Chapter 90: Ark

Toren Daen

Darrin was the first to break out of our collective reverie. He turned back to us, gesturing to the shoreline below. "We gotta get down there soon," he said.

I shook myself out of my surprise. The Empire State Building was intimidating, but was it truly beyond anything I'd seen here before? The ground below, however, drew more immediate attention.

"There are no corpses about," I said quietly. Sure enough, only the dark gray of asphalt welcomed my eyes. Instead of a zombie-infested city, I felt I was looking down upon a ghost town.

There was a palpable unease traveling through the group. We'd grown used to watching out for hordes of undead down below. This zone seemed to take pleasure in planting expectations like a watching farmer, tending them and nurturing our perception. And when we thought we understood our place, our entire crop was ripped from the ground and tossed to the side.

"We've planned for the potentiality of a horde waiting for us," Darrin said. "But we couldn't account for everything. This seems to work in our favor, doesn't it?"

The striker's words seemed to resonate with the group, instilling them with a measure of courage.

"So," Jared said from the side, "How are we going to get down?"

Darrin exchanged a look with me. "Have you ever heard of elevators?" he asked the group, a wide smile on his face.

In short order, our group managed to find a set of elevators, primed and ready to take us to the ground floor.

There was no elevator music on the way down. I had hated the music the last time it had scraped against my eardrums. But now the silence felt hollow; devoid of any sound or emotion whatsoever. I found myself tapping my foot against the metal floor, the claustrophobic mishmash of bodies ramping up my anxiety.

When the doors finally opened, I was among the first to shove myself out. The other mages were suitably intrigued by the elevator, just as Darrin had been, but I needed to occupy my mind. I scanned the bottom floor, which revealed a wide-open lobby space. The ceiling was easily thirty feet above us, giving the lobby a sense of grand scale. Pristine marble floors and statuesque reception desks revealed this to be some sort of grand hotel if I hadn't been able to tell from the rooms above already.

And the fact that the words 'Marriott' were plastered everywhere. That was kind of a dead giveaway.

"Alright," Darrin said, stepping out in front and scanning the lobby. "We need to get to the edge of the water, then Jared, Jameson, and Hraedel can start forming our raft."

A few people made nervous noises. Dima looked like she wanted to ask a question, but she visibly centered herself. There was something undecipherable in her eyes as she looked at the leader of the unblooded party.

The group slowly moved toward the exit, eyes on every surface. I hobbled along in the center of the group, suppressing my limp the best I could as we made our way to the automatic doors.

"We were ready for a huge fight, too," Alandra said with a bit of a chuckle. The sentry was hanging very close to Jared, who in turn kept wary eyes forward. "It's a good thing we aren't getting swarmed. I don't think we could've held off those undead hordes."

Alandra's words seemed to buoy the spirits of the group. Everyone was tense at the unexpected ease of our passing. And ascenders learned to never expect the Relictombs to hand them an easy escape.

"Don't let your guard down so easily," Hraedel said with a grunt as he stepped out under the dreary sky. "This zone has been nothing but hell. It's foolish to assume we'll be given any sort of reprieve. This is a trap of some sort."

The mood quickly dampened, dipping even lower than it was before.

How am I able to read these people's emotions so well? I wondered absently. It wasn't just gaining a sense of their body language, emotions and such. It was as if I could taste their thoughts in the air. The pervading sense of doom tingled against my senses.

"The undead can still swarm us, true," I spoke up, feeling the depression in the air as a physical force. Our meager band was unraveling at the seams before our escape even started. "But we've planned for this, yeah? Just keep your eyes on the prize. Only a little more to go."

My words seemed to reach some of the men and women around me, but not nearly enough. We moved in covert silence after that, shuffling out onto the waterfront. The sand crunched under my boots, the moisture inside a strange contrast to the last time I'd trekked through the sand. The desert zone had been dry and extremely hot, yet here it was slightly cool with the scent of freshwater in the air.

I looked up at the Empire State Building, standing tall in the center of the lake. The testament of steel was a menacing final goal. Alandra's little sentry spell did point toward that island colossus, yet said nothing of which floor we'd need to reach to actually exit. Would we have to scour all one hundred and two floors?

My attention was drawn from the scene as Hraedel stepped forward. A wand was clutched tightly in his hands, and I felt the mana react as he began to focus on his spellforms. Jared stepped forward text, gently brushing Alandra's hand from his shoulder. Jameson, the quiet shield who had always solemnly stood by Hraedel, was last to stand in position.

As one, the three mages raised their weapons: a wand, a large shield, and a simple staff. Together, the mana fluctuated at their call. Slowly, ice began to spread out from the still water, creating slight ripples in the mirror-like surface.

I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. I turned about, expecting now to be the time when the shoe dropped. We were exposed on the beach of the lake, forced to wait for these mages to complete their spells. There was no better time for us to be attacked.

Jana shifted nearby, the only other shield on standby. Sevren rested his hand on his dagger, feeling the same sense of wariness. Darrin watched the slowly growing ice floe with a stony expression, as if glaring at it would make it grow faster.

