Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

Excitement for the day was over.

There was no intact magic pulled out of any of the cottages, to nobody’s surprise. The salvage and scrap, however, was much harder to clear out, and was basically swept aside as junk and detritus in most cases, there but just trash.

As a result, it wasn’t hard to find what did remain, and it wasn’t a small amount, given the number of Cottages scattered around. However, it was also being Burned away at great speed, as we split all the findings with the Royal Scouts, who had all Named their Weapons and had their own little geegaws they wanted to power up and help them out.

Kris did her eight hours of Investing, helping the scouts do the same, then worked on getting the Wagon ready for the overchannel trip. Using her new Mask of Clarity she was easily able to see the angle and run she should be using, and the sun would be setting behind the mountains, so the shadow would make night come early. We’d be able to take off very soon after dusk, and she wanted to be ready for it.

The razored prow we’d made up for the Wagon was mounted on the front, razored steel over reinforced Shaped Stone, just for the recalcitrant things at sea that might want to get in our way. She didn’t want to have to ram anything, but if we had to, it was going to hurt.

Especially if I dropped Greater Magical Weapon onto it, in addition to the other kinds of reinforcing I had to do. I couldn’t Ironwood yet, as it was a IV, but in time.

The Scouts were a bit worried the Wagon could carry them all, but that wasn’t an issue. Putting a couple Castings of Mass Disk up under it gave multiple tons of weight limit, and they were all slaved to the master Disk under the front seat. Touch that, and everything was absolutely fine. Their only problem would be holding on, and we also put in a Shaped windbreak up on the front. Even crystallized it, so it could be seen through. Handles on the top to hang on to, or of course they could just ride inside, backs up against the seats and furniture, if they so desired.

None dared to, not wanting to miss the sights of riding on the top of it.

I spent my rep count time working on Vulnerability to Slashing on the Isparian side of the equation. Most of the aquatics had proven to have some vulnerability to Fire or Slashing damage over time, and using Whirling Blade could turn Shards into slicing crescents instead of typeless damage, with a nicely improved crit rate on top of things. The Scouts were all prepping broadhead and crescent-tip bolts and arrows in expectation of trouble, which hopefully should be minimized with our speed and the shortness of the run.

Also, they were going to be Invisible, the miracle of which they’d already experienced once and didn’t have to be told about again. To whatever was waiting, Kris would look like the only thing that was out there running across the surface, a novel enough thing that it should surprise them. We knew there were species that could glide above the ground and surface, if not outright fly, and the Mick had assured us they could move damn fast when doing so, as fast or faster than the fastest humans had been able to achieve.

Well, it basically meant I had two tactics I could use for dissuasion. I could blast the crap out of them with Toppling Shards, which would knock them out of the air and mess with any pursuit, or I could drop a Slow on them, and Kris would then outrun them without any difficulty, but they wouldn’t actually be harmed.

An Emerald Shards would paralyze them, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop magical flight, which worked on will, not physics. Likewise, doing a Stillflight Field might be a bad idea when your ride was mounted on Disks and your engine was someone Lightfooting it across the water.

A Wingbind, the targeted Stillflight, was an option, but I’d never Surged for it, so c’est la vie.

I would have more success landing the Shards than a Slow or a Slashing Vuln. We’d already seen a broad range of the aquatics, and after that meet and greet with the Tremendous Monuga, the Mick had made it plain the things deeper in the lake were going to be nothing but more common versions of the stuff we would meet in the seas.

That, of course, begged the question of how this society could have any kind of naval presence at all. The size of the stuff in the sea here was huge, they were magically powerful, intelligent, old, and really didn’t like us land-dwellers much. Anything that was put out to sea in this world was likely just sending out free lunch to inquisitive ocean-dwellers.

But then, of course, there was the fact this island was just sucking in so goddamn much magic to power its effects, and the simple fact that it could maintain Shorewards of such size and efficacy spoke volumes, all by itself.

So did the fact that there weren’t any remains of Empyrean ports anywhere we’d seen as yet, despite both Hebian-to and Mayoi being ideal locations to set up actual harbors for ocean-going vessels. It was an island: out of necessity, it had to have developed ports, right? The original inhabitants weren’t natives to this place!

There were none. As if the natives didn’t dare to go out onto the seas without very, very good reason, and/or a whole lot of magic on their side… or said ports had been emphatically wiped out enough to lose all signs of them.

