The Storm King

Ships in the hastily reconstructed port were ablaze, sailors and marines were scurrying around finding their weapons and getting organized, and the hundreds of other ships anchored out at sea were slowly getting moving.

Leon could only stare at the chaos going on back at the fortress, almost unable to understand what in the hells had just happened, before his brain kicked in and he shouted, “We’re heading back! Now!”

Without another thought, Leon tore off into the jungle, the rest of his squad just behind him. They left the crucified skeleton behind. Leon knew how to find it again, anyway, but right now, whatever it was pointing at or whatever that bird had tried to lead him toward could wait. Their priority had to be the fortress.

Leon kept his magic senses projected the entire time, keeping just enough of his attention on the jungle around him to not stumble or trip, but his focus was on the fortress. The more he saw, the more he could see the order in the chaos: the marines were far more organized than the sailors, already forming up along the battlements of the fortress walls and getting into formation just behind them. The sailors and marines at the port were focused mostly on putting out the fires, but already Leon could see that at least two dozen of the smaller ships and at least two larger war galleys had been damaged to the point of no longer being seaworthy. It looked there had been significant damage to many more ships, as well.

But there didn’t seem to be any sign of whoever or whatever had done all of that. Leon couldn’t see any sign of their enemy, and neither did it seem like anyone else could, for the rest of the fleets were scrambling to get their crews back at their battle stations while making sure that the port was locked down.

And then Leon found out what happened, for it happened again. A lone ship, only a little bit longer than a war galley, but much thicker, erupted from the ocean right in the center of a cluster of ships. A pair of short metal tubes attached to large metal canisters easily the size of carriages the looked terrifyingly similar to the Legion’s Flame Lances that were mounted on its main deck swiveled as men and women scrambled around their base. A moment later, the tubes flashed with red light as countless runes along their length filled with power, and fire poured from their barrels, bathing a number of the nearby Legion ships in bright orange flame.

The sailors on the decks of those ships screamed as the flames washed over them, the sound reaching Leon’s ears even as far away as he was. For a moment, this handful of burning ships almost seemed like they’d keep floating, the enchantments wrought into their hulls doing their best to keep them above the water, but then Leon watched them begin to sink into the ocean as the attacking ship passed them by, with many of the surviving sailors jumping into the water to try and save themselves.

The rest of the ships in the group didn’t take that lying down, however. Most of them were small ships, but a few were decently-sized war galleys with brutal rams that were already turning to face their attacker. One even had an artillery trebuchet that Leon could see being loaded with a round stone covered in fire runes.

As this conflict continued, the bigger ships in the fleet turned their attention their way. The dreadnoughts had already brought their Flame Lances to bear on their attacking enemy, but other Legion ships always seemed to be in the way—or rather, this attacking ship was making sure it stayed close enough to other Legion ships that the dreadnoughts couldn’t fire for fear of hitting their comrades.

By this point, Leon and his squad had torn through enough of the jungle that they emerged out of the tree line and into the cleared area in front of the walls. But once there, Leon’s focus was pulled away from the battle out in the port when he noticed—with his eyes rather than his magic senses—a dark shape a couple hundred feet away.

It was vaguely humanoid, dark, and emitted a few traces of killing intent, though little else in the way of noticeable aura. It was hunched over behind a fern, not moving too much, but just visible enough to catch Leon’s attention. As Leon stared at it, his senses locking onto the unmistakably human shape that he occasionally glimpsed as it seemed to shrink away from him, he realized exactly what it was: someone was wearing a black cloak that covered their entire body, and one that had been somehow enchanted to be nearly invisible to magic senses.

“Hey!” Leon shouted a moment after he came to a stop, the rest of his squad looking in the same direction he had and brandishing their weapons. Fortunately, all were fully armored, as was Leon, for in response, a hail of arrows came pouring out of the trees.

With a quick swish of his blade, Leon let loose with a torrent of lightning, while Anzu flapped his wings and created a powerful gust of wind, and Maia summoned a water dragon to provide all of them with more cover. Not a single arrow even touched Leon or his squad.

“What the…” Alix muttered in shock and anger before pulling her bow off her shoulder and drawing a handful of spell arrows.

