Less than a second after the Images turned to go vertical and climb the last cliff facing of the Singularity Caul’s rim, the Fireballs hit in perfect spreads of lightning, fire, and shadow that covered acres of area in blasting magic. The whole face of the rim there basically exploded and blew apart. It didn’t matter if you could dodge the direct blast or not, you were still getting blown off the face of it when the entire face was destroyed.

  Just to the right of the explosions, Princess Kristie shot up from the side of the wall below and zipped past the blasts, heading for the top of the rim and completely avoiding the explosions that had just popped all of our Mirror Images. Before the monolithic virindi could get another volley off, we were up on top of the rim, over the edge, racing for the summit… and this time I sprang for Paired Dispels and a Fastcast Dispel as Kris dodged the only Fireball which might catch her. The other three incoming Fireballs smashed into Silver Magic and detonated harmlessly in warring pyrotechnics in the air behind us.

  Then we were over the ridge of the rim and totally out of line of sight, driving toward the edge of it a hundred meters away, veering left just in case it had something really, really big-

  I think it came out of the high sky, hitting the rim behind us so hard and fast that it sheared at least two acres of it violently out into the sea, blowing through the stone and collapsing the whole face of the rim there with a meteoric crater whose components hit the sea below REALLY fast, plumes of water rising up higher than we were!

  I flipped up a Ward Wall to catch the impact of the shrapnel and seawater spraying itself our way, then watched it fracture and shatter from dozens of rocks smacking into it like catapult loads as tons of water sloughed away around us. We let the shockwave of the deafening impact smash us along and help us on our way out to sea as the Force Magic broke and fell away after doing its job.

  No stopping, running downhill, out to the sea and away from the virindi, Kris’ Null punching through the Shoreward without slowing down.

  “Fuuuuuuck!” Kris swore, still pumping hard as we ran down the air, unable to stay elevated, but that was only nice, as kindly King Gravity acknowledged our obeisance and helped us with some nice downhill speed, not to mention more wind from Primus.

  I swirled up an Illusion behind us, an Illusionary Wall at IV hanging in the air, whose only function was to be Really Big and show the sea beyond us, and not us.

  The massive virindi came looming into view as Kris stayed absolutely on course, the height of the Illusionary Wall extending all the way down to the sea. I watched it levitate forward, tentacles weaving lightning and fire, ready to blast. It came right up to the limit of the rim wall, avoiding the fan-shaped crater it had just blasted out of the side of the island and the dust cloud billowing up from below.

  It panned right, then panned left, its whole body turning since it had no neck. It extended itself out over the edge and tilted over to look down and around the rim, seeing if we were down below and running along the beach or cliff-face below.

  It saw nothing, and Illusionary Walls at IV do not radiate magic, too bad, so sad.

  We weren’t heading towards land, but Kris stayed absolutely on course with the Wall between us and it.

  It hovered there about thirty seconds, and then turned slowly around, heading back up towards the ridge, and then out of sight of us.

  I put up another Wall, but kept this one only ten feet square and directly in front of me as I stayed facing the island, Kris’s Disk turned to keep me that way as she arced left and headed north-east just above the surface of the sea at speed, making sure to leave no wake on the waves just below us.

  We were three-quarters of a mile and moving increasingly away from the barren, impassable shore of the Singularity Caul’s outer side at this point. I took no chances, and was rewarded as the massive virindi popped up further down the ridge-line, heading north at speed to see if it could see us out there, its tentacles waving and pulling at the magic I could only see working because of my Mask of Clarity’s Eagle Eyes magnification at x50.

  “Double fuck. It’s Summoning something in. Calling something from the Seas of the Aether! Something goddamn big!”

  “Do you know who that was?” Kris grunted, not slowing down in the slightest. It was almost ten miles across the sea to the Withered Beach, but she wasn’t going to let up at all.

  We’d be there in less than five minutes at this pace. I spun my head around, looking across the waters. We should actually be ahead of the Mick if he was looping around the island, too...

  I’d seen too much of it, without even trying to. I could feel my brain seem to swell as I remembered what I’d seen, and lost our Marklink as I clapped my hand to my head, Crown hovering there and keeping the Illusionary Wall up for me as I did.

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  “no,” I said in a very small voice. “and you can’t make me go look again.”

  “Oh.” I could hear her grimace as I rocked back and forth and held my mind together again.

  Don’t use Divinations on powerful Aberrants. Don’t use Divinations on powerful Aberrants, you idiot. Don’t use Divinations on powerful Aberrants, you total fucking moronic jackass of an idiot!

  I tossed a Restoration into my own head, which had the pleasant effect of Restoring my normally very composed and controlled self by washing across the memory of what I’d seen and eroding away about 99% of it. Enough remained for me to know that I’d seen something of fire and shadow and lightning and virindi aetheric mindfuckery, and that was just about it.

