The whirling cloud grew closer. In retrospect, it had been remarkable that we had ever outrun it to begin with. As it drew nearer, the rest of the mist once held at bay by Breaker pressed all around us. The buzzing noise returned to my ears.
Behold its burning eyes,
The hate that rages and will not die—
“Rage?” I shouted as the whirling darkness closed in on us. “You think you know rage, you jackass? Because you hate burnt salad and bottled water?”
Teeth growled with me. My molars itched as they ground together. I felt the magic surrounding my body begin to surge.
“You think having to deal with a couple food allergies means you’re having a worse day than the rest of us? That nobody else feels up to throwing a world-ending tantrum or two?”
Blood, lightning, and natural elements erupted around my body as my Battleform engaged. Gold and red scales began to form over my flesh and armor.
Behind me, I heard Via hiss in surprise, as her Water magic suddenly flared around her as well.
“You think no one else is ready to let loose?” I shouted as the dark cyclone sped toward us, a mere hundred feet away. “That we can all just hold it together forever, like good little boys and girls? While we all huddle and quiver at the power of a jackass like you having a bad day?”
I growled as my jaws stretched, merging with my helmet and adding another row of teeth. Claimh Solais blazed even brighter as a giant gold talon incorporated with it, turning it into a longer, sharper sword. Via let out a snarl of her own as she fired a pillar of water into the advancing storm. It hissed upon contact, but I couldn’t tell if it did any damage beyond that.
The pitch-black cyclone was a mere stone’s throw away, and in my anger, I couldn’t care less.
“Well, let me tell you something about rage!” I shouted, raising the blade of the Woadlands over my head with both hands. The black cloud would be above our boat at any moment. It brought the buzzing back, reawakening the damaged piece of my mind that kept begging everyone not to step on my hand. I ignored all of that as I swung Claimh Solais down to meet the mist that had claimed Icons, shouting out the words I had been holding in all this time, the words that the quiet voice inside had been offering for every moment of this desperate battle.
“Let the lightning beget fire and light, and let the light beget more rage!”
My sword and knuckles both erupted in silver light. The burning lightning crashed into the poisonous darkness, shattering every shade of color in my world but black and white.
The darkness blazed white upon contact with my blade, but the storm pushed against my blow, as if it were trying to parry my swing. The boat rocked beneath my feet once, then twice, then it finally lifted up and turned, as an unseen strength lifted half of it out of the water. I heard Via scramble and shout behind me as she struggled to maintain her footing and reach me at the same time. Color flashed back into my vision, letting me see enough detail to realize that the sail over our heads had ripped in half, and was now fluttering about in the invisible maelstrom. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Via grab the side of the ship, let out a stressed, defiant scream, and cast a Water spell quickly with her free hand. A large scythe of clear liquid splashed out from her palm and slashed most of the rigging off the ship. I heard the massive sheet flutter and twist over our heads as it ripped off the mast.
My sword arm continued to wrestle with the might of the dark storm, pushing against it, struggling to deny it from sweeping over our boat. The force of the magical collision continued to toss our vessel about, lifting it out of the water at dangerous angles, but my feet remained locked in place. I couldn’t have left the stern of the ship if I had wanted to. After another moment, I felt the other half of our boat lift out of the water, and our damaged craft began spinning through the air.
I growled and pressed harder against my invisible enemy, trying to sunder whatever force powered the toxic darkness.
It pressed back, but my blade still held the shadows at bay. They continued to lift and spin our vessel, but the mists themselves still burned away whenever they crept into our boat. But all the darkness needed to do was to turn our craft upside down, and then it would be over. So I strained harder, pushing my sword and Soulcurrent against the invisible force resisting my swing. I felt my muscles burn and tremble, but just before I reached my limit, the pressure gave way. My sword continued its downward strike, cutting through the heart of whatever magic had just tried to consume us and igniting it with the Soulcurrent. The buzzing noise still droning in my ears cut off abruptly as it was replaced with a pained, whinnying scream that rattled throughout my skull. I saw the rest of the encompassing mist burn apart, eaten away by silver lightning and golden flames. Bright-white steam rose in its place, possibly the same substance I had seen earlier in the clash, blocking our vision of whatever lurked beyond the boat.
