“You sent your granddaughter on ahead?” I asked the former Queen politely.
“She is coming along nicely, but she’s not yet good enough to risk this passage,” Elysa Strathelar nodded once.
Fan Borelean was a noble beauty, taking the best of Aluvian and Sho heritages. She had straight, luxurious hair as golden as her grandmother’s had once been, sky blue eyes, and stood taller than most Sho men. Her facial features were mostly Sho, perhaps a little paler, her complexion the envy of all her Sho attendants.
She’d also taken up the path of an archer, not a spellcaster, and as a result her grandmother had been deeply involved with her almost all of her life, especially with the death of her mother Hoshino during the Fall.
Fan had expected to take up her grandmother’s Bow, but instead was now building up a Windbow of her own, the white and blues a reflection of her own eyes, simply called Azure.
Being sent on ahead meant she’d used the Big Jump for the Linejump right to the Overlook Fortress, doubtless with eight guards and attendants filling out her personal Fellowship.
Like her father and grandmother, she had jumped into the Matrix Levels with both feet, dragging along her attendants on the same kind of crazy Leveling as them, especially to Name her Windbow and build its power.
However, she was already young and didn’t need the rejuvenation of Matrix Levels, so going Deep was an extremely important and viable option for her personal power, especially once she committed to archery. At just twenty-two years of age, she was already well past 150 on the Isparian side, despite the sparse Leveling opportunities, and advancing nicely on the Matrix side to supplement things.
We only knew one another in passing, although Kris impressed the heck out of her as a fellow princess, and she was always pestering the Royal Scouts and the Mick to come along on raids and missions. King Borelean just threw up his hands when told of such things, as he knew as well as any that without Levels, the Powered here simply weren’t going to respect you that much. She had to get those Levels, take the risks, prove herself, and go above and beyond what others were in order to be Queen someday.
If she couldn’t, there were certainly enough people around quite willing to take the throne from her, so she would have to be good about it.
“Any activity from the shadows?” I asked Elysa softly.
She inclined her head ever-so-slightly. “There are watching eyes, but they keep a careful distance. My granddaughter, however, has become aware of them, which means that they either dare to move closer, or have been told to.” She glanced at me warily. “Yourself, Magos?”
“There’s at least three agents of foreign powers watching me right now,” I said cheerfully. She raised her eyebrows in interest. “Whoops, two.”
I turned my head as the Mick turned the corner from the fishing village that had renamed itself Jump Village proudly, my first landfall in the Vesayans starting to turn into a larger and busier place with the traffic moving through it from Dereth. From here traffic flowed across to Kryst, hopped to Fishtail, and thence to Freehold in a straight line of travelers and benefits.
The Mick had someone slung over his shoulder, calling out to one of the royal guards there and depositing his load into their grim and ready hands after a quick word from him.
“Two. One. Oh, looks like the others are withdrawing. Maybe they knew one another, or something,” I said lightly.
She caught just the slightest sign of motion in the tree line behind the village. “And the Aun are following them,” she judged, sharp approval in her eyes.
“And the Aun are following them,” I beamed. “With orders to clean them up or capture them, as they like.”
The Mick ambled up, radiating a grim power and resolve that got people moving out of his way before they even saw who was coming up on them, falling respectfully silent as he strode past. He met my eyes, inclined his head just slightly with a faint sign, and met the eyes of the Queen, who he gave a more formal nod to without stopping.
His Roaches were already up and on the lead Wagon, no place else they were going to be. If that meant they got to fight where Princess Fan wasn’t allowed, well, they weren’t royalty risking their necks, and they weren’t leaving Lord Mick.
He waved greetings to some of the paramounts he knew personally, all of whom he recognized, and now who definitely recognized him.
Then he hopped down from the pier onto the surface of the water and strode up next to Kris, also standing out there and not falling in, ignoring the envious eyes looking out after him for being able to do that with his own power.
“I see the excitement today will be high, Yer Highness-ness,” he drawled, crossing his arms and eyeing the waters of the Channel, actually looking at the Detect in the Markspace. “Ye think they know we got true self-made royalty along?” he asked with a grin.
“Oh, you’d be surprised what they can deduce just from the way people defer to one another,” Kris responded affably, stretching out slowly and leisurely, something that always attracted attention. She didn’t have a chest, but the rest was just impossible not to admire, and she knew it well. “Worried the old woman can’t take care of herself?” she asked archly.
His grin only got cheekier. “She don’t look so old no more, Highness.”
“That’s true,” Kris agreed. “Some people are just born to wear white hair.”
He snuck a glance at the Queen Mother. “Truth an’ no lie, that.”
