C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 192 - Dark Ocean
🕑 Added 2025-07-03 08:28:01 +0000 UTCThe building crumbles around me, fire crawling up the walls, smoke climbing and pooling along the ceiling. All the while he wears it, that i
The building crumbles around me, fire crawling up the walls, smoke climbing and pooling along the ceiling. All the while he wears it, that insufferable grin. My staff explodes with flame as I swing it. He meets it with a straight and jagged greatsword that crackles with barely contained electricity. The force of the weapons touching sends a numbing buzz through my hands, my teeth rattling in my mouth, and the magic peeling off the weapons combine, compete, and erupt.
My back strikes a windowed wall, my right shoulder bruising as the wooden wall splinters beneath me while the rest of my body tumbles through the glass. The road meets me outside, gravel and cobblestone trying to peel off my skin as I bounce along the ground. Behind me, the windows of the house detonate together, a cloud of dust and smoke blown out onto the street, flickering flames crawling after.
A wave of crimson boils off of me, my soul presence fanning out, searching for him as my wings pull me up to hover just above the street. Ferro doesn’t hide for long, walking from the broken doorway of the burning house, patting fire out on his pant leg.
“You seem angry,” he says.
Dragonfire screams along with it in a gout of unrelenting flame that washes over the front of the building and the monster standing in front of it. The air sizzles, flashes of heat distorting everything as I exhale my rage and fire at the monster. A shadow leaps from the path of the fire as it crashes over the burning building in a liquid wave. Before I can track it with more dragonfire, I feel movement in my aura and dodge away, turning my staff to catch the flung blade coming at me from the left.
The haft of my staff only catches the back end, leaving the sword of crude iron to cut a gash across my cheek as I sway from its path. Ferro is on me before I can recover, dropping from the sky, his greatsword swinging down in an arc. As I meet it again with my moonsilver staff, catching his blade with my weapon, the street beneath my feet bends with the force of the blow, nearly buckling.
I reach for him, my hand seizing his wrist before he can get away from me. Turning, I throw him into the ground, cracking the cobblestones further, but failing to injure him. The staff clatters as my now freed fist descends, a sheath of dragonfire scorching the air around my arm.
Ferro’s stolen presence flairs out from him as he lies on his back, smiling up at my descending fist. The street around us ripples like mud, stabbing points being birthed from the roadside, iron swords jumping up to meet me like the snapping jaw of a snake. I don’t dodge this time.
My burning fist connects with the monster’s face, a sea of fire covering everything I see as the ground beneath us begins to fall in. I twist, relying upon the awareness of my soul presence, but the burgeoning blades are impossible to avoid completely. I’m too slow. For an instant, the coffin returns to me, the crushing confines of my prison stabbing into me. The pain helps, driving away the hallucination, the claustrophobia.
One of the swords impales me from the side, cutting nearly through my stomach and out the other side, while another stabs through my arm. Several more of the birthed swords nicks and cut lines across my skin as the two of us begin to tumble into the dark. I try to fly, but the road itself encloses me, dragging me down with its weight.
My soul presence collapses in on me as I lose focus, wrapping me tight in a sheath of crimson energy. I splash into darkness, my eyes burning as I open them, foul-tasting liquid pouring into my mouth as I try to breathe; oil. The swords, still fused to the rock and stone of the broken street, drag me down and down into the liquid. Despite the agony, I kick at the stone, ripping the crude iron out of my skin, gritting my teeth against the feeling of metal scratching against bone inside my body. My hands are torn apart, the oil all around me seeping into my wounds, setting them on fire.
The first of the stones hits the bottom of the enclosure, a plane of steel at the bottom of the vat. I find my leverage, pushing down with a foot against the hilt of the blade, managing to tear it free from myself. The one through my arm comes away next, releasing me from the ton of stone dragging me down. The sky affix infusing my wings helps me ascend through the cloying oil, taking me beyond the surface to hover in the dark underground chamber, spitting the caustic fluid from my mouth and scraping it from my face.
The air itself tastes of acid, unbreathable, but I have a long experience now holding my breath. When my vision clears, I stare down at the lake of oil beneath me. Blood-red light sprinkles down from a hole in the ceiling sixty feet overhead, setting the sea of oil alight, as if it were made from rainbow fire. A steel door to my right marks the borders of the room, a simple railing running along the wall the only landmark.
