Chapter 97: A Whale in the Storm

Jeanne didn’t wait to hear the rest. She was already scrambling out through the broken window, hauling herself up onto the inn’s sloped roof, fingers digging into the edge of wet, slick tile as she pulled her own weight up beside the Phantom soldiers already staring north.

The sight waiting for them there was nothing any of them had been prepared to imagine.

Thousands of Gargoyles, wings beating in a dense, churning mass against the storm, bearing down fast under the hammering rain and the thin, cold light of the moon. Even the villagers below, catching sight of it, folded in on themselves, sinking to the ground in open terror.

A question nagged at Jeanne even through the horror of it, a pattern she couldn’t quite shake loose. Every Dark Beast incursion she’d faced, this one included, kept circling back to the same single target.

Korven. Given where the Calamity Forest actually sat, Dark Beasts should have been spilling out in every direction at once, north, west, south, hitting a dozen cities across the empire at random. Instead, every single wave of them seemed to be converging on one place alone.

She didn’t get the chance to chase the thought any further. Elder Petrovel and Lucian weren’t looking toward Korven at all. Their eyes had locked onto something far closer, hundreds of Gargoyles peeling off from the main swarm and angling directly toward their own position.

Petrovel’s read on it came fast and grim: the Dark Beasts had already spotted them, the village and the humans sheltering in it both, and meant to erase the whole place in a single, overwhelming pass.

Lucian, still catching his breath from the last fight, forced himself upright anyway, sword back in hand, eyes narrowing against the rain as he watched the swarm bank toward them.

CLANG! CLANG!

The alarm bell tore through the storm again, ringing out across the Phantom ranks, the unmistakable call that the enemy was nearly on top of them.

Sweat broke across Jeanne’s skin despite the cold. One Gargoyle in open air had already been hard enough. Hundreds, descending on them all at once, was something else entirely.

The unit had no Wizard, no Magic Archer, nothing built to answer a threat coming from the sky. With what she had, holding the line against this would be brutal.

She organized what she could, ordering every soldier up onto the rooftops, into a tight defensive formation. Soldiers who normally fought sword-first found themselves hauling out shields they rarely bothered carrying at all, because every single life here mattered, and the mission they’d actually set out on hadn’t even truly begun yet.

The whole company surged into position, voices rising in their own hoarse battle cry, blades striking shields in a steady, bracing rhythm.

Then footsteps, light and quick, climbed up beside Jeanne and Lucian both.

"What exactly are you doing up here, Miss Eleonor? You’d be safer inside. I’d rather your country never mistake this for something we did to you, when it was the Dark Beasts all along."

Jeanne’s voice left no room for argument, ordering Eleonor and her companions back down at once.

Eleonor only smiled, raising one hand with a gentle, unbothered wave, her eyes drifting half closed.

"You worry too sweetly, Lady Jeanne. But there’s nothing here for you to fret over. I only came up to help you finish this swarm off. One spell should do it."

She said it with a confidence so complete it bordered on absurd, as though facing down hundreds of Dark Beasts alone was the most reasonable plan in the world.

Jeanne’s mouth opened, then closed again, caught somewhere between disbelief and the sinking suspicion she was being made fun of.

Even a fighter who’d clawed their way to Tier 7 or 8 Core would struggle to touch a swarm this size with a single strike. Whatever Eleonor meant by that, it couldn’t possibly be meant seriously.

Eleonor paid her doubt no mind at all.

Through the driving rain, she stepped forward to the highest ridge of the roofline, and her hands began to move, slow and deliberate, tracing shapes in the air that meant nothing to anyone watching her.

That wasn’t all. A Grimoire rose beside her, bound in white shot through with threads of deep blue, hovering steady at her side as her fingers closed loosely around its spine.

A moment later, whatever words she’d been shaping with her lips came to their end, and her eyes snapped open.

Behind those strange, triangular pupils, something shifted, the pattern unfolding into what looked, impossibly, like an entire ocean contained within her gaze.

Mana surged out of her all at once, a flood of it, Light-aligned at its core, yet carrying a strange warmth, like wading into sun-heated water rather than the cold sting of rain.

