Chương 487: 487

ETA to that leviathan sighting?" Mark asked, glancing over the edge of the skiff, at the mirage-blurred world. It was dark down there and the sky was full of auroras. The Forgetting was still with them.

"Can't see shit."" Apologies, sir," Quark said, "I have lost connection with everyone." Mark hmm'd." 10 minutes, based on previous trajectory and gravitational readings," Derek said, looking outward at the mirage of the world.

"This isn't going to clear up before we get to D'Manila Bay—" The left side of the hovercraft suddenly sheared away, like they had run through monowire. Sparks flew everywhere. Derek was half-dead and suddenly splitting into more people, grabbing into the air, grabbing for Mark.

Mark Unioned with Alacrity and Slowness, feeling out the world out there as the grabbed Derek into a bowl of adamantium and threw out a rotor overhead— The rotor instantly caught something in the clouds that was not there until suddenly it was, the swirling mist suddenly physical and strong as kaiju scales. Sudden spikes coalesced out of the mist, forming long, spindly legs that shot through the chests and heads of every single Derek, and bounced off of Mark's skull and chest.

The Forgetting suddenly vanished, revealing the monster in all its cloudy glory. It was not a kaiju, technically. It was an absolutely giant cloud spider with about 20 legs, or more, so a really old one. Specifically a thunderhead strider, if Mark's guess was correct. The beast's body was about 50 meters long while its legs were easily 100 meters long, making it technically a kaiju, but only technically.

It emitted no Call and it made no noise except for the noise when it slammed its long legs into Mark's body, bouncing him away with every speedy slam as it tried to spear him like a kebab. Mark kinda sighed. The spider had killed every single Derek, successfully spearing through his bodies and then wrapping them up in mist and clouds before tucking them away into the cloud it stood upon.

Some of those bodies evaporated into so much mana, but the strider was a monster that specialized in collecting the uncollectable, so many of Derek's bodies went into the larder." Fuck," Mark said, allowing himself to fade into normal time. There was no point going fast when the only person Mark needed to protect was already dead, but it wasn't like he was actually dead. He was still out there, in his other bodies. This was going to make entering Vaka a bit harder.

The spider sped up, comparatively, never stopping its attack, but Mark solidified himself and the spider's speedy hits were like nails thrown at solid rock. The spider's hammer-nail feet bounced off of Mark's chest and head, only briefly catching on his eye a little before the leg flexed off toward the side. Mark glared at the spider's many eyes, and the spider pulled away, the white, misty surface of the spider once again turning more cloud-like. At least the Forgetting was gone.

The sky here was rather beautiful, in an absolute-killer sort of way. Clouds everywhere, a canyon of subtle glows, and the auroras overhead. If it weren't for the kinda-kaiju then it would have been a beautiful place to hover for a time. Mark asked, "Quark? Is Derek still there, somewhere?"" Connecting—"" Mark! What the fuck was that?" Derek asked, voice staticky and distant." A cloud strider, I think. Rare variant," Mark said, looking at the spider as it curled further into the clouds under its many, many feet.

The cloud shimmered in the dark depths with something like lightning, but Mark knew it wasn't lightning. It was something struggling to free itself now that the spider wasn't draining it of mana and life.

"Thunderhead strider, I think. The Empire has a no-kill order on them, right? They clean up the skies and this isn't a shipping lane."" Oh shi— Yeah. No-kill on them. Must be because we were outside of the shipping lanes… Ah, fuck. Well… You can come back and get me, or keep going to the place you have to go. Can't talk about it over the lines or…" Derek's voice faded away with static. Mark waited. Derek's voice came back stronger.

"I got your location from Quark. I marked the strider on the map. You wanna turn around and come get me? You don't have to. I'm just gonna die out there again to yet another monster. The Forgetting..." Derek's voice dissolved into static again. Mark waited. More static. Mark said, "Quark, tell Derek that I'll catch him at the destination. See if there's an upload for you for further instructions." Quark beeped and said, "I already have the directions, sir. Shall we wait for the connection to come back?"

