Young Justice: Poseidonis

August 27th, 2010

There had to be some reason for this attack, right? I suddenly regretted disabling all of the attacking men. I should have left one to interrogate. The Imperius curse was one of the spells that I’d found was fully blocked by water, but that didn’t matter if I just got close enough to jab my target with my wand.

I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what Black Manta might be after, but I just didn’t know enough about Poseidonis to say one way or another. The royal family seemed like an obvious choice, but both the King and Queen could defend themselves and the palace was probably teeming with guards. If I’d been able to take out the entire group with two spells, Mera could probably swat a force five times as big out of the water, and Aquaman was a powerful, experienced combatant as well.

If that was the goal of the attack, would getting involved be at all helpful? The Conservatory was a fair distance away from the palace and getting there would take a not inconsiderable amount of time even with our brooms. And when we did get there, Zatanna and I would be two more unknowns in the middle of an active battlefield whose layout we didn’t know. We’d be lucky to avoid getting attacked by the guards, much less accomplish anything.

What else? The Conservatory maybe? It was probably less well defended than the palace and the students, teachers, and texts within represented an enormous amount of future potential for the Kingdom. Destroying or even just damaging the Conservatory would cause potentially irreparable harm to Atlantis’s magical traditions.

We were also right here. The students, teachers, and guards around the Conservatory had been seeing us every day for over a week and we’d had time to get the lay of the land. Even if the Conservatory wasn’t the target, it getting damaged in the midst of the attack was unacceptable.

“He and his men will answer for what they’ve done,” I told the guard firmly. “Right now however, we need to focus on protecting civilians and the Conservatory. One of the men called for reinforcements before I could disable him. Have everyone keep their eyes peeled and get people away from here. I’ll take care of them when they show up, but I can’t protect everyone if I’m busy fighting.”

“Right!” She saluted me, raising one arm in front of her face the way I’d seen Aqualad and some of the other guards do in the past. Then she swam away, already calling out to some of the other guards and the people crowding the water outside the damaged buildings.

The other guard tending to his downed friend straightened, heaving the disabled guard after him. He saluted as well, then swam away, leaving me alone with Zatanna for the moment.

“I think we should stick around here for now,” I told her. “There are a lot of vulnerable people here and I don’t want to leave them alone. I’m going to go keep an eye out for those reinforcements. Can you make sure the other guards get the message and help get people away from here?”

She clearly didn’t like the idea very much, but she also knew that someone needed to do it. Too many of the other guardsmen had been disabled during the initial barrage, leaving few to corral the panicked Atlanteans and rescue the people trapped inside. “Okay, but be careful, Hydrys.”

“I will be,” I reassured her. “Take care of yourself first. You can’t save anyone if you go down yourself.”

“I know, I know,” she waved me away, but I could tell that she appreciated the concern in my voice.

We both went our separate ways. Zatanna swam down towards where a guard was struggling to free a child and two guards that had been helping him when Black Manta’s men had appeared. I swam up, away from all the buildings, rubble, and kicked-up sand that was obscuring my vision of the surroundings.

I stopped a few meters above the roof of the tallest damaged building and took a deep breath, making sure that my occlumency shields were working properly. Then I carefully drew the outline of a keyhole in the air, pouring a single mote of blue mana from Shadowcrest into my wand. “Homenum Revelio!” I declared firmly, pouring as much energy into the spell as I could manage without destabilizing it entirely.

An almost visible ripple of magic rushed from the tip of my wand and expanded out in all directions. Almost instantly pings began to appear within my mind and only my well-structured mind allowed me to sort through all the information in a reasonable amount of time. That was me, the guards, civilians, Zatanna, a handful of people still trapped inside the buildings that we’d missed, and finally, in the distance, a cluster of twelve people moving rapidly towards us between the buildings.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“There are still people trapped inside!” I called out loudly to the closest guard. He turned to look up at me and I pointed towards the collapsed store. “Second floor, three of them. All close together. A bathroom maybe?”

“I’ll get them out!” he told me seriously. “Thank you, sir!”

I nodded back sharply. “Good. There’s one more inside the apartment, somewhere in the basement I think? Less urgent, but keep an eye out for them.”

“I’ll pass it along.”

