BT II - Chapter 12 (Patreon)

Micah was in the water in a flash, only delaying the handful of seconds necessary to slip on the armor.  For a second he held his spear, frowning at it before glancing at the endless expanse of choppy waves.  He wouldn’t have any way to hold the weapon, and the idea of swimming across the entirety of the Emerald Ocean with just one arm made him shudder.

He abandoned the spear and sprinted to the water.  It had served him well for years, but he was out of time.  It wasn’t Micah’s first choice, but its loss was also an opportunity.  Years had passed since he crafted the weapon, and his skill in enchanting had risen since its creation.  Once he got a moment, Micah would need to enchant a new spear.  One so heavily laden with runes that it would serve as a fitting companion for his armor.

Micah dove into the ocean.  Compared to the sweltering, heavy air of the island, the lukewarm water was a welcome relief.  Almost as soon as he cleared the shore, the top of the volcano practically exploded, sending a rolling wave of soot and ash down its slopes.

Silently, he cast refresh, letting the tingle of magic flow through his muscles.  It wasn’t enough on its own to take the edge off of his lack of sleep, but right now it was Micah’s only option.

He shook his head, trying to clear the lethargy from his system as he pumped his arms through the choppy surf.  A quick glance overhead helped Micah locate the afternoon sun and orient himself toward it.  He might not have anywhere near the navigation training of a ship’s captain, there was no way he was going to end up in Takkint, the port the Amelia had set sail for, but there wasn’t much across the Emerald Ocean but Dodessa.

Another island, little more than a triangle of black somewhere to Micah’s left, erupted, sending another wave of choking cinders out over the ocean and obscuring the sun.  Mentally, Micah shrugged to himself.  Hopefully he was more or less on the right course because it would be a while before he was in any position to check the sky once more.

Behind him, lava sprayed up into the air, spewing toxic gasses from the depths of the planet that soon would be mixing with the superheated and choking smog that was rapidly covering the water.  Plumes of molten rock rained down around Micah.  It hissed as it hit the water, flash cooling and  kicking up clouds of steam as the stone hardened and shattered.

Micah dove beneath the surface as the ocean around him roiled, the waves turning choppy from the volcanic assault.  Cautiously, his tired mind hoping that the untested enchantments on his new armor were working properly, he inhaled the salt water.

It tasted like the sea breeze back in Basil’s Cove, just filtered through a sock.  Micah practically choked as he pulled the water into his lung, letting the magic filter what he needed from the liquid before he exhaled it.

The liquid was so much heavier than air, inhaling it felt like trying to draw a breath after he had hiked for hours to the top of one of Karrell’s tallest mountains.  Still, it was so much better than staying on the surface.

There was a reason that the eruption of the Serpent’s Teeth shut down all oceanic trade for months.  The worst of the eruptions only lasted for a week or so, but a ship’s captain could simply steer clear of the island chain if that was the main problem.  The real issue was the massive banks of cinder and toxic gas that would choke a massive region, constantly fed by even more material leaking from the volcanoes as they slowly smoldered their way back into dormancy.

If Micah remained on the surface, he might be able to survive for a couple of hours, but even if the burning smog didn’t kill him with heat damage, it would almost certainly fatally poison him.  In short, unless someone could travel above or below the low-hanging and inky black clouds, getting trapped near the islands was almost certain death.

He opened his eyes, wincing as the salt water attacked and stung them.  For all of his effort in enchanting the Maarikava scale armor, Micah hadn’t remembered to add a fairly minor ability designed to make the use of the enchantments less uncomfortable.

Mentally Micah made a note to craft another enchanted item to create a bubble of air to protect his eyes as cast air supply.  A moment later, a translucent sphere appeared around his face, prompting a sigh of relief.

Ultimately, the failure to balance his enchantments had been a rookie mistake, likely induced by sleep deprivation.  It could have been worse.  When Micah had been first learning to enchant, he’d read horror stories about equipment not taking into account side effects: flight amulets that let their user suffocate if they flew too high, swords that exploded into lightning upon a successful hit and electrocuted their wielder, and bracelets that increased their users strength to the point that every day activities dislocated limbs.

A stream of lava landed in the water next to Micah, raising the temperature to a boil almost immediately.  He kicked his legs twice, diving deeper into the ocean’s relatively cool depths.  Almost immediately he felt the water pressure increasing on his body.

