am-books Book 5: Chapter 45: Ephemeral Art
Book 5: Chapter 45: Ephemeral Art
Book 5: Chapter 45: Ephemeral Art
Heretical Fishing
I cackled as the well-intentioned woman aboard the closest ship to the god-empress finally realized her mistake. It had taken everything in me not to burst into laughter at least three different times during the last minute, and I was glad I’d managed it. The timing of her scream couldn’t have been any better.
The woman—apparently named Fern—was extremely perceptive. She had been the first person to notice the crustaceans boarding the Elegos, despite them making not a sound. I had left Paul, Toby, and Theresa completely in charge of this battle. All I knew was that they wanted me to waste time until something happened—this, clearly—so I’d been even more surprised by the crustaceans’ arrival than she was.
If I’d been surprised, though, the bloke beside Fern was flabbergasted.
The moment Sven had spotted the half-dozen recon crabs and assault shrimp clinging to the side of Elegos, he tried to raise the alarm, but Fern covered his mouth with her hands. Just in time, too, because Rocky ambled up onto the deck a moment later, his black and red carapace obscured by multiple coats of orange paint. He looked... kinda normal, actually. Steven had done a wonderful job. I wouldn’t have known Rocky was any different from a regular rock crab if not for the fact he was the size of a medium-sized dog.
Before Sven could try to raise the alarm again, Fern had rushed to explain herself. These were obviously regular creatures. If they were spirit beasts, they would have been burned away. Surprisingly, that explanation swayed him.
Until Rocky’s fresh coat of paint started to blister.
“Spiri—” Sven started, only to get shushed again by the compassionate woman beside him.
“Don’t you see?” Fern hissed. “I told you! You heard the god-empress! Any spirit beasts or cultivators will be cleansed in an instant. This is like the rope that fell overboard. The poor thing is being burned over time.”
She had a great imagination. The truth was Rocky couldn’t suppress both his chi and ambient heat at the same time. If he suppressed his heat, the god-empress would detect his essence. Unfortunately for Steven, that meant his artwork was ephemeral—it would burn away before long.
Though Fern was entirely incorrect, she’d convinced Sven. I recognized the fervor in his eyes. He saw his god-empress’s word as law, so he couldn’t imagine a world where she was wrong and our forces could travel through the ocean. How had
they done that? I’d have to ask Paul about it later. The chi flooding from those artifacts posed a serious threat if any of them actually touched it.
“We should put it out of its misery,” Sven said.
The look Fern gave him in response could have melted steel beams.
“It’s heretical!” Sven tried.
She proceeded to fetch a spare patch of sail from a nearby crate, which she folded in half then placed overtop Rocky, hiding him lest he be discovered by another. All the while, she gave him a passionate recounting of her childhood. Before her parents had passed—poor girl—she had grown up by the sea. Church doctrine be damned, she’d loved spending time in the nearby rock pools, observing the sea life that could be found there. Rocky, though massive, looked just like the baby crabs who used to peer out at her from their hidey-holes. And who knew, maybe he was one of the small crabs she’d seen back then? Maybe the table scraps she’d stole from the trash and thrown into the shallows had helped him grow big and strong enough to travel all this way.
She finished by patting Rocky’s covered head. “Don’t worry, little one. I’ve been burned by the god-empress too. You’ll feel better soon.”
That explained it. She was an animal lover, crabs and fish included. My kind of person.
Sven actually teared up. “You’re a better person than I am, Fern. Maybe I need to be more open-minded about—heavens above!”
The material lovingly placed over Rocky had burst into flames.
Fern whipped it off him and threw it overboard. Her eyes were wide with terror and regret as she realized it wasn’t just the sail that was on fire, but the crab too. It was really just Steven’s art going up in flames, but she didn’t know that.
Both Sven and Fern shielded their eyes against the immense heat, only daring to lower their hands when the flames were gone. How must Rocky have looked to them in that moment? He stood atop a charred circle of wood that darkened the closer it was to his pitch-black carapace. The red cracks lining his body flared bright as he withdrew a cigarette from nowhere, lit it against his shell, and took a mighty drag.
Nobody made a sound for a long moment. Well, those three hadn’t. I’d hit the god-empress with my riddle about something very-pinchy that rhymes with tarnation.
