses that the wizards at Damoda have unleashed no fewer than 11,787 V4 drones into a single, swirling vortex of technocratic madness. They call it ‘coordination,’ but any sailor worth his salt knows black-hearted witchcraft when he sees it. Back in my day, if you wanted ten thousand things moving in unison, you needed a fleet of disciplined men and a very loud boatswain with a whip. Now? It’s all silent algorithms and invisible puppet strings pulling at the very fabric of the ether.

I caught up with First Mate ‘Glitch-Eye’ McGhee down at the Silicon Tavern, and he was shaking like a schooner in a hurricane. ‘Captain,’ he whispered, clutching a flagon of fermented coolant, ‘I saw ‘em. 11,787 of those mechanical gnats, all dancin’ better than a ballerina on rum. No wires, no pilots, just a hive-mind that’d make a Borgia blush. They formed a dragon in the sky, Cap’n! A dragon made of math!’ He’s not wrong, mates. These V4 models aren't just toys; they’re the devil’s own fireflies, capable of staying in formation with a precision that makes the Royal Navy look like a tub of drunken ducks. If one of ‘em sneezes, the other eleven-thousand-plus adjust their bearings in a microsecond. It’s unnatural, I tell ye!

What does this mean for us honest privateers of the information age? It means the North Star is officially obsolete. How am I supposed to navigate by the constellations when the Great Bear has been replaced by a giant, glowing corporate logo? Lord High Admiral Byte-Smasher of the Admiralty was heard shouting in the halls of Parliament: ‘If a merchant can command a swarm of nearly twelve thousand flying daggers with a single keystroke, what hope has a man with a cannon? We’re not fighting ships anymore; we’re fighting a cloud of angry, illuminated hornets!’ The tactical implications are grimmer than a week-old hardtack. A broadside can’t hit a swarm, and you can’t board a ghost made of LED lights and lithium-ion batteries.

The sheer audacity of the Damoda sorcerers is what gets my bilge boiling. They’ve managed to synchronize these units so tightly that they move as one gargantuan, shimmering beast. It’s a hive-mind of copper and code that threatens to make every sky-lane a crowded nightmare. Imagine trying to smuggle a crate of encrypted spices through the Caribbean when the sky itself is watching you with 11,787 glowing eyes. They aren’t just breaking world records; they’re breaking the spirit of the horizon. Every time one of those V4s chirps, a traditional navigator loses his sextant.

So, batten down the hatches and hide your frequency-shifters, for the age of the Sky-Swarm is upon us. Damoda has proven that with enough silicon and a reckless disregard for the sanctity of the clouds, one can play God with a swarm of metal bees. We are no longer masters of the wind; we are merely targets in a giant, 3D game of ‘Join the Dots’ played by a computer that doesn't know the meaning of mercy or a well-timed parley. Keep your muskets loaded and your firewalls high, me hearties. The sky is no longer ours—it belongs to the swarm, and the swarm has no soul to speak of!

— Captain Iron Ink