Kris wasn’t discouraged, of course. In the Power of Ten game, Sama had been the only person who could reliably get a ship from the mainland to the jungle island and high-level playground of Coralost. Teleport was interdicted by expanses of water, and there were rifts in the skies which horrendously distorted Linejumps, while trying to fly the whole way was asking for some horribly dangerous Elementals or aerial creatures to take a shine to you.

Taking to the seas had also stirred up monstrosities to take a run at you, but the Intrepid had considered such things to be entertainment and Karmic bonuses, not truly dangerous. The krakens and sahaug and sea demons and sea serpents and undead whales and the like she ran into found themselves agreeing with her, often to their own surprise.

The problem wasn’t as bad back on Terra-Luna, as the large numbers of aquatics weren’t there, and there were things fighting back against such creatures taking over our seas, often Jotuns of various levels of friendliness themselves, as well as the various whales. The Hardmen and other Wavelocks weren’t allies of the invading aquatic races, either, as the world’s oceans knew what was native and what was not, and if they weren’t respected, neither did the Father Oceans care for infestations in turn.

They were The Shit in the Seas. It was the reason that in any reasonable magical world, nobody was going to have cities on the oceans. It was just too damn easy to get overrun and destroyed by the things that lived there.

We had no hopes whatsoever for friendly relationships with the creatures of the oceans. The Mick had made plain The Deep saw us as little more than expendable tools, and its moarsman servants were always hostile, while the various niffis, nefanes, remorans, sleeches, and the like were ‘turn to acidic sludge first, give a damn later’.

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“Ye’re still keen t’ do this, Highness?” the Mick asked one more time from his seat on the front of the Wagon.

“You just keep your eyes open and mouth shut, Lord Mick,” she responded, down to shirt and shorts, bare feet streaming the Waveskating Step, long legs and killer butt on display, plainly ready to move, even her long dark hair braided behind her.

She was Breathing, taking in more than lungs could hold, swirls of Rising and Racing Winds adding in as she prepared herself for pure speed. The men were enjoying the sight, but plainly she wasn’t going to back down.

She was on the shore, standing behind a convenient boulder as the last of the light slipped away behind the shadow of the mountains to the west. The Wagon was completely invisible, as were those on top of it. I was sitting on the very back of it, eyes wide behind, while a Detect Aquatics at III and Detect Aberrants at III, long-cast and attuned for natural surroundings, ranged out three hundred paces in front of the Wagon in a sixty-degree arc, the details of which I was feeding to both the Mick and the Princess.

Anything we ran into was likely to be Aquatic, but the tentacle-dripping shelled things were also Aberrants, and we wanted to know if any of them were ahead of us.

I was looking backwards because I had better night vision than the Mick did as yet, him getting his Levels one by one, day by day, and having a lot of things to pick up.

Time the ally, time the enemy, depending on what you wanted.

“Hold on tight, everyone!” Kris shouted, bracing herself, inhaling one last time, ki swirling unseen a last time about her Vajra. Then she was around the edge of the stone, a trot becoming a run, a run becoming a sprint, and a sprint becoming a speedskating blur of motion as she hit the water a hundred meters away from her starting point in under five seconds, and we were all in motion.

The shore here was shallow for a hundred meters out, the lulling motion of the waves on the shore lapping lazily. The only things on Detects were scattered schools of scavenger fish, likely using the Shoreward as shelter from things bigger and stronger hunting them, a fact preyed upon by what fishermen along the shores worked them, giving them improbably-good hauls for the shallow water they were in.

I couldn’t Holo our progress to the rest of the scouts without betraying the fact to anything watching that the Wagon was keeping easy pace with Kris just an arm’s-length away as we picked up speed. Then the Wagon shifted over behind Kris as she expanded her Null to full, and she rammed into the Shoreward.

The Ward was only tangible in the spiritual sense. We could throw rocks through it, shoot bows through it, even launch magic through it… but we couldn’t physically pass it unless it didn’t regard us as intelligent or a threat. It was obviously tuned to let through non-intelligent fish for a food source, for instance, but would only allow in the smallest of aquatic predators in turn, or perhaps their random eggs.

Likewise, we couldn’t get out. As soon as the water was deep enough, the Shoreward kicked in and we couldn’t pass.

Not being an actual field of force, but an abjurative ‘Thou Shalt Not Pass’ effect, her Null hit it like a load of solid magic, and punched a hole in it instantly.

There was nothing of relevance except a couple sharks within range, and they weren’t going to be leaping out of the water to pass through the Shoreward before it auto-sealed.

Kris was out into the open waters and power-skating for the Vesayan islands!