Finally, Rocky exhaled and gave a respectful nod of his carapace, which broke the spell.
Fern realized her mistake and took a step back. Sven stumbled past her, squealing like a girl. The god-empress whirled towards Sven’s scream and caught sight of Rocky. She pivoted, redirecting she divine spear she’d intended for me.
My enhanced cognition flared, and time crawled to a stop. I was once more in control of every drop of my power. With her back exposed to me, my instincts screamed that I could end her. I’d need only a single partition of pure chi to do it. Maybe two. She was strong, but I was on another level.
I wasn’t going to attack, though. I didn’t want to end her, and this wasn’t my fight. Not directly, anyway. I knew what had to be done. As I gathered the resolve to do it, I smiled at the scenes unfolding across the battlefield.
The enemy fleet was arrayed in a V, with each wing consisting of twenty ships spread out over a hundred meters or so total. Theoris was at the tip, with Elegos flanking its rear. I suspected they’d chosen this formation so every attacker had line-of-sight, letting them shoot us with their overpowered, hard-to-block chi. But that meant I could also see them, along with the groups of crustaceans that had scuttled up onto each ship’s deck.
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The assault shrimps were clustered together, and the recon crabs flanked them in a clearly practiced formation. There appeared to be a vast spectrum of capability among the enemy mages. Some had no idea they’d been boarded, others were already preparing attacks. I imagined those divine strikes crashing into Snips’s bonded crustaceans and breaching their defenses.
I grimaced and closed my eyes. Looking at the battlefield had been a mistake.
How would I handle it if anyone were injured, or worse, killed? It was a very real possibility. Could I really do this? Could I hand over my power again and leave everything up to my friends...?
One of my friends nudged me. Teddy. His awareness wrapped around me, a bear hug that told me everything was going to be okay. Another pal whapped me playfully and whispered in my mind, the sound like a soft breeze passing through her canopy. Lemon’s message was clear: it is time.
They couldn’t complete their task without me. And I couldn’t complete mine without them.
I opened my eyes. The god-empress was halfway through launching her spear at Rocky. Most of the assault shrimp had sprouted their giant claws and were gathering power there. Some of the enemy mages had divine essence glowing around their hands, ready to be unleashed at any second.
I leaned against Teddy’s awareness, opened myself up to the soothing rustle of Lemon’s voice, and made my decision.
I surrendered my power to my friends.
Teddy and Lemon drank half each. They both roared, Teddy like a bear protecting his cubs, Lemon like a hurricane ripping through a forest. I might have joined them. It was hard to tell. I felt nothing. Saw nothing. Heard only the deafening roar. When I came back to myself, Maria was holding me upright. I was so, so weak. She held my chin with one hand, helping me see the battlefield. What I found there brought a tired smile to my face.
My ideal had merged with Teddy’s, my desire for Tropica to prosper boosting his offensive aura multiplicatively, making red waves of power bloom from all of Tropica’s forces. And that wasn’t all. Lemon had absorbed the other half of my chi, which she’d merged with the world’s pure essence. She flooded this potent combination out over the bay, and it surrounded the red waves of Teddy’s aura, wrapping them in a shimmering layer of chi that contained and stabilized Teddy’s aura.
Time’s passage had resumed. The god-empress’s golden two-meter-long spear was screaming towards Rocky. Smaller versions were flying from the hands of experienced enemy mages, rocketing for the clusters of crustaceans aboard their respective ships.
The sound of hundreds of claws clacking together was thunderous as the assault shrimps, recon crabs, and Rocky all launched their counter-attacks. When the hundreds of strikes collided with the divine spears, it was deafening.
I witnessed only a fraction of it. All I saw before the world was consumed by light were golden streaks, blue arcs of chi wrapped in Teddy’s aura, and twin red explosions from Rocky that were so large they engulfed the god-empress’s spear and knocked her backwards.
Maria sent what had happened across our connection. My smile widened.
It had worked.
Despite divine chi being a higher tier of essence, we had successfully nullified every single one of the spears without needing to use abyssal chi. Each had resulted in the magical equivalent of a flashbang. The enemy invaders were stunned. Fern had fainted. Even the god-empress stared in shock, gazing up at what remained of the galleon Elegos’s sails, which had been shredded and singed by Rocky’s explosion. Her shock was made worse when over a dozen of her lesser fleet’s masts tottered and fell, having been felled by crustaceans on any boats whose mages had been too slow or too inexperienced to attack.