An oil-slicked hand emerges from the pool, fingers snatching at and denting the catwalk, as Ferro pulls himself from the oil. He still holds his enchanted sword, stabbing the end into the catwalk to give himself a lever to pull his way out.
My first spear reaches him as he is spitting up the dark fluid. The edge of the black sand spear punctures his steel aura, not slowing. His head whips up, his body lurching back as the black spear stabs into the walkway in front of him, and he turns his half-burned face to stare toward me.
Less than a second, the spear of black sand holds its form for less than a second after entering the soul shroud billowing off of the monster, but that is long enough. More black sand pours out of my vault, solidifying in the air, forming octahedrons of geometric pattern, flying at the monsters as I race toward them. My staff appears in my hand once more, swinging at the monster as I pull on all of the sand I have stored to create weapons. I abandon flame, stabbing at him, pushing him back and away with spears of sand and the enchanted staff that I swing like a club.
He is forced to backpedal, lances of sand stabbing at him, some puncturing a leg or shoulder before coming apart, returning to rivulets of disintegrating matter that falls into the oil below. I recycle the material, claiming dominion over it as it leaves the reach of his presence, crafting new spears to help me in my assault as I back him toward the wall. A spear from below stabs up through the walkway, the metal we stand upon vibrating and complaining at the strain. He tries to defend himself, his magical blade cutting down, bisecting the spear in a shadow of sparks that fly over the oil, but it doesn’t matter. Even as he cuts it in two, my power over the weapon thrusts it forward still, stabbing through his stomach and pinning him to the wall.
Ferro’s hand slaps into the wall as the black sand in his gut starts to fall apart. A wave passes through the stone of the chamber, hundreds of swordpoints growing from and stabbing toward me from the wall. Despite everything in my body telling me to push forward, despite wanting nothing more than to grab this monster by the throat and roast him alive, I retreat. Jumping back, my wings taking my weight once more, I hover away from the monster, a trail of black sand following in my wake. I call it to me, finding it the simplest thing in the world to manage ten globes of black sand, setting them to orbit my head. Ferro slides down, leaving a bloody smear against the only flat section of the wall remaining, the rest turned into a pincushion of stabbing iron.
When he looks up at me, holding his guts in, I get my first good look at his face. Half of it is charred black, not simply stained from the bath of oil, but burned nearly to the bone, his left eye white and melted. He uses his sword like a cane, pulling himself to his feet with it, his eyes never leaving me.
One by one, the orbiting globes of sand begin to burn with blue dragonfire, the fumes of the oil beneath me condensing on their surface.
“That…that is a nice trick,” he says, despite his jaw being nearly burned away.
I begin to ascend, the light of the globes hovering around me growing in intensity. I rise into a godbeam of crimson light, nearly reaching the surface before the balls of black sand start to shift, their color taking on the burning hue of orange and white.
“Die.”
A storm of fire rains down, plunging into the sea of oil, setting it ablaze. There is a sound like a dragon taking a breath, a rumbling warning, as the sea of crimson liquid turns to flame. A wall of hot, burning air hits me like a punch in the face, snapping me back with concussive force as a geyser of roiling flame throws me high into the air. I come out of my tumble above the city, the fringes of my dress curling and turning to charcoal from the hellfire below me. Below me, a lake of red fire burns, the street and most of the surrounding buildings having crumbled and fallen into the burning oil.
Staring down into the flames, I feel the exhaustion of my mind and body try to creep back, the overwhelming rush of the otherworldly power I connect to the only thing keeping me conscious. There is something hypnotic in the dance of the flames, something that calls to me. Seven of the ten globes of sand are gone, blown to Exeter knows where as I was thrown into the air, my presence collapsing into a sphere around me once more as I was rendered insensate. When I try to breathe in, my chest complains at my lungs expanding.
“That was close.”
The voice is too close. Turning to the left, I find him there, standing on the air. No, with the iron aura bubbling around him, Ferro stands on the flat edge of his massive sword as it hovers in the air, held there by his presence. The monster’s clothes are charred black, nearly destroyed. He smiles at me, his face once again whole, not a scratch on him as far as I can see. The limp body of a man hangs from his left hand, Ferro’s fingers digging bloody holes in his throat, nine iron swords forming a circle about him, their points directed toward me.
“I thought I would try your trick myself.”
