Chapter 44 That! Was! Awesome!

  “A spark on the scales of planets,” Jane began a tenth level chant. Her eyes blazed with power as she broke the Convention of Mortality. She was no longer mortal after all, so what would some dumb old law like that mean to her anyway.

  Clark pulled out a diamond that looked like an apple wedge. If one was to cut an apple down from top to bottom into quarters, that was the shape of the strange diamond construct in his hands. It was thoroughly infused with platinum enchantments and he looked frantically at Isaac and Shamesh.

  “a jolt on the scales of planes, a zap to cross a continent,” Jane continued.

  “Once she finishes, I am going to activate this.” Clark hurriedly explained at the same time.

  “a bolt to assert who’s dominant.” Jane finished and lightning coursed over her body before it gathered between her outstretched hands.

  “We’ll need another wall-” Clark got out before he was cut off.

  A concentrated orb of pure electricity hovered in place as Lenna’s lenses turned black and Isaac’s vision was filled with spots. A shockwave hit everyone present like running into a wall. All of them, save for Shamesh, nearly lost their hearing but instead were only plagued by incessant ringing. The blinding flash and deafening boom were just the openers for the real spell effect. A lightning bolt four full inches wide obliterated the air between Jane and the tornado. Once it hit the tornado, the lightning spiderwebbed out in all directions, moving through and totally infusing the natural disaster with more lightning than the entire storm had produced in one instant.

  The tornado turned slightly translucent as all of the water inside of it was instantly turned into an explosive gas and an inert one. Tons of dead and destroyed plant matter still hung in the tornado, along with a few dozen of the undead monstrosities. Right after the flash was done from the lightning, the glob of oils got close enough to the tornado and was pulled apart and inwards like someone sucking through a straw. Jane sagged slightly and then took a deep breath and readied herself for another spell.

  Clark sat the strange diamond on the ground between them and the tornado sent mana into it. A Reality Wall formed in front of them but Jane continued as if it wasn’t even there.

  This time she clasped her hands together like she was praying but her eyes never left the tornado. The tornado started to behave erratically as Jane’s Control Weather muscled the air to build whatever chemical monstrosity she was cooking up. “Burn oh hate of heavens,” She began her second tenth level spell. Shamesh’s Reality Wall appeared a few feet in front of the magic item’s one. “seethe oh bastard star, ignite oh orb of transgressions, explode oh arbiter of char!” Jane finished and then visibly deflated from over exertion.

  A spark of brilliant sapphire blue formed in the dead center of the tornado just before it finally blew apart on its own from being too unstable. Then, in an instant, the entire world flashed white and Shamesh’s Reality Wall shattered.

  Isaac had never seen a tornado explode before. In fact, he was positive, somehow, that even in his past life he had never seen something so unreasonable. It was truly a catastrophe worthy of its demigoddess. The impact of the shockwave was almost as fast as the light, at least from the onlookers’ perspectives. His mind had just put together what Jane was doing while she was doing it, but actually being only two to three miles away from it was an entirely different thing. It was one thing to instinctively understand what Jane was cooking up, it was an entirely different thing to get hit by the shockwave through two Reality Walls.

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  The second Reality Wall fractured but somehow managed to hold firm after Shamesh’s wall broke the initial impact of the shockwave. Even so, Isaac, Clark, Jane, and Shamesh were all thrown from their feet. Lenna had braced herself for it enough that she only staggered but she still ended up dropping to a knee almost immediately after it had hit them. None of them knew which way was up and which was sideways. Their ears were all ringing and their worlds were spinning. The sudden yank forwards, from all the air trying to fill in the space that had just exploded, was finally enough to force Lenna’s hands onto the ground.

  Isaac burned death flames through his, Lenna’s, and even Shamesh’s entire bodies just in case they took some kind of actual damage through two Reality Walls. As his eyes cleared, his hearing returned, and he was finally able to keep his balance, Isaac realized that the sky had lightened up. Where Jane’s storm once was, there was now just a ring of dense clouds and falling water. Below, where the tornado had once touched down, there was nothing but a crater the size of a town, not even a small town, just the size of a normal town, blown to absolute bits. Bits that were raining down in small chunks of dirt and rocks for miles in all directions. Some were even raining down on top of Catastrophe’s audience.