  My eyes snapped open just in time to see something that was part reptile, part fish, and part squid come through a purple and thatsnotacolor hole a hundred feet in diameter in midair, plummeting into the seas a mile away with a big ol’ splash.

  Some of the many, many eyes on it were looking this way, the angle for the Wall wrong.

  “Fuck, it noticed us,” I told Kris, who had looked back in time to see the same thing.

  “That was a thousand feet long,” she judged with a wince, and then just shut up and ran like fuck, because the long, long line of it was turning and making right for us.

  “There’s going to be people working the Withered Beach,” I hissed, and wove a Sending. The psychic interference radiating out from the Caulcano seemed to be emanating from the nice big black cloud rising over from it like a dreadful mushroom.

  -Lord Mick! Send out to get anyone and everyone away from the Withered Beach with all speed! Teleport if they can, as far inland as they can make it if not! They’ve got like three minutes to get away from the shore!-

  There was only a moment of hesitation before the /reply came back, chased with sensation of a man in motion. -You’re what that damn thing is chasing!? I can just fucking see you ahead of us! Elysa is there with her people, they’re pulling out as fast as they can run!-

  I certainly didn’t have any more faith the Shoreward was going to stop the thing than he did, and he had the Mask of Clarity to get a good look at it, too.

  “Can you get rid of it? Banish it?” Kris grunted between breaths as she churned for speed.

  The fucking kaiju was goddamn gaining on us, rising up out of the water with its own speed as it did so. I did not particularly want to see more of it and all those lidless black eyes fixated on us.

  “Not in memory today. Wasn’t expecting a Summoned Kaiju! A Dispel won’t work, it’s been Called here, we’d need a true Banishment!”

  “Or bringing in something equally big?” Kris grunted.

  I blinked, and brought up another Sending. -Great Elder of the Sea! An interloper from the Aether has entered the ocean off the island of Dereth here! We cannot stop it! Can you help?- The words translated to singsong effects and were accompanied with our exact location and the appearance of… whatever was following us.

  The ringing song of a /reply that came back was surprised… but also in the affirmative!

  “The leviathans said they can help,” I told her, trying not to look too closely at the massive thing that was chasing after and rapidly overtaking us.

  “It’s an Aetheric Tide Ravager,” Kris grunted helpfully, and I gave her a look. “And that virindi? That was Aerbax itself,” she added coolly, just to make my day complete. Her Monster ID/Assess Creature Skill technically wasn’t magical, especially from a Null.

  “It’s going to catch us maybe a quarter-mile offshore,” I judged calmly, eyeballing our relative speeds. “We can’t fly out of its reach, the Veil around it cracked bringing the fucker in. You ready to try a Run at VI and see if that will help?”

  “Sure!” she grunted, and I Raised the spell and slapped it on her head.

  Something happened with her feet, because we definitely picked up speed, only the kaiju noticed it, too. The waves it was churning up were massive as it actually picked up speed as well!

  “About at the Shoreward,” I judged fatalistically, noting the grasping tentacles extending out from around its mouth. Easily as long and powerful as those of a kraken. Those I might be able to stop for a moment, but if it just came in jaws wide, well… there were a LOT of those teeth, and they were all longer than I was tall...

  “Shoreward should slow it down, but won’t stop it, at least not completely. If we can make it inland, though…” Kris grunted.

  “The Shoreward on the ocean is much stronger than the lakes, and gets stronger against stronger things. It’s why there’s no giant nefanes floating across the landscape slaughtering everything.” I watched the oncoming behemoth with a grimace. “Fifty-fifty chance?”

  “Better than nothing.” She closed her eyes slightly and concentrated on speed, golden lights already flaring on her feet getting brighter as she committed everything she could to this, including more layers of Soul Magic.

  Boots of the Hare Soul Tats and Speedy Soul, on the stack!

  Maybe a little more than fifty percent chance, if the Shoreward could slow it down…

  ---

  The island of Dereth was located in the middle of the sea, out in the center of absolutely nowhere.

  As is normal for such islands, that meant it was created by volcanic action. That meant that the seas around it were very deep, and they dropped off very quickly close to the shores of the island. The Shoreward was basically at the chest-high cutoff, and the shore dropped off precipitously close to the island.

  I was not looking into the eyes of the thing once it got within a thousand feet. The Aura of it alone would have had any sane person gibbering in fear, and was certainly the strongest Fear effect I’d ever run into, although probably not so powerful as the Thi- (ugh) was...

  Huh. Even remembering it, the stutter in my thoughts made this thing’s Aura seem like chump change. It even tossed the Aura back, and I could feel the thing’s utter confusion at the very sudden sense that it had just rammed its Fear into something impossibly beyond it.

  Was that even possible from something so small?

  It was still incoming, however. We were simply too small to be threats to it. Jaws opening, not looking in there, just feeling the air as its tentacles spread out-

  Wall of Force!

  The massive pane of unbreakable force materialized between us as those tentacles snapped forward.

  ============================

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