“So what’s the plan, captain?” one of the crewmen asked.
“We’re here to get leviathan scales. Captain Seaton has assured me that once the Endless Blue and the Island That Swims start fighting, we should be able to grab some. The Endless Blue might be almost invincible, but the Island That Swims is strong enough to match him. A couple of good hits from the kraken should be enough to jolt some scales loose. Our job is to wait, watch, and grab some scales before we get out of there.”
“Begging your pardon, captain,” one of the older sailors asked. “But… wouldn’t we have to be pretty close for that to work? We’ve got a dreadnought. We’re not exactly built for speed.”
The others all looked squeamish. They’d seen firsthand what a kraken could do when Timmy turned his zombie kraken on the island’s defenders. It was impossible to forget the sight of the zombie kraken picking up a galleon and throwing it. The Island That Swims would absolutely dwarf that kraken.
“Yes,” Jake conceded. “But Captain Seaton knows what he’s doing. Neither of the two monsters will care about us, so long as we stay out of their way and don’t interfere.”
“Let’s hope so,” someone muttered. “Or this is going to be a very short trip.”
John nodded grimly and looked out across the water. They were in the deep, deep waters at the heart of the Broken Isles. The name itself was horribly apt. Once upon a time, there had been a host of thriving cities in the archipelago. They had made a living from fishing and from the trade that flowed through them due to their fortuitous position along some major trading routes. Their sailors had been renowned throughout the world, and their cities had grown ever grander and more prosperous.
Everything had changed in a single night.
The Endless Blue and the Island That Swims had decided that the archipelago, which had been called the Calm Isles at the time because of how calm its waters were, would be a perfect place to fight. They had utterly devastated the archipelago in their struggle, but things had gone from disastrous to apocalyptic when some idiot had gotten it into their head to try to fight them off instead of waiting for them to battle to a standstill and then slink off to lick their wounds. The two legends had stopped fighting each other and turned their attention to the puny mortals who dared to attack them. Not only had they sunk the entire fleet of the Calm Isles – a fleet that had gone from roughly one hundred of the finest ships in the world to exactly zero ships in the span of a few minutes – but the two behemoths had also then proceeded to turn their ire on the cities and even the islands of the Calm Isles.
The Broken Isles – previously the Calm Isles – were now home to precisely zero cities. There were also about a dozen less islands than there used to be. The only visitors these days were desperate pirates, ambitious monster hunters, and anyone else crazy enough to brave the seemingly never-ending bad weather and the monsters that had moved in not long after the Endless Blue and Island That Swims had dealt with the former inhabitants of the area. Normally, the rough waters would have been home to smaller krakens, sea serpents, leviathans, giant sharks, and all manner of beasties. Indeed, sailors often debated about whether it was more dangerous to sail through the Broken Isles or the aptly named Isles of Tears. Right now, though, none of the usual beasties were present, which could only mean one thing. Something was coming, something big and scary enough to scare off all of the other monsters. Jake had a feeling that it wouldn’t be long now, and the increasingly foul weather only strengthened his suspicions.
“Furl the sails!” Jake bellowed. The stiff breeze had become a shrieking gale. “Move, damn you! Get those sails furled, or we won’t have to worry about those two giants!”
The gale was still strengthening. It was almost like being in a hurricane. If they couldn’t get the sails in quickly enough, they’d lose them and the masts, and not even a dreadnought would survive that. Sure, they could try manoeuvring the ship with water magic, but their mobility would be a pale shadow of what it would normally be.
This was no natural storm either. His wind mages hadn’t been able to do much about the wind at all, so the two behemoths could not be far. If that were the case, it wouldn’t be long before water magic became all but useless too. He’d have to do this the old-fashioned way.
