Chapter 17 – Flying through the Shadow Filled Skies

“Ready,” I yelled and Shart continued waving his hands around.

“Not yet, air currents are going to be a bitch,” he yelled.

“Hurry up, those shadow chickens brought friends,” said Badgelor as he blasted away another bird.

It was Link to the Past all over again.

If you told me my plan to slingshot myself onto the flying, tentacle covered shadow whale was going to fail because angry birds were upset at me going after their eggs I would have called you a liar.

“We could have found another lubricant,” said Shart.

“They know what they did,” I hissed.  I was holding the catapult closed through stamina alone, but it was just enough that I couldn’t use tireless stamina to maintain my hold forever.

“Stay on target,” said Badgelor.

“Almost there,” said Shart.

“Pull up,” I announced, yanking the counterweight and flinging myself into oblivion.

I summoned the glider instantly, confident it would last long enough to get me into range.  That was based more on hope than evidence.  I’d done what repairs I could, but I didn’t have the right skills to actually fully repair the glider, or come even reasonably close.

Still, I was high level and the repairs weren’t impossible.  As the shadow whale continued to expand in my vision I held out hope for a bare instant that everything was going to go well.  Then the glider’s wing snapped off.

Without a moment's hesitation, I grabbed Shart and threw him under my feet.

“Feck you,” were his last words as I sprung off of him and launched myself towards the shadow whale.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t going to make it.  Glancing down, we were well over the ocean.

“Any bright ideas?” asked Badgelor.

I extended my hand and pulsed a small amount of mana through my anti-magical field.  One of the whales long tentacles instantly snapped towards me.  I blinked to the side and used my whip to attach to the tentacle.

The whale wasn’t fond of that, and pulled the tentacle back but by then I was already bound to it.  We carved through the air as the tentacle flailed about trying to fling me off.  It didn’t work, my grip was so firm on the weapon that it might as well have been part of my arm.

“Release when I say so,” said Badgelor.

I nodded.  While I wasn’t going to be thrown off, I also didn’t have a good idea of how I was supposed to actually land on the stupid whale.  On the other hand, being whipped around like this was earning me some serious Mitigate skill points.  That was always the counterpoint on Ordinal, you might get punished but every time you did you got skill points.

“Now,” yelled Badgelor and I released the binding on my whip.  The barbed end slipped off of the whale’s tentacle and we were sailing through the air.  Badgelor expanded to ultimate size and aimed for the back.

We smashed into it right behind the blowhole.

“That’s impressive,” I said, Dodging a tentacle that was trying to clear us off the whale’s back.

“You should see me with a dragon,” grinned badgelor using his destructive gaze to slice off a tentacle that didn’t get the point.  Two more shots and the Shadow Whale no longer had any tentacles capable of defending it from the top.

“I choose you, Shart,” I said, causing the annoyed demon to pop into existence on my shoulder.

“You kicked me onto one of those cow things,” grumbled Shart, several hoof prints visible on his face.

“I assume he got the worst of it,” I offered.

“Yes,” grumbled the demon, “But still, you should have kicked off of Badgelor.”

“He bites,” I said.

Badgelor shot a toothy grin at Shart.  He did have a surprising number of teeth.

“Now what?” I asked.  We were sailing high over the ground, not as high as the LOOKOUT! Of course, but we were still up high enough that picking out the details on the ground forced me to use my Perception skill.  With no means of controlling the whale, we might be were safe from ground based predators but we were open season to sky based hazards, and there were plenty of those.

I looked at several clouds that were full of dark, flickering shadow lightning.

“Well, this is where I work my magic,” said Shart, wiggling his fingers.  Within moments he cast two portals on either side of the Shadow Whale’s head.

“You can cast them on a living creature,” I groaned.

“Only if it is large enough to allow the portal to expand naturally,” said Shart.  “I just cheated and made the portals really small.”

Of course, you could do that.  I made portals repeatedly, but I always made them the same size.  Given how many variables there were with any spell, I was sure that I could expand or shrink the portals if the urge had struck me.

