Chapter 1478: The Belt

The displacements deep in the black water hadn’t just been a patrol.

They had been a warning.

It was Day 40 of the Northern Expedition. The Sixth Legion vanguard had sailed off the edge of the map, leaving the shallow coastal currents behind for the deep ocean. They had sailed straight into a wall of howling black cloud that ran from one end of the horizon to the other and climbed until the eye gave up following it.

And for eleven days, the sun had not risen.

The flagship pitched forward and dropped forty feet into the trough of a swell, then slammed into the next wave with a boom that rattled Rian’s teeth. Freezing seawater poured over the main deck in a knee-deep flood that never drained, tearing at the ironwood grating and dragging at anything that wasn’t bolted down.

Rian stood on the main deck, lashed to the base of the repaired mainmast by a thick coil of salt-stiffened hemp rope.

His hands stayed buried in the pockets of his soaked uniform coat. He didn’t shiver. He only shifted his feet each time the warship rolled, letting his Paragon-level balance swallow every lurch before it reached his knees.

He kept his Shingan locked down. He didn’t need the Third Eye to see the destruction, and pushing his aura out into a storm this choked with essence would only invite the attention of whatever was swimming miles beneath the hull.

The Eleventh Squad was lashed to the grating a few paces away.

Han was curled into a miserable ball with his arms wrapped around his cracked ribs and his face the colour of wet ash. Baletta stood with her feet planted wide and her jaw locked, squinting into the ice-flecked wind. Doron’s shadow-soul fog was useless against the gale. It tore away into the storm the instant it left his skin, and so the Master simply shivered in his soaked leathers like everyone else.

They were border veterans. They were used to fighting in deep snow and bleeding in the mud. But the open northern sea was a different kind of monster.

It was a monster you couldn’t stab.

Above them, on the exposed quarterdeck, Captain Ysolde Vaertia gripped the iron rail.

The Ascendant commander of the Winterward wore no furs. Her dark blue coat was plastered to her armor, and the silver lion on her collar had gone dull under the salt spray. She was barking orders into the wind in a magically amplified voice, trying to keep the scattered vanguard from colliding in the whiteout.

Beside the helm, Bosun "Mother" Grael was fighting a war of her own.

She was soaked to the bone, her scarred two-fingered hand clamped on the heavy iron wheel alongside three quartermasters. Between the four of them, they leaned against the whole weight of the ocean, and Grael put every ounce of her Master-rank strength into the spokes to keep the flagship from turning and snapping its repaired ironwood mast in the gale.

"Hold the port line!" Grael roared, spitting a wad of seawater and tobacco over her shoulder. "If she turns broadside to these swells, we all drown!"

Rian watched the Empire fight the sea.

In truth, it was an impressive display of logistics and stubborn endurance. The Sixth Legion did not trust its life to timber and sailcloth alone. It had its Tide-Sages.

Across the vanguard, Imperial battle-mages in soaked blue robes stood at the prow of every ship. They worked in rotating shifts, burning their essence down to the dregs to keep the vessels afloat, and the wards they wove spread ahead of each bow in shimmering sheets of blue light that broke the swells before they reached the hull.

Rian turned his head and looked through the driving rain at the escort ship running parallel to the flagship.

A Master-rank Tide-Sage named Vang was holding its prow.

Vang looked like a corpse. His blue robes hung in shreds, and his cheeks had sunk in to the bone. He stood with both hands thrust forward, and the light in his palms stuttered and flared like a lamp running out of oil.

Through his suppressed senses, Rian read the man’s core. It was empty. Vang was no longer drawing on the essence in the air. He was burning his own life to keep the ward alive.

The ocean did not care.

A rogue wave rose out of the dark like a jagged black hill and swallowed the horizon.

It stood ninety feet tall if it stood an inch. It blotted out what little grey light the storm had left, and it came straight for Vang’s ship as a sheer wall of freezing water.

On the quarterdeck, Ysolde shouted something, but the wind tore the words away.