“Whatever’s happening is multi-pronged,” Gaius said. “We need to get inside the walls! Better to fight there!”

“I agree!” Marcus added, his eyes locked on Leon.

Leon almost growled before putting away his blade. He cast his gaze up to the low crenellations where he could see many Legion marines who already seemed to know what was going on, so he glared once more at the trees from which no more arrows appeared and began to run again for the walls. He knew that Gaius was right, with those cloaks he couldn’t get a good idea of just how dangerous this threat was, and he didn’t want to get caught up in an unwinnable fight outside of the walls.

It didn’t make it feel better, though. He felt almost like he was running away from this fight when the enemies were right there. He contented himself by running at the back of the group, drawing his bow from his soul realm, and firing a quick explosive arrow back into the trees, which detonated with a satisfying boom and gout of bright orange fire that Leon saw engulfed several of the dark shapes that he could see now that he was looking for them.

Fortunately, he—or at least Anzu—was famous and eye-catching enough within the task force already that the guards didn’t even hesitate to open the gates to let them back inside the fortress. Leon and his squad sprinted on inside, with Leon glowering back at the jungle hundreds of feet away, his heart racing madly and his face scrunched up in distaste behind his helmet, the one explosive arrow not doing enough to alleviate his anger and indignation.

“Leon!” called out the Tribune that had command over this gatehouse. Leon glanced up at the man leaning over the battlements on the gatehouse roof. “Sir Sigebert sent a runner here only minutes ago! You’re needed back at the command tent!”

“Got it!” Leon replied, waving at the Tribune, who quickly turned his attention back to the jungle. It didn’t seem like anyone was charging out of the trees, though even if they were, Leon knew from experience that the enchantments placed upon the walls of Legion camps were tough to crack, especially for those without siege weapons.

Leon then led his party through the camp towards the command tent. Any signs of revelry and relaxation from earlier in the night were gone; aside from the main paths through the square-shaped fortress, there weren’t any people around. They were all on the walls or assembling just behind them.

“What in the hells is going on?” Leon heard Alcander wonder aloud behind him. Leon had told the others of what he’d seen, but he hadn’t been too descriptive, and he wasn’t entirely up-to-date on the situation, either. He quickly fixed that as well as he could with a pulse of his magic senses.

The situation in the port had changed for the better, at least as far as he could tell. The marines had gotten most of the fires under control with the swift action of the Legion water mages, while the ship that had caused so much damage in the first place had vanished—presumably diving back under the waves where Leon’s magic senses couldn’t easily penetrate. Leon didn’t think it had been sunk, for the rest of the Legion ships were still circling around one area of the bay while the rest took up defensive positions a few hundred feet out from the docks. He couldn’t see anyone else attacking the fortress; all other sides of the walls were manned by the marines, but it didn’t seem like many were actively engaged in combat.

Leon quickly informed his squad as they sped through the camp about what he could see.

“It was only a matter of time before Jormun decided to attack,” Marcus responded to Alcander. “The only thing surprising about this is that it seems so small. I would’ve thought a bigger fleet or maybe picking off our scouts. This is… both too small and too bold, I can’t understand it…”

“Well, hopefully we’re about to get some more information,” Leon said as they arrived at the command tent.

Upon entering, he found the three Fleet Legates, their immediate subordinates, and the highest-ranked commands of the marines all gathered a hand-drawn map of the fortress and its surroundings.

“Leon!” Sigebert exclaimed as Leon walked in, the rest of Leon’s squad following him inside save for Anzu and Maia, who stayed outside.

“Looks like there’s some people out in the jungle, but they’re not attacking,” Leon stated as he walked over to the table.

“Are there…?” Basina replied as she scowled and quickly made a few quick marks on her map. “Do you know how many?”

“Couldn’t say, they seemed to have some kind of cloaks on that prevented me from seeing them,” Leon responded.

“Regardless, thanks for the info,” Basina said. “For now, we need you down at the docks. That ship out there is Jormun’s, I would stake my life on it. And if he’s there, then that’s where our strongest fighter has to be.”

“Makes sense,” Leon agreed. “If you don’t need me for anything else, I’ll head out right now.”

