83 – Three Of Seven

One hundred and seven years ago.

All that saved humanity—all mortal races—from extinction was that the Cataclysms were forces of nature. They did not target strategic locations. They did not erase research facilities, trade hubs, or capital cities. They destroyed indiscriminately. The Cataclysms were fundamentally the same as natural disasters: horrible events to expect, account for, and maneuver around.

But humanity could not afford the loss of Lichenport. Lysander knew this with a cold detachment that none of his peers likely did.

Or perhaps they were aware of the fatal strike this would deliver, if the fight today was lost. Perhaps they knew about the trade intricacies linking the kingdoms and how humanity was already dangling on a thin string, despite the inspirational propaganda being pushed. That the loss of this port city would be a devastating blow humanity could little afford. But he had always underestimated those he rubbed shoulders with, and in those rare instances where he didn’t, he had always come away disappointed.

So he doubted they knew, despite his constant hope that he was not alone in possessing basic reasoning. No, the men and women around him feared for something much more trivial: the hundreds of thousands in immediate danger.

There was strong evidence to believe some higher-up or another had deduced how important this defense was, and had blown the horn. Because, despite the Colossus having apparently wandered into the Eastern Kingdom, the Party of Heroes was here, not there.

Lysander watched an enormous tentacle rise into the sky. A kraken’s limb could cleave a ship in two with little effort. This was no regular kraken. The Maw of the Abyss was the first, or greatest, of those awe-inspiring beasts. Its appendage hovered just below the clouds like an executioner’s blade flesh-forged by the gods, a mountainous pucker-filled curve blotting out the sky. Waterfalls that could fill lakes cascaded from its length.

The sight filled him with an indescribable emotion. To know one’s worth… or the lack of it.

The involuntary thought annoyed him. The death sentence didn’t even hang over his head. It was targeted toward one of five legendary individuals who had come to aid the city. Why had he himself felt paralyzed, however briefly?

Irrational. How upsetting.

The limb fell. A searing light brought brilliance then darkness to the noon seas. A skill rang out, vocalized by a hero of an ilk humanity had never seen, and wouldn’t again, not if ten millennia passed. Joyous, almost childish, a gleeful laugh in his voice, the Gladiator exclaimed:

“[From One, Make Two].”

A severed limb longer and wider than a hundred capital ships slid downward, parted by the blinding light Axian the Gladiator’s blade had carved. From the distance Lysander stood, on his ship hovering a mile off the coast of Lichenport, even he couldn’t make clear sense of what had happened—the sheer scale of the attack.

The puckered tentacle crashed into the sea, and the Party of Heroes continued their fight. Simply one exchange of many. Lysander’s attention had latched onto the falling limb though… or rather, the wave it had spawned. A wave of equally titanic proportion to the beast itself. Headed straight for them.

He watched, face calm, but with growing horror. From so far, the wall of water seemed almost innocuous. Even the slightest application of logic told him how monstrous that swell was going to be, though. It would easily wipe out any ship it met, the Osprey included.

“Barriers,” Lysander screamed over his shoulder. “Get your barriers up!”

The six gold- and silver-rank mages assigned to him stared blankly in response. They saw the same thing he did. He met their gaze, and for a moment, sympathized. The command was truthfully absurd. The incoming mountain of water held enough energy to pulverize even an archmage’s shield—a dozen such shields. Lysander hadn’t even attained the title of grand magus, being merely a magus, and was the strongest of the collected mages on this vessel by a decent margin.

So, nobody here had control of whether they lived or died. A call to put up barrier spells was ridiculous.

Lysander’s gaze flicked to the fight happening in the distance. He watched the Knight be scooped up by a giant tentacle and thrown several miles into a mountain face. The Sorceress called down a column of hellfire to shrivel another of its many thrashing limbs. The Rogue stabbed the beast in its eye, an X-shaped blast of black and green energy that could’ve cut through starmetal like paper. The Monk, sprinting down a tentacle, raised his staff and surrounded the elven woman in a defensive shield, aiding her in her escape.

Meaning the Heroes were, as was reasonable for fighting a Cataclysm, occupied. Those five men and women always attempted to save who they could, but fights against Cataclysms never came without casualties. The Heroes were concerned with the Maw, first and foremost.

He looked back at the incoming tidal wave bearing down on their ship, thoughts sprinting. He couldn’t rely on a savior. Perhaps one would come, but perhaps not. So what could he do, personally?

Perhaps… if he focused all of his efforts on a shield that enveloped only himself, he might survive the enormous wave of kinetic energy. Might. But he would be condemning the mages assigned to him, and the civilian crew of the Osprey as well. Dishonorable by many interpretations, but logically speaking, attempting to shield the entire boat would be a symbolic gesture—suicide for appearance’s sake. It was only rational to save what he could. Meaning himself.

Unfortunately, Lysander valued rationality, but often found himself not living up to that ideal. “Barrier,” he screamed to his allies, louder. “Surround the ship! That’s an order!”

His thoughts raced. He refused to abandon his subordinates and the ship’s crew. But what could he do? His current strength and arsenal of spells simply wouldn’t suffice. He knew that with certainty.

