Chương 81: Chapter 76.5: Landfallen

++Demigods were one thing I did not learn about more after my rebirth, not in terms of their behaviour and dispositions at least. This is because they really never change. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. I did the mathematics myself, in my head. I was good at that. Rederiving the formula to balance drag forces with gravity and starting speed, using that with my estimated distance off the ground. I must have landed at a good sixty miles per hour, maybe more.

Apparently that was over the limit of my personal shield's force-cancelling properties, but not by much. I had bounced against the insides of my own protection and now felt littered with bruises. But those calculations I did had been a test, and I knew that the brain matter I was currently piloting still functioned by how easily they had been done.

Once I had made sure that my own brain was not at risk of dribbling out through my eye sockets, which would be difficult to explain, I turned my focus to the rest of my companions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were all not only suitable for an open-casket funeral, but not even requiring burial. Not a single one of them had perished. That did not, however, mean that they were all in good condition. Agrian in particular worried me.

I made my way to him fast and saw that my brother was breathing, and not with any particular difficulty, but was absolutely littered with bruising and marks. He looked rather like he had spent our journey being dragged along in the sand beneath the cloudscraper. But he looked alive, and after I sent a swift jolt of illusion magic running through his body to activate a few nerves, he sat bolt upright with wide eyes and heaving breaths.

"The—necromancer, what?" The boy was drenched in sweat, only partly due to the heat, and looking around like he expected each and every single grain of sand around us to turn into Sakhent. I stood up and left him to his mental breakdown, having far more important things to focus on while it progressed. Korig and Varnel were both already awake, and Bagran did not slip down for some moments more. All of them were unhurt.

There was only a single member from among our original party now unaccounted for, and she did not take long to locate. The skies were practically tearing apart with the intensity of her combat. Clouds coiling around, displaced or dragged inwards with the vacuums made each and every time she swung her weapon. Golden blood drizzled down in volumes I could hardly believe a single body would store, and every other second it seemed a new necromantic limb was being torn apart.

The boys were all silent and daunted as they stared at the combat. I was just… nostalgic. It made me fondly think of the times I had torn apart a Demigod with my own magic, and made me eagerly wait for the times when I would do so again in the future. For now, this was a nice refresher. But it did not last long.

A few dozen blows, thrown in a handful of seconds, and Aryqatan had beaten back or shredded each of the shadowy tendrils, which I watched either dissolve or retreat into the jagged gashes in Estalia's skies from which they had slithered. This meant the Demigod was free from attack. And it meant that there was no longer anything holding her up in the air.

"We should clear this area," I told the group as I began walking. They took a few moments to realise what I was talking about, then scrambled away in rather a less dignified manner than I was moving. Thirty seconds later the Demigod impacted. Sand flew in all directions and I was hit by a sense of deja vu, then the debris cleared from the air to reveal where she lay in a crater. The woman was beyond wounded.

Indeed, if she had been a human—even a warrior—I had no doubt her life would have ended before she hit the ground. She was a tapestry of gashes and cuts, and I could see bone peeking out from beneath golden bloody foam in easily a dozen places. Her eyes seemed unfocused and shaky, and her breaths were grotesque and rough. But she was breathing, and I had fought enough Demigods to know that they were infuriatingly difficult to kill. Perhaps that was a bit rich, coming from a lich.

In any case, it was good for me at the moment. Aryqatan was still an ally for now.

"Oh Gods," Korig whimpered.

"Oh Gods, she's…she's dead?!"

"Obviously not, idiot," Bagran snapped.

"She's still breathing." That barely seemed to calm the panicking boy, whose fear was reaching a new height every other second. His breathing actually became less even than the half-dead body's. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Calm down," I ordered him. He did not.

"I am warning you, stop defying my will!" Again he did not, and I was sorely tempted to blast him off his feet with a spell. Instead I settled for a dash of illusion magic, smoothing over the worst of his fear and restoring some semblance of order to his thoughts.

"We need to move fast," I instructed the group.

"That those tendrils have gone now means that their controller, almost certainly Sakhent, cannot maintain them for long at a time. But we do not know how long it will take him to bring them back. Every second wasted is another chance he has to make another attempt on our lives. And the Demigod's." It was that final sentence that fully snapped Korig out of his fearful frenzy, duty sinking in where logic had not and prying his thoughts into some semblance of order.

"Right," he blinked back his own fright.

"Right, yes, you're right. How do we move?"