Vang didn’t step back. He didn’t run. He locked his knees, tilted his head back, and poured the last drop of his soul into the ward. The blue shield flared into a blinding dome of solid light just as the mountain of water slammed into the ship.

The impact sounded like a cathedral collapsing.

The escort ship shrieked. Its timbers groaned and its iron bolts whined as the wave shoved it backward and buried it whole.

But the ward held.

The water broke around the blue dome and poured over the deck in a torrent, but the hull did not shatter. For ten seconds, the ship sat inside a bubble of light beneath the sea.

Then the wave passed. The escort ship burst back to the surface, bobbing violently, its deck scoured bare and its hull somehow intact.

At the prow, Vang was still standing.

His hands were still thrust forward. His eyes were wide open. But the blue light was gone.

Rian didn’t need to read the man’s core again to know what had happened. The Sage’s heart had given out the moment the wave hit. He had died on his feet, his devotion to the Empire’s flag holding his dead limbs exactly where he had planted them, and his fading Will had held the ship together for those last ten seconds.

Grael climbed down from the helm, grabbing the lifeline and pulling herself hand over hand to the main deck. She stopped beside the mast with her boots sloshing in the freezing flood and followed Rian’s gaze to the dead man standing on the neighboring ship.

She spat into the churning water.

"The sea doesn’t hate you," Grael shouted over the gale, her harsh voice perfectly flat. "It just doesn’t know you’re there."

Rian looked at her, his dark eyes unreadable.

’That’s profound. Depressing... but profound.’

He turned back to the escort ship.

Vang was dead, and the rest of the rotation had already been burned dry. There was no one left on that deck with enough essence to raise another ward.

And the sea was already raising another hill.

A second rogue wave, larger than the first, was forming off the escort ship’s port bow. It crested in a heavy silence, and its shadow climbed until it blotted out the sky.

Rian stood lashed to the mast, measuring the distance, the weight of the water, and the exact output he would need.

He could save them.

If he dropped the sellsword act, slipped his bindings, and fired one full-output burst of Lightning Rod, he could vaporize the crest of the wave. If he used Eclipse Step, he could displace the escort ship out of the impact zone. He had the reserves. He had the power.

But Paragon-level output in front of Captain Ysolde Vaertia and the entire Sixth Legion vanguard would shatter his cover on the spot. It would expose the lie of Rian the Mercenary. It would compromise the Archduke of Ryugan, the Tempest Spire, and the entire board he had spent months building.

The wave began to fall.

Thousands of tons of black water came down toward the fragile wooden deck. Rian didn’t take his hands out of his pockets. He didn’t tense his legs.

’I can’t save everyone’s toys.’

The wave struck.

There was no blue ward to catch it this time. The escort ship didn’t even have time to splinter. The mass of the ocean drove it straight down, crushing the mainmast, shattering the hull, and carrying a hundred Imperial soldiers into the black abyss in a single stroke.

The ship was simply gone.

Where a heavy Imperial warship had been sailing a moment before, there was only a churning patch of white froth, and the next swell rolled over it and smoothed it away.

Rian stared at the empty water. The cold spray stung his face. A few feet away, Baletta’s knuckles had gone white around her rope, and Han lay utterly still in his ball.

He did absolutely nothing.

The Eleventh Squad was safe. The flagship was holding. The rest of the Empire’s problems belonged to the Emperor.

As the broken remains of the escort ship sank into the dark, the surface of the water heaved against the swell.

Just beyond the wreckage, a pale spine broke through the waves. It was jagged, crusted in thick rime, and as long as three warships laid end to end. It glided through the heaving water without the least effort, as unbothered by the hurricane as a fish is by the rain.

It wasn’t fighting the storm.

The Leviathans were using it. They were swimming along the edges of the chaos, watching the Imperial ships break themselves against the weather, and waiting for the stragglers to sink.

They were herding them.

Rian watched the pale spine slip back beneath the black water and vanish into the depths.

’Well. At least the local wildlife is eating well.’