He could… make a new spell, perhaps. Even if he succeeded, it might not matter, and in fact he doubted it would, but at least he would be doing something.

In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, an on-the-spot invention of a new spell would also be suicide, just a more flavorful version of the current one rushing toward the Osprey. Mages couldn’t conjure up new abilities whenever they pleased. Not even an archmage. Even Lysander himself, who was a genius among geniuses, with a career trajectory to rival Archmage Aeris’s, couldn’t manage that with anything close to consistency.

But what other choice did he have?

Magical barriers sprang up to surround the ship, his subordinates obeying his orders, however pointless they knew the action. Lysander didn’t join them in casting; he was still formulating. In the scant thirty seconds as that titanic wall of water rushed toward their vessel, he finalized the prototype of a new-and-improved barrier spell. It was specially designed against physical, non-magical forces, and it used a novel, ground-up redesign of theoretical absorption-and-repulsion arrays to self-fuel, allowing for vastly greater resilience in specific circumstances—namely against natural kinetic forces. He had been working on it for years, one of many great projects that he spent endless hours idly theorizing about. Even he couldn’t pull a design of such ingenuity from thin air. He’d had the bones of the spell prepared already.

Then the wave was nearly on them, and Lysander was out of time. He rushed through the last portions of mentally-arranged High Arcana and began painting the design onto the air with his mana. This might actually work, he thought, heart racing. He was a genius. If anyone could conjure a miracle on a whim, it would be him. Whether it would save them? That was a murkier question, certainly.

He finished, and, watching the wall of death approach, invoked the spell.

The mana imploded.

Instant failure. Not even a moment’s hesitation before the design collapsed in on itself. His skin went cold, and his eyes widened in horror. Not simply because the error meant his and the crew’s death, but because when novel spells—especially ones fed with as much mana as he’d just given—ran wild, a quick death would be a fortunate result.

But he didn’t get a chance to so much as croak out an involuntary scream.

“[Dispel],” a woman’s voice calmly commanded from his side.

The immense, mutating energy about to gleefully warp into some horrible phenomenon dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere.

Only belatedly recognizing the flash of spatial warping, he spun to see a demon floating in the sky a half-dozen feet away, robes and long white hair shifting gently in the ocean breeze. She was of shockingly small stature, and she wore, despite the chaos of the situation, an expression of total boredom. Not even tight composure, like an especially competent commander, but actual, genuine disregard, her red eyes almost contemptuously disappointed with everything happening around her.

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“[Mass Greater Hydrokinesis],” the Sorceress ordered disinterestedly, waving her staff.

And the tidal wave that had seconds ago been the guaranteed doom of Lysander and his allies, and the majority of the relief fleet meant to contain the Maw’s hordes of fishmen raiders, simply… flattened out. Slunk into the ocean and dispersed, with barely a ripple to be remembered by.

Red eyes fell on Lysander.

As a general rule, he had never felt cowed when speaking to his magical superiors. The opposite: he often came away with a vague sense of disappointment, if not disgust. Even so-called legends like Archmage Aeris had never floored him—not through demonstration of an unparalleled magical mind, at least. Aeris’s mastery of various branches of the arcane was unlike anything Lysander had seen, yes, but that was a product of centuries of experience, a cultivated level, and—since the archmage was a great defender of humanity—access to many of the world’s most restricted resources.

So, external factors. Combined with talent, of course, but not so much of it that Lysander thought Aeris’s exceeded his own. Lysander knew he would one day stand as that man’s peer. Would surpass him, even. Why would he be nervous around someone like that?

“Interesting,” the Sorceress murmured. Her voice was only marginally less flat than the total boredom on her face. He heard a tinge of curiosity. “Absorption, self-feedback… repulsion. I see what you were going for. Perhaps something like…” She waved her staff. “[Absorption Barrier].”

A circular glowing diagram of bright white runes engraved itself onto the air, whole in the blink of an eye. It activated in the same instant, a shimmering barrier with a white-blue tint manifesting in front of her.

“Or maybe…” She dispelled the shield. “[Absorption Barrier].”

Lysander again caught a flash of the design, and what he saw shook him to the core. She had already stabilized the layout with the first attempt—had solved in a single heartbeat what Lysander had spent years theorizing and failing to manifest. But now she was iterating on the design.

In the middle of a fight against a Cataclysm.

“Still inefficient,” the Sorceress commented, once more dispelling and instantly casting another version. “[Absorption Barrier].”

The third version was essentially unrecognizable from Lysander’s starting point. Only the barest influence of his personal notes showed.

When the Sorceress dismissed the third barrier spell—the sequence taking place over no more than a handful of seconds—she twitched, as if remembering where she was, and what was happening around her. The bored gaze turned back to Lysander.

“Ah. My apologies. It was an interesting puzzle.” She held her free hand up. “[Grimoire].”

Lysander stared, eyes nearly bulging at the gigantic tome that popped into existence. It was thicker than his fist was wide. It couldn’t possibly be a grimoire. Not even the Sorceress’s. Is it a jest? An illusion? How many spells would fit inside a monstrous thing like that?