A light drizzle began. Within minutes, it had turned into a bitterly cold driving rain that raked across the ship with a sound almost as loud as thunder. Peering through the rain, Jake could just barely make out John’s ship nearby. The smaller vessel was doing its best to weather the storm-tossed seas. A crack of lighting split the sky overhead, and the rain intensified. It was a torrential downpour now, and Jake had to fight to keep his footing as the waves battering the ship grew larger. The sky was an endless vista of storm clouds, and he lifted one hand to shield his eyes from the rain as the howling wind brought the rain in sideways.
“Water mages!” he bellowed. “To the quarterdeck! You’ll be taking orders straight from me. I doubt it’ll help us move much, but we should still be able to get our bearings with water magic.” The waters here were incredibly deep, but there were floating wrecks and other debris to worry about. “I’ll take what I can get in this damn storm.”
The ship shuddered as another wave hit it, and Jake grimaced. They couldn’t take too many more hits like that. “It’s the middle of the day,” Jake muttered. “But it’s dark as the dead of night.” His jaw clenched as a dense mist sprung up. Visibility without the aid of magic was down to less than a hundred feet. Ahead of them, almost too close for them to avoid, the wreck of a galleon drifted past. He was about to yell more orders when he felt it.
Jake didn’t have much in the way of magic. He wasn’t one of those legends who could raze cities and crush armies on his own. But Jake did have magic, and anyone with magic could tell when something was headed their way that was completely, overwhelmingly, and terrifyingly beyond them.
Dragons were the most famous magical creatures. Their fire was both physical and magical, and they backed their terrible might with intelligence and cunning. Leviathans and kraken had magic too, but they tended to use it in a more instinctive way. Their bodies and magic both grew as they aged, granting them greater and greater strength and durability. Being near a kraken or leviathan was enough to set anyone’s nerves on edge, but the Endless Blue and the Island That Swims were on an entirely different level.
Jake felt like he’d been doused in oil and thrown into the lair of a hungry, fire-breathing dragon.
Every mage on the deck staggered. A few of them even threw up. Jake’s ears rang, and he stumbled away blindly, barely managing to catch himself against the railing as the dreadnought bobbed up and down like a child’s toy in a bathtub. Dimly, he realised that something must have passed under the ship, something huge and vast beyond reckoning. From the shape of the shadow beneath them, he guessed it was a kraken.
A moment later, he saw how right he was.
An impossibly huge tentacle burst out of the water, so long it looked as though it could tear the clouds out of the sky. The magic that filled the area was mind-boggling. Without even trying, the Island That Swims was altering the weather, driving the storms into an even greater frenzy. The surging water and raging winds threatened to swamp his ship, and Jake dragged himself out of his paralysis and bellowed more orders.
As his crew hurried to obey, he rushed for a spyglass and did his best to peer through it as the rain all but knocked him off his feet. What he saw would stay with him for the rest of his life. Seven more tentacles rose out of the water, so big they looked more like pillars built to hold up the sky. His mind screamed that this could not possibly be real, that nothing so large could exist, but he knew the truth. Those tentacles were real. The Island That Swims had arrived.
The surface of the sea bent and collapsed inward, a gigantic whirlpool forming that seemed to fill the whole gap between the islands of the archipelago. The dreadnought lurched, and Jake screamed for his mages and crew to fight, to keep the ship from
being dragged into the depths by the churning waters. At the centre of the maelstrom was the kraken of krakens, a legend that had lived long enough to remember a time before even the elves when the gods had still walked the earth. The Island That Swims had to be more than ten miles across. He was a mottled white, grey, and blue, the colour of old ice and snow. He must have been a polar kraken, a species that dwelt in the extreme cold of the far north or south. But how could he be here where the waters were far warmer? Almost as if the kraken had heard his thoughts, the temperature began to drop. Soon, snow was falling, and ice spread across the surface of the water, small icebergs crunching into one another.
“Get rid of the ice!” Jake shouted. “We’re done for if we get iced up! And keep a watch! We’ll be sunk if we run aground one of those icebergs.”
By the gods, this was what power was.
But it wasn’t over yet.
Another unfathomably vast shape, moved through the water. The Endless Blue had arrived to answer the legendary kraken’s challenge.
