BECMI Chapter 376 – We Just Came From Here!
For good measure, I Nameripped the demon as it died, because Dread naturally recognized the twat.
This Roaring Fiend was one of Delphax’s preferred Avatar forms! He was actually coming out here and attacking mortals, figuring nobody was going to notice or care, this mortal fleet was doomed anyway against the undead armada, and He could have some fun.
Which was utterly wrong, on the face of it. Immortals had to be watching, the move was too blatant.
But, they weren’t going to do anything. Because the mortal fleet was doomed?
Well, that was just turned on its head, because the Immortal empowering it just blew up, as Roaring Demons are wont to do when their skulls are cloven in twain.
Lots of Immortal Power boiled suddenly in the air, two other Immortals suddenly intervening in this area. Dimensions cracked, shattered, and began to spin, fed by the explosion of the demon and outracing the vivus that should have been making such a thing impossible, actually using it to fuel what must have been a waiting spell of some size and power.
Everything was lost in a combination of the howling Fireball that became a screaming mistball as this part of Delphax was utterly destroyed and consumed, and then it tore the world apart and we were forcibly drawn into a raging maelstrom definitely not of mortal design!
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“Blargh!”
Sama expelled the water from her lungs violently as she clawed her way back to the surface with speed and energy. She had been blown away with thunderous speed by the explosion, propelled not so much by the exploding demon as the dimensional rift which had opened and expanded like a wall of Immortal Power.
Her Null, which refused to open or give way, was shoved backwards like that one rock that refused to be pried up and sucked in. Unable to anchor herself, she couldn’t stop the thing from manifesting.
It also drove her about two hundred yards underwater before it faded, and did that while churning the currents into a fucking maelstrom effect as the waters surged back the way they’d been pushed!
Thankfully she had tons of experience swimming, her Vajra handled the pressure, and if she had to power through the waves to get back to the surface, well, she could hold her breath for an ungodly long time, even if she didn’t have the fanglike Mask she could slap on her face and use to breathe water.
She still had some of the tainted shit get forced into her, waters tasting of the poisons floating over and through them. She vomited it out as she surfaced, ejecting herself from underneath the surface to stand atop the rolling waves around her and look around wildly.
Not a ship was left to be seen!
There was a raging, circling maelstrom extending down to the seabed hundreds of feet below in front of her, the waters spinning and pouring down into the vortex. The damn thing was a half-mile across, and it seemed to have plucked up every ship, wrecked or not, and then driven them down to the bottom of the funnel and beyond!
Waters raced by beneath her feet as she stood there staring, glaring at what was going on.
Some sort of dimensional dump had picked up all of the undead and human ships and sent them somewhere else.
Edge was with them. If they survived, they’d be fine. Edge would survive, a little dimensional collapse and wormhole manifestation wasn’t going to stop her in the slightest. Sama was more worried about Duum, really. He might get his Hat wet.
There was a cracking as the rupture collapsed and the Veil raged back in to stop the draining, and suddenly the water was surging in from all sides beneath her. Sama stood her ground (wave?) as it swept past, the sides of the funnel collapsing inward, slamming into one another. With a roar and crashing of waves that sent water spraying hundreds of feet into the air, the maelstrom closed, rebound waves surging back and through to keep the havoc going, leaving a surprisingly calm sea there for a moment.
Bobbing up and down as the waves blew past her, Sama turned around, Tremble still in hand, and stared at the volcano that had been pitching out poison clouds.
Yeah. Yeah, it was time that volcano and the city beneath it learned to fucking Tremble!
-This is Sama Rantha. I just witnessed Edge and the Eiscall Fleet get sucked into a wormhole by Immortal Power. I’m sure she’ll be in contact soon, but I’m making a judgment call now.
-It’s time to shut down Mount Delphaxia. Prep the contingencies. I’m going in there to set the stage.-
-Yes, Warlord Rantha,- a /voice she’d never heard before, but replete with winter gales, hurricanes, and summer storms, breezed through her mind. -We are readying things now. Enjoy your fight.-
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Ah, Edge’s Sims. That was probably Windrose herself, now a Primal Elemental of Air, a high noble of that realm, and a really terrifying enemy if you crossed her. Also considered the #1 aeromancer in the Delphan Empire, for some strange reason.
Sama grinned as she began to skate and pick up speed, racing over and through the waves like a living ice rink was moving all around her, harmonizing with the ocean and letting it propel her across it even faster as she cut across its waves and used their energy to pick up speed.
Oh, totally fuck them and their arsehat of a god. She was coming for them, and they would Tremble before she killed them all!
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Resisting too hard probably would have meant death. I went along with the suddenly opened wormhole, the world went spinning round and round, round and round, round and round. La di dah dah la di dah…
Then we were spit out a transplanar conduit into a new dimensional space, and I got to pretend I was waking up with everyone else while I reclaimed control of my stomach and didn’t puke up seawater, unlike most of the crew.