“Good man. I’ve got trash to take out.”

I tapped my wand against the side of my head and my senses expanded in all directions as the supersensory charm snapped into place. Dark water turned clear as day and I could hear the scrape of rock on rock inside the store, the splash of Atlanteans swimming around, and the soft hum of whatever magic or technology that Black Manta’s men were using to get around.

The water around me lit up and I shot away, moving to intercept the men moving swiftly towards the group I’d taken care of earlier. It was sort of a waste of the trap I’d set earlier, but I didn’t want to risk not having one to interrogate if they all got flash fried.

I stopped above a flat-roofed building and peaked down. The men were swimming close to the ground and moving between the buildings, making them all but impossible to spot from ground level. Their black armor blended in with the dark waters and the contraptions on their backs pushing them through the water were so quiet that I could have easily dismissed it as background noise. They’d clearly come prepared and knew what they were doing.

Unfortunately for them, I knew they were coming and my revealing and supersensory charms made their attempts at stealth laughable. I twirled my wand around my body and vanished from view, my disillusionment charm leaving me as little more than a dark blue blur in the dark ocean.

I swam slowly after them. Without active hydromancy, which would have immediately given me away with its glow, I was slower than them, but I could go over the buildings and natural terrain that they were going around so I managed to stay ahead of them regardless. I held my wand loosely in my hand as I swam, twirling it in slow circles as I searched for the perfect opportunity.

Eventually, they reached a narrow alley and bunched up, swimming two-by-two towards their target. My frown turned into a predatory smile and I brandished my wand, finally casting the spell I’d been focusing on for the past thirty seconds.

One of the problems with using transfiguration in combat was that transfiguring air tended to be very difficult. Difficult to the point that conjuration––creating temporary matter from nothing but magic––tended to be more efficient. Thus, you typically needed rubble or some other material to work with if you wanted to be effective.

Underwater, there was no such issue. Water was actually rather easy to transfigure, though the closer what you were making was to water the easier it became. Transforming water into another liquid like wine or pumpkin juice was easy. Even some more exotic fluids weren’t too hard. There was a spell to turn water into quicksilver, honey, and even custard.

As funny as it would be to trap the terrorists in honey, right about now I was thinking of a slightly different liquid. A very dense, very dangerous liquid to be submerged in. It wasn’t so much an exact spell as a general transfiguration. I visualized the desired effect, focused my magic, and cast the classic liquid-to-liquid transfiguration.

My wand sang and just over two-thousand gallons of saltwater turned into concrete, encasing the ten men at the back of the group and the legs of the first two in liquid stone. A casual swipe of my wand instantly dried out the cement––it wouldn’t be as strong as if I’d allowed it to dry normally, but it would do the trick for now––trapping all twelve men in place.

To their credit, the two men who weren’t fully trapped tried to react. They twisted around, their weapons raised in the air as they searched for their attacker. I swam down towards them, trusting my shield and charms to protect and hide me from view.

Once I was close enough, red light flashed from my wand and one of the men slumped, unconscious. The other man responded instantly, shooting a flurry of orange beams towards me, but he didn’t have a good angle and the few shots that did get close to me splashed off my protego with no effect. These men may have been ready for Atlantean guards, but they weren’t ready for a wizard of my caliber.

I stopped barely a foot away from him and jabbed my wand into his back. “Imperio!” I hissed. The man stiffened and I felt his mind give way, completely unprepared for the blissful dominance of my curse.

I had the man wait patiently as I went through and stunned the ten other men one by one. No use risking them breaking free somehow. Then I finally dropped my disillusionment charm and approached the man. “Now then, what do we have here,” I asked rhetorically. “Why are you here? What is the plan? How many other men are there? Tell me everything,” I ordered.

And so he did. He told me about his squad, about the other teams throughout the city, and, most importantly, about the final group using the chaos as a distraction to steal something valuable from the science center. That certainly sounded rather interesting, now, didn’t it?

A few minutes later, I left twelve stunned in my wake and headed back towards the ongoing evacuation and recovery efforts. It seemed that I’d been wrong. Neither the Palace, nor the Conservatory had been the targets. Though what a terrorist wanted with a giant block of ice I honestly had no idea.