Micah pursed his lips as he began to swim in a generally westward direction.  Pressure was another force he hadn’t properly considered. Given his body attribute, it wouldn’t be much of a problem so long as he kept air supply active, but as resilient as the Micah was, the tender membranes of his eyes and inner ears wouldn’t hold up long against the ocean’s crushing depths.

Still, he would simply need to make do with what he had.  Micah kept swimming, powerful strokes of his arms accelerating him through the water.  Already, the light filtering down from the ocean surface was beginning to disappear.  It would only be a matter of time before the clouds of soot and cinder left Micah in complete darkness.

The water around him churned, rocks thrown up by the eruption slamming down next to gouts of lava that evaporated large swaths of the ocean.  Micah knew that the buffeting currents were knocking him off course, but there really wasn’t anything he could do about it.

So he swam for hours in darkness.  Occasionally he would take some minor damage from the ocean’s heat as molten rock flashed a small amount of light into the inky depths, but there was little to break up the exhausting monotony.

He had to recast both refresh and air supply almost a dozen times, but eventually it was too much.  Micah cast temporal stutter on himself and let himself float to the surface of the ocean.  He rolled over until he was face down in the water to protect himself from the noxious fumes that choked the air, and closed his eyes to sleep.

The spell saved him.  Maybe not from death, but at least from a painful wound.  For a fraction of a second, burning agony filled his body as a superheated boulder crashed into his lower back.  Then, Micah found himself pulled a handful of seconds back in time.

As soon as he found himself back in control of his body, Micah kicked with both of his feet, clearing the area just before the rock splashed down in the now empty water.  Shaking his head, Micah began swimming once again.

There was no way of knowing how many hours he had been unconscious or even which direction he was swimming.  All Micah knew is that he needed to clear the area so that he could at least try and tell his general direction by the sun or stars.

Hours passed into days.  At some point, Micah began to wonder if he was going insane as time lost all meaning.  While awake, he would swim aimlessly, far under the water’s surface, trying his hardest to stay in a straight line.  When he grew tired, Micah would approach the surface with temporal stutter active and sleep face down, letting the waves carry him.

Micah had no way of knowing whether it was day or night.  In the soot choked twilight, he had no way of measuring time.  Each bout of wakefulness could have lasted anywhere between 45 minutes or a dozen hours.  All Micah knew was that he was alone with his thoughts for an interminable amount of time.

At first, he tried to think about his next steps: how he would find his friends; what he would need to do to rid them of the third prince’s nagging influence; and what enchantments he wanted on his new spear.  That kept him occupied for… some time.

Then his thoughts began to run together.  One minute Micah would be brainstorming where he would source reagents for a new enchantment, and the next he would be worrying about whether his companions were safe.  Before long, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t make himself focus on the ‘what ifs’ buzzing through his head as the darkness began to close in on him.

Instead, he began counting his strokes as he swam.  For a while, that kept him occupied.  Whenever Micah imagined something brushing against his leg in the inky water, he would push it from his mind, forcing his attention onto the physical act of swimming and trying to keep his place in the count.

He lost his count a handful of times.  Rather than try and guess whether he was at 15,100 or 15,150, Micah just restarted from scratch.  At some point the numbers began to slither around in his mind, echoing off either side of his skull as the repetitive activities drove him half mad.

Eventually, Micah’s hunger and thirst began to gnaw at him.  Even if refresh could take the edge off, his body still needed sustenance.  Unfortunately for Micah, the local marine life was far smarter than him.  As best he could tell, there wasn’t a fish, turtle, shark, or monster anywhere nearby.

Finally, just as he was starting to go delirious from thirst, light began to filter from above.  Micah swam upward, popping his head through the surface.  The air was hazy and tasted like smoke as it attacked his lungs, but for the first time in days, it didn’t send Micah straight into a coughing fit.

A glance upward found the sun, blood red through the volcanic ash that choked the air.  Micah licked his lips, reorienting himself so that he was facing West once more before beginning his interminable swimming.

Later that day, he caught a break.  A flock of seagulls passed overhead, and between flight and air knife, Micah was able to harvest an easy half dozen of the plump birds.  There wasn’t anywhere to stop and cook the meat, so Micah ate them raw.

It should have been disgusting, but honestly, the damp slimy meat was the best thing that he’d ever tasted.  It didn’t matter that the food was bony and musty.  Moisture and calories filled his body, dispelling some of the gloom that had begun to cloud over him.