Mark waited. All he heard was more and more static. The Forgetting was here again, like a soft mist in the sky that had nothing to do with the hidden thunderhead strider." Let's get going," Mark decided, as he got to flying away, down the canyon of clouds. Behind him the cloud strider flexed out of the cloud again and reached out a leg, slow-like, and tapped at Mark as he went by.

It tried to curl some sort of spellwork onto Mark that was reminiscent of Buckler and Lancer's force bubble containment magic, springing a sudden wrapping of solid air around Mark. Mark spun himself a little, distorting his whole body into a spiral of blades, breaking the magic. The spider backed off, pulling its leg back— Something shocked lightning into the thunderheads below, into the canyon of moon-lit clouds, so the spider sank deep into the clouds to eat that lightning.

Soon, the lightning stopped and Mark flew on, his webweave repairing itself to the best of its ability. Mark was glad he had stopped to get some good self-repair webweave before he left New Tokyo. Shame about losing all the luggage, though. Those dress clothes from the clothiers of the Imperial Hotel were nice." I'll just have to wear webweave for a few days, I guess," Mark said, leaving the cloud canyon behind and entering a clear sky full of aurora light. A massive bay lay down below, like a bowl of black ink.

"Oh! Is that D'Manila Bay?"" Correct, sir. We were closer than anticipated." Mark would get to the leviathans soon enough, but first he hovered alone in the night sky of Daihoon, gazing at the land below. Most people called this place the D'Philippines, since it was mostly a match for the real Philippines over on Earth. It was completely uninhabited on both worlds, as far as Mark knew, but on Earth it had been one of the many industrializing places before the Reveal.

Perhaps, if the Reveal would have never happened, then the jungle islands would have been covered in skyscrapers. Or maybe it would have been kept natural. Or maybe something else would have happened. Mark didn't know much about world history, but he had taken the same history courses as everyone growing up in Orange City, and broadly speaking everyone imagined that Earth would have been in the spacefaring age if not for all the monsters.

But in this world, and especially here on Daihoon, the tropical islands were dark. They hadn't been changed by human hands in 10, 000 years. This was the home of monsters and leviathans. It was lonely. Not a single visible light of civilization anywhere, though that thunderhead strider back there still had its gently-thundering cloudbank, and it was never truly dark on Daihoon with all the colorful auroras in the sky.

The moon overhead was mostly dark, but even the light from the illuminated part was more than enough to make out landscapes out there. It was a big forested mountain straight ahead, ocean all around, the inlet to the bay down below, and the 10-kilometer-wide bay itself, directly below. Quark put boxes of different sizes into Mark's vision on the dark waters below, first a larger green box and then smaller and smaller redder boxes, here and there, saying, "These are suspected leviathan nests.

There are 4 here, the largest known in the whole island chain, but when you kill them and take their Ocean Shapers the other leviathans will move in and take over this ancestral lair." Mark looked at the land outside of the waters a bit more, noticing the way the trees grew about a kilometer away from the waters. Kinda weird, but also kinda expected. Every single leviathan had Ocean Shaper, and leviathans were terribly lazy. They used Ocean Shaper for everything, for eating and such.

They washed the lands rather regularly to snatch up monsters of all kinds while also dragging the oceans into their mouths to filter feed. Mark had never actually seen a leviathan in person, and the ways in which the monster manuals talked of them were as if they were almost kaiju. They weren't, though. Back before Mark was on the Kaiju Squad, he had known as much about leviathans as anyone; 'run and don't look back'.

There was a bit more about never going near the water during a leviathan sighting, how Ocean Shaper was like the well-known Sky Shaper but thicker, and how everyone on support would need to be ready for flooding and sudden drowning. But not much more than that. People on the Kaiju Squad got more. And now, Mark was the tip of the spear.

Mark stopped spinning the blade overhead, transitioning the rotor to a bunch of knives that he held on his back and beside his arms, ready for use, and then he plummeted from 5 kilometers in the sky. It was a thrilling sort of fall, the sky falling away, curling on blades, whining as it ripped, the world below approaching like a wet darkness.

