Xiang Yu blinked through the salty water dripping down her face as the shouting around her escalated to a wordless humdrum.
"Captain, it's the rescue boat!" Her first mate shouted into her ear. She felt a rush of relief as the approaching ship came closer to their heavily damaged boat. There were giant dents that looked more like craters and canyons on the boat she had once been so proud of, probably well beyond the range of fixable.
"Thank god," she said hoarsely. "I need to speak to their captain; we need to send word back immediately."
----------------------------------------
Learning there was a Kraken on the loose the same day Mohan made a melodramatic declaration of revenge wasn't really Joyce's idea of a decent Wednesday, but on the other hand it finally got the goddamn song out of her head.
'What is love, baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more,' she had been making sure Spade shared in her pain by broadcasting the tune through their mental link until he manually shut it down.
"A fucking Kraken? Are you kidding me?" Spade sputtered into the phone.
Joyce shot up from where she had been lying on the floor. "A Kraken?! Like Pirates of the Caribbean?" she asked. Spade held up a hand to shush her as he finished the conversation with Kajio.
"Put your robe back on, we're going to the harbor," Spade said. He gave an angry sigh. "They're putting together a joint task force and we're on the list. Apparently it beat the shit out of a boat. The crew says it's the size of an island, and it's only an hour away."
"Crew's alright?" Joyce asked.
"Seems like it, you can speak to them when we get there. Apparently the captain said something it was huge."
"Damn. Holy shit, I actually jinxed it! Wait, how old is this thing? The Azure Dragon said something about the 'ancient one approaching' or something really Lord of the Rings-style like that," Joyce said.
Spade shook his head. "Is that the one where several different species beat a dictator to death with a ring and throw him into a volcano? What the hell, Joyce."
"Yeah, that's the one. I just meant literary style, not the actual plot."
"Anyways, back to the topic at hand...the Kraken was last recorded when the last spirit-sent appeared, it's been around for thousands of years so it could be that. Everyone thought it was gone already and here it is...you didn't summon it or anything right?" Spade glanced at her askew.
"Nope, but wouldn't be surprised if it were related. Anyways, if the Azure Dragon said it would help, does that mean we have to summon it or will it just appear?" Joyce pulled on the robe reluctantly, already feeling the humid heat that the sleeves would trap in.
"Lord Meng Zhang," Spade corrected absentmindedly. She stopped.
"What?"
Spade turned to look at her. "The Azure Dragon's name, Joyce. You have to refer to him as Lord Meng Zhang if you're going to invoke him. Or summon him."
"He? Also, the dragon has a name? Wait, dude, I don't actually know how to summon anything you know?" Joyce considered taking the robe back off.
"You also didn't know how to summon multi-colored lightning storms. Someone told you it'll work and it worked. Just go by instinct and go for it," Spade shrugged. "Make it dramatic if you will."
Joyce froze in place as her brain ran through approximately 3 MB of information she had on the Azure Dragon. In other words, a meme from Avatar.
"Damn, I better do some internet magic," she sighed. Spade shook his head and pretended not to hear.
"Let's get going already," he said resignedly, putting the metro card into his sleeve.
They walked down the street, Joyce holding onto Spade's sleeve with one hand while she attentively typed with the other, stopping Spade to ask what a word meant almost every second.
"Look, why don't you walk, I'll read," Spade suggested.
"Good idea," she gave him a thumbs up and handed him the phone. They moved on to researching the Kraken on the subway and had a stockpile of memes and fifteen different astrology charts by the time they'd gotten to the harbor.
"There's nothing useful," Spade complained, "Just do a sweep later and go for it." She shrugged.
"Honestly, I feel like we should get a motorcycle," she said.
"I'll get you one," Kajio called. They both stopped mid-step and turned towards him.
The man looked weary and frazzled and ridiculously handsome anyways. It was ridiculous in Joyce's opinion that some people could look good no matter what they did and she always looked like some kind of edible animal.
"Really?! Hi, by the way," Joyce waved at him. Kajio ran a tired hand over his face.
"I have a motorcycle I use for business trips, I'll bring it down to the harbor. All things considered, I'd rather be ridiculously overprepared than unprepared," Kajio said as if he hadn't just shoved the mental image of Kajio on a motorcycle at them.
"Thanks," Spade said. "We'll walk with you."