The next morning, Micah was awoken by his first sunrise in a while.  The air was still polluted by the results of the mass eruption, turning the morning rays of light an angry red, but it still improved his mood immeasurably.  To his right, what Micah believed to be the North, the cloud of volcanic ash and dust was a smear, blotting out most of the horizon.

He rolled over in the water, angling himself between the rising sun and the roiling toxic cloud.  The Amelia had been almost right on course to land in Jakint when he’d been forced to lead the Maarikava away, and it had been almost in the center of the Serpent’s Teeth.  If Micah were to the South of the volcanos now, that could only mean that his time in the darkness had knocked him off course.

This time, when he began swimming, Micah was able to see his progress.  He cut through the waves, powerful arms pulling him toward his destination three to four times faster the Amelia could ever hope to travel.

In a way, not being slowed by the ship was a blessing.  His body attribute was incredibly high, all but the rarest close combat classes lagged behind its development.  More often than not, Micah’s largest limiting factor when he exerted force wasn’t his actual strength, but rather the durability of the tool he was using.

Technically, the fastest way to cross the Emerald Ocean would have been a smaller galley that Drekt and he could row.  The only problem would be enchanting the wood to be able to survive the titanic forces that Micah could exert.  Even with his armor, half of the reason he enchanted it for durability was so that his movements in combat wouldn’t deal more damage to the scales

That night, Micah was woken by a shark, pushed into a frenzy by the bird blood drenching his chest until it attacked his sleeping form.  Well, attack might have been the wrong word.  The creature was certainly trying to gnaw on his torso, but its teeth couldn’t penetrate the Maarikava’s scales.  Instead he just felt pressure as its fangs clicked off of the rock hard scales layering his chest.

Even without a weapon, his hands were more than enough to tear the shark apart.  He’d spent so long fighting higher level monsters, either dungeon escapees or in the dungeons themselves, that he’d almost forgotten about normal animals.

His first punch tore through its rubbery skin.  The second crunched through cartilage, embedding Micah’s fist deep in the shark’s body.  It twitched once before going still.

Once again, Micah ate his fill, more interested in the moisture from the meat than the food itself.  He was still parched by the time he finished, but at least the pounding dehydration headache abated some.

Then, like every other day, cast panacea on himself, purging his body of any illness or parasites, and began swimming.  The blood would draw more sharks, and even if he could handle them, it would only serve to delay Micah further.

Finally, on the fourth day after he left the still visible cloud of volcanic ash, the shore came into view.  A steady line of verdant green stretched across the horizon, clearly not the red granite cliffs that Jakint was built into, but a welcome sight nonetheless.

That night, Micah didn’t sleep.  He kept swimming by starlight, aiming for the growing coastline.  By noon the next day, he’d arrived, washing up on a white sand beach thirty or so paces from the beginning of a massive rainforest.  Trees towered above him, each of them almost as tall as the largest growths in his grove in back in Pereston.

He staggered ashore, stumbling on unsteady legs toward a nearby river that emptied a torrent of fresh water into the Emerald Ocean.  Micah fell to his hands and knees, taking in great gulps of the water as he tried to ignore the pounding dehydration headache that blurred his vision and churned his gut.

Nearby, a large turtle surfaced, cautiously eating some sort of kelp as it kept an eye on Micah.  Birds chittered and flitted from branch to branch in the canopy far above him, undisturbed by the noisily slurping human.

After what felt like twenty minutes of drinking, Micah stopped, once again casting panacea to ward off any infection.  Technically, he could have just boiled the water, a high tier wood magic spell was more than overkill for the sort of naturally occurring diseases he might encounter, but after his long time in the ocean, Micah wasn’t inclined to wait.

He rolled over.  Muscles aching and eyes drooping.  More than anything, he just wanted to nap after his long swim, but just as he was closing his eyes, Micah saw it.

A dagger made of fine steel, a wavy pattern set in its blade lay half buried in the mud of the riverbank next to an unmistakable human footprint.

Wearily, Micah pulled himself to his feet.  He might be lost and in danger, but he wasn’t alone.  Reaching down, he picked up the dagger and tucked it into his belt.  If he had neighbors, it was better to find them and introduce himself while awake and prepared.  He’d prefer not to wake up with a blade to his throat or tied to a tree.