I was instantly buffeted by the storm raging all about me. Even though my exertions in the control room had felt like hours, it had to have been only minutes. And yet, in that short amount of time I spent struggling with the door, Tatsugan’s influence had turned the skies into a veritable hurricane. A great cyclone had formed in the heavens to encircle the entirety of the caldera, and the rain fell heavy enough that I felt like I was underwater. Winds howled so loudly that I feared my eardrums would burst from the pressure alone, much less the thundering of the proto-Calamity as it battled Shacklock and his forces.

(Was that even still true? Had Tatsugan ascended, and slain his opponent? I had no way of knowing.)

And so I was caught in the storm. Before the face of it, I was little better than an ant before the goliath.

My wings were caught by the wind, and I went into a death spiral.

I was falling, I knew that. I could feel myself tumbling erratically through the air as I fell towards the inland sea below me. The world made no sense to me whatsoever, and my senses were overwhelmed. The sensation, my core ring calmly noted, was not unlike If I had been dunked into a pool.

But I couldn’t do anything about it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t angle my wings to catch onto the wild, chaotic winds that raged all about me.

Panic overtook me, for a moment, and I became convinced that I was going to die. Any moment now, I would plunge straight into the raging waters of the inland sea, and get torn to shreds by the innumerable stone shards swirling within it. That was if the impact with the water didn’t instantly kill me, though. This caldera was huge, after all, and the ‘dock’ had been quite a distance above the waters.

Shut the fuck up, Core.

I’d had an idea, piercing through my panic. If my wings were what was causing the problem…

Then they had to go.

I released my hold on Vis Maledicta Exactoris. Immediately, I was lighter, and my helpless spinning stopped. With the whirling of the world solved, I was able to see again, even if the speeding rain stung my wide-open eyes.

What I saw was the looming, lurking form of the gargantuan mountain. Gorenzan dominated my sight lines, almost appearing to sneer down at me from the rocky crags and sharp spires of its face. I could easily imagine Tatsugan’s roost speaking to me from the storm.

How dare you think you could brave my domain, fool, it said.

I narrowed my eyes, as much against the wind and rain as it was against the half-mad taunt I was anthropomorphizing.

We’ll see.

Back in my normal, mostly human form, it was easy for me to fold my arms and legs together. As I did so, my orientation changed in midair, and my view shifted from the imposing form of the mountain to the yawning, churning pit of water far below me. Plunging head first in that direction, I thought that I could just barely see the mostly rectangular shape of the barge, bobbing up and down on the turbulent, crashing waves of the inland sea. It didn’t seem to have gone far from the point it must have touched down upon.

My friends were waiting for me.

I guess I couldn’t keep them waiting then.

I closed my eyes momentarily in my fall if only to steady my nerves. Strangely…

Strangely, it came easy to me. For once, I didn’t miss the artificially calming effect that my lost middle ring could grant. I could do this myself.

So to speak.

But I was going to have to time this right if I didn’t want to end up as a smear on the deck of the ancient barge. The timing would have to be precise, down to the last second. I couldn’t risk reactivating my transformation early, or else the veritable sails of my wings might blow me off course. Then I would risk crashing into the waters to be blended.

It had to be at the last possible moment to break my fall.

…actually, would the force of such a thing be too much for my body to handle? So much momentum being drained away in an instant might just snap my wings right off of my body.

My Core Ring brought up a good point, I acknowledged, as I plunged towards my possible death.

I should reinforce myself, in that case.

I waited.

A particularly powerful gust of wind threatened to blow me off course. I tensed my muscles to streamline my form even more, and let it blow over me.

I waited.

A strike of lightning pierced down through the heavens and into the inland sea close enough that I was able to see it skitter across the waters. My Core sighed in relief that it wasn’t close enough to fry us instead.

I waited…and then…

The deck loomed in my vision, the barely visible forms of my companions staring upwards, searching for something.

Or someone.

Now!

I activated Vis Maledicta Exactoris and Might of the Wyrdwood simultaneously.

This time, at thirty-five percent. My struggles holding the door told me I could handle thirty if I put my mind to it. Why not try five more percent, if only to avoid becoming a smear on a plank of ancient wood?

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Instantly, I exploded into my transformed state, and I flared my wings out as wide as I possibly could. They shuddered violently, feeling very much like they would be ripped right out of my back to be cast into the wind. But only for a moment.

Because in the next, ghostly crimson vines began to crawl all over my body in a strangely purposeful manner. Only my core had the observational capacity to notice what they were doing, while my outer self was busy fighting to keep us together in the face of the immense physical strain we were under.

The vines were forming into what looked to be armor. Still vague, still indistinct.

But armor nonetheless.

My fall slowed from the terminal plunge it had been into a mere fast drop, instead. Angling my legs downwards, the instant my feet touched upon the wood of the barge, the entire structure of the ship shook violently from the force of the impact. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Renauld stumbled and nearly fell over, only to be steadied by Kazuma.

Both of them were gaping at me in surprise.

As I rose to my full height, releasing my hold on both of my active Skills as I did so, I noticed they were the only ones. Liora was merely shaking her head at me with a small smile on her face, while Azarus was rolling his eyes. Venix gave me a brief, acknowledging nod from his point on the bow of the barge before casting his eyes back upwards to try and catch a glimpse of the distant struggle with Tatsugan.

Meanwhile, Bella had leaned over the wheel over the ship above my position and was grinning at me. “Bout time!” She called out, shouting to be heard over the storm. “We was about ta leave ye behind! We got places ta be!”

I huffed a laugh, rolling my shoulders exhaustedly. The entire struggle to lower the barge and then the plunge towards might have only taken perhaps…fifteen? Maybe twenty minutes?

