Chapter 625: A Wave [Bonus - ]

Chapter 625: A Wave [Bonus Chapter]

FLASH!

High above the plaza, a massive circle of purple starlight flared to life.

Aeliana’s voice echoed down from the clouds.

"Teleport."

VUM-VUM-VUM-VUM!

The two hundred civilians vanished from the temple steps in rapid soft bursts of violet light, swept away into the safety of a nearby barrier.

SWOOSH!

From the shadow of a shattered fruit stall at the edge of the plaza, Tasmin materialized, stepping out of the dark with her daggers already wiped clean.

She walked toward the crater, eyeing the mountain of severed monster parts with a sharp suspicious scowl.

"That was my target sector, brute," Tasmin snapped, crossing her arms. "I had this plaza marked with my eyes before you took flight."

"Your sector?!" Brida gasped, leaning against her cleaver with an offended pout. "I was the one who fell out of the clouds and turned thirty of ’em into sausage meat! Those two hundred saves belong on my tally!"

"You didn’t save them," Tasmin retorted smoothly. "Aeliana extracted them and I was the one who provided the trajectory that landed your fat ass in this courtyard in the first place... Technically, every single kill you just logged is a secondary assist derived from my throw!"

"Assists?!" Brida roared, stepping down to Tasmin until their foreheads practically touched. "There ain’t no assists in a warrior’s tally, you skinny little gremlin! I did the smashing, I get the points!"

"You get nothing but a lecture on basic arithmetic—"

RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMBLE!

A sound like an entire ocean collapsing down a flight of concrete stairs suddenly drowned out their bickering.

Tasmin and Brida froze as the air in the plaza, previously dry and thick with desert dust, suddenly became damp.

...Violently damp.

A deafening freight-train roar echoed from the wide boulevard leading down from the grand aqueducts of Sector One.

The ground vibrated with the catastrophic weight of millions of tons of churning high-velocity water.

"What in the hell is that...?" Brida blinked, turning her head toward the avenue.

"Brida..." Tasmin’s voice went completely flat. "Move."

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The stone facades of four commercial buildings at the mouth of the boulevard completely disintegrated as a fifty-foot-tall tidal wave of dark saltwater tore into the plaza like a roaring leviathan.

’Fucking hell!’

Contrary to what it looked like, it wasn’t a flood... Instead it was a pressurized aquatic battering ram. The churning wall of water swept through the streets, carrying shattered cars, uprooted palm trees, and dozens of thrashing drowning monsters in its violent belly.

"FUCK!" Tasmin shrieked.

SPLASH-CRASH!

The wave hit them both.

Brida’s body kept her feet anchored to the stone but the monstrous volume of water swallowed her up to her chin while Tasmin was ripped from her footing, cursing violently as she submerged, her hands clawing through the churning foam until she drove a dagger into the base of a lamppost, hauling her dripping head above the surface with a furious gasp.

COUGH-SPIT!

"WHAT MANIAC DROWNED THE DESERT?!" Brida bellowed, spitting a mouthful of salty foam onto the churning surface, her hair plastered across her eyes.

Tasmin wiped the stinging brine from her golden eyes, looking toward the apex of the fifty-foot wave.

Her jaw dropped.

Standing balanced upon the very crest of the colossal churning tsunami... riding the curling lip of the wave with her boots planted wide on a floating slab of polished marble like an surf-rider was a woman.

She wore a long captain’s coat of deep sea-green wool, unbuttoned to reveal a tight leather cuirass and a bare midriff scarred by old blades.

Her wild ink-black hair whipped violently around a face that radiated intoxicating arrogance while her stormy gray eyes burned with pirate glee as she held a sword of glowing blue alloy... Tidebringer above her head!

Morwenna.

"AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Morwenna’s laughter tore across the flooded plaza like a cannonade.

"COME ON, YOU SALTWATER SCUM!" The pirate queen roared. "IS THAT ALL THE TEETH THE SOVEREIGN REALM CAN MUSTER?! MY GRANDMOTHER SWAM THROUGH COLDER SEAS THAN THIS PUDDLE!"

SHRIIIIIIK-CRACK!

