Chapter 43 That Kind Of Crazy.

  The howl of the dead. That was what the winds sounded like to Isaac, Lenna, Shamesh, and Clark as they watched the winds pick up. The winds continued to speed up more and more until they became an opaque white. The doom funnel reached down from the heavens until it made contact with the ground in the dead center of where the undead had once swarmed. The howl got lower and the hum of a cubic mile of violently twisting air built as it gathered more and more of itself. The ground picked up and was torn apart as the funnel made landfall. It only took a few moments for the funnel shape to stabilize into a cylinder and then steadily increase in size.

  Isaac swallowed as his heart raced. His heart pounded in his chest as hard, if not harder than it had when he was fighting Jallen V’Nova or in the middle of getting Meteor Stormed by Shamsha. It was incredible and terrifying in a way that only a natural disaster could be. He felt the howl of the wind in his chest and feet as the funnel turned brown and green. The winds nearby had turned eerily quiet for a moment before air started coming in from behind them. The unwavering breeze coming from behind them steadily increased until it felt almost as if the tornado itself had a magnetic pull on everything within a few miles of itself.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be another mage in there?” Isaac asked in awe. “How are you fighting through the dispels? Are they even trying to dispel this?”

  “Oh, they can’t.” Jane said with a grin. “My spell isn’t even within a mile of them, not directly anyway. This is all nature in all of her fury. I just spurned her on and gave her some direction.” Jane’s eyes were the entire rainbow as her mana, her magic, was so intense that her body physically changed while she was using it. Isaac could feel the power just in her eyes and knew that she was watching the way the mana itself moved along with her every motion and the tornado’s every shift and twitch.

  Isaac swallowed. It wasn’t often that he was put in his place on the power pyramid but just that day he had been reminded no less than three times. Maybe even four if he was counting the way Klein talked about Strength. He now understood why the demigods let him mess around and claim to be one of them. If he ever did something bad enough that they would need to step in, he wouldn’t stand a chance in the first place. He simply wasn’t strong enough to matter, not yet anyway. Maybe one day he would be like Gilgamesh. Someone so powerful that the mana within their local area was permanently bent to their will, but only time would tell. As it was, he was just a child wearing an adult’s armor and carrying an adult’s sword. There were normal adults wielding the same, like Judgment, but there were also sword masters, like Klein and Ori. Then there were adults who used actual barrels of explosives like Jane and maybe Storm.

  Isaac thought he picked out a small figure being sucked up into the tornado but blinked it away until he saw another and another. “What is that?” He asked and pointed at one that was orbiting the tornado that had now reached an impressive one mile width. Non-magical lightning had started crashing across the heavens as the clouds overhead just continued to build. She was not just forcing a tornado to spawn as Isaac had originally expected, no, she was doing exactly what she had said that she was. She was using nature like a block and tackle. She was using an eighth level spell to do more damage than a tenth level one because she had already used a tenth level one to create all of what she needed and then had simply started pushing it in the right direction.

  “Undead.” Jane told him. “Those powerful ones I’d wager. Probably like the one you fought on the other side of the range.” She was talking about the one that Isaac had fought in Alten but obviously had trouble with all of the names involved. “Do ya think you can handle a hundred of them?”

  “I can try.” Isaac replied with grim determination. “But only Shamesh or yourself can actually get rid of them. We used the Reaper’s power to forcefully pass on the souls trapped inside of the undead to cleanse them last time. I think disintegration should still do the trick though, right?”

  “Kinda.” Jane said with a rueful grin. “They are resistant.”

  “Resistant to disintegration?” Isaac asked incredulously.

  “Yep.” Jane confirmed. “Total obliteration, Boat Man, or some trick you have up your sleeve.”

  “I can’t break apart an amalgamation of souls like that unless they have somehow become more vulnerable and not less so from being merged together.” Isaac explained.

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  “Unlikely.” Shamesh put in his own thoughts based off of what he was seeing with his Soul Sight.

  “How many did you see?” Isaac asked his retainer.

  “It was hard to tell at that distance. I would estimate just under one hundred and fifty.” Shamesh replied. “Would we be able to lock their limbs inside of a Bottomless Bag?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Jane said with a shrug. “Unless it messes with the pass-on ritual in some way?”

  Isaac shook his head. “It shouldn’t.” He began. “The Reaper only needed the head and main body. There is one other slight problem though, Lua definitely won’t be able to help. We’ll be more or less completely relying on The Reaper’s willingness and whatever other restrictions he is under to allow him to help us.”