Yet the seconds ticked by without interruption. Small waves coursed out from the center of the block of vaguely oval-shaped frozen water as it displaced the lake, casting strange distorted reflections of all the discomforted mages by the edge.

I licked my lips, my hand feathering across Oath's hilt. Something had to happen now. Yet I had to be missing something. The undead wouldn't simply let us escape, would they?

As the ice raft slowly extended its bulk deeper into the water, Jared's touch on the construct slowly began to form. Thick metal sheets slowly slipped into place along the sides, reinforcing the edges from any potential assault. The metal spread like water flowing over the side of a bowl, slowly encompassing every side.

"Something is wrong about this," Sevren whispered at my side. It was too quiet for anybody else to hear but me. I suspected he knew that. "The Relictombs won't just let us go. We're missing something. Something crucial. "

"We can't account for every flaw in a plan," I said quietly, parroting something Karsien had once said. Granted, the advice felt a little stale, considering what had gone wrong in our assault on the Joans' distillery. "We'll take it as it comes. React as we need to."

It was the only advice I had to give. Very rarely had my designs ever gone well in this new world. First, my plans to slowly grow in strength were disrupted by the Joans. Then the Rat had stolen me into his crew. After that, my assault on the distillery had gone horribly awry.

I'd been living on the seat of my pants for the past few months already. This wasn't much different. Part of me wondered if there was some sort of life lesson I should take from this. I could imagine Hofal drawing on his pipe, a contemplative look on his face.

"Buildings are never made exactly in the architect's image," he'd say. "There are always places where planning breaks down. A mudslide at the construction site might ruin a foundation. Rain on an unfortunate day can wipe away all the paintwork of a week prior."

Thinking of the burly shield back in Fiachra settled my resolve, allowing me to believe my own words. Sevren, however, clearly wasn't nearly as soothed by my reassurances.

I knew from discussions that the ice I looked at wasn't just frozen water. It was extremely dense: in fact, its mass was nearly too concentrated to float on water. Hraedel and Jameson had worked to keep the central, core part of our little buoy far more concentrated than the outer layers. Such precise spellwork strained the limits of their runes, costing them precious mana and time.

Yet the completed product looked like something out of the Arctic. If it weren't for the metal rimming, I would have considered it a natural sheet of ice in my previous world.

"Alright," Hraedel said, heaving for breath slightly. His hands twitched on his wand, clearly wrung from exhaustion. "That should do it. We need to leave. Now."

The group shuffled onto the makeshift raft, the movement making it shift slightly. It was at least thirty feet from tip to tip: more than large enough for our group. The moment we were all on the ice, however, was when the first sign of change came.

I heard it before I saw anything. The sound of shattering stones erupted from all around us, malformed hands thrusting their way through solid concrete in an uncountable number. I cursed, using my telekinesis to pull Oath and Promise from their sheaths. Simultaneously, I prepared a dozen fireballs around me, each primed to strike anything that got too close.

As undead dragged themselves from their street prisons, the mages around me were quick to react. Our three large-area shields–Jana, Jared, and Jameson– threw up their defensive barriers, and prepared for an onslaught. Meanwhile, Hraedel, still noticeably weary from working on the raft spell, conjured half a dozen icy paddles.

"Take these!" he said with a note of anxiety, gesturing wildly with the conjured items, "And row for all you're worth!"

Yet before any of the others could grab a paddle, I intervened, latching onto each of the oars with my telekinetic emblem. Outlined in a shimmer of white, the icy oars positioned themselves on either side of our raft.

"I'll handle this!" I said with gritted teeth, fighting against the strain of keeping so many spells active, "You all take down those undead! And plant your feet!"

Without another minute to spare, I directed each of the paddles to dip into the water, a perfectly synchronized movement beginning to propel us forward. The men and women around me lurched, unprepared for the sudden spur of movement.

Then the first salvo came. The undead at the shoreline had finally arrayed themselves against us, a loose collection of corpses lobbing meager spells our way. Gyrating spheres of earth, bullets of wind, and tendrils of electricity all created a mishmashed storm of death as it sought to cover the lake in a tapestry of mana.

Shields rose above our heads, made of interlocking layers of ice, metal, and earth. A shadow was cast over our little raft as our defenses blocked out the sky. Our three shields worked in tense tandem, angling their barrier so most of the projectiles would skitter off.

Nothing happened for a heartbeat. Then two. Then three. And on the fourth erratic thundering in my chest, the shields took a deluge of attacks. From the sides, I watched as most of the spells plunked against the water harmlessly, except for spreading their own ripples. The lowest ranks of the undead had horrid aim with their spells.

Yet some still struck against our protections. I heard it as dull, echoing thumps and cacophonous zaps. Our shields grit their teeth as the barrage persisted, but they gave no quarter. Our little raft moved toward the central island without further contest, skimming the new waves boldly.

The undead's spells were weaker than the average mage's attack, yet in such overwhelming numbers they packed a hell of a punch.

Once the barrage ended, there was still, taught silence. The mages aboard the little ice raft collectively held their breaths as the attacks ceased.