Duum crawled out of my hair, looking properly incensed at the sheer rudeness of this whole maneuver. He was perfectly aware that by myself I could have taken out that whole undead fleet. Did they not know how badly I owned undead?
I actually stiffened up with him when I saw the sky, however.
“Are they bloody kidding me?” I asked nobody in particular, as a semi-familiar wind blew past us in a sky painted a specific shade of sky blue, and the rainbow fell in bands below us towards the white-hot sun at the center of the skyworld here.
I looked at Duum on my shoulder, who just sniffed loudly. “It’s definitely the Delphan Skyworld here, mistress,” he confirmed the smell of the place.
I took a moment to digest the sight all around us, feeling somewhat surreal.
I’d taken exactly four visits back here after Delpha was torn apart, just to make sure I knew the place, and to give the Sims here some support they’d requested for, eh, special projects. I was roughly familiar with the fate of the Delphan sky continent after I left as a result.
That was important, because I could see the scattered remnants of those worlds far off in the distance ahead of us, the shredded remnants of Delpha having magically grown green and recovered after all this time. The scattered portions of it were spread across a hundred thousand mile arc of rotational space, and history had started anew after the coming of the Worldstorm.
Heck, it took a thousand years just for the warping of the skybands to smooth themselves back out. There’d been a lot of planet-sized hurricanes with green and yellow air sweeping through this band over that time, like nasty tests for the few people who’d managed to escape to other parts of the bands, had returned from other locations, or simply had been buried deeply enough to survive the storms.
New kingdoms and empires had arisen on different landmasses, and as might be expected, they didn’t much like one another and blamed one another for all the troubles they were having because none would bend a knee to the others.
Floating around me in the windy expanse were the remains of the Eiscall fleet and its sailors and marines, looking mostly intact, along with the crushed and destroyed ruins of some of the undead ships, which most definitely did not look intact at all.
I snap-flicked up an array of Shards. My Call Lightning was universally useful here, but disrupted and gone after the Wormhole trip. Actually, there’d been some temporal shenanigans, as a Renewal had passed and most of my temporary Buff spells had expired.
The armada was tumbled and scattered over a sphere within roughly a mile of me, and my eyes narrowed when I saw two intact ships I knew had gone violently under when rammed and split in two by the undead boneclads. At least four others looked to have intact crews, when I knew they’d been massacred during the short and brutal fleet battle prior to this.
“Lady Edge!” the frightened voice of Captain Sigmal, the nominal leader of the crew, called out after shaking himself awake. The Auggi-born Northman officer was a brave and fairly honorable man for his sort, but he was gaping in total awe at finding himself, his ship, and his crew all seemingly alive and floating out in the clear blue sky… and the sky, the sky seemed to go on forever here!
Whatever chain of command had existed before had obviously evaporated. Almost desperately, he hurried towards me across the deck of his frigate, all of the crew splitting their attention between me and gaping at the sky.
“Lady Edge, do you know where we are? What happened?” he asked me desperately, clearly in way over his head here.
I had no idea what the purpose was for putting a fleet of sea vessels up here looking over the remnants of the Delphan homeworld, but I could only work with what I had.
My eyes were glowing with ruby light, and I was aware that I looked very intimidating now as I slowly looked around, completely unmoved and even looking a bit disgusted by our situation.
“Yes, Captain.” My Magevoice rang out to everyone on every ship. “Attention, Eiscall Armada, this is the Lady Edge. I am assuming command of the fleets until we properly return home. Anyone who wishes to contest this can stay drifting in the skyworld winds until you run out of food and water, or crash into an earth-berg and die.” I paused to let that sink in, and definitely heard some quick calls of rapid agreement ringing out from the nearer ships. “Excellent. With that, get busy! I will be bringing the Scampering Wave around to get everyone into formation. Retrieve any useful supplies or timbers that may be floating into the void next to you, don’t jump overboard unless you want the winds to blow you away and turn you into a meal for the skavvers or skysharks, or maybe the neoli tendril clouds, and don’t shoot at strange stuff you see unless it is attacking you. I do NOT want to deal with an arrowhawk swarm pestering us.
“Clerics, it’s a new day. Regain your spells and focus your efforts first on Healing any crew that need it, and then focus as much effort as you can on contributing to the supplies with Created food and water. Everyone, there’s going to be a bit of Traveler’s Stew for a time, but if you care to look into the distance, that’s nearly a thousand miles to the nearest major land mass, and resupplying might be just a little bit difficult.
“Captains and bosuns, ready your woodworking tools. We’re going to have to set in wingsails and enlarged rudders for all ships in order to be able to navigate effectively. Break out the extra spars and sailcloths, and be ready to start improvising and working together to get the sailwings in place.”