Chapter 15-400: Shadows at Sea (1/2)
Ch. 400 is here! Another three months of daily updates have passed, and you’re still sticking with me! I honestly didn't think the story would generate so many chapters, especially given the scale of The Far Future, but there's still a couple months and more to go... (yes, that means I have finished it, and am starting on the next one!)
If you’re a Reader on Royal Road, I hope you’ll pass me a 5-star Rating or Review. If you’re truly impressed, I’m hoping you can pass me some Patreon support so I can keep up with the stories! Even a one-off is great, and shows your appreciation for what I'm doing, so I thank you in support for any donations!
There’s more to come, and stories not yet told waiting for the screen!
The second E-book for the original stories is in the editing phase, which will finish off the First Day. Then we begin on the First Week...
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I was a hundred miles off Wake Island for this meeting, sitting on the ocean out in the middle of nowhere.
I wasn’t quite alone, although they probably didn’t know I was extremely aware of them. Watersight turned the waters below me into open sky, and Devilsight removed any illumination impediments. I could see right through the waters, all the way to the depths thousands of feet below, like it was all open sky.
There was a lot of stuff swimming around about me that wasn’t animal life, looking up at me warily as the time came, suspecting a trap or something worse.
But there was just Legion, Sleipner, and I. No ships, no planes, no bloody anything around at all. Which was also very disconcerting to them, and should have been. It meant I didn’t need any support to do what I was doing.
One just didn’t meet the Dragon King (self-styled, not an actual dragon) of the South Pacific just out of the blue, and he didn’t come out of his palace in the deeps for no reason.
Thus, I’d sent an emissary, recruiting Prince Tithkianlan of the Triton Kingdom of the Mediterranean for the job. He was happy to help after Legion asked him, as Legion made just about anyone weak in the fins, and the tritons were no exceptions.
Of course, I was Legion’s Lady and Liege, and the tritons were quite aware of who I was and the things I’d been doing. Asking them to serve as diplomats and ambassadors for me to the various aquatic races was a point of honor and pride for them, and when I informed them of why, they agreed without hesitation.
This was not something we’d had to do for the Atlantic. The tritons had excellent rapport with the various independent and scattered tribes of merfolk the length of the Atlantic. They had been able to take my findings of settlements therein and cross off the places that should not be hit, and emphasize those that Must Be Blown Apart.
There was no triton presence in the Pacific, so they had no intelligence here... or in the Indian Ocean, for that matter. So, that meant contacting one of the native kingdoms here and learning what we needed to know.
Basically, who not to blow up!
Given how involved I was with the whole dispersion process of the bombs, and how Blessed and Marked were scattered in and around the whole thing, both participating and not, nobody was going to play any games with me. Using this information to get rid of ALL the aquatic races had certainly been proposed by more than one power, and my quiet reply was that it was a death sentence for all those involved... and the one thing we did not want at this time was even fewer allies in the deeps.
The Dragon King of the South Pacific was the strongest of the non-Evil monarchs of the deep. His people were plentiful and warlike, totally capable and willing to contend with the sahaug, Deep Ones, kopra eel-men, xichatl rays, the krakens, and others. The whales spoke respectfully of them, there’d been peaceful encounters with Waterbound and Druids of the Blue, and they didn’t raid the land.
That said, there were a lot of fishing boats that went missing if they didn’t heed the warnings of severed nets and stay out of merfolk territory. That could upset a lot of people, but the merfolk just didn’t care. In their eyes, it was no different from a roc flying over a ranch and deciding to make off with your cattle.
Where they had been before the Shroud came down and forced them back into the mortal realm wasn’t something I knew about, but a few miles away and hundreds of meters down, there was a realm lit up by phosphorescent shells, magic, and glowing coral, carved from the sea and the growing things there, populated by tens of thousands of merfolk spread across a massive area.
Naturally such a population required a lot of food, and they would guard it zealously. Even with magic helping, they required a lot of area to farm their food supply, and given how much they could mass, that only made the problem worse.
Naturally they were an innately magical people, like all the aquatic races, as there was no way a humanoid could exist like that underwater, or even be able to breathe properly.
No member of an official land government had managed to meet with the Dragon King, the response tepid given their interactions with individuals who were not tied to the Waters.
That didn’t mean they didn’t have sources and contacts, nor that they were unaware of the conflicts raging about them, especially in Southeast Asia. The Cultivators were beings that made their blood go cold, and they’d expended much quiet effort stymieing Cultivators of either stripe who took to the sea. The ocean, after all, was just full of endless amounts of resources and things and beings to kill, right?
The merfolk had been happy to amend that to ‘be killed by’, also, and certainly didn’t deal with them on the sly, like the other races.
For that alone, they had my respect.
The call of the horn rose around us, the very waters vibrating with its power. The ocean around us went still and calm as glass as the sea responded to the authority behind that call.
I could see the blob of figures ‘flying’ through the sea in our direction, more riding on a current than swimming, and inclined my head.
With a sirine’s control of water backed by fifteen Wrath, the water below us was politely shorn free of the control of the horn, and Sleipner sank down as a dome descended into the sea, dropping us below the waves.