As my Familiar, Shart could fully access any spell I could cast.  I could even feel my Biological Aeromancy core engage while the runes necessary to power the gateways opened up.  I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but Shart had his own pool of mana so I pushed it out of mind.

It wasn’t like Badgelor and I weren’t already sharing a health and stamina pool.

Shart waved his hand and the creature suddenly turned left, and then again causing the creature to turn right.

“Impressive, now all we need to do is find Windfall,” I said.

“That’s not hard,” said Badgelor pointing towards the distance.  It took me a moment to notice it, but there were subtle markers everywhere.  A breeze here, a flicker of lightning here. A massive stream of pure shadow mana that flowed underneath the ocean before splitting into the sky in a shower of dark energy, all pointing straight towards Windfall.

“The Ley Line,” I said, realizing what it was.  There was a massive ley line of shadow mana flowing underneath Windfall.  Charles used it to power the barrier.  On Ordinal the ley line was mostly concealed, here in the Shadow Realm it was a massive, throbbing wound in the landscape.

Now that I was looking for ley lines, I found several.  There was a fire line running down the coast.  Several lines of earth ran through the mountains, and several water lines ran through the ocean matching the currents.  The air ley lines were not even bound into the ground, they appeared as massive jagged lightning bolts perpetually jolting across the sky.

“Why are the ley lines so obvious?” I asked.

“The Radiant Mana on Ordinal enforces Order, this is what it looks like if you can filter out that kind of mana,” said Shart.

I brought up my Arcane Sight and scanned the distance.  Carefully I focused on just the Air Mana until that was all that showed up in my arcane vision.  When i had just arrived, I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do next, but now I realized that there was an opposite to the action I’d just taken.  I concentrated on not seeing the Air Mana and slowly it dimmed in my vision.  I continued focusing on it until the air ley line vanished entirely.

· Skill Up: Arcane Sight rank up to Master.  You gain another Perk.

Scanning my options, I chose Two Worlds.  It was a perk that granted you the ability to separate your vision into Mana and ‘normal’ modes.

“That’s trippy,” I said, practicing focusing on each individual kind of Mana.  Surprisingly, I was invisible to my own Arcane Sight.  I forced myself back into using Perception and could see myself normally.

“Figured out you made yourself invisible magically,” said Shart.

“Yes,” I grumbled.

Shart had already directed the Shadow Whale towards Windfall.  I settled down, safer on the giant hell spawned monster than anywhere else we’d been since we got here. Badgelor was still scanning the air with his laser vision at the ready. While we knew the top of this sky beast was disarmed, nothing else did and he relaxed slightly as well.

“So the earth ley lines make up the continent?” I asked. The pattern was blazingly obvious when seen from this side, like the back of a cross-stitch. “What governs the pattern?”

Shart was about to call me a dum dum, but the question derailed him. The little demon watched me for a moment before responding. “Each world uses divine shards to balance out their mana network. Depending on their placement in the astral plane, you get various shapes.”

“Astral plane?” I asked.

“It is a fancy way of saying where they are connection to the Essence layer of the world,” said Shart plopping down. “Or more simply, their physical locations are irrelevant to where they were affixed to Ordinal’s Essence layer.”

“So that’s how we got the donut?” I asked.

“Yup, Michael was in charge of the placement right after the war. He dropped them like this to give us a single Mega continent. It wasn’t perfect, that massive Shadow leyline is obviously a bit much, but aside from the islands just east of the main landmass there isn’t anything else.”

“A bit much?” I asked.

“He said it was to keep all the problems in one place, but that is a tremendous amount of power to be moving through a single point,” said Shart. “I half expected the world to unravel when Charles grabbed the divine shard.”

“But it didn’t?” I asked.

“Obviously, Dum Dum,” said Shart. “Michael always knew macro leyline manipulation better than I did, he said the math worked and he was right,” said Shart. “Like usual.”

“And if one gets destroyed?” I asked.

“The leylines would reassemble themselves,” said Shart. “It would be cataclysmic.”

“And if Badgelor eats the crystal?” I asked.

“Then it goes into a buffer, I grab it and throw it back into the dungeon where the other two are stored,” said Shart. “If you actually break it, then things get interesting.”

“Interesting is never good.”