Kajio shook his head. "The Shaman Council and Hengshan actually have cars, so you guys are ten minutes late already. The Harbor Association's already shut down the whole harbor and sent out an emergency alert for all ships to get the hell out of the water. The rest is all up to you guys. Just get there and start shaman-ing, alright?" He turned to leave.
"Kajio, um, I might need you to live-stream something," Joyce called out. He turned back again, raising a perfect eyebrow.
"I have a full set of equipment ready," Kajio said drily. She gave him a thumbs up.
"Might need it to be waterproof. Between the Kraken and the Azure Dragon there's gonna be a shitload of water," Joyce said.
"It is waterproof and also what the hell?!" Kajio glowered at her as if she'd just broken his priceless set of porcelain inherited from his great-great-grandma. She gulped.
"Um, he'll help us if we restore his shrines eventually?" she managed.
"It's more plausible than having her take on the Kraken. The sea's already salty I don't think dumping salt on it would be enough, psychologically," Spade cut in. Joyce paused.
"Damn, I hadn't even thought of that yet."
"So salt would work?" Spade felt for the bag of salt in his sleeve.
"Not anymore it wouldn't, the placebo effect's done for now."
Kajio shook his head in disbelief. "Actually, I don't want to know, but that plan better only have one phase. I'll go get the bike, you go deal with the shamans. Go." He pointed at the dock. They hurriedly began marching over.
"He's like a CEO," Joyce said.
"Don't know what that means, but yeah," Spade grumbled back.
The dock was full of people, with at least forty people each in the robes of the Shaman Council and Hengshan Association. They looked like they were squaring up for a Hong Kong-style gang fight rather than collaborate with each other.
"Pania! Luco!" Joyce called out as soon as she spotted them. They whirled towards her. "Oh hey, Feng Xia and Li Peng are here too, hi guys." Spade nodded at all four of them with one singular nod.
"What took you so long?" Feng Xia snapped.
"Sorry, the subway only runs so fast, you know?" Joyce replied.
"You took the subway?" Feng Xia glared at her in a mixture of disbelief and outrage. Joyce gave her a hurt look.
"I don't have a car and the taxi would have gone through the busiest streets, it's the Law of Taxi Slowness When You Need to Get Somewhere," she said. Feng Xia looked about to smite her with whatever spirit was hovering three feet above the shaman's head.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Now that you're here, could we please get to the task at hand?" Pania cut in.
"We're down," Spade said, nudging for Joyce to move forward. They walked over to where their liaisons were, the crowd of shamans and harbor workers parting for them. "What's the objective?
"Banishment is the first choice, but if we can't then our goal will be getting the Kraken to unpopulated waters. We've prepared a legion of trained shamans, but we have two more legions on backup," Pania told them, nodding at the forty-or-so shamans behind them. Luco waved at them and Joyce waved back.
"Same here," Feng Xia added.
"The problem now is doing a sweep – water-spirits are all fleeing to the harbor area or going outwards, same with other types of spirits. It's difficult to find the exact location and the damn thing keeps moving," Pania grit out. Feng Xia frowned.
"Is it appropriate to refer to an Ancient Spirit like that?" Feng Xia asked in a tone that said it wasn't.
"Have we interviewed the crew yet?" Joyce cut in. These guys were more prepared for a fight than for handling a Kraken. Kind of like Congressmen who were more prepared to throw down than to actually deal with a national crisis.
Li Peng handed her a file. Joyce opened it and promptly handed it to Spade.
"Crew says they were hit from underneath, damaging the ship. They saw a giant tentacle they took for a snake, but then the whole thing surfaced. They escaped after getting smacked in the face with a tentacle, but the rescue crew had to leave the ship behind because the Kraken was close by and the ship couldn't move fast," Spade summarized. Joyce blinked.
"So it stayed close to the surface?" she asked.
"Only until the boats left, drones didn't pick up anything after that," Spade said, flipping through the rest of the report. He held out a map with a curved arrow on it.
"Look, this is the ship's trajectory, and the red dot is where they encountered the Kraken." He pointed at the dot.
"That's the gist of it," Feng Xia said. "So now our problem is doing a sweep to find it. We've brought over specialists in conducting general sweeps, but unfortunately, the energies are completely off the charts throughout the area."
"Do any of the European sailors know where the Kraken might've come from? I saw on the online forums that some British sailors talked about a giant octopus in the ocean around Portugal, but I can't read Portuguese so I couldn't confirm anything else," Joyce said.
