Chapter 40 Lady Catastrophe.

  Isaac, Lenna, and Klein appeared on a small hillside overlooking no less than twenty more miles of rolling hills. Isaac braced himself for a sudden meeting with the soft grassy ground but nothing happened. He looked over his shoulder to stare questioningly at Klein.

  “I merely brought the black mana within a dozen feet of myself along with us.” Klein explained why Isaac wasn’t suffering from whiplash of the magical variety.

  “You can do that?” Isaac questioned.

  Klein nodded in the affirmative. “Gil might have gotten flashed but a little light never hurt him.” He replied.

  “Flashed?” Isaac questioned but before Klein could reply he realized what must’ve happened. “Ah.” Isaac said to keep Klein from having to unnecessarily explain something. Upon the sudden lack of dark mana in the area, the entire space within a dozen feet of where Klein had been was suddenly entirely illuminated. Gilgamesh was most likely seeing spots.

  Klein hummed in acknowledgement of Isaac’s understanding and moved on to the topic at hand. “I’m leaving you here as I am positive that this is outside of the-” Klein’s voice was cut off by the ground rumbling under their feet. “That. It is outside of that.” He grumbled. “Jane is currently not following the plan and has already started engaging the enemy.” He gestured behind them to where a large stone castle was built at the base of a mountain range that looked like it averaged a seventy degree incline. “That is the castle that is to be your fallback location. It is preferred that the castle and its inhabitants be removed from the conflict, but as long as none of them die from an ensuing battle, no one will think anything less of you.”

  “Is it just me, or is it getting cloudy over there?” Lenna asked as she stared out into the distance. It had been a clear sky but she was right, there were clouds starting to form in the general direction that the Demigoddess of Catastrophes was supposedly located.

  “No, no.” Klein sighed. “You are correct. Now, I would take you the rest of the way myself, but I am only operating within the bounds of the mortal of whom I was replacing. That means that I am to stay well away from any and all combat zones. This was the designated drop location, so here you are.” Klein informed them that they were not going to be getting a free ride to wherever Catastrophe was playing around with world rocking attacks. “Have fun, good luck, and don’t die.” Klein then snapped his fingers and vanished without even stirring the local mana.

  Isaac let out a long groan and Lenna sighed deeper than she ever had before. “The power difference is just obscene.” Isaac grumbled.

  “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” Lenna confided in her husband. “If he wasn’t bad enough, the Guild Leader gave me the chills.”

  “Tell me about it.” Isaac sighed. “I have never felt so utterly oppressed simply by being near someone than when I was standing in front of the Guild Leader. What made it worse was that it was easy to tell that he was holding back as much as he could.”

  “Agreed.” Lenna breathed. “Why did we agree to this again?”

  “Lua asked them to bring us along.” Isaac said flatly. “I don’t think I was ready to meet with people like that. Maybe once I hit level twenty, then I would at least be at the top of my game, but standing in front of them felt like standing in the middle of a blizzard without a hat or mask. I just felt exposed.”

  Lenna nodded. “My armor wouldn’t have done any-” Lenna’s voice was cut off by a shockwave hitting them. It didn’t take a huge mental leap to realize that it was the air shockwave from whatever had shaken the ground under their feet two minutes prior. “I don’t think Lady Catastrophe is going to be much better.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Only one way to find out.” Isaac grumbled and summoned Shamesh. “We need to meet up with Catastrophe as soon as possible and I need to read this report while we go. Shamesh?”

  “As you have said, so shall it be done.” Shamesh replied and casted Flight as well as two Levitates.

  While they flew towards the combat zone, Isaac and Lenna filled in Shamesh on everything that had happened between his summonings. Shamesh also took that time to inform Isaac and Lenna what he had seen. “The Guild Leader is very much a dragon.” He said with total certainty. “I could see a faint outline, more of an echo really, of his soul in the area around him. He is so powerful that our Soul Sight constructed him as simply a solid white human shaped object. The echo of his soul, or maybe it was just how much could not fit in such a small body, was still being expressed around him however so I was still able to verify that information.”

  “There was also a desk sized for a five story tall dragon behind his little desk.” Isaac informed Lenna and Shamesh.

  “Little desk?” Lenna questioned as her brain skipped over the first bit of insanity that Isaac had said before it circled back around to it. “Wait, that was another desk? I thought it was a walkway or an office at the top of the library.”

