Chapter 45 Catastrophe.

  Walter was sitting in the tea room on the Ashborne floor of the noble tower in Material de la Celestia. He was in the middle of a conversation with Lady Ashborne about specific naturally forming plants creating certain types of extreme reactions when mixed together. He reached for his freshly refilled teacup when all of the sudden the entire tower rattled. The teacup clattered against its plate and Lady Ashborne barely kept from spilling the tea in her hand. In less than two full seconds Lord Ashborne was in the room with them. He staggered slightly from overusing his teleportation, he had probably teleported three or four times in that span of time in order to get there, and grabbed onto the doorframe for support only for it to be even more shaky than his knees.

  Lord Ashborne and Walter shared a look. “Catastrophe.” Walter said what both he and his adoptive father were thinking.

  Lady Ashborne sighed. “Someone needs to make some kind of magic that warns everyone before that girl tries to split Primatia in two.” She complained.

  —

  Phantom was in the middle of sparring with a street kid that he had picked up. It was going to be his last day in Sapphirestone for a while, he needed to get back to Safeharbor, he had been gone for too long, and the boy had wanted to get one last lesson in before the Phantom of Darkness had to leave once more. The ground suddenly rumbled and the boy took a tumble, Phantom had been in the middle of an attack and nearly caught the boy in the throat as he fell into his strike. At the last second Phantom’s wooden curved sword turned its blade sideways and shot forwards and up slightly, far faster than the falling boy could react, and the flat of Phantom’s blade practically clotheslined the boy. At least he only hit the ground with his knees and not his nose.

  “W-what’s goin’ on boss?” The boy asked the Phantom who had frozen in place as soon as he had saved the current slum kid, future Shadow of Darkness, from getting a mouthful of dirt.

  “Get to the hideout on the surface.” Phantom told the boy. “I might be stuck in Sapphirestone for another day or two. Just, stay out of the tunnels for the next day or two.”

  The boy nodded. “Sure, I can do that.” He assured the man who had ripped the guts out of Sapphirestone’s underworld and remade them in his own image. It had been a lot easier once Isaac and Lenna had butchered most of the key players and stolen nearly all of the wealth in the undercity.

  “And keep an eye on the ocean.” Phantom added almost as an afterthought. The boy knew better than to ignore anything that Phantom said however and would make sure that not only himself but everyone he knew would keep a close eye on the ocean for the next two days. The boy didn’t know why it was important but he refused to be the one idiot to get himself killed because he didn’t take the Phantom’s words seriously.

  The Phantom in question had heard once that ground tremors could cause tsunamis and if Storm wasn’t nearby to try and stop or at least lessen one, the port side of town could be underwater by the end of the next day. He wasn’t sure if it was real or not but the very sudden and severe ground tremor had practically thrown that memory into his face.

  —

  “EEEEP!” Madeline jumped as a glass toppled free from the cabinet. She had been putting the cleaned glassware away when the whole manor started rattling. She heard a loud crash outside somewhere and another glass broke as it rattled against its neighbor.

  “Madeline! Martha!” Margaret called from the living room.

  “Mom! Mom! Mom! The house is shaking!” Martha yelled as she ran down the stairs.

  “Everyone to the front door!” Margaret ordered them and practically appeared next to Madeline with her hand around the teenager’s arm. “Now!”

  —

  “Alexander. Report.” Izen spoke aloud and through a mental connection that the Court Mage had made with him as soon as the rattling started.

  “So far the cavern appears to be stable.” Alexander replied as an array that rarely ever activated was showing him a projection of the entire cavern’s structure.

  “Good. If anything changes, well, I suppose I would probably hear it.” Izen said with a frown.

  “I will let you know.” Alexander assured him. “What of Ben’s End and Outpost Charles?”

  “Once we are positive that there won’t be a follow-up tremor, take Michael and check Ben’s End. For now, message Edward and have him check in with the interim Guild Master in Outpost Charles.” Izen gave his orders. The interim Guild Master was actually just the Guild Receptionist who had been forced to take on the Guild Master’s duties. Not that there were very many adventurers out there to busy a Guild Master in the first place.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Understood.” Alexander confirmed and cut the connection.

  “The boys are on it?” Sera asked her husband as she sat perfectly calm with her tea still in her hand.

  “Yes.” Izen replied.

  Sera nodded. “Marie, grab four ducal guards and meet me at the front door. We should do an inspection. It will help to calm the people and if there are any collapsed buildings then we will be able to get help to them faster.”

  “On it.” Marie replied and launched into action.

  “Sera.” Izen said with a frown. “What if-”

  “I won’t have it, my love.” Sera told her husband with the same gaze that had initially drawn him to her. “Continue organizing everything from here. Marie will protect me and if we require additional assistance then you will be informed. Have Tim be ready to dispatch guardsmen for rescue operations. Make sure he has a few healers on standby.”

  Izen sighed in resignation. “Yes, my Lady.” He told her with a bow of his head and a smirk that was barely hidden by his beard.

  —

  Gilgamesh’s booming laughter did little to help the poor chandeliers and windowpanes. Tizshamesh just froze in place as his body absorbed all of the energy the ground was trying to impart into him and the minute shockwaves from his companions boisterous laughter.