"Agrian?" I asked. My brother had overcome his dizziness by now, and responded to me with a grin. He knew what I was suggesting before I could even complete the sentence.

This second sled was quicker to construct than the last. Agrian once again left the technical work to me, but those brute-force craftings that he could contribute to were finished fast and well. We had to make the vehicle a shade bigger this time, to accommodate the Demigod, but a few choice improvements on our last design saw it taking off at an even greater speed.

Chief among these was that we now had three extra magicians to power it, and if none of our companions were quite as powerful as Agrian we still benefited a lot from spreading out the burden. I doubted a train would have made its way along Estalia's sands faster than we were at that moment. Aryqatan had not given us precise directions for the field army, which proved to be our first major obstacle. Fortunately it was one that we all had the tools to overcome quickly.

Geometry and trigonometry are basic requirements in the Winzorth Institute's education, just about any application of aether has enough in common with engineering that those without such knowledge are disadvantaged, and the fact that we had been travelling directly over the landmass in a straight line before simplified our problem immensely.

A few choice calculations to compensate for the fact that we were now moving at only one fifth our cloudscraper's speed, and we were soon shooting on as if the crash had never happened. But it had, of course. And I was greatly annoyed by the rest of my companions whining about it during the entirety of our trip.

"So many people," Korig whispered.

"Captain and co-captain, the crew. Had to be a dozen in that cloudscraper, right? Just transporting us. They were no threat to anyone. Now they're dead." Ah yes, I had not actually bothered to save any of them as we fell since the cloudscraper's destruction meant it would have been a lot of effort for very little returns. I might have tried anyway, if I had known how annoying Korig would be about it.

"Things happen," Varnel shrugged.

"Can't be a bleeding heart all the time right?" I happened to agree with his way of thinking, but Korig responded to it with a glare. Bagran just rolled his eyes. I could imagine what he thought about several magicless commoners dying, and was, if anything, surprised not to see him just state it outright.

Longer-distance travel with our new sled revealed a handful of complications that our last trip had not, namely that our creation's lasting power was limited not by how long the aether took to naturally break down, but rather that this aether still experienced wear and tear. At least when it spent eighteen consecutive hours being dragged against sand at around four times the sprinting speed of a very fast man.

Twice we had to stop and waste precious minutes repairing the hull of our vessel, once we had to remake the thing from scratch. This resulted in a superior piece of craftsmanship after the fact, however, and all in all we did not make such bad time. It was also not fully wasted time, not even for me. I had a new project that I began to work on as we rode, a continuation of the studies I had begun in my laboratory back at the Winzorth Institute.

It kept me occupied while I rested between sessions spent powering our new vehicle, and fortunately was not yet at the stage where I needed large-scale resources and prepared testing grounds to make progress on it. The curiosity it attracted from Agrian was easily dismissed, while the curiosity it attracted from the others was non-existent. Even Bagran did not seem to care what I was doing, aside from choosing, for some reason, to tell me that I was cute when I concentrated. I rather hoped he died soon.

Day turned to night, and night back into day. The fear was mounting among my companions as our travel continued and all of them became more certain that Sakhent's next attack was drawing near. I was less sure. What would I have done in the necromancer's position? Thrown everything I had at striking down Aryqatan and the rest of us before we could flee, so as to conceal his return. He had failed at that once, and the fact he had taken this long told me he simply could not strike at us again.

Not for a while at least. I was proven right when we finally caught sight of the field army on our horizons. From this distance, the marching men more closely resembled a tide of ants scrambling over the landscape. I heard breaths catch in throats as my companions saw them and felt it all sink in, though for me it was old news. Some of my past armies had outnumbered this one more than a thousand to one, though the magic I saw swirling around it was certainly significant. That would be the Demigod, I imagined.

Even from this distance his power was like a bonfire in my vision.

"Is it…too late to head for shore?" Agrian asked quietly.

"We could make a boat using the same techniques here, right? Make for Garamon proper." Nobody argued. I saw yearning looks of agreement from the others, in fact. The magic waiting ahead of us was more than Aryqatan's by far, and endlessly beyond her in aggression and savagery. It was like war itself had taken on a consciousness and we were hearing its thoughts. But we had no choice.

"We cannot make it across an ocean without supplies, and we will not get them anywhere but the army," I pointed out, which settled things in one stroke. Our sled rattled and shivered as we made for the army. With our current speed, we would reach it in only a few minutes.