Her strongest followers—the two Seers and the five mages she called ‘the Prime Cadre’—all stood beside her on Theoris’s deck, frozen like statues of ice. None of them had lifted a finger. They’d seen their god-empress gathering her power, and had likely assumed that meant it was all over.
Paul, Toby, and Theresa were the first to speak.
“Hold!” Paul and Toby yelled.
“Atta—” Theresa had started, which she turned into an awkward cough. She studiously examined the sky as the other two gave her a pointed look.
The clusters of crustaceans on each deck hunkered down, the assault shrimp forming a tight group that the recon crabs surrounded. Not that any of the terrified mages were attacking them.
Rocky, however, advanced. He hopped from Elegos to the deck of Theoris, landing opposite the god-empress and her most-faithful. The suave crab raised a claw to his mouth, took one last drag of his cigarette, then chucked the still-burning stub into his mouth.
“Do you surrender, Your Holiness? As you can see, you are outmatched. We use but a fraction of our might, yet you cannot hope to defeat us. We welcome any challenge, but would prefer to avoid bloodshed.”
The god-empress clearly had something funky going on with her mind. I had sensed a second personality within, who’d almost succeeded in taking over. I hoped that seeing her attacks so easily nullified would help that other, kinder personality seize control.
No such luck.
She snarled like a cornered wolf and lines of golden light swirled across her irises. She still held a spear in her left hand, which she passed to her right and flooded with power. Then she drew her arm back, the spear glowing with power.
Nonplussed, Rocky unhinged his clackers. The red cracks lining them glowed brilliant under Teddy’s aura. He exhaled a cloud of smoke—don’t ask me how he’d spoken without releasing any—and it billowed across the deck towards her like fog.
Eustace sprinted forward. I raised both eyebrows, wondering if she was daft enough to take Rocky head-on after he’d so easily matched her leader’s spear. But she ran right past him, his smoke swirling behind her as she leaped diagonally from Theoris onto the deck of Elegos. She sprinted towards the unconscious form of Fern. Sven tried to get in her way, so she kicked him two meters in the air with a savage punt to the knackers. Then she collected Fern, threw the woman over her shoulder, and leaped off the side of the ship. Just before she hit the water, a golden platform appeared under her. She landed on it and sprinted northward, still carrying the unconscious Fern like a sack of potatoes. Was this an abduction? Should we intervene?
Perhaps wondering the same thing, the other Seer dashed to Theoris’s railing, eyes wide as he yelled, “Eustace! Don’t!”
She didn’t so much as glance back, so he clutched at open air, which made a giant hand of light materialize over the bay. His hand shot forward, and so did its golden copy, fingers closing around the two women. Fern, who had been flopping around lifelessly until this point, lifted her head, flashed an impish smirk, and shot a thick arrow from each upraised palm.
This was no abduction.
This was an escape.
Both arrows struck the golden hand. Fern was clearly one of the newly awakened. She’d poured everything she had into the projectiles, and it only succeeded in slowing the hand for a moment. Her eyes rolled back as she fell unconscious, pushed beyond her limit. It might not be enough.
The Seer aboard Theoris clenched his fist, and its golden copy did the same. The fingers formed a cage around Eustace and Fern, but Eustace burst forward at the last second, breaking free. “I won’t forget that, Anius, you old bastard!” she called over her shoulder, now fleeing unimpeded toward Tropica’s northern headland.
The god-empress had been gathering power the entire time. The spear had repeatedly grown then condensed, and the essence now radiating from it was so potent that tremors pulsed across the surrounding ocean. Her followers, even those at the far end of her V formation, kept stealing glances before looking back at the glowing clusters of crustaceans on their decks.
She launched her spear. This time, I didn’t have the full weight of my chi at my disposal, so the world neither froze nor slowed. Her golden projectile warped the surrounding air as it elongated, stretching to resemble a giant needle. With how close she was to Rocky, it would have reached him in the blink of a cultivator’s eye if she’d aimed it at him.
She hadn’t.
The giant needle raced northward, it’s tip piercing through Fern and into the back of Seer Eustace.