Basina nodded, and Leon turned right around and hurried out of the tent. The Legates had to organize the counter-attack and send out patrols to secure the surroundings. It as going to be an organizational nightmare as far as Leon was concerned, and he didn’t want anything to do with it.

‘… Even though I might need to do that myself one day…’ Leon thought, his scowl growing deeper.

Only a few minutes later, Leon found himself down at the stone docks feeling kind of useless. There weren’t pirates running around looting and pillaging and burning, the fires had largely been contained, and the attacking ship had vanished. There didn’t seem to be much for him, specifically, to do.

Alix asked the question on everyone’s mind. “Where the hells did they go?”

Leon sucked in a frustrated breath and glanced at Maia, a concealed smile appearing on his face behind his helmet. “Up for a swim?”

Maia silently replied, [Always. Should be fun to find these little minnows and tear them asunder—so long as they aren’t too far out to sea…] A vicious smile spread across the face of the river nymph, and Leon found himself almost feeling some kind of pity for the crew of that ship—probably Jormun, but he didn’t want to make any assumptions.

“Uuuh, a swim?” Alix asked. “If you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do, I don’t think we’d be able to follow you… I also think it’s a terrible idea…” She cast a meaningful glance at Marcus, Alcander, and Gaius, who while remaining silent, nodded in agreement. They were all third-tier or stronger, and while that meant they could hold their breath for a while, their ability to fight underwater wasn’t superb.

“We won’t go far,” Leon said, ordering them all to stay there, despite their protestations.

He was serious, he and Maia were hardly going to be swimming out to sea. It was just that magic senses had a terrible ability to penetrate water—it was damn difficult to penetrate water when they were projected from above the waves, and even when projected from below, his range was only a little over ten percent what it was on land. It was almost impossible for Leon, or even Maia, to see what was beneath the surface without sticking their heads beneath the water and using their eyes.

“Quick look,” he said, “just to see what we can see…”

Maia nodded, and the two, without so much as another word, smoothly jumped off the docks and into the water.

Leon immediately engaged his armor’s enchantments to keep water out of his helmet and create the ice flippers so that he could actually swim with something that resembled speed. That, however, was all he did, for as soon as he started to actually look out into the bay, any desire he had to swim out farther than the end of the docks instantly vanished, to be replaced with a deep, visceral fear that cut to his very core.

Out in the deeper reaches of the bay were gigantic dark shapes that twisted and curled in on themselves, huge cephalopod bodies surrounded by hundreds of writhing tentacles. These hordes of tentacles whipped through the water, snapping up the bodies of sailors that had fallen into the water and pulled them toward the base of the creatures’ bodies, where the tentacles extended from. There, the bodies of the sailors disappeared, presumably eaten by these immense leviathans.

These creatures numbered only three, but that was more than enough to instill a primal fear deep within Leon. As the closest of these creatures twisted in the water, turning its body until an eye located about halfway up its long and relatively thin body pointed in his direction, that fear doubled. These monsters were krakens, and Leon had just entered their domain. Worse, he could feel through their connection a spike of fear within Maia, even though he couldn’t see her—she’d vanished as she melted into the water around them.

Leon’s heart rate skyrocketed as his helmet had to work overtime to supply the air for his sudden and panicked spike in breathing rate. His eyes made contact with the enormous round eye of this beast and he couldn’t look away, some magic the creature possessed keeping him from reacting as he should’ve. He was utterly entranced and paralyzed with fear, unable to do anything more than slowly float down to the sandy bottom of the harbor.

This kraken slowly split off from the other two, its tentacles—each hundreds of feet long, and it had far too many for him to count—whipping through the water as it turned its body to ‘face’ him, and slowly start to accelerate in his direction, the sheer size of thing causing great waves to be kicked up onto the docks as it rapidly cut into shallower water. Its dark green body shone as the feeble light of the moon penetrated the water, its sixth-tier aura growing in intensity as it swam in Leon’s direction. The thing was massive, but fortunately, when it turned toward Leon, it had broken eye contact. The monster’s eyes were on the sides of its body, not its pin-shaped front tip, and that presented an opportunity.