"You mean to find the trajectory instead? That might take too long, we might need to evacuate the harbor before that," Luco warned her.
Joyce nodded and decided not to object. It didn't sound sane enough to say she wanted to feel the aura, as if she was some crystal-using anti-vaxxer soccer mom.
"I could search it up if it would make you feel better," Selva said, emerging from the crowd with Kajo and a motorcycle.
"Sounds great," Joyce gave him a thumbs up. The shamans around her shot the motorcycle a confused look but didn't comment.
"We could also try doing a preliminary sweep while the experts discuss the next steps," Spade offered.
"That would be best, I think," Li Peng said, nodding for some of the Shaman Council members to clear off the dock.
"Oh yeah, it showed up briefly around Portugal before disappearing, and it showed up about 100 kilometers off the shore of Indonesia, but because it didn't surface people just thought it was a weird octopus-shaped shadow," Selva offered.
"Bro, that was fast, kudos to you," Joyce said, genuinely impressed. She turned to Spade. "The vibe's gonna be more jumbled than earphones left in a pocket, should be pretty distinct."
"You should do the sweep," he replied resignedly, "I'll be on standby." Which was code for he would stab anyone who tried anything. Fair enough, given the eighty or so shamans they were surrounded by.
Joyce nodded and walked to the edge of the dock, a Hengshan shaman dancing around her to put some distance between them.
She sat down on the wooden planks and tried to dip her hands in. It was too far and she was straining like an idiot.
Joyce gave up and dipped her feet in instead, tossing her shoes behind her blindly. She eventually gave up even more and just dipped a single toe in when it became clear that she had really short legs.
She closed her eyes and pushed herself into the mass of energy in the ocean.
The ocean was nothing like the city – it had nothing but water, and water in such intensity that the spirits seemed to almost blind her with the huge glob of water spirits. She swept forward and reached outwards until the flicker of metal-spirits from the harbor were so far she could barely feel them.
The density of the water-spirits fell and continued to fall. Joyce frowned and tried to position herself. It was like being suspended in the ocean of the Spirit Realm again, surrounded by water-spirits on all sides, their faint blue glow moving in a wave-like pattern. The ocean was definitely different.
It wasn't a web, she realized, it was a whirlpool in slow-motion.
The water-spirits were flickering outwards from the center of the whirlpool, but there was a strong pulse of energy that was dragging her in.
'Guess I'll let you do the work for me then,' Joyce thought as she let it pull her closer.
She felt the Kraken before she saw it. It was entirely different than the surrounding energy, just as Selva's research suggested. And then she saw it, looking far smaller than she imagined compared to the vastness of the ocean.
'Oh, shit, still huge,' she realized grimly upon a closer look.
"I think I found it," she said. A lot of people began talking at once.
"Hold on," Pania said. There was the sound of clanking metal. Joyce didn't really think Pania would pull out an AK47 or a bazooka but she opened an eye to peek anyway. Pania was leaning close, very close, and Joyce gulped at being this close to someone who was built like Chris Hemsworth. The shifting movement of the Kraken pulled her attention away.
"It's moving," Joyce said distractedly, closing both her eyes again. Pania reached out with a clanking noise. Joyce opened both her eyes in alarm.
Pania lowered something that looked like a metal headset towards Joyce's head. Spade's sword was out of its sheath in a flash, his eyes glinting dangerously as he put the sword between the headset and the top three inches of Joyce's ponytail.
"What the hell are you doing?" he growled.
"It's an energy reading device, it'll get us the specific location, or does Joyce have a built-in coordinates tracker now?" Pania snapped back, glowering at the blade in annoyance.
"How about you ask first?" Spade snarled, taking another step forward. Luco hung back cautiously, fire spirits slipping from his sleeves into his hands. Joyce glanced around in alarm.
Feng Xia looked ready to jump in for a fight, and actually, so did eighty percent of the people in the vicinity. Joyce cursed mentally.
This looked a bit too much like when the more-colorful personalities among her relatives were about to throw down and enforce the stereotype of All Asians Know Kungfu to their neighbors.
"It won't clamp down with little stingers, right?" Joyce asked Pania. Pania gave her a confused glance.
"Why the hell would I put something like that on you?" Pania asked.