  —

  “Please, stay here, Your Majesties.” Oliver Von Victoria said and cast a Reality Wall in a half circle over all three of them. He was one of the few people permitted to teleport and cast spells within the Royal Palace and he had instantly shown everyone why. He was not just a duke, nor was he just an advisor to the king, nor was he just a wizard, Oliver Von Victoria was the King’s Wand which meant that in this instance, he was also his Majesty’s Reality Shield.

  All of the windows in the towers cracked or broke entirely. Nearly one hundred other windows suffered a similar fate across the city. But that was not the worst of it. A few locations along the wall had cracked stone blocks and no less than two dozen buildings collapsed. By some miracle of Lua’s perfect plan, no one died from a single collapsed building in any city that had suffered catastrophic building failure.

  —

  Judgment frowned as his church to Justice rattled. He was going to have words with Catastrophe the next time they met. Maybe with a hammer of justice thrown in the mix. She deserved no less for whatever collateral damage her most recent spell had caused. She had been warned about using such unreasonably destructive measures in the past. He rose to his feet, turned on his heel, and strode out of the temple in search of anyone unlucky enough to have been a victim of Catastrophe being exactly that.

  —

  Jane, or Catastrophe as many knew her, had never been exactly normal as a child. Growing up, from as far back as she could remember, her favorite things were thunder, puzzles, and staring into a fire in that order. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, she didn’t hide inside, under or in her parents’ bed as so many other village children did, no, she would stand outside in the pouring rain and stare up at the clouds. She once had a grand plan, at the ripe old age of eight, that if she could get struck by lightning then she could awaken magic powers like the storm sorceresses of far off lands or maybe even like Storm themselves.

  Jane’s village was on the other side of the planes. She was not a native of the Kingdom of Altia and in fact rarely spent a lot of time in the well protected kingdom. Altia had enough old monsters living in it that they didn’t need her. Now, looking out over her own destruction, she was starting to second guess that plan. Maybe being closer to the old dragon was a good thing. He was the best informed singular individual in the world after all. If anyone knew anything at any time, it was Gilgamesh, the Keeper of Knowledge. How the old brute had managed to gain such a title from just his hobby, Jane could only guess but it was what it was.

  When Jane had grown up, she had done everything that she had to in order to get into a magic academy and learn wizardry. It was a decent backup plan after getting struck by lightning didn’t work out. While there, she learned that her two favorite things were explosion magics and chemical explosions. That was where her proficiency in alchemy started and her obsession with chemistry. She had always been chasing Control Weather, Meteor Storm, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and Heaven’s Fall. Those were spells that had been legendary in so many stories and were cornerstones in forming her path that lead to where she was today.

  Speaking of chemistry, what she had just done, the explosion that had rattled widows countries over, was just a wonderful application of chemistry facilitated by magic. It would have been even better if she had a few more mages with her to handle the Control Weather for her. She knew that she was the only one who could cast tenth level spells but an arch mage or two working together could have handled the Control Weather just fine, well, as long as they were also as obsessed with chemistry as she was.

  Hydrogen stops burning and starts exploding between thirty and forty percent saturation. Nitric Oxide is an oxidizer which means it will help Oxygen do its half of what Jane had been planning. Electricity is great at helping to rearrange chemical bonds, especially when it is on the level of a lightning strike magnitudes more powerful than a naturally occurring one. The right finesse with the way the lighting spread out, the right altered composition of the rain water to include more chloride and sodium than any other non-water molecules, the right air currents pushing the key components back into the center of the tornado, and then finally, the right spark. With the addition of oils and plant matter as ‘solid’ combustibles for the flames from her tenth level Fireball, known as Sapphire Star, to feed off of, everything was set up as perfectly as she could physically and magically make it without external help. In the end, it was just as amazing as she had hoped.

  It was truly a boom that would go down in history. It was the singular most potent explosion a singular human, even a demigod, had created to date. There was only one person who could ever match her but he had never tried. That just meant that it was up to her to hit Gia hard enough to wake the old bitch up. Not that she would ever say something like that out loud. That was a good way to get Space, Time, Gravity, and Gilgamesh to smear her corpse across her own divine domain. If they actually thought that she was trying to cause the greatest cataclysm, the most catastrophic catastrophe in all of creation, then they would definitely put her down for good. Maybe she was over reacting, but she had seen them end a demigod before and did not want to be the next on the list. So instead, she stuck to this. The biggest booms she could make without dying for real.

  Jane shook herself from her worries and wiped her mouth of the expelled mana potions she had just watered the plants with. There were still some undead left, the one that had been thrown into the upper clouds by the tornado and then blasted nearly into orbit by the explosion, as well as the ones who had gotten lucky by some other means. In the end, by her mana senses and constantly active Detect Magic vision, she could see the one on the ground Isaac had pointed out, three more falling from what might as well have been low orbit, and one that had gotten launched into the far distance. That one was ‘lost’. She would make sure to tell Gilgamesh that they lost at least one but there were plenty of Guild Masters and Archmages around who could handle one of them on their own. Two would be too much but one was definitely doable for anyone worthy of being called a Guild Master.

  “Clark, tell them there are more falling from the sky.” Jane told her apprentice. He at least still had mana left. “Oh, but only the tea guy doesn’t have mental protections.”

  Amaranth Serentia V'Nova Wexler