The air around her bent, light gathering into a vast, shimmering expanse that tore itself open into something that could only be called a doorway, a rift leading somewhere far beyond this storm.

"O ruler of the bottomless sea! Rise from the ocean of dark clouds! Let the sky split beneath the weight of your coming, and hear my call! Manifest, and swallow the darkness whole! Omen: CAELUM!"

The instant the last word left her, something vast began pulling itself free of that tear in the light, rising skyward toward the oncoming swarm.

Every soldier watching understood, in the same breath, exactly what they were looking at. An Omen, the kind only a White Awakening bearer could ever call forth.

What emerged was a whale, colossal, drifting through open air as easily as water, its massive form a deep, luminous white shading into blue along the length of both fins. One enormous eye blinked, slow and deliberate, and turned toward the swarm bearing down on them.

Eleonor’s command rang out clear over the storm, and Caelum answered it.

The Gargoyles had already sensed it too, wheeling as one to meet this new threat head-on, diving straight for the whale’s massive, drifting bulk.

Caelum didn’t flinch. Its mouth split open, vast enough to swallow a house whole, and released a storm of glowing bubbles into the dark, each one drifting lazily until it brushed against a Gargoyle’s wing or hide, and detonated on contact.

Light met Dark Mana and the Dark Mana simply couldn’t hold against it, every creature caught in the blast igniting and burning away in an instant, the bubbles’ pure Light element tearing through them like fire through dry paper.

Caelum surged forward, weaving through the remaining scraps of light still drifting around it, encircling what little remained of the swarm and unmaking it in a single, sweeping pass.

The fight, if it could even be called that, ended almost before it began. A swarm that had terrified half the village moments earlier lay reduced to nothing in what felt, to more than one soldier watching, like the space of a few heartbeats.

With no Dark Beast left anywhere nearby, the great whale simply dissolved, fading back into the light it had come from as quickly as it had arrived.

But off to the side, Eleonor’s knees buckled, her whole body swaying hard enough that Arnold and the soldier beside her lunged to catch her before she hit the roof tiles.

"Ohh, think I overdid it a little there. Arnold, five bottles of potion, if you would."

Arnold had the pouch at his hip open before she’d finished the sentence, pulling out five bottles identical to the one Lucian had been handed earlier.

"Ten more, Arnold."

"Fifteen now, actually."

"Make it twenty."

Jeanne, Lucian, and Elder Petrovel, still half stunned from the sheer scale of what they’d just watched, found their awe curdling into something closer to bewilderment, all three of them now quietly wondering exactly what kind of constitution let someone put away two dozen potions in the span of a few minutes.

For someone built as slight as she looked, Eleonor clearly had an appetite built on an entirely different scale underneath it all.

She still hadn’t stopped asking Arnold for more.

Jeanne, at a genuine loss for what else to say, simply offered her thanks. Not one of her soldiers had taken so much as a scratch tonight, and that alone was worth more gratitude than she knew how to put into words.

"Oh, don’t thank me for that." Eleonor waved it off with an easy grin, uncapping Arnold’s last bottle and draining it in one go.

"I’m a future Saintess, after all. Helping people out is sort of the whole job description, even before I’ve officially taken the title. Might as well start early, heh."

"Though, Lady Jeanne, shouldn’t you all be making your way to Korven right about now? If there were thousands of this many Gargoyles out here, I’d bet good coin there’s something far worse already loose inside that city."

Something in the way she said it told Jeanne she’d arrived at the same uneasy suspicion on her own.

"If you’re heading that way, would you let us come along?"

The offer actually suited Jeanne’s situation better than she wanted to admit.

Korven sat close enough to Virelle’s own border region, Eleonor’s original destination, that the detour cost her nothing.

And keeping Eleonor traveling with them meant one less unpredictable foreign presence left wandering loose inside the empire’s own borders.

She brought it to Elder Petrovel, who agreed at once, calling it a sound plan, especially with Commander Ulrich’s forces waiting to link up with them soon enough to make the rest of the journey considerably safer.

Petrovel gave the order, and the Phantom unit began readying their horses for the road ahead.