Chapter 746: Second Objective
Chapter 746: Second Objective
[A/N: There was a mistake where i mentioned the number of Kingdoms. The participating Kingdoms are only from Upper Layer, so the number of Kingdoms in event is 312 total, and of them, 294 remaining after the first objective.]
***
The Chainbreaker had been afloat for less than an hour when the event decided the family had rested long enough.
[Second Objective: Your starting island is gone. Locate and reach a new island.]
[Time Remaining: 24:00:00]
[Failure Condition: Kingdoms that fail to reach land within the time limit will be eliminated from the event.]
The word eliminated hung over the dark deck, and nobody needed it explained. Marcus read the notice twice anyway, his jaw tightening on the second pass.
"No bearing. No map. No hint," he said. "Just an ocean with no edges and a clock."
"That’s the event being honest again," Ainen said from the rail, but the dryness in his voice had thinned. "Find land or stop existing. Simple menu."
Rudra’s hands stayed easy on the wheel, and his voice stayed level, because a crew borrows its calm from the helm and he had known that for longer than most of this crew had been alive. "Then we stop treating this as sailing and start treating it as a search operation. Fraisea. Lily. Almond. To me."
The three of them became the ship’s senses within the first hour, and it was the strangest navigation team any ocean had ever carried.
Fraisea stood at the bow with her palms open over the water, reading pressure and current the way other people read a page. "The ocean has structure," she reported. "Deep currents, layered, moving with purpose. Currents bend around solid things. If there’s an island within my range, the water will tell on it."
Lily climbed to the top of the black mast and sat there in the wind, eyes closed, listening. The Unheard Absolute gave her the note at the core of everything, and the ocean below sang one vast, endless, violet tone. "Land will sound different," she said through the Geneline. "Stone holds a different note than water. The moment anything solid enters my range, I’ll hear it."
And Almond stood amidships with a bucket of seawater drawn carefully on a rope, reading the essence of the ocean itself, over and over, looking for the one thing every essence carried. A truth. A want. A place where it had already been hurt.
"It’s hungry," he said quietly, after the fourth reading. "That’s its truth. This whole ocean is one hungry thing. Keep that in mind for everything that happens tonight."
What happened tonight started at the second hour, and it started with the fish.
Kayla saw them first from the stern watch, a patch of ocean off the port side where the violet surface had gone strangely bright, as if a field of stars had sunk and kept shining. The brightness spread, and organized itself, and began to pace the ship.
"Contact," she called, calm and clear, the way the drills demanded. "Port side, below the surface, big school. They’re matching our speed."
They came out of the water all at once, without a warning splash, a thousand silver bodies long as spears and edged like them, and the night filled with whistling steel. The first volley hit the hull and the raised shields, and the crabshell armor rang like a struck bell down her whole port flank and held.
"Blade-fish," Silvester shouted, hauling a young soldier down behind the rail as a second volley went over their heads. "The ocean skipped the small talk!"
The family’s answer was the answer they had drilled for twenty days. Natalia’s ranged lines rose along the rail in one motion and filled the air over the water with fire, and Kayla’s support formations threw up lattices of light that turned the blade-fish volleys aside like rain off a roof.
Hiroshi and Maya walked the deck between the formations, knocking down the fish that made it through, and Maya’s interlocking patterns turned three near-misses into three kills without anyone’s line ever breaking.
The school pressed the attack for an hour, wave after whistling wave, and learned the same lesson everything eventually learned about the Regalons. Their wall did not have gaps. When the last of the silver brightness sank away into the deep, the deck was scarred and studded with blade-fish like a pincushion, and not one member of the family had gone into the water.
"Casualties?" Rudra asked.
"Cuts and one broken arm," Marcus reported. "And about two hundred fish that Ainen has already claimed jurisdiction over."
"They attacked a ship carrying me," Ainen said, gathering blade-fish with the serene focus of a man who had decided how the night would be redeemed. "Becoming soup is simply the consequence."
The laughter that ran the deck was thin, but it was real, and Rudra let it run, because he knew what the ocean had just done. It had taken their measure. And out here, things that took your measure always came back.
The nature of the ocean came for them at the sixth hour, and it did not announce itself with brightness.
The wind died first. Then the temperature fell, fast enough that breath fogged, and Fraisea’s head came up sharply at the bow with her pale eyes wide.
"Pressure drop," she said. "Massive. Something is pulling the weather in on top of us. Storm, and not a natural one. It’s forming in a circle." She turned to the helm, and for the first time since the water, there was urgency in her voice. "Centered on us."
The Thurmugin storm did not arrive. It closed, like a fist. Black cloud walled them in from every horizon at once, the violet sea rose into ranges of moving hills, and the rain came down so hard it stopped being weather and became attack.
And the rain was ocean. That was the discovery that turned the storm from misery into mortal danger, because the first soldier struck by a heavy sheet of it felt the water grab at him the way the sea had grabbed Almond’s blade, clinging, pulling, hungry, and understood that the five-second rule had just learned how to fall from the sky.
"Canopy!" Rudra’s voice cut through the roar. "Nobody stands in the open rain! Saffa, give me a roof!"
Saffa gave him a roof. She stood at the mainmast with her arms raised and her ice domain flowering out overhead, and a ceiling of blue-white frost grew from mast to rails in under a minute, ringing under the rain like a drum but holding it away from every living soul beneath.
Clovelle stood beside her and folded the worst of the wind around the ship rather than through it, and between the two of them the Chainbreaker sailed through the heart of a killing storm inside a bubble of borrowed calm.
But the waves could not be folded away, and the waves were the storm’s real teeth. They came in ranges, taller than the mast, and Rudra read each one from the helm and took them at the exact angle the old red keel could survive, and even so the ship dropped into troughs deep enough that the storm-walls above them blotted out the sky.
It was on the fifth great wave that the ocean nearly collected its first Regalon.
The wave broke early, against every pattern Rudra had read, and a shoulder of violet water came across the bow rail and swept the forward watch off their feet. Three soldiers went sliding across the tilting deck in a sheet of foam, and two caught the lifelines, and the third, a young woman named Sera from the ranged lines, went over the side.
The whole family felt it in the Geneline at once, one thread suddenly screaming.
She never reached the water. Clovelle’s hand closed on empty air and folded it, and the space between Sera and the sea simply stopped being a distance. The young soldier landed hard on the deck planking she had been thrown from, three feet from where she had left it, soaked and shaking and alive.
Saffa was there before anyone else, frost crackling with fury as she hauled the girl up. "Count," she demanded.
"I, what," Sera managed.
"You were over the water for two seconds," Saffa said, and her voice shook exactly once before she mastered it. "You had three left. Count them sometime, so you understand what your sisters just spent." Then she pulled the young soldier into a brief, hard, entirely un-icy embrace, and went back to holding up the roof.
The storm fought them for four full hours, and then, like a fist that had failed to crack a nut, it opened. The cloud wall thinned, the ranges of water flattened back into swells, and the Chainbreaker sailed out of the far side of the closing weather, battered, iced, and whole.