Mark laughed a little, wind catching in his mouth, on his ears, on his fingertips, as he felt a normal, small rush of fear, as he spread his arms and legs and caught the sky, just a little. It wasn't often he got to go skydiving; there were always other things to be doing. For a small moment he felt normal. Nothing was normal anymore, but Mark could pretend sometimes. 40 seconds after he started falling, Mark reached the water in a great slamming splash. It hurt a little, actually, which was uncommon.

Mark had fallen into water from great heights before. It hurt about as much as slamming into a bed. But this water was different. It was filled with vectors and power, and Mark hadn't recognized how deeply the leviathans' astral bodies had controlled the water until he was in it, caving into it with his body. Briefly, Mark flickered black, his Variable setting on the Physicality of his body slamming to full power. He stayed black as the ocean crushed onto him, distant monsters trying to figure him out.

Mark met the tests with his own astral body, Unioning with Good and Bad and hitting them with all the Bad he could find. Wasn't much right now. It was enough. Something screamed in the water, more of surprise and dislike instead of actual pain. Something else grabbed Mark in a swirl of power and dragged him into the cold depths, twisting the water around him and pulling him in.

Mark went with the flow, right to wherever his target was in the deep depths— If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Other waters twisted around his legs, around his right arm, and yanked in the other direction. For a moment, Mark was pulled in two directions, and rather strongly, too. Stranger still, the leviathans fighting over him did something different to the water.

The water around Mark's legs twisted, clouded, and then froze over, locking Mark down and pulling him back the way he had come, the leviathan using the ice for more leverage on Mark's body. Monsters rumbled in the dark, screaming incoherent rage and annoyance. The first leviathan condensed the water around Mark's upper half into boiling evaporation that blasted away the ice on his lower half and flash-fried the ocean, briefly exposing Mark to a bubble of superheated water.

For a moment, the sky was open and Mark could see down into the depths. Tendrils snaked out of the edges of the pulled-open water, grabbing for him blindly and from many directions. One of the tendrils found him first, snatching him and then ripping him into the wall of dark water, back into the depths, all the while that entire half of the open ocean roared its dominance at the other sides of the open ocean.

Mark's webweave broke under those vibrations, his entire body solid black under the pressure and ripping noise. The other leviathans gave chase, but they couldn't catch up to the 'captured morsel'. The 'winner' dragged Mark toward them— Mark slammed into a wall of long teeth, each of them covered in ripping currents of water. It was like whale baleen but made of chainsaws. Leviathans descended from whales, so that made a lot of sense.

Whales were apex predators, too, but Mark had never really thought about it that way before now, where teeth made of water tried to rip him into digestible chunks. All around him the ocean pressed in, locking him to those buzzsaw teeth. The current even dragged in Mark's astral body, which was the point of going with the flow right now. It was minimally painful. Mark imagined that the leviathan's Power Level was something like 93, or maybe 95.

So it was about 4 less than a match for Mark, and it was just a whole lot of water and Mark was adamantium. Perhaps, if the leviathan had carved into Mark like Wandering Sage had done with her streamer-of-air attack then the leviathan would have carved him up, but it was not smart enough to do that. Mark imagined he had about 20 seconds of the leviathan sucking and buzzing on him before it switched from standard consumption protocols. It was more than enough time. Mark closed his eyes and dove into the dream.

He opened his eyes to a monster in the darkness of his soulhouse, but smaller. Able to stand, frozen, on the lawn of his house. It was a leviathan alright, but about a thousand times smaller. The standard bulbous body, with four nubby legs. A face made of baleen. It resembled mostly a dog, but mostly blubber, and it lived underwater. These things never moved much unless they were mating or hunting for new locations to nest.

Usually they dug into the ocean floor, just off of the coast of some island, and settled there in the muck. They used their Ocean Shaper to bring the surface down to breathe, since they were technically air-breathers; whales. They also used their Ocean Shaper to hunt, wiping out the land with tsunamis and then dragging the meat into their sharp baleen. Fish didn't stand a chance against them. Technically, they were a 'good' sort of monster. They kept monster populations in check.