But it had felt like a lifetime. I was pretty damn exhausted after that.

Time for a pick-me up.

I fished around in my supply pack for what I was looking for with one hand, as I shrugged the opposite shoulder at her. “Forgive me, Captain!” I called back, retrieving a small vial with a butter-yellow potion in it. “I was delayed by a pack of ne’er do wells.”

Bella rolled her eyes at me as I popped the cork and downed the mild Energy potion. Instantly, I felt most of my exhaustion vanish. Which was good, but I was going to feel that later. I knew I would. The burst of energy these potions granted didn’t come with zero cost.

Oddly, Renauld shook off his shock at my abrupt entrance and marched over to me with a frown. He seized me by the arm, and started dragging me over to the small cabin beneath the helm. I let him, considering my nearly implicit trust in the Gnoll.

Besides.

It was nice to get back out of the rain, if only for a moment.

Kazuma trailed in our wake silently.

Once inside the darkened interior of the wheel house, Renauld irritably flicked out a hand and cast a light spell. The small orb of bright white light floated up near the bare ceiling and brightened. Helpfully, Kazuma imitated him, casting his own, Cultivator Art version of the same thing. His was instead a bar of light that he held in his hand like a torch, holding it above Renauld as the Healer kneeled down in front of me and…held his hands out over my leg?

I looked down and understood.

Ah.

That scrape I’d felt as I was fleeing the dockside bunker had been a bit more serious than I’d thought. The talons of one of the Wyrmkin had torn right through both the armored, mystically enhanced silk of my pants and the scales of my transformation. In the near-perfect illumination of the room, I could in fact see the white of my own bone from a large gash that Renauld was inspecting on my right leg.

I hadn’t felt the wound at all with the adrenaline pumping through my veins from the fight and flight. Now that it was fading, though…

I tensed, hissing through my teeth as I struggled to keep my hands off the leg. The pain was hitting me all at once, and it was not slight. I did not appreciate the twitching feeling in my leg as severed muscle strands tried to contract.

There it was. That familiar longing for my middle ring.

Hello, old friend.

Renauld ignored my twitching, instead of visibly casting one of his Healing spells, a slight green glow starting to flow from his hands to my leg. This wasn’t my first time being healed, and I was sure it wasn’t going to be the last, but it was still cool to watch as my flesh knit itself back together before my eyes. It only took the Healer minutes for the grievous wound that would have taken months to years back on Earth to heal to close completely. In its place was a ropey, black-scaled scar spanning the length of my right shin diagonally. Even that was more of a symptom of Renauld’s haste, though. I knew it was possible to have scars erased by a Healer of sufficient skill. I just hadn’t ever sought that service.

Maybe I should, though. It might help to make me appear less inhuman.

I shelved that observation from my core for later consideration. For now, I gingerly stood up from the chair Renauld had shoved me into during the treatment and tested the leg. No pain greeted me, so I nodded at my Gnollish friend. “Thanks, man. I didn’t even notice.”

Renauld just rolled his eyes at me. “Yeah, well. I did. Try and be more careful next time, Nate. I’ve only got so much fuel for the fire, and we don’t know what’s waiting for us at the mountain.”

I ignored Kazuma as he nodded wisely at Renauld’s mild rebuke but still took it in the spirit it was given. I knew that he just said it because he cared.

Together, the three of us exited the cabin to find that everyone else had ventured up to join Bell at the helm. There, they were huddled around…the map that Masayoshi had given to me?

I instinctively reached for my supply pouch where I had thought the map was, but I found it missing. Bella must have seen the movement as we walked up to join them, because her eyes flickered my way. She wiggled her eyebrows at me slyly.

I grinned back, reluctantly amused at her quick fingers, but focused instead on the map with the others. There, I found Venix tracing a line with his finger from the representation of the caldera’s edge, before tapping a position in the sea portion. “Here,” He said roughly, barely audible over the thundering of Tatsugan’s rattle. It had never really stopped. “We are roughly here.”

The position he had pointed out was at around the four o’clock position on the caldera, very close to the wall. Meanwhile, the marking for the impenetrable wall that the Kawamaran’s called the ‘Gate of the Underworld’ was near to the eight o’clock location on the mountain.

Somewhere on that imposing cliff face lay the bunker I had come so far for.

Bella studied the map for a moment longer before looking up from it to study the sea around us. She made an L shape with her fingers and framed a portion of the mountain with it, and then nodded sharply. “Get on the oars, boys,” She said shortly. “Liora and I will raise the sails. Renauld, you go bang the drum. With all o’ that…I can get us there in about thirty minutes, mebbe an hour I’m thinkin’.”

I looked askance at her as Venix, Kazuma, and Azarus departed for the oars. A grinning Renauld walked up to the ancient hide drums and picked the stick bound to its side. “An hour? Does Shacklock have that long? Come to think of it…why hasn’t he already, you know. Core Collapsed?”

Kazuma stopped long enough to grimace at me in passing. “Pride,” He said dourly, just barely loud enough to be heard over the storm. “Shacklock wishes to test his limits against the Oblivion Wyrm, in the twilight of his life. . For now, I believe, he is leading the creature on a veritable game of cat and mouse, drawing it away from the mountain. I was informed that he intended to fight the beast as long as possible before initiating his plan. Partly to give us time to actually enter the mountain, party for his own amusement. And then the sword, and my ancestor, will be lost.” At that, he walked away, shaking his head, to pick up an oar.

I exchanged a look with Bella, who shrugged at me before joining Liora at the rigging. I shrugged as well before joining the others on deckside oars. Plunging mine into the churning waters, I did my best to ignore the soreness in my muscles as Venix set the pace and Renauld banged on the drum.

At least this wouldn’t take too long.

Not sure how much more exertion I could take.