A massive Trench-Kraken erupted from a rift directly in her path with its twelve barbed tentacles whipping forward to drag her under but Morwenna didn’t even drop her center of gravity.

SWOOSH!

She stepped off the marble slab in mid-air but she didn’t fall.

The water beneath her boots rose like living steps, catching her feet as she sprinted up the vertical face of the wave.

"Why don’t you die for me...?!"

Tidebringer began to flow!

With an effortless sequence of Tidal-Blade Arts, she redirected the kraken’s massive momentum straight back through its own rubbery flesh.

SHRIT-SHRIT-SHRIT-SPLAT!

Twelve massive tentacles were severed in the span of half a second.

Before the monster could even screech, Morwenna blurred through its central eye cluster, her blade leaving a five-mile-per-hour pressurized water-vacuum in her wake that violently imploded the kraken’s skull from the inside out.

BOOM!

The massive carcass dissolved into fine black chum, swallowed instantly by the roaring wave and down in the churning water below, Tasmin and Brida hauled themselves onto the steps of a temple, coughing up seawater and glaring up at the pirate queen with expressions of murderous disbelief.

"MORWENNA!" Tasmin screamed, her cloak dripping gallons of salt onto the marble. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?! THERE WERE CIVILIANS DOWN HERE!"

Morwenna landed lightly upon the temple roof twenty feet above them, her sword resting casually against her nape as her stormy gray eyes looked down with a teasing grin.

"Keep your breeches on, Shadow-Girl!" Morwenna called down, flicking a glob of seawater from her thumb. "Look at the water! You think I’m a rookie pirate who drowns her own prize?"

Tasmin blinked, looking down at the swirling floodwaters.

It was true as the citizens caught in the wave weren’t drowning.

Enveloping each human was a gentle semi-translucent bubble of pressurized surface-tension that held them upright, carrying them smoothly along the crest of the floodwaters toward the barriers where Aeliana’s starlight teleportation were waiting to pluck them out of the foam.

As for the monsters caught in that same wave...?

The internal currents within the water were spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute creating high-pressure water-blades that shredded the flesh, bone, and organs of the horrors into unrecognizable pulp before they could ever reach the people.

"Haah..."

Morwenna sheathed her cutlass with a crisp oily click, leaning her forearms against the temple balustrade with a triumphant sneer.

"While you two have been bickering in the dust over a few dozen stragglers..." Morwenna bragged, holding up four fingers, "...I breached the aqueduct gates, flooded the northern area, and flushed four thousand citizens out! Four! Thousand! The prize is mine, girls! You can spend tonight polishing my boots!"

Tasmin’s eye twitched so violently that her vision blurred. "You flooded an entire sector of a capital... for contest points?!"

"Hell yes, I did!" Morwenna laughed unapologetically. "That’s pirate logic! Maximum efficiency, minimum paperwork! Captain is gonna be so damn impressed he’ll actually take my virginity!"

She paused, her stormy eyes turning south toward the distant spires of the Grand Oasis Palace and a small smirk crossed the pirate queen’s lips as her thoughts drifted.

’That overgrown weed Eluned is stationed back with the Captain’s family, isn’t she?’ Morwenna mused, her fingers tapping rhythmically against her cutlass hilt. ’She better have used that little glass camera to snap some pictures of his little sister... If I don’t get to see what Silas’s sisters looks like after all this swimming, I’m going to set fire to her favorite flowerbed.’

Two miles away, beneath the towering living wooden roots that held the shattered thirty-story frame of the Grand Oasis Palace aloft.

The air here remained an oasis of miraculous quiet.

The celestial garden that Eluned had called forth from the cracked asphalt had expanded, carpeting three city blocks in lush velvety grass, blooming blue lotuses, and fragrant white jasmine.

The violent earth-shaking rumbles of the collapsing city were muffled by the dense canopy of ancient roots overhead, reduced to a distant harmless hum.

The last of the ordinary hotel guests and staff had already been ushered through the underground and all that remained within the emerald sanctuary was a small, quiet circle seated upon the soft turf.

Martha sat with her spine straight as an iron rod with her hands folded neatly over her apron, though her eyes never left the girls.