That changed in the next moment, though, when a screaming, whinnying figure charged through the swirling mist and steam. I saw a burning, orange, four-legged giant gallop toward my position and raise one of its unnaturally long limbs. Its giant, bony claw slashed across my chest before I could parry or move out of the way. The force of the blow was blunted by my script wards, my dragon scales, my three layers of physical armor, my Ideal spells, and my magically toughened body, meaning only an inch of each clawed finger tore into me from my right shoulder diagonally down toward my left hip.
It was still enough damage to savage my vital guard and send me hurtling out of the boat. Via screamed as I went sailing through the air, and a moment later, I heard a splashing sound and another shrill whinny of pain. Then a powerful feminine hand caught my own as I twisted through the air.
I focused my vision and saw Via flying through the air with me, pulling on my arm with all of her might as we spun in a circle around our vessel’s sail-stripped mast. Her other arm held the handle of her long whip, and the rest of the weapon was currently wrapped around the pole in the middle of our boat, the reason we were currently rotating around our ship instead of just flying off into the stagnant, poisonous water beyond it. She screamed as her arm strained against mine one final time, flinging both of us back into the ship. Somehow, she’d had time to work one last water spell before we landed, and we crashed into a giant bubble of water before we hit the ship’s deck.
The landing still hurt like hell, and combined with the burning pain of the Nuckelavee’s attack, it was enough to make me black out for a split second. When I opened my eyes again, Via was kneeling over me, tugging and unbuckling the straps on my armor, muttering oaths in a language my mindscreen wouldn’t translate.
“Wes,” she said anxiously. “Can you hear me? Can you move?”
I nodded weakly, wincing far more than I should have. A blow like this wouldn’t normally exhaust my vital guard. I should already be back on my feet. But then my chest screamed again, and something burned along my veins.
“Your wounds are still bleeding, and you have a poison running through your body,” the olive-skinned woman told me. “I’ve tried to treat it with magic, but I need to touch the wound directly. Can you move enough to help me with your…” she trailed off in frustration, muttering more curses in her native language.
Armor straps! She sent through the mindlink in exasperation. Help me unbuckle your armor straps so that I can cure you! Stupid English words almost killed you!
I was groggy enough to wonder why she still just wasn’t using the mindscreen’s translation magic for issues like this, but the comment about poison made me alert enough to accept her requests. I began unfastening the various straps holding my scale armor on until Via was able to just yank the mail painfully over my head. She saw my chain mail underneath, cursed again, and hurriedly helped me out of it with another painful tug.
“Three layers!” the beautiful Satellite screamed when she saw my heavy gambeson underneath. “Why do you always walk around with three layers of armor? You weren’t even expecting an attack today! Do you jus
t wake up every morning thinking the sky will rain heavy rocks on you? Do you go around worried that you could slip on a puddle or banana peel and land on a hidden bed of rusty knives at any moment and without warning?”
“Yes,” I answered tiredly as I fumbled with my final layer of nonmagical protection. “And yes. You’re the first person to guess both on your first try, though.”
She muttered another curse as she helped me with the last buckle, finally slipping the heavy padding over my head. She breathed a sigh of relief, murmuring that she was expecting to find a suit of platemail under my aketon, then cleared my torn shirt out of the way and pressed her warm palm directly against my bloody chest. Magic seeped out from beneath her hand as she rubbed it across my chest in a slow, looping circle over the trails left by the monster’s claws. I felt a soothing sensation run down my veins, chasing the burning poison that was traveling through them. Her eyes widened in surprise when her magic finally caught up with it.