The oldest of all leviathans ripped out of the water, coiling out of the waves like the biggest sea serpent in creation. His eyes were stars of eldritch sapphire light, and the leviathan himself was a glorious, shimmering blue, his scales spanning the colour of the deepest reaches of the ocean to the blue of a summer sky. The storm howled in response, and great ladders of lightning raced through the clouds. The ice and cold didn’t seem to bother the leviathan at all. If anything, he seemed amused, and why not? What was an iceberg the size of a ship to a creature whose mouth was large enough to swallow a dreadnought with room to spare? The waves lashing the area rose and fell with the undulations of the Endless Blue, and the rain swirled around the leviathan. Jake swallowed thickly. The leviathan’s scales were huge, and he honestly had no idea how they’d be able to haul them onto the dreadnought.
There was a pause then, a brief instant of calm as the two ancients stared each other down.
“Captain,” one of the mages nearby said. “We’re crazy for being here, aren’t we?”
Jake gulped. The surface of the sea had gone completely still. “Yes. Yes, we are.”
And then the battle began, and the ocean and the sky roared as one.
It was hard for Jake to wrap his mind around what happened next. It was like watching two mountain ranges colliding or two seas flooding into one another. Tentacles large enough to tear islands apart fought to entangle a creature big enough to crush a city with ease. The kraken and the leviathan fought, and the waters around them seethed. The storm raged overhead, thunder, lightning, ice, snow, and even hail battling against each other. A deep, thunderous roar shook the air, and it was met by a bellow of equal force.
Their opportunity finally arrived as the Island That Swims flung the Endless Blue against an island and lashed out with his tentacles. It was a blow that would have broken a mountain in half. Even so, only a handful of the leviathan’s scales cracked, and only a few fragments of those broke off and plummeted into the ocean. With another roar, the leviathan wrenched himself off the island and rammed the kraken head on, driving the other creature deep beneath the surface of the water.
“Go!” Jake screamed. “This is our chance! Set a course for those scales!”
They charted a mad, desperate course for the scales as John and his ship did the same. It was brutal. The sea was a roiling tempest, and waves bigger than the dreadnought threatened to capsize them as the kraken surged upward again, forcing the leviathan to rear up out of the water once more. The Island That Swims tore a chunk off an island and clubbed the Endless Blue over the head with it. The chunk of rock shattered, and pieces of it hurtled through the air. Jake dropped to the ground as a piece the size of a wagon shot through the air where his head had been. It smashed through a section of the railing around the deck and slammed into an approaching wave. Water flooded across the deck, and Jake scrambled to grab onto a nearby rope before he could be swept overboard.
“Captain!”
He turned. One of his crewmen slid past, carried along by the water, and he grabbed hold of the man’s arm with all his strength.
“Hold on!” Jake bellowed.
The surging water spilled over the side of the ship, and the two of them staggered to their feet. This was worse than any storm he’d ever been in.
“By the gods…” the crewman breathed.
“What?” Jake asked.
The crewman pointed. The Endless Blue reared up again, and the muscles along his body rippled before a beam of water shot out of his mouth. The beam scythed right through an iceberg and then split an island in two. The Island That Swims raised its tentacles to fend off the attack, and there was a hideous grinding sound as the torrent of water struck the kraken’s tentacles head on. Water flew every which way, turning the seemingly endless rain into an almost solid wall of liquid.
“Get moving!” Jake drove himself forward, grabbing onto a rope in a bid to keep his balance. “By the gods, we have to keep moving! We can gawk at them after we get those scales!”
Another wave broke over the ship, and Jake’s palms burned as he fought to keep his grip on the rope. He shook his head to clear it, and one of his mages grabbed hold of the rope beside him.
“Captain!” the mage cried, pointing.
Jake cursed. The two titans were headed back their way. The kraken had begun to fling icebergs and shards of ice the size of the dreadnought as the leviathan continued to unleash blasts of water that threatened to simply tear apart the islands they struck whenever one of them missed the kraken.