Leon, realizing that he had only a few seconds to act before the monster drew close enough to reach him with its tentacles, immediately sent a bolt of lightning surging through his body, the silver-blue power of the Thunderbird cleansing whatever hold the kraken had seized over his mind. His heart rate didn’t drop, and he was still terrified almost beyond reason, but Leon had control over his body again.

With a powerful kick, Leon exploded toward the surface of the water, only a few dozen feet away. As he did, he bellowed at Maia, [We need to get out of the water, NOW!]

He felt no argument from his river nymph lover, only agreement and terror as the kraken swiftly drew closer. The fact that it was so much weaker than the two of them, magically speaking, doing nothing at all to weaken their terror. The thing was large enough to be beyond reliable evaluation of its danger by strict magical tiers—it had so much mass, so much physical strength, so much physical toughness that to fight it was not something Leon or Maia wanted to try, even with all the powers at their command.

It only one more kick for Leon to come within a foot of the water’s surface, and he risked one last look backward. The kraken was still bearing down upon him, but he could see in the distance its two fellows writhing and twisting as they swam away. Between their massive forms, Leon caught a brief glimpse of a long object—the attacking ship entangled within dozens of their tentacles.

For the briefest of moments, Leon thought that maybe the ship had been caught by the monsters and was being dragged down into the depths, never to be seen again, but then he saw a single person standing on its deck, his feet planted on the wooden surface and his hands folded behind his back as if he were enjoying a leisurely cruise on the ocean surface.

Leon instantly recognized him. Turiel—or rather, Jormun.

The pirate seemed to sense Leon’s attention and glanced back over his shoulder, and he and Leon briefly made eye contact. The pirate smiled at Leon, his face splitting open with a tremendous shit-eating grin, and one of his hands came up to give Leon a sarcastic wave before the krakens and his ship vanished into the darkness of the abyss.

Leon kicked once more and burst from the ocean with enough force that he was easily able to pull himself back up to the docks. His pause to look back had been just long enough for Maia to have emerged before him, and for the last remaining kraken to have already been reaching out to grab him. As Leon stumbled up onto the stone docks, the end of one of its smallest and longest tentacles—it was still as thick as his waist—whipped out of the water and wrapped itself around him, squeezing him hard enough that he heard his metal armor groaning with the strain.

Leon screamed in terror and rage; he wasn’t about to let this happen to him, even if it did terrify him in the most primal possible way. He called upon his lightning as his comrades only a few steps away reeled back in surprise and shock. Only Maia darted forward, the water around the dock receding as she formed much of it into a massive serpentine dragon.

Silver-blue lightning danced across Leon’s form as his arms wrapped around a nearby iron cleat. The dock had only been built that afternoon, but the Legion engineers had made sure that it was strong and stable; even as the tentacle started to pull Leon and the cleat began to bend, Leon avoided being ripped back into the water.

His body exploded with lightning at the same time that Maia’s water dragon tore into the kraken’s sucker-covered tentacle. A moment later, it released Leon, its oily green hide scorched black by lightning, and pulled back into the water leaving a trail of blood behind it.

But Leon didn’t relax even as the tentacle vanished beneath the turbulent waves. He pulled himself fully back onto the dock and shouted, “GET BACK! KRAKEN!”

Not even a moment later, a dozen tentacles erupted from the waves and began slamming down onto the dock, smashing several Legion sailors into paste in an instant.

Three tentacles almost fell on Leon’s squad, but a quick lightning spear from him deterred one, Maia’s water dragon threw back another, and an explosive spell arrow nimbly fired by Alix injured the third enough to wave it off.

By this point, many of the sailors around began to scream in fear and run from the dock, and Leon wasn’t far behind them. He kept himself between the water and his squad, his magic senses bathing the docks as he searched for a sign that the kraken wasn’t backing down, but fortunately, it seemed they’d injured it enough to get it to leave. As the sailors fell back and Legion ships started to come closer to protect the dock, no more tentacles came whipping out from the water.

“What… the fuck…” Alcander gasped as he stared at the water, his eyes wide with fear.

“That was a mistake,” Leon murmured mostly to himself. “Not doing that again. Not jumping into the ocean ever again…”