"That can't be everything," a voice said shakily. "There's no way they would let up–"

I sensed the attack coming before anybody else, the familiar nature of the spell alerting my senses. My eyes widened in alarm, but it was approaching too fast. I opened my mouth. "Incomi–"

A huge storm of fire crashed into the water near our position. Tremors rocked our little vessel, the sprayback sending the entire ice floe crashing across the water like a skipped stone. Water sprayed everywhere as bodies tumbled, mages losing their balance at the explosion.

Wounded as my leg was, I was unable to maintain solid footing on the metal floor beneath me. I was thrown into the air as the floe churned, the disruption breaking my hold on the oars pushing us forward. I slammed back into the ice with a grunt, but grabbed Promise which hovered nearby. I stabbed it into the 'hull,' grasping onto the dark leather hilt for purchase.

Not everyone around me was so lucky. Alandra was nearly flung from the raft, but Jared's meaty hand grabbed her own, hauling her from the water. Sevren had anchored himself similarly to me, holding onto the thin metallic wire that connected to his dagger. Most of the other mages were in tangles of limbs around us, yelling and crying for reprieve.

But I could see with perfect clarity as Darrin was launched into the water like a spring, trying desperately to reorient in the air.

He hit the water with a crash, throwing another spray of water onto our vessel.

He'll be fine, I thought absently. He's one of the strongest mages I know. But we need to get back up. Reorganize our defense. If we don't, those attacks will come again, and–

My eyes trailed upward, looking back at the shoreline. I felt my words catch in my throat, the sight there something that would stay with me to the end of my days.

Thousands of undead lined the beach. Uncountable violet eyes gazed eerily toward our little raft, the sole attention of an entire army's worth of monsters focused solely on our little group. At their head, near where we had launched ourselves from the sand, were five large, monstrous amalgamations of flesh. Five commander undead stood at the head of an army, glaring out at our little raft.

No, I realized, feeling the weight of the Intent in the air. It was a choking, viscous force. In such absurd numbers, the collective weight of their will suffused the ambient mana like a piercing blanket. They aren't focused on our group.

Their eyes, each and every one of them, were focused on me alone.

Fuck, fuck fuck, I thought, my heart thundering in my chest. Darrin might make his way back to the surface eventually, but we had no time to wait. With my unique advantages, I had no doubt I'd be faster underwater. 

I wrenched Promise free from the raft, pushing myself to my feet. I ignored the sharp pain in my leg, focusing on the necessity of getting the group back together. Oath and Promise sheathed themselves on my waist as I prepared. I spared the mages around us a glance. Only Sevren was stable enough to meet my eyes.

I took a deep breath, then I slammed a mindfire stamp into the ground, propelling myself into the water in front of me.

I was shocked by how utterly cold the liquid was. It suffused my entire being, drenching me with a feeling that seemed to reach even my mana core. Yet I only remained surprised by the temperature for a moment.

I could sense Darrin's mana signature far deeper in the lake.

Too deep.

I reached outward with my telekinesis, pulling on the water in front of me. Simultaneously, I pushed with full force against the water behind me.

I shot forward like a rocket, blurring through the water almost as fast as I did in the air. I felt a brief moment of surprise at the effectiveness of this improvised swimming method, the water streaming off my glowing telekinetic shroud in a haze. I slowly felt myself heat up as I seared through the water.

I followed Darrin's errant mana signature, but something about it was wrong. It was sinking fast. Far, far too fast. If the leader of the Unblooded Party were safe, he'd be swimming up, not venturing deeper into the depths.

I didn't have time to contemplate the implications. As fast as Darrin was sinking, I was faster. I felt the burning in my lungs as I went deeper and deeper, darkness slowly overtaking my vision as the light above became distorted by hundreds of feet of water.

I neared Darrin's mana signature. It was getting weaker by the second, tapering off as his oxygen presumably ran out. The deepness around me was all-encompassing, and I had difficulty seeing a yard in front of my face. My eyes scanned the water, the mana reinforcing them trying to search for the slightest contrast in the blackness. I was so close, and the light emitted by my telekinetic shroud gave me the barest of visibility.

But I heard it before I saw it. Sound travels strangely in water, muting and dampening noise in a familiar way. Yet sound still travels through liquid, carrying its messages to waiting ears.

And the slitheriing displacement of something massive brushed against my eardrums. I saw a faint shadow in the distance, pressing against my light for the briefest of moments before retreating. The barest reflection of dead scale revealed itself before my eyes before retreating.

No light reached me at this depth. It was pure and utter blackness; the kind you saw in the darkest of nights. I'd often heard the sea compared to the sky, yet there were no glimmering stars to light my way or a moon to see by.

But I could see something. The waves of a being moving jostled my body to the side, causing me to stall in the water. The pressure at this depth was notably high, yet my telekinetic shroud held against even this.

But as the source of the movement revealed itself, I felt my telekinetic shroud was woefully inadequate. Eyes as large as my torso peered at me from the depths, slitted pupils blinking with intelligence. Their purple glow illuminated a massive, serpentine skull, rife with decaying flesh and sloughing scales. Around me, I could see the aftereffects of the colossal snake's body coiling against the water.

And at the forefront of it all was Darrin Ordin, his leg trapped in the jaws of this mighty beast.