The tentacles of the Aetheric Tide Ravager crashed into the domelike structure of the Wall of Force that I’d Evoked, slapping against it with titanic cracks and whaps, trying to get around the edges as we kept going towards the Shoreward just ahead.

  I had fantasies about it bouncing off the dome and being diverted, but no. It just breathed, and something like water, only it was Aether, full of quantum fucktardness and not material at all, washed out and across the Wall and erased it from existence.

  However, that pretty much ate up the force of the breath weapon, which meant we weren’t erased with it. I called it a win.

  Kris smashed into the Shoreward in a dive, making a hole as small as possible, and I crouched down to follow suit.

  Then that otherplanar kaiju smashed full on into the Shoreward.

  The crack reverberated right through the bones and blood. It felt like all of reality just got slammed, the impact radiating out from behind us as the Shoreward bulged. The whole manafield stretched and distorted, pouring massive amounts of energy into the power needed to stop this thing from coming in.

  It was basically riding its own wave now, but the back of its body was still out in deep water, propelling it forward, chasing after us as Kris hit the sands and headed in along the inlet. Going up the cliffs was death, we could only go for distance and hope we had slowed it enough.

  The Withered Summons there had absolutely no chance to react to us, and besides, they were gaping and paralyzed with terror at seeing the incoming Aetheric Tide Ravager coming for them, its head the size of a castle keep and moving like an impossibly fast onrushing mountain.

  The Withered were tough in relative terms, but were either flung away like chaff by the waves or simply crushed to a pulp under its bulk as it flattened them while lunging for us.

  Thousand-foot kaiju had a lot of momentum, it seemed…

  “Straight into the wall!” I jabbed Crown into the sands we were streaking past as the jaws loomed above us-

  And Kris hit the very narrow opening that had suddenly appeared in the stone wall of the cliff overlooking the beach, which hole actually extended over two hundred feet into the rock.

  The impact of the creature’s head into the stone behind us was devastating, the shockwave unstoppable. It blew through the stone around us, fracturing and splitting it, but I didn’t care, as Kris simply took the impact and rode it on ahead, trusting in me to keep the stone intact enough to move, her Disk no wider than my hips now as I was flat on my back as she pushed us ahead.

  Crown traced the shattering stone and my Shaping Stone pushed on ahead of us.

  The roar that came through the rock was absolutely pissed on so many levels, and would have blown out our ears without some Thunder resistance. I knew what was coming next, and in one inhalation diverted our course, sealed the passage behind us, then extended ours out ahead even further and upwards.

  Tons of stone moved into the way of the Aetheric Breath that filled the tunnel behind us, trying to drown the ants and following the path of least resistance as it turned stone to vapor and really made a mess of things behind us.

  Kris had slowed down enough by simply coasting that she wasn’t going to run us into a wall. I filled in enough behind us to stop anything from following us, and we gained altitude towards the plateau above the beachline.

  Massive impacts shook the stone behind us and shattered the cliff-facing, doubtless revealing the holes behind us as the stone collapsed. But could it collapse enough stone to catch us if we moved in another direction as it tried to find us?

  Impacts of its head made the stone bounce around us, trying to find and bury us, but scores of yards of rock were now in the way. I could feel a psychic sense trying to find us, but her Null and my Astral Ward VII+1 were enough to stop it and render us invisible, no doubt very frustrating.

  It was a good two hundred feet up to the top of the cliff, and we were inland over a thousand feet, slightly serpentine course, before we suddenly broke into the open surface and shot out.

  There it was behind us, looming up, as much slug and squid as snake or lizard, mouth-tentacles spread wide and looking around in all directions as lesser tentacles felt the ground and tried to feel where we’d gone.

  “Breath Weapon incoming!” I told her, and she leapt up, spinning through a roller-coaster spiral and turn to the right and above the ground.

  A stream of quantum irregularity puke twenty feet thick blew by below us and just washed away reality behind us, making a perfectly formed gully twenty feet deep and wide in an arcing path perfectly aimed to intercept us and adjust for a ground-level evasion… but not one in the air above the strike, which it didn’t raise in time to catch us before it expired.

  Kris snapped back and away from it, and seconds later we were out of its breath range.

  The shrieking bellow of the thing was not for anyone sane to hear, but it still felt grand, even if we dared not-

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  It was answered.

  The Sound, the Sound was so loud the whole world went silent. The shriek of the Ravager was swallowed as the pitiful thing it was. Looking back in utter shock as the sheer power of that sound echoed through us, we saw something come out of the deeps like a hundred yards offshore, rising, rising into the air...

  The back half of the body of the Ravager was between its jaws, jaws that were rising and had to be nearly as long as it was.

  The Ravager was jerked away from the land so fast it was like a whip snapped, the Shoreward doubtless helping the abrupt rejection.

  Kris skidded right to a halt, not that she could keep running after that sound had basically paralyzed everything.

  That Leviathan had to be at least a mile long. Jaws a thousand feet long, it looked like he was holding onto a snake or something as the Aetheric Tide Ravager dangled from it.

  And then, in horrible, awesome slow motion, another one came up out of the waters opposite it, jaws wide, and clamped onto the front of the Ravager, swallowing it from view. That Sound pounded out again, the whole world going silent in the face of it, our bodies unable to do anything but stand there and let it go through.