A sneer and three balls of dragonfire are my reply. The monster hurls the corpse at me, the first of the bolts of dragonfire detonating in the space between us. The sword he stands on rockets forward far faster than I could ever have expected. He sails through the air, outpacing the bolts of dragonfire that erupt in the air after him. The red sky over Danfalla becomes a garden of blossoming flame.
A score of dark flashes speed my way. The globes of black sand hovering around me stop spitting fire, flattening and coming together to form a sheet that I pour steel-affixed mana into. The first of the flung swords hits the plane of hardened sand, cracking a dent into it with the rending sound of metal, while the second one cuts an inch through less than a second later. Five more of the swords hammer into the barrier stabbing through it, barely held off from skewering me.
Then he collides with the sheet of hardened sand. It comes apart beneath the force of his attack, magical sand scattering, steel mana fighting with the power he pushes into it, neither able to overtake the other, resulting in all sense of cohesion disintegrating.
I try to move, try to turn, and put my staff between myself and the grinning demon swinging his massive sword at me, lightning crackling behind him. I don’t make it in time.
The edge of the sword hits me in the gut, a line of fire cutting across my midsection, my wrist snapping as the mageblade in my hand tries to bear the blow. The block is just enough to stop me from being split in two, but the force of Ferro’s swing is too much to take. Air rushes past me as my vision goes black. No more than a second passes before the red sky pops back into existence, but there is no time to right myself before I collide with the roof of a warehouse building.
Lumber scatters as I crash through, crates piled almost to the ceiling, slowing me with breaking and unforgiving pieces of wood before I hit the floor in a heap. Even with the power of the throne, even with the tempering my body has undergone in the last month, I feel bones shatter and muscles tear. As I lay on the ground of the warehouse, crates tumbling to the ground around me, a wheeze escapes my mouth, a rib stabbing through my lung, hitching my breath.
The pain isn’t the worst of it. It is the sound, the feeling as my flesh begins to squirm and pull itself back together, the magical energies circulating through my body not stopping even for this. I spit up blood as the hollow thunking of boards throughout the building slowly falls silent. A dark curved piece of some creature’s carapace clatters to the ground next to me. I recognize this place.
“Don’t stop now.” Ferro stands on his sword once more, hovering above the hole my body made in the roof of the building, red light shining down around him. “I can feel it. This is it, this is what I have dreamt of. Try to kill me, try to push me down. Help me be better.”
My soul presence crawls like a beaten animal, slowly seeping away from me, sliding along the floor like it was made of some real material. All of the black sand is gone, scattered by the wind throughout the city. I look down, seeing my hand jerk, fingers twisting straight, the moonsilver staff gone. Lying in the wreckage, unarmed, I push out with my presence. The edges become tattered, squirming like the tendrils of a creature as they reach further and further away, climbing over the crates throughout the warehouse. Though my weapon is lost to me, though the grains of magical material I have spent months accumulating lay scattered to the wind, I do not despair. Because he threw me here.
At last, the crimson and gold aura finishes stretching out, invading every part of the 4th army warehouse, creeping into the chests, crates, and boxes filled with weeks of material nearly a hundred adventurers spent gathering from slain monsters. I reach out, touching all of it at once, and activate a simple piece of magic, the first piece of magic I ever attained.
The building comes apart as all of the monster parts and natural treasures in the warehouse are disenchanted at once. Crates explode, and I summon an ocean of black sand.
Comments
Shaun McDonough
I mostly agree. The fighting is just feeling very overly drawn out and people are making dumb decisions. Plus weirdly it feels like for the majority of this arc the bad guys have plot armour which is making things just drag 🤷♂️
Vanessa Bräuer
I am sorry, but I really don’t like these chapters. Partly because you just killed off my favorite character, partly because these battles with endlessly regenerating monsters are somewhat repetitive, but mostly because everyone seems to try to act as dumb as possible. From making bad choices before and during the battle to endless monologuing like we are in a bad comic strip, to not even trying to press their advantage while someone is injured, always waiting for them to recover and even giving them hints how their powers work so they can best counter them. I really do like your work and hope you can recapture the magic of the first volume, but for me this is just too much blood and gore and brainless violence. The Charlene arc was interesting, but everything else felt very troperidden and cardboard-like. I hope this wasn’t too harsh, I really liked your earlier work, so I guess I am just a bit frustrated that you didn’t 100%, exactly absolute fully fulfill my hopes for this book ;-)