  “Just do what you need to. They are going to start falling soon.” Jane informed him. “I can push them back into it, but some of them are still going to just get slung out.”

  “Say, have you ever lit one of those on fire?” Isaac wondered.

  Jane’s wicked grin nearly split her face in two. “Give me a potion.” She told Clark and held out her hand. “It is gonna get hot and very bright.” She explained as she received the potion from her apprentice. She slammed it like an alcoholic five shots deep into the night. “I was holding back a bit but if you are fine with the heat and light, then I’ll cut loose.”

  “I am married to a woman who Fireball’s herself on a regular basis and has lit herself on fire to kill something, and also once just to make a statement.” Isaac told Jane flatly. “If it gets a bit hot, then it gets a bit hot. As for the light, shadows are the darkest when the light is brightest. By all means, cut loose.”

  Jane knelt down and planted one of her fists into the ground. She was barely containing laughter even as she prepared to bring the hells to the surface of Primatia. “Tool for light, fuel for fire, food for might, douse my ire.” She chanted and the ground in front of her started to shine with all manner of oils. “Gather and move as Lua does to the tides, wash and sway forth and glide.” She followed her first spell and all of the oil that saturated the ground in front of her started to wash down hill towards the tornado. “Gather and move as Lua does to the tides, wash and sway forth and glide.” She chanted once more and then a third and fourth time. Each time she did so, the oil sped up until it was barreling down towards the edges of the tornado. The liquid gathered more and more until it was a ball of fuel waiting for a match to set it off.

  “Oh she’s that kind of crazy.” Isaac commented.

  “What kind?” Lenna wondered.

  “The kind that would get along very well with Walter.” Isaac replied. “Though I’m not sure how well this is going to work.” He confessed. “There really isn’t that much oil and…” His voice trailed off as he noticed all of the dead plant debris being funneled back into the tornado. “She’s going to flash ignite the whole funnel.” Isaac said with wide eyes. He slowly turned to Jane who was trying, and failing, to suppress manic giggling. “Are you going to ignite the compressed air in the funnel by flash burning all of the oil and plant material?”

  “Yeah.” Jane giggled with obvious manic glee.

  “Two questions.” Isaac began. “The first is, will that even work?” He then looked at her with a much more worried expression. “And the second is, that won’t spread at all will it? Like, the atmosphere itself isn’t going to ignite, right? There is a lot of flammable shit in the air and if it gets that ridiculously hot, won’t we risk the atmosphere itself igniting?”

  “Oh you worry too much.” Jane told him and rose to her feet and she redoubled her focus on her Control Weather spell. “We are not causing a fire, that wouldn’t actually end up doing very much against the undead in question, no, use your brain young mage.”

  Isaac’s brows furrowed as he watched and felt what was happening. He thought back on each word that Jane had said and what she was known for. This was not a demigod of magic that he was standing next to, no, this was a demigod of Catastrophes. As in all things that caused widespread destruction or suffering. Technically she could have poison smoke bombed a city and it still would have been in her purview. Isaac brought his wandering mind back on track a bit and started thinking more and more about what exactly was happening in a more scientific way.

  “The oxygen and hydrogen in the water is still bound so an explosion is out of the picture…” He realized it as soon as he said it and looked up. The lighting that had been flying freely across the sky was starting to move in odd ways. More and more it started striking towards the tornado directly. A few even followed the funnel the entire way down to the ground, ricocheting off of a few of the undead inside on its way down. The lightning was altering the makeup of the air. His head hurt as his brain tried to pull on more and more knowledge that had but was connected to events and memories that he had traded away. “You are going to blow up the whole gods damned tornado in a hydrogen oxygen explosion.” He spoke in equal parts shock and realization.

  “Right on the money kid.” Jane said and prepared to cast another spell to further set the stage. She had to get everything just right if she wanted it to go off. Making explosions was actually harder than a lot of people thought. A proper boom required a lot of planning, perfect conditions, and enough fuel to power it. It was a lot like a spell. In fact, Jane had first made that connection while using the Fireball spell. A spell that she had since made a tenth level version of, two of them in fact. One that was more of a whoosh of stone-meltingly hot flames and another that was more of a boom that could break windows a mile away. “Potion.” She told Clark and he handed her another. She looked a bit queasy at the potion but slammed it anyway. She momentarily held onto her stomach but then took another sip of Shamesh’s ginger tea and resolved herself to force through the nausea. It was for a good cause, explosions and destruction were always a good cause in her book. Even more so when there weren’t any innocents in the blast zone.