  “Oh, it might be that too, but it is definitely an ancient dragon sized desk.” Isaac informed her. The entire time they had been talking and flying, Isaac had been using his shadows to keep from losing any papers and was reading the dossier on their target. There weren’t very many facts but plenty of speculations and theories. “A shapeshifting druid checked out the lich from the air and nearly got shot down from over a thousand feet away. Apparently there is an army of skeletons carrying a giant onyx dais with a throne on it. That is where the lich resides and was somewhere in the back one third of the mass of undead. They have already moved straight through a smaller kingdom on the steppes. Estimated losses are around forty thousand. By the time the Adventurers Guild had been informed, it had already been too late to save the town and city that had been in the undead's path.” Isaac explained to Lenna and Shamesh what he was reading.

  “That’s awful.” Lenna commented. “Shouldn’t there be scouts about? And why couldn’t Space and the Guild Leader intercept them immediately, before the city and town even properly fell?”

  “Apparently the only Guild Master in the kingdom had been indisposed and got the message back to Central about the incoming wave while he fought off the endless tide. By the time anyone could respond, it was already too late for the city, the town had been entirely leveled without anyone even knowing about it.” Isaac informed her. “It really seems like this army just popped up out of nowhere.”

  “And since it was too late to save the city and town, there wasn’t anyone else in immediate danger and they could wait for us and Lady Catastrophe.” Lenna surmised.

  “Lua informed them that there was a calamity in that direction during the first full moon but they weren’t sure exactly where it was or its scope. Not truly anyway. The region had been on high alert but apparently that wasn’t enough.” Isaac said with a frown. “It doesn’t help that the city was under attack around an hour before midnight.”

  “What has the lich been doing for the last sixteen days then?” Lenna wondered.

  “Fifteen of that was spent animating the dead. They just started moving again yesterday.” Isaac explained. “The timing is almost too perfect.”

  “Some things are just coincidences.” Lenna told him.

  Isaac sighed. “Yeah. There is even a note in here to expect higher tier variants of undead because the first new moon of the year is the best time for necromancers.” He conceded and looked up from the papers that were still flapping in the wind in his hand. They had covered a good distance and the sky had turned graphite gray up ahead. There hadn’t been any more cataclysmic strikes impacting Primatia but it was clear that Catastrophe was just building up to something even worse. The scent of ozone carried on the wind as the air itself seemed to be charged with power even from a mile away.

  “Higher tier, like the one you fought in Alten?” Lenna wondered.

  “Probably.” Isaac replied. “Probably a few of them, if the theories in this packet are correct. Apparently there is a very high probability that the lich is the master of the necromancer who made that undead.”

  “What’s next? Are we going to have to fight the demigod of undeath or something?” Lenna wondered. Fighting up the chain of command was as annoying as it was exhausting.

  “No.” Isaac said with a shake of his head. His hair was whipping about and Shamesh had been forced to bring them lower and lower to the ground as he brought them towards the two in the distance. “Someone else will have to fight them if that’s the case. Maybe those two monsters we just had a chat with.”

  Lenna huffed a laugh. “Better them than us.”

  Out in the distance, Isaac, Shamesh, and Lenna could see two people standing on top of a hill. One of them had their hands held high and the other looked like they were trying not to blow away in the wind. Speaking of the wind, it had picked up enough that Isaac was forced to burn power just to keep a solid wall of shadows fully encompassing the dossier to keep the pages from being torn apart in the wind as he finished the final page. It was just a map with the arching path the undead had taken drawn out in red ink. There was zero doubt in anyone's mind, who saw the map, that the lich was heading straight for Altesia.

  As they continued the last of their approach, Isaac couldn’t help but wonder if the lich had some means of dealing with Gilgamesh. The Guild Leader was an ancient dragon after all but if the lich was making his way directly towards the mythical creature’s lair, then it must have some way of dealing with him.

  The building storm ripped Isaac’s focus out of his internal contemplations and back onto the world around them. Thunder rolled and lightning danced across the heavens in rainbow colors as verdant green rain began to fall. All of it was a good mile ahead of the two standing on the hill but just looking at it was enough to make all of Isaac and Lenna’s hairs stand on end. Whatever cataclysm Catastrophe was about to unleash upon the army of the dead was going to be one that neither of the duo would ever forget.

  Amaranth Serentia V'Nova Wexler