  There was one section of the crater that was, in fact, not a crater at all. It looked like a little black dot so Isaac took out his spyglass and eyed the strange phenomena. A thirty foot wide section of ground was mildly churned but otherwise untouched. Over top of it were over a dozen powdered skeletons from the massive onyx dais that they had been carrying. The dais, and the lich sitting proudly in the throne at its center, were still completely intact, though a chunk of one of the onyx spires behind the throne had broken off and was nowhere to be seen. Their target, it seemed, had survived having a tornado blown up in their face.

  “What in the name of all that is, was, and will be.” Isaac swore as he squinted through the looking glass to try and make out any more details about their target.

  Jane had just dumped a healing potion over her head. The potion was one of the more expensive kinds, probably costing close to ten thousand gold, but she apparently absolutely did not want to have to drink another potion. She was also laughing. Clark looked like he wanted to die as he pulled his own healing potion out of his Bottomless Bag and drank it.

  “That! Was! Awesome!” Jane exclaimed and threw her arms into the air as soon as the healing potion had been completely dumped out.

  “My head is killing me.” Clark groaned.

  “What would have happened if Shamesh hadn’t put up his shield?” Lenna questioned the demigoddess.

  “Clark and ‘blacky’ would’ve been fine, they have items to keep from dying. The rest of us…” Jane interrupted herself with giggling. “You might’ve survived.” She offered Lenna.

  Isaac’s eye twitched. She literally just blew up the air and nearly killed them with the shockwave, yet somehow, not only was she happy about it, but the target was also still in one piece. “It’s Darkness, not ‘blacky’,” He corrected her. “Or Isaac, or even ‘him over there’ is fine, but calling me ‘blacky’ makes it sound like I am some child’s poorly named black dog.” Isaac then sighed deeply. He was impressed, awestruck really, but the shockwave had also thrown him out of the stupor the blast had put him in. They needed to capitalize on their target’s state after being hit with Catastrophe’s aero-chemistry experiment done catastrophically right.

  “Fine.” Jane replied. “You with the face.” She called him. “Do you see any of the undead crawling around anywhere?”

  Isaac looked at her like she was insane for a moment before his gaze panned out over the area. His eyes caught something. It was just a torso, head, and one arm but it was moving. “Shit. Yes, I see one of them managed to survive. If there is one then there might be others.” Isaac grumbled.

  “Probably.” Jane confirmed. “I’m spent. It’s all up to you now.” She then promptly turned to her side and vomited up a mixture of tea, bread, and lots of mana potions.

  Isaac sighed again and rubbed his temples. “Well, she did what they said she would.” Isaac muttered and got completely to his feet. He looked out over the crater that was nearly three miles across and just shook his head. He wondered if Safeharbor felt the tremor from the explosion or not. Altesia definitely did. It wouldn’t surprise him if Walter felt it too. That boom was beyond all reason.

  —

  Commander Adrian Blake was in charge of Saint Worthenson Castle at the base of the Altian Mountain Range. To his rear was the capital and the mountain range of which it was built. To his front were the steppes and plains where humans slaughtered each other en masse for farmland and greed. He was looking out over the steppes in question when the storm on the horizon suddenly turned into a gray halo. He looked on in confusion as the entire direction darkened. Then he felt the most intense ground tremor he had ever experienced. A stone fell free from somewhere on the wall and a window broke just from the sudden bounce. It felt like the entire castle had just hopped over a jump rope. He had barely managed to get his feet back under himself when the darkened easterly direction hit him with enough force that he was sent toppling backwards off of the walls and onto the stable’s roof. The fifteen foot high fall combined with his heavy armor meant he went straight through the wooden planked roof and crashed on top of an already bucking horse. He would survive the encounter, but it would be something that he would never forget. In fact, until the day he died, if he ever heard that Catastrophe was heading out, he would find an open space, sit down, and pray for Halya’s protection, just in case Catastrophe decided to blow up the sky again.