“Wasn’t talking about her, Lord Mick,” she winked at him, and in spite of all his seniority, he blushed fiercely, before valiantly recovering with a self-assured stroking of the white at his temples and beard.
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“The Black Aluvians in white were always the most dangerous, ‘tis true,” he agreed with a haughty sniff.
“Because you rarely lived long enough to go gray, let alone white?” was her immediate rejoinder.
“Aye, there’s the right of it!” he agreed firmly, seeing her turn around and face the Shoreward a few dozen yards away. His hand twitched up towards Bunita, but he did not pull it or his Shield Clan out. “How ye be planning this?”
“I’m being lazy today.” Kris negligently waved her hand at the top of the Wagon. “Thin the chaff out, would you, Magos?” she asked lazily.
---
Hitting Nine had given me access to a Mastery, which I’d spent on Argent Savant Mastery/5, Master of Force.
It cost the same as a Feat, more even. It was an at-will, Spell-Like Ability with a range of twenty paces, which allowed an Argent Savant to shatter Force Structures at will, not even a Caster Check allowed unless it was being actively fed/enforced. Doing so also blew the thing apart for some nice shredding Force damage to those in the vicinity.
I couldn’t blow the entire Shoreward apart, of course, but I could easily shatter open an opening big enough for the Wagon… or somewhat smaller.
But that wasn’t what I was doing.
The Shards I’d flicked up hadn’t gone down, because the other thing becoming a Nine had given me was those V Valences, which were just enough to let me use Perpetual Spell.
I had to use base Shards, because my Soul Magic wasn’t up to snuff at only +4 on Metamagical Soul. I had very little wriggle room for Metas, so I couldn’t stack the best and most powerful of them.
But, you know, I could ladle in all the +I and +II Metas I’d spent hundreds of hours making Efficient and Practical and whatnot that I cared to, and I had two floating Valences from my Traits I could still apply.
That meant 2 +III Metas, or one +IV Meta. Oh, and Residual Metamagic rendering one Meta free if I repeated the same spell on successive rounds.
Which could totally be Perpetual Spell itself, letting me ladle in +IV effects on the second Casting.
As for the first Casting, Chain/Echo did the job.
These weren’t chaff, so I wasn’t using individual Shards, I was Spellwarping them down to Shardrays for the amassed single-target punch. My targets had a minimum of 200 Health, and the bigger ones grew quickly to 1000 and more, with the colossal bastards into the tens of thousands and higher out here.
Hydrous and Aqueous Spell were both +I’s, included for free, and meant I wouldn’t have any problems with underwater targets.
Polychromatic Lights condensed down and shot out through the Shoreward. We could toss spells out, they couldn’t toss them in… and they hadn’t seemed to have learned the lesson that I, in particular, had massive range with my spells, to the tune of 3200 feet and more, a good thousand long paces.
The Shardrays of many Colors and patterns shot out into the waters, the targets on my Detect Aquatics all shining for attention, and they began to reap.
Due to the costs, the Holy Metas were applied to the main spell, not the Kickers, so 18d8’s, +50%, Consecrated to 18 x 12 and +6 per die against some very non-Good targets, along with some fixed add-ons from Intellect, Masteries, Crown, and what-not, including at least +50 +8d6 in Kicker damage, strobed out from me.
The only reason it wasn’t a lot brighter was that the Radiant portion of it was all aimed at the remoras and their nautiloid bosses out there, and I had painted them all.
The nautilods knew I was looking at them, but they weren’t powerful enough to punish me for doing so. If their boss, the house-sized bastard, showed up, I’d have to pull it in, but they could feel me staring at them in cold hostility, and now I opened up on them.
The water about the beams didn’t even boil or bubble, despite all the strange energies passing by and through. Two Shardrays struck Aquatics, and they began to die.
400+ damage was a lot of damage to eat, and these things’ main protection against spells was lots of Health and Health Qi, not fancy things like Resistance, Protection, Ablation, and Armor and stuff, which let mere humans survive such stuff.
They didn’t have any of that protection.
The distance of the Chains was only sixty feet per jump, so it meant I could only take out clusters of them.
The second volley went out, Residual Metamagic kicked in, and Fastcast came in as payment, but it was single-target only, playing clean-up or picking off single targets with its own Split Rays.
The third volley of spells I could Pair and Chain respectively, however, plus the Echoes came back to haunt them.
Eight Shardrays hurtled forth in volley three, and Aquatics winked out all over my Detect area. In Volley Four, it was ten, as Echoed Paired Shards came back to bedevil them.
What it looked like to those looking on was a volley of two spells became six spells, became a volley of eight spells, which then became a volley of ten spells, all stabbing out into the waves out there where they could see nothing, chiming and shining and lights going off in the rapidly-deepening waters… and things were leaping up out of the waves in a panic.