“Hard to starboard!” Jake bellowed, praying he would be heard over the roar of the waves and the rain. “Hard to starboard if you want to live!”
* * *
Jake flopped onto the deck. He wasn’t the only one. It was finally over. After what felt like an eternity of fighting the ocean and the storm while avoiding the two behemoths, there was finally peace. The Endless Blue and the Island That Swims had both gone off to lick their wounds after fighting each other to a standstill. The kraken had departed for colder waters while the leviathan headed for the tropics.
It had not been an experience that he or anyone in his crew would ever forget, especially the part where the Endless Blue had thrown the Island That Swims clear out of the water. Not to be outdone, the kraken had thrown an island – an actual island – at his opponent. Yet as awe inspiring as the experience had been, Jake was glad to be done with it. He wasn’t sure how much more he, his crew, and his ship could have taken. With a groan, he dragged himself to his feet and directed a spyglass at John’s ship. The other captain looked to be in much the same condition as him, and he had several new scars as well. They waved at each other, and then Jake turned to give the orders his crew had been waiting for.
“Set course for Chesterton, the usual cove.” Jake grinned. “We’ve got cargo to deliver and pay to collect.”
They’d been unable to leave while the two titans had been battling since the raging currents had dragged them back whenever they had tried to escape. As a result, they’d managed to snag all the leviathan scales the dreadnought could carry. If the scales had been intact, they’d never have been able to drag them aboard. Thankfully, the broken shards, while still very large, were just small enough to be hauled onto the ship. He hoped they’d gotten enough for whatever Katie had planned because he had no intentions of being anywhere near another brawl between legends. From what Jake had seen through the spyglass, John had managed to secure a fair number of scales as well.
“Let’s hope the pay is worth it,” Jake said as the crew passed around some celebratory rum. “And think of it this way, how many people can say they’ve seen the Endless Blue and the Island That Swims fight?”
The trip back to Chesterton went smoothly, and the two ships made their way to a sheltered cove not far from the city under the cover of several illusions. Jake wasn’t foolish enough to think they’d gone unnoticed – the authorities had ways of dealing with illusions – but it
was enough to prevent any casual observer from noticing them.
Jake was pleased to see that Timmy and Katie were already there. Gerald had come along too, most likely to make transporting the scales easier since they were very heavy. It made him wonder how anything that was covered in so many of the scales could possibly float or swim. Then again, leviathans did have magic, and the Endless Blue was the greatest of his kind. Maybe he should ask Timmy. The necromancer had mentioned dissecting a leviathan once, albeit a much, much smaller specimen.
Timmy, Katie, and Gerald made their way onto the deck of the dreadnought. The necromancer took in all of the damage the ship had sustained as well as the cuts, bruises, and more serious wounds that some of the crew had. “You’ve taken a bit of a beating. I hope there weren’t any casualties.”
Jake came forward and shook Timmy’s hand. “No, there weren’t any casualties, but you’re right. We took a beating.” He gestured at the ship and his crew. “I’ve never been prouder of my crew or my ship. If someone had told me that a dreadnought could make it through what we’ve been through, I’d have said they were lying.” He grinned. “Although if someone had told me that I’d one day actually choose to stay where a kraken and a leviathan were fighting, then I’d have said they were lying too, and yet here we are.”
“Yes, here we are.” Timmy glanced to the side as John and some of his crew came aboard. “I’m glad you made it through, Jake.”
John chuckled. He had some new scars on his arms and chest. “What? No warm welcome for me?”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Of course, you’re fine. You come from a long, illustrious line of monster hunters. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t make it back in one piece.” Her eyes narrowed. “Although you do have some extra scars.” She paused. “Maybe you should wear a shirt or a tunic more.”
John threw his head back and laughed. “Hah! If you were any other ten-year-old, Katherine, I would be offended. But since you’re the one who requested this mission, I suppose I can overlook it for now.”
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