Chapter 13-361: The Triangle Marks the Spot (1/2)

Legion was having that pleasant explorer-scout discovery thing going on, a world even bigger than Hyperborea unfolding about them.

My explorations were more of the merciless find and kill them all mindset, even if it all was VERY interesting, and The Map was getting filled out to a simply unbelievable amount of detail as I swept down the remaining coastline of North America and headed into the Caribbean.

The mineral wealth alone that I’d charted would keep Heavenbound Hall in money for ages. There were also many, many shipwrecks that I’d pinpointed for investigation, including at least two treasure galleons of one sort or another, which still had the gleaming heavy presence of valuable metals within.

Wavelocks in Florida were heading out quickly to secure those, although I did indicate that there was at least one giant octopus in the area.

I headed right out into the Caribbean, and the area that even in this world was called the Bermuda Triangle.

The Caribbean had a mixed bag of sahaug, locathah, merfolk, crabfolk, and various random magical beasts in it. Our main helpers there were a strong dolphin presence, but the stronger whales didn’t usually move about much out here.

It was shallow for a major sea, but also warm, so it didn’t have as much free-floating sea life as it did reefs.

Underwater skirmishes between the various races went on often, but enough sharks were present that the bodies basically never made it to shore. None of the sapient races had a good opinion of mankind, which was hardly surprising, and fought their wars against one another down in the bloody deeps.

A lot of ships had gone down in this area, even in the modern era, and the biggest area of mystery was the Bermuda Triangle.

There was a list of at least thirty ships and several flights of planes that had been lost in this area, including military vessels, and nobody knew how or why. The ships should have been able to weather a storm, and there hadn’t been a pure hurricane going at the time. Conventional wisdom was that they’d been boarded during the teeth of a storm and then scuttled somehow, but there’d been no debris or remains from such things found along coastlines anywhere, pretty much an impossibility... something should have floated free!

That meant the area was either a free-fire zone where a lot of dangerous things lived, or it was a major power base for some major influence.

I, naturally enough, was going to use my mapping runs to find out what was going on here, sweeping along the edges of the islands and laying down locations of sunken things, places where aquatic races dwelled, and the ruins and wrecks of many ships lost here over the centuries.

I did find some of all of the above, but nothing major, and notably, no plane wrecks as I ran up the Florida Keys past Puerto Rico, turned north to Bermuda, and discovered only one sahaug settlement in the deeper waters on the way. I turned back to Florida, filling in the triangle, and there was literally nothing in the northern part of the triangle... which raised my interest higher, because that included magical beasts.

Magical beasts would naturally fill in the gaps between the aquatic races, and there were none living down there...

I closed the triangle, turned, and aimed for the heart of the place, very interested now. The aquatic races seemed to be avoiding something down there...

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I didn’t find any ships, planes, or wrecks of any kind whatsoever there. The place was very suspiciously bare, with next to no animal life even down on the sea floor.

It was like they knew there was some really nasty stuff in this area, surprise, surprise.

There was dimensional magic, and a bunch of it. There was also a raging magical Formation down below, which was looking for a shot in the arm from elemental forces to power it up.

Interested in what would happen, I promptly Summoned up a storm in this area to pummel it with lightning. There was no shipping or planes around, and given the pounding I was going to be putting on the area, they weren’t going to be flying into this area, especially after Heavenbound Hall warned everyone a storm was going up out here.

The Haze thickened into rumbling darkness, hate lightning flared with unwanted holiness, and the winds startled spinning and howling about a circle here that could generate an entire hurricane if I let it persist.

I didn’t think that was going to be a problem, as the water began to spin, too.

The sudden flaring of the Stillflight Field wasn’t a problem, as we were standing on the surface of the sea, Still Water keeping a small area around us. Still, any magical creatures would have lost flight, and when the maelstrom started below, and generating a whirlwind above it, I was watching very closely.

Dimensional magic was reaching out along the cyclonic winds, bending all paths of travel into the dimensional funnel being opened up. Any ships or planes in this area were going into this thing, whether they liked it or not.

The big question was, could they keep ME in wherever it was? I frowned, and the Old Steed burst into motion towards the vortex.

Oh, and in the meantime, the coordinates of this place and what it was doing were going out to interested parties, putting the whole damn area into a no-go zone unless the pilot was a certified chucklehead. The winds generated by this vortex were indeed reaching out for thirty miles in all directions, making this the Bermuda Vortex, not a triangle... but it was close enough for our purposes.

I wasn’t particularly worried for one reason: any dimensional world had to be open under the Shroud, it couldn’t remain closed. The Felldeep caverns, the Hollow World, Hyperborea, the Mountains of Madness... all these ancient realms formed by extremely powerful beings had nevertheless been forced out into the open by the Shroud.