This venom is even more potent than I thought, she sent to me. Even with your powerful body, you shouldn’t be alive right now, much less able to move.
I thought back to the Woadlands’ Rite on Avalon, where I had absorbed the blood and venom of a Keeper Queen and gained her resistance to a variety of poisons. Supposedly, my blood had gained other properties as well, which my mindscreen had not discovered yet.
But Via had gone back to work before I could answer her. Combined with my blood’s own toxin resistance, her magic was able to overpower the Nuckelavee’s lingering poison.
It’s strange, though, she told me. The poison doesn’t seem designed to kill you, after all. It’s supposed to change your body, in some way. But I can’t fathom how. Anyway, hold still, she said, moving her hands across my chest in a different pattern, chanting a new healing spell that would repair the wounds on my chest. While she worked her magic, she brought her other hand up to my face, running it across my forehead and cheek.
No fever, she said in a strangely careful voice. You should have some lingering pain and a lot of fatigue, but that should be it.
Her hands lingered on my chest and face.
And cold, she added, still sounding careful. Does your body feel cold?
I stopped for a moment, still groggy, and tried to figure out if I actually felt cold or not.
That doesn’t matter, Teeth spoke up. What matters is the answer that will make her keep touching us.
“Are we,” I paused to blink and take more of my surroundings in. Including Via herself. “Are you alright?”
The beautiful woman nodded, dark eyes flashing as she spoke. “Except for the fall at the end, I came through everything unscathed. I’d call that a miracle, but I saw what you had to do with it. So that wouldn’t be fair to you, ya?”
I grinned at her.
“I couldn’t say. But I’m pretty sure your piloting and catching me in midair had a fair bit to do with keeping my own self alive.”
“You had better believe it,” Stell’s Satellite chuckled, not shy about her own part at all. Then her expression softened again. “The Nuckelavee fled. You had given it a large wound with your sword. It only took one more blast of water to drive it away after it struck you. So you saved another island I should have lost. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, shifting into a slightly more comfortable position. Or rather, I tried to. It was a damaged sailboat, not a luxury yacht. “It’s sort of what Challengers are supposed to do, though, right?”
The beautiful tan woman frowned at me for a moment.
“According to Breena, you keep saying that sort of thing. She and the others keep telling you that you can't come back from the dead, like the other Challengers could. And you can’t go home,” she added quietly. “Like the other Challengers could.”
“Both true,” I answered her. “Which means that your worlds are my home now. If I want to keep my new home, I’ll have to fight for every part of it.”
Otherwise, I would watch it fall to pieces, just like my home had back on Earth.
Via blew out a frustrated breath.
“Breena said you would say stupid things like that, too. I’ll just focus on the gratitude I feel for what you’ve done, and pretend you can’t actually talk.”
I had to chuckle at that. Then, when Via finally let go of my face, I craned my head to look at the water surrounding our wrecked boat. To my concerned astonishment, there wasn’t an island in sight anymore.
“Where are we?” I asked the dark-haired Satellite. “Sorry for stating the obvious, but this doesn’t look like the same part of the ocean we were in before the fight.”
“It’s not,” Via answered with a shrug. She removed her second hand, to Teeth’s grumbling, and knelt on her haunches as she tossed another look all around her. “The Nuckelavee’s cyclone moved us to somewhere with no landmarks. I have no idea where we are.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Have you tried reaching the others through the mindlink?”
“Three times,” the water mage said with another nod. “The first time, I was able to reach Breena and Gabin. I could confirm that their vessel got away safely, but I had no way to tell them where we are, since I don’t know myself. The second time, I made brief contact with Breena, before some kind of static cut our conversation off. The third time, I couldn’t reach anyone at all.”
“Alright,” I said, shifting into a sitting position of my own. “Breena might have a chance to locate me through her bond with either of us. But since we don’t know how far away she is, we don’t know how long it will take them to find us. We may have to sit tight for a day or two, and hope it takes the Nuckelavee that long to lick its wounds.”