Penelope was curled up beside her unconscious older sister, Harper, gently holding Harper’s limp hand against her cheek, listening with quiet tearful relief to the steady rise and fall of Harper’s breathing.

Kaede sat cross-legged near her four Yamato bodyguards with her chin resting on her palm, her dark eyes wide with fascination.

...And sitting right in the center of the grass, her small knees pulled against her chest, was Lia Graves.

Beside Lia knelt Eluned.

The Former Spirit of the World Tree was speaking in a soft melodious voice with her slender hands weaving small, harmless illusions of golden light in the air to illustrate her words.

Lia listened with her eyes wide, occasionally glancing at the massive, thirty-foot-thick tree roots holding a literal skyscraper above their heads.

"So..." Lia said softly, tilting her head. "You all are... really, really strong, right? Like... stronger than the army?"

Eluned smiled, a gentle radiant curve of her lips that made the jasmine blossoms around them lean slightly toward her light.

"We are strong, Little Sister," Eluned replied, her voice carrying certainty. "Each of us has walked through the fires of the Sovereign Realm... We have faced horrors that would shatter the sanity of ordinary mortals."

She paused, her emerald eyes looking down at Lia with deep, unyielding reverence.

"Yet, our strength is not our own. Everything we are... our blades, our evolution, our purpose was granted to us by Lord Silas. When he arrived in our realm, he did not treat us as expendable tools to be bartered away... He poured his blood, his resources, and his very soul into forging us into an unbreakable family. If we are mountains today, it is because he provided the earth upon which we stand."

Lia stared at her with her lower lip trembling slightly as a strange overwhelming lump formed in her throat.

For years, her big brother had been the tired, quiet boy who came home with oil under his fingernails and bruises across his shoulders, counting Spirit Credits on the kitchen counter to make sure they had enough for winter coal.

To hear him spoken of as a savior... as an emperor whose name brought a beautiful woman to her knees in adoration felt like stepping into an impossible dream.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

A high-altitude sonic roar violently shattered the peaceful quiet of the garden and Lia flinched with Martha instantly rising to her feet as her hands dropped over the girls’ shoulders!

Dropping out of the bruised purple clouds at a blistering angle was a sleek needle-nosed aircraft.

It was a state-of-the-art executive transport... a forty-meter vessel of gleaming white carbon-titanium that moved with the terrifying agility of a fighter craft.

BZZZZZZZZZT-CRACK!

Enveloping the entire fuselage was a multi-layered, interlocking shield of radiant purple mana runes.

Three descending rift-drakes attempted to intercept the descending craft however the moment their claws struck the purple barrier, the runes violently condensed, transforming into dozens of razor-sharp floating violet energy blades that sliced through the beasts, severing their wings and sending their smoking carcasses spinning down into the empty streets.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The jet’s reverse-thrust vector nozzles fired with an ear-splitting hiss of pressurized plasma.

The craft decelerated from Mach 2 to a dead hover in the span of thirty paces with its magnetic landing gear deploying smoothly as it settled onto the flower-strewn asphalt of the intersection with a soft thud.

CH-H-H-H-H-CLICK!

The primary hydraulic passenger ramp hissed open, dropping down to the grass.

Standing in the pressurized airlock, coughing against the sudden rush of desert heat, was Evelyn.

Her tailored blazer was unbuttoned with her silk blouse slightly rumpled, and clamped firmly between her lips was a thin smoldering cigarette.

’Fuck... we made it... a lot earlier than planned.’

Her dark hair was pulled into a hurried messy bun, and her pale face was flushed though there were dark circles under her eyes.

’I hope Silas is okay, well that meanie is a gold core so naturally he will be... I should stop worrying.’

She took a long sharp drag from the cigarette, exhaled a thick plume of grey smoke into the hot air, and glared down the ramp.

"GET YOUR ASSES IN THE CABIN!" Evelyn yelled, her voice sounding hoarse over the whine of the idling turbines. "NOW! MOVE! I had to personally threaten a flight marshal to clear this descent, and the radar is showing seventy more bogeys dropping from the upper thermosphere! MOVE, PEOPLE!"