Enough leviathans, together, even stopped kaiju from passing through without a big fight. But they were still monsters. You had to kill a lot of them per year to keep them from piling up and encroaching on human lands. In the research on these monsters, back when he was regularly doing kaiju squad work, Mark heard that it usually cost Aluatha 100 lives and a billion gold leaf per year to hunt enough of these things to prevent them from coming ashore. It cost them a lot more than that pre-Reveal.

Before the Reveal, Aluatha had no idea where the leviathans actually came from. Now they knew that the leviathans came from these islands here. So, in coming here, Mark was both gathering Powers to give to the People so that they could help themselves against the goblin menace and also solving problems for Aluatha years down the line. With a rip and a tear, Mark dove into the soul of the leviathan and grabbed a shining, bright Binding from its core.

It was like looking at the ocean's surface from far below as a summer sun shone above, casting all the rest of Mark's soulhouse into underwater light. It was beautiful. The leviathan remained alive, but it would not be alive for long. It would die, drowning under its own immobile body. That seemed cruel, so Mark splashed away the soul with a wave of blades, cutting the beast into memories of blood and viscera, the whole leviathan bleeding out into the air of Mark's dark soulhouse like red clouds underwater.

With a shove, Mark pushed the remnants outside, into the dream. Mark tucked Ocean Shaper into a folder in his Skilling room and then he— — opened his eyes to reality, to the cold, wet darkness. The baleen teeth in front of him were off, the water-buzzsaw ended, the water choked with warmth and blood. The leviathan's vector was gone. Mark had 'Soul Kill'ed the beast. Or at least that's what he imagined he had done. He had the actual Soul Kill Power still in his list.

According to the Sigaldry in that one, and looking at what Mark had done with splashing away the leviathan's soul, Mark had 'disrupted the soul' like how Mark imagined the Power Breaker worked, but instead of working on anything physical, it worked on the soul— A tendril of water grabbed at the leviathan in front of Mark, testing the surface of the dead thing, and then, finding it pliable, it ripped at that leviathan.

Roars echoed through the water and more and more tugging tendrils of Ocean Shaper grabbed at the dead leviathan, ripping it apart and spiraling the remnants toward their controllers. One 'lucky' leviathan grabbed Mark, yanked him across the 10 kilometer span of D'Manila Bay. That leviathan became the next contributor to the wellbeing of humanity in the Two Worlds, and then the remaining leviathans in the bay started to eat that one, too.

Mark grabbed a third Ocean Shaper from a third leviathan before he left, flying out of the waters and entering the sky once again—" Walaria is calling, sir," Quark said.

"It was not urgent, and she said not to interrupt you." Mark turned around a bit in the sky, not quite sure which way was south, as he said, "Give me directions toward the target, and connect her." Quark populated maps into Mark's vision, overlaying the land and the ocean with a wireframe, and then vanishing that wireframe and putting an arrow on the horizon. Mark turned as the arrow said to turn, and then there was a dot far ahead that read 'Vaka'. Mark flew in that direction.

The comms crackled, probably due to the Forgetting being kinda close, but Mark wasn't going to trigger it again, and hopefully Walaria wouldn't either—" Mark. Good work with New Tokyo. The new squadron of Dynamo-enabled mages will come in truly useful. Can you make another one of those Solar Flares?"" I surely can. I got 20-ish Dynamos left in the tank."" I'm commissioning another one for Aluatha. Addavein has taken the one you made for himself, which is likely the best outcome." Mark grinned at that.

"I heard that Eliot warmed the city."" Nothing catastrophic. Can you keep that heating effect, or was it a byproduct?" Mark glanced up at the moon as he flew fast, saying, "I was thinking of making a cooling staff. A moon-based one. But probably not; that'd be rather demonic by Daihoon standards." Walaria didn't respond to that, because yes, it was demonic by Daihoon standards. Mark continued, "Other than that…

It put Solar Flare together with Sigaldry and Basic Enchanting methodologies, using some Manawork compatibility flows to tie it all together and make the Dynamo sun produce mana aligned with the user. There were always going to be side effects, though, so I funneled the incompatible mana or the mana the user didn't use into a byproduct of heat and light.

