Chương 107: Water Devours All Equally

June snorted water and opened his eyes to the sudden intrusion and saw a blur of light above him. Thunder brutally crashed down and exploded into the side of the stone archery tower, and the sheer supernatural force of the sky's wrath tore the bricks and foundational wood apart like paper, causing it to buckle like a broken leg. Still disoriented, June rolled onto his stomach to suddenly start sliding across the slick, flat surface of the tower as it began to collapse.

He slowly and with quickening pace scurried helplessly up the steepening surface as the floor tilted into a wall and then a ceiling as it began to push him towards the far ceiling. He reached out for the only source of comfort with an extended arm and curled his body around his delicate gourd as tons of stone erected from earthen magic shattered and placed his small body into its crushing embrace.

With simple glimpses, he first saw the dark, brooding sky that was both weeping and lashing out with thunderous outrage. Then, as he fell further, he caught his final glance of the outer castle walls; trees were uprooted and thrown by hurricane-force winds, and the surrounding area turned into an indistinguishable rapid. He fell further, being pushed by the once floor and now ceiling towards the ground. The last things he saw were the inner courtyard of the new Brighthaven castle.

The place where people were celebrating and toasting the night before, the festive singing was replaced by a cacophony of screams, drunkards were carried away by a rising flood that shattered through the castle's entrances, and blue sparks were sparsely placed around like an odd piece of modern art. Then the tower reached the ground. With June underneath it.

River woke up submerged under water. His personal quarters were on one of the lowest floors of the underground dormitory network of New Brighthaven. He quickly swam out into the dark hall, and all the torches that softly illuminated the subterranean town had been doused.

Fortunately, River didn't have a problem with darkness or the flooding, Tritons were water dwellers, and light was often sparse deep below; his Triton eyes were well adjusted, even designed for cases like this, but humans, elves, and non-deep dwellers were not. River swam through the drowned catacombs at an inhuman pace and found his way to the cohorts' dorms. He placed his back against a narrow wall, and Mule kicked Ann's door down and quickly swam in. The room was in disarray but empty, to his delight.

He swam out and onto the next room, and with the same technique, he burst Eren's door down with a slight bit of trouble, but to his relief, he was also not in his dorm. He quickly swam to Silvester's door, and to his surprise, the door was already open, and inside was Silvester swimming up with all his might and breathing with a small pocket of air that remained within his room. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

While June and River had a habit of staying underwater for extended periods of time, drowning was still a plausible cause of death; air was not required within the simulation, but having water enter your lungs was still cause for death here. The problem was that this information was not common knowledge.

The cohort may have known this information, but simultaneously, they understood that one mistake would snowball into an unavoidable death, and to a living being, breathing came as naturally as breathing; it was so ingrained in their bodies that they had phrases for it, and to suddenly stop something like that and maintain that concentration was not something that anyone could do.

Silvester dived down and yelped underwater at suddenly seeing River, but the local Triton acted quickly and lifted Silvester back up before the water was able to take him. After a few moments, River let go and swam up to the air pocket next to Silvester.

"Silvester, you need to hold your breath!" Silvester treaded frantically as his head bobbed up and down, trying not to slam his head against the ceiling and breathe within the pocket at the same time, he spoke and bubbles spouted out. The elven man changed the angle of his face and spat out water before retorting.

"Do you know how hard it is to just stop breathing?"

Ann woke up on Eren's back with a pounding hangover. They stood on a soaked podium, surrounded by a few more people. The situation had escalated too quickly to be prevented, and June, Silvester, and River were all unaccounted for. Ann stood on her feet with a light sway, and her eyes widened as she heard the sound of air escaping as water gushed into the dormitories. She swayed a little more, not knowing if the hangover was taking over her or if the sudden loss of life was making her knees weak.

The water under the podium wasn't too deep, but its currents were out of sync as water slammed into each other, violently splashing meters in the air. The survivors who found elevation either held on for dear life as the fierce winds slowly pushed them away from safety, or the heavy rain not only slicked the ground but also made it impossible to see anything 5 feet away.

All lanterns, lights, fires, and every source of illumination were drowned out by the insatiable hunger of water as it replaced those sources with its own lighting and blue mist. The immediate death toll was climbing rapidly. She felt like the world was ending; everything was happening so suddenly. Ann dropped to her knees and clutched her head as she witnessed not bodies, but distant sparks appearing and fading.

She felt a gentle hand grab her shoulder, and as she turned to view its owner, she saw something worse than the storm. Eren stood behind her, but instead of grief, anger, or any understandable emotion, his grip tightened on her shoulder, and an eerie grin widened on his face. She glanced at his fingers out of habit and closed her eyes in acceptance. His fingers were pale and elongated; in fact, they were no longer his fingers. But the Wendigo's.