  The leviathans fell down in opposite directions. So did the Ravager.

  Their impacts should have raised a tsunami. Instead, they fell back into the water as if sliding into it, barely a ripple and gone from sight almost instantly, barely any sign they were there at all… save for the fact that the clouds in the sky above us were basically gone, and that mushroom cloud above the Caulcano had basically collapsed upon itself for some reason, as if the air couldn’t support what was in it any more.

  I just sat there and blinked, unable to talk, mouth dropping blankly as the Sound thrummed through me.

  Kris kind of grabbed my wrist awkwardly, her muscles still not working precisely, either. -Magevoice. Let it know the creature that called in the Ravager is on the Caul. Also, we can vivic Burn the Ravager so it doesn’t infect the seas.-

  I couldn’t work my jaw to Cast. Heck, I couldn’t blink. My whole body was just stunned and unable to work effectively.

  But then, Silent Spell meant I didn’t need to, and Magevoice was just a projection of the voice. My mind still worked fine.

  -Great Elders, the one responsible for the Calling of the Aetheric Tide Ravager is on the volcanic island that just erupted out there, draining Fire Mana from the core of it. Also, if you want us to clean up and purge the Ravager instead of having to eat it, please drop it on the shoreline and we will Burn it down to vivus, just as we did the Wisps and Elementals on Asheron’s Island which your Juniors guarded.-

  The whole world seemed to still for a second, and I could see it coming, a grandoise note that Sang of the great open waters, a simple acknowledgment as it blew through us, and again, we couldn’t move.

  Except I could, because I could raise my own voice into that Thunder, and ride it out and beyond on the Sublime Chord.

  “TRUTH!

  “HOPE!

  “VALOR!”

  I Sang the Words of Creation back on the Sublime Chord to the Leviathans!

  If they were bloody awesome and I was an ant, that was fine. They were atoms to the truth and power of Heaven!

  Three miles out to see, way too fast for physics, two massive forms surfaced at the same time. Eyes larger than I was tall looked across the miles at me, and met my stare.

  As quietly as they’d risen, they submerged, but a moment later a pair of massive flukes flipped out of the water, and something long and skinny flew into the sky.

  A long, long way into the sky...

  And, I noticed, the flukes indicated the leviathans were now pointed directly at the Singularity Caul!

  “Oh, shit,” Kris got out before I could even blink yet. The ripped and torn remains of the Ravager fell from the sky in a long, limp arc, smashing into the water right through the Shoreward, before bouncing and rolling and crashing to a halt right next to the cliff-face it had been pounding on.

  Kris was really stiff, but I couldn’t move at all, so she just turned us around and started moving awkwardly back the way we’d come. There wasn’t a lot of grace, but ki didn’t require grace, and she got fractionally better with every step she took and every breath she inhaled.

  I just sat there and watched out to sea.

  Watched, as the two leviathans surfaced on the northeast side of the island, near the very cliff that Aerbax had blown a chunk out of with its meteor strike. Great jaws and heads rose from the waters, and yes, they extended far above the walls of the rim.

  I couldn’t feel the Note they made so much as see it. The way the air rippled and basically became a standing wave. It was directed, with power and knowledge, and completely and utterly harmonized.

  And, I could tell from looking at it, it bore shadows of a Word.

  Truth. They’d learned something from me with just one Word!

  The walls of the rim of the Singularity Caul just sort of fell over and collapsed.

  The sound hit the stone, and it was reduced to sand. They didn’t get blasted inwards or anything, they were just shaken apart and fell down. As they fell down so heavily, not even raising any dust because the pressure in the air was too great, we could see the inner hills and walls of the Singularity Caul within all collapsing and falling down out there in the distance, driving in towards the side of that volcano, dispersing the remnants of the pyroclasm completely and bringing down everything in its path.

  The wave of sound played over the side of the volcano, and it looked like it… polished the stone clean, wiping it free of imperfections and protrusions, leaving it completely bare and unmarked. What happened as the sound passed into the stone I didn’t know, but I imagined something wasn’t going to like it.

  Then the massive heads of the Leviathans slowly sank into the waters, and they were gone.

  Kris slowly cleared her throat, staring across the miles of ocean at the new break in the Caul’s walls, there on the horizon. “Well, I think someone got their message across as to what they thought of bringing the Ravager here,” she murmured as she stopped on the edge of the cliff to look down at the five parts of the creature, scales that looked to be harder than steel punched through and flesh compressed as if it had gone through a pressure cutter.

  The insides, from what we could tell, looked like pulp. That Sound going through it at that range had probably liquefied its innards.

  Still couldn’t talk. -Scales might be worth something-, I /told her in Markspace. -Gotta vivify the rest.-

  She gave me a look as I just sat there and could barely move my eyes, trying to shake off the physical effects of that Note. “I’ll go down there and see what might be done. I’d normally say the bones, too, but I think they are dripping.”

  I focused on the winding unnatural configuration of its spine, and the spirals of its ribs.

  Yeah, they were kind of oozing and falling apart, completely losing cohesion there.

  “By the way, what are you holding in your hand?”

  ============================

  For those who would like to support me and my daily updates, my Patreon Link is at:

   Ebook Series: The original Power of Ten: The First Day, The First Week, and finally The First Month, Vol Five and Six!