I also made it in the soulhouse and brought it into reality, but the first time didn't work because I didn't put enough dream into it, so I put more dream into Solar Flare. So yeah; the heat was a byproduct that I chose to make happen, because otherwise there would be unstructured mana outflows. I can likely tune the excess, unwanted mana into something else, though."" I want the unstructured mana in the next one to be turned into a directed ray."

"… So you want a corruptive staff? Like… literally corruptive?"" Directed corruption is quite useful, and some people, like Eliot, could make use of any mana that enters his space. So instead of trying to choose the outcome you can choose all outcomes and leave the user to deal with the fallout."" Unstructured, active mana is basically radioactive so you mean the literal fallout."" Quite so." Walaria continued, "Quark logged that you spotted a thunderhead strider 40 minutes ago. That strider is known to Aluatha.

Did you ever hear of the story of Stoneweaver, while you were here at the Winter Ball?" Mark had to think for a second— Oh.

"The spider kaiju that Gedahowla the Bright tamed and made dig cenotes for the early Empire."" Middle to late empire, roughly 200 years ago, but yes. That thunderhead strider is the same one that was the mate to Stoneweaver. The one you found is Skyweaver. It's about 800 years old, as far as our records tell us. You can kill it and take its Power for yourself.

It should have its eponymous Skill, which would be invaluable in the coming war, but if you kill it then it will likely release all of the dragons it is keeping in containment, sucking them dry." Mark had already decided, "It already seems like a useful sky-cleaner far out of the way of everyone, so I wasn't going to kill it, and now that I know it will release dragons I don't think I should kill it even more." Walaria moved on, "Thank you for alleviating Jessie's issues. He was much better after he spoke to you.

Can you remove his Resurrection safely?" Mark had known this was coming. Mark said, "I probably can, but it'll be weird. There's a lot of openness to the dream in his spellwork. I'm not sure how he hasn't died from some sort of soul infection yet." Walaria repeated, "He was much better after he spoke to you."

"… Oh. I see."" Will you look after him if he comes to Dawncoast permanently?"" I can't promise direct oversight, but I will promise to keep an eye out for him if something happens to Cade or whoever else comes. Eliot and Aurora would do more than I can do for him, as will the other True Powers I make for Aluatha. I plan on upgrading a whole bunch of people at Dawncoast after I come back for Gate Day…" Mark realized he had lost track of time.

"Whenever that is?"" You have 70 hours to get back to Dawncoast for the delayed Gate Day on the 20th. It will be a large event. I suggest you clear out the worst goblin encroachments for the People, give them some strong Powers, and then leave them to fend for themselves. Due to the nature of their homeland I cannot give you more guidance than that. I knew the people in charge who came here for the Winter Ball, but nothing more than that." Mark went, "Huh! Really? That's…

that's not that surprising, actually, based on what Derek was telling me."" Derek Kevins has probably seen more of Vaka than most living people. I would go with his suggestion, if he is still there."" Heard and understood."" Second-to-final word: You still have Light Body and Lightspeed, Light Shaper, and that Annihilating Light I was having you save. I will have two options for Annihilating Light when you get back, after Gate Day. One is the Lightspeed option, with every Okuanan fortress becoming a target.

There are 176 targets. The other option is Light Body, which will be slower but possibly stronger, since the user will no longer be physical at all. Think on how it would work best."

"… Heard and understood," Mark said, unsure.

"... I'm honestly not sure which option would be best but… any of those options would be a nuclear bomb moving at the speed of light all across Okuana. It would be…" Mark redirected his complaint, "What Okuana did was a war crime, Walaira, but to do the same in turn would also be a crime against humanity."" Consider it." Walaria moved on, "Interrogate a few of the higher-up goblins about how serious of a threat they would be if Dominant got control over them again.

Maybe BiggestBaddest will tell you the truth the easiest of all, and work to ensure that they weren't controlled by Dominant ever again. I doubt they could do much to you these days, but even so try to steer clear of Wongod and their witches. Greeplox and Puppet especially."" Ah… Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that, but… I could go in and demand answers from them, couldn't I."" Good work, Mark. Darklight protect you." Click.

Mark eyed the horizon, thoughts too deep, flying fast as ocean and islands passed below like textured darkness underneath a demon-moon sky full of rainbows.