"All righty then, I'm ok with it. Spade?" Joyce turned towards him. Spade glared at Pania a little longer and sheathed his sword again.
"If you're down with it," Spade said, but he didn't step back.
"I'll put it on now," Pania said, and Joyce nodded against the headset, closing her eyes again. She felt around in confusion for a bit, suddenly finding herself outside the center of the whirlpool.
'Where the hell did it go?' Joyce twisted through the energies until she felt the familiar pull again. The Kraken had definitely moved and moved quite a bit. It was definitely closer to the distant flicker of metal-spirits at the harbor
A gasp sounded out from behind her. "What happened?" Joyce asked. The Kraken kept moving at a steady pace, and Joyce followed it intently.
"Keep on it," Spade said. "It's moving towards us, they've got coordinates now."
"Nice," Joyce said. She paused. "Not nice, but nice that we have coordinates at least?"
"They keep changing," Spade said drily.
The Kraken seemed to be moving faster now.
"It's approaching, get all the civilians out!" Feng Xia shouted. Kajio shouted something in Farsi, his voice moving away.
"How far off is it?" Joyce asked in alarm.
"Not too far, it'll get within half an hour," Spade said in a sad attempt to be reassuring. Guess it wouldn't be helpful to keep looking at this point.
Joyce opened her eyes and took off the headset, ignoring the protests from the shamans around her. She blinked at the layers of wards that had shot up above and beneath the water, flickering in a range of colors.
Just from what she could see, there were wind-spirits, water-spirits, and fire-spirits weaving together a few hundred feet away. There were several more layers of wards behind that as well, spaced out over what was almost a mile.
"Nice wards," she said. Spade chuckled wryly.
"Probably can't stop an Ancient Spirit, to be honest, not for long," he said. "Can't stop you for sure."
"Joyce, you're on banishing," Feng Xia called over. Joyce shot back a thumbs up, pulling out a bag of salt.
"You're not actually using that?" Kajio said as he approached.
"Done evacuating already? That was fast," Spade said. Kajio shook his head.
"Of course we have existing procedures for hasty evacuation. People around here are used to it, what do you think happens during a typhoon?" Kajio said. He nodded at the motorcycle.
"Still think that'll be useful?" he asked. Joyce nodded.
"Not sure how though, I can't even ride it," she said.
"I can," Spade shrugged. "Still don't see how it would work."
"Either way, things are going to do down fast once the Kraken gets close, I'm ready whenever you guys are, but obviously nothing's going to happen if you die. Either way, don't screw up too much," Kajio warned. Joyce gave him a thumbs up.
"I don't think I'll die. Hopefully, my one-step plan will go just fine," she said cheerfully.
Kajio and Spade shook their heads almost in unison, looking as exasperated as a parent whose kid failed a math test because their handwriting was too messy.
This would work out just fine, she supposed. She could figure out the rest later.
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"Taeyun," Helang called out as he entered the room. Taeyun nodded at his friend.
"Looks like the Kraken will be there within half an hour," Taeyun said mildly. Helang glared at him.
"Looks like you're not taking this seriously," Helang snapped.
Taeyun sighed. "We have over 100 shamans on standby, if we keep raising wards before it can crash through them, we'll last long enough for the Research Department to find a solution. After all, what happens until then is serving as a square-off between our students and Jia Xu's. What can I do? I can't exactly do this for them."
"We might actually have to if they can't handle this," Helang sighed. "Not that I know how to handle a Kraken."
"Either way, we're waiting on the Research Department. So what is that?" Taeyun nodded at the photo in Helang's hand. Helang glanced at it.
"Right, that was what I came here for. It's not really a priority right now, but I suppose it'll become one very soon. As in right after this is over. Luco sent in an old photo for high-res cleanup," Helang handed it over to him.
Taeyun frowned at the photo. Lin Bo, younger than Taeyun had ever seen her, staring straight into the camera with an arrogant grin. Behind her, a tall blonde man leaned on her shoulder, smiling at the camera.
"Is that –?!"
Helang looked back uncertainly. "I don't know, Taeyun. That man's identical to Spade."
Taeyun looked back at the photo. Everything seemed to fall into place with startling clarity, the wards, the banishments, the energy sweeps, everything up North and in Hong Kong, it all suddenly made a lot of sense.
The man could be Spade's father, he reasoned, but it fell flat against the pile of incriminating evidence otherwise. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"We're going to the harbor. Now."