“Or we can just wait a few hours for nightfall,” Via said with another shrug. “And I’ll be able to tell where we are by the position of the stars in the sky.”
Right, I thought. Ancient sailing techniques. Still a thing.
“That also sounds like a good idea,” I said stupidly. “Tell you what. I’m going to admit you are the only one of us that knows what she’s doing right now, and then I’m going to shut up. Sound good?”
She laughed again. It sounded nice.
I reflected on the fact that we would have to find ways to entertain ourselves for the next couple of hours, assuming enough of this ship remained for Via to actually sail us somewhere after she got her bearings. Then I remembered that I had seen at least one leak form in our boat during the last fight, and that the ice I had patched it with had probably melted by now. I scrambled around to look for the hole, but before I could shout about it to Via I noticed that the hole had already been plugged. The beautiful sailor shot me another smile and patted a small pouch at her belt.
“Magic caulk,” she replied smugly. “A girl’s best friend when she needs to run a ship on a budget.”
“The word ‘magic’ in the name makes it sound like it’s probably not the sort of thing you could afford if you’re on a budget,” I said carefully.
“That’s true, if you don’t make it yourself,” she smirked. “But don’t expect me to give you all my secrets. Not yet, anyway,” she finished with a wink.
She hesitated a second later, and I caught a thread of embarrassment leaking over the mindlink from her. I didn’t care, though.
“Good grief, you’re amazing,” I said in artless astonishment. “You do magic. You manage islands. You slice monsters apart with nothing more than a whip. You pilot a ship like you’re psychic. And on top of all that, you make your own magical tools to use on your ships? You put all the badass heroines in my favorite pirate movies to shame.”
Now a larger thread of embarrassment leaked from the incredible woman, but it was followed by another sensation of happiness. Both of those were then washed away by a flood of excitement.
“Movies!” she shouted out loud and in English. “That’s the proper word for them! I knew ‘magical glowing pictures’ sounded wrong!” her grin took on a savage, disquieting edge. “Oh, I am never go
ing to let Stell hear the end of this.” She looked back at me, before I had time to process how I felt about her new look. “You say you like movies with ships! Quick! Which ones?”
“Umm,” I began, not sure how to handle the beautiful Satellite’s sudden intensity. “To be honest, I only saw a few classic ones. I’m more of a science fiction kind of guy—”
“Science fiction?” she pressed, growing even more excited. “The ones with those ships in space, no? With the… the…” she made a ‘pew-pew’ sound and cocked a finger as if she was shooting a pistol, then remembered she could talk with her head.
Lasers! She shouted triumphantly over the link. They are called lasers in English! Ha! I am invincible now!
I couldn’t help but laugh in return. The beautiful nerd didn’t even notice before she continued talking.
I love those! Stell let me see a few! But tell me! Which ones! Which ones do you like? This is very important!
Um, well, I said cautiously. Which ones have you even seen? I’m not sure you’d recognize any—
I have not seen nearly enough! Via insisted. So it does not matter! I can always learn more! Even if you have only seen the movies with the light swords, with the men that keep missing with their lasers and losing their hands when they fight, the Space Wars movies!
I think you’re getting the name of that series wrong, I said carefully, wondering how she could figure out the word ‘lasers’ through the mindlink but not the name of possibly the most successful sci-fi series ever produced. But yeah, it’s amazing just how many movies they made for that series over the last hundred years.
No, it isn’t, Via sent firmly, with a bit of an edge to her mental voice. Because they only made three, and then they stopped, because those three were perfect. Anyone else who says otherwise is mistaken.
Okay, then, I agreed quickly, having learned my lesson from previous fans of the series.
See? She smiled at me. I knew you were smart. Now what about the other series? The one they never made enough shows or movies of, where the people take ships to trek and explore through space?
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