Chapter 744: First Objective (1/2)
The light let go of them all at once, and the Regalons landed on wet black sand under a sky the color of old steel.
The island rose behind the beach in tiers of dark rock and pale forest, maybe six miles across at its widest, ringed on every side by an ocean that stretched to the horizon without a single break. The water was a deep, strange blue, almost violet where the light hit it, and it moved with a slow patience that made everyone watching it feel, without knowing why, that it was watching back.
The Hub wrote their welcome across the sky before anyone had taken ten steps.
[War Event: Conquest of Thurmugin Ocean]
[First Objective: Your starting island is sinking. Build a vessel from native materials and leave before full submersion.]
[Time Remaining: 24:00:00]
The counter started falling the moment they finished reading it.
"Well," Ainen said into the silence, "at least the event is honest about wanting us dead."
Marcus was already moving. "Look at the waterline." He pointed down the beach, where the wet sand ran a full thirty paces higher than the water currently stood, up to a dark stain on the rocks. "That’s not a tide mark. The stain is fresh the whole way. The water isn’t coming and going. It’s only coming."
Fraisea crouched at the edge of the surf, her eyes going pale as her analytics settled over the water. "He’s right. The island is dropping at a steady rate, a little over a hand’s width every ten minutes. Faster near the end, if the rate curves the way I think it will."
"So the deadline is real," Rudra said, "and probably generous by less than they want us to think." He turned from the ocean to the island, and everyone could see the Admiral settle over him like a coat he had never really taken off. "Then we do this properly. Nobody touches that water. Not a boot, not a finger, until we understand it."
Almond picked up a piece of driftwood from the sand, and then, on instinct, drew one of his own Grimblades and held them side by side. The Essence of All Things opened behind his eyes, and he read both objects down to the single truth at the core of each.
"The driftwood carries something," he said slowly. "A signature. It’s in the grain, in every fiber. The ocean put it there. My blade doesn’t have it." He looked up. "That’s the rule made physical. This water only holds up things that carry its mark."
Rudra took the Grimblade from him, walked to the surf line, and tossed it out onto the water.
It did not float for even a moment. It did not even splash properly. The violet water simply opened and took it, straight down, like the blade had been dropped through a hole in the world, and the surface closed over it without a ripple.
Nobody spoke for a second. Then Silvester let out a low whistle. "Five seconds under that, and you don’t come back. Understood. Message received. Thank you, ocean."
Almond called the blade back through his spirit link, and it returned to his hand soaked and cold and somehow heavier, as if the water had been reluctant to give even that much back.
"Twenty-four hours," Big D rasped, planting himself on the high sand where the whole beach could see him. "Four hundred of us, one island, one ship big enough to carry a kingdom. Marcus, carve it up."
Marcus carved it up in under two minutes, because he had been carving up impossible jobs since the bottom plane.
Rudra took overall command of the build, because a fleet man builds ships the way other men breathe. Gopu, who had come through deployment in his preferred dragon form and was already eyeing the treeline with an engineer’s hunger, took the construction itself. Almond took materials, because no one else on the island could look at a log and read whether the ocean would love it or swallow it.
Lily took the hidden things. Ainen took processing, and said only, "Bring me anything. I will decide what it wants to become." Hiroshi and Maya took protection for the forest teams, because an island in a war event was never just an island. Natalia and Kayla took the beach, the perimeter, and the sky. Fraisea stayed on the water. Saffa and Clovelle went with Gopu.
"Questions?" Marcus asked.
"One," Aryan said, deadpan, already shouldering his pack. "Does anyone else find it concerning that the event’s first move is to drown its own map?"
"Deeply," Marcus said. "Go."
The kingdom scattered into the island, and the counter fell.
---
The forest gave them their first answer inside the hour.
The pale trees that covered the island’s middle tiers were like nothing from home, smooth grey bark over wood so light that a trunk two men could not wrap their arms around came off the ground with one. Almond laid his palm on the first felled log and read it, and the ocean’s signature ran through it bright and deep.
"Palewood," he named it, for lack of anything better. "It floats. It floats almost aggressively. But it’s soft." He dug a thumbnail into the grain to show them. "A hull of only this would ride high and beautiful for about as long as it takes something out there to hit us once."
"Then it’s the flesh, not the bones," Gopu rumbled. The dragon was moving down the treeline as he spoke, layered dragonfire held low and precise in his throat, felling trees with single measured breaths that cut cleaner than any saw. "Find me bones."
The bones turned up on the island’s north shore, where the rock met the water in fields of tide pools, and the tide pools were full of crabs the size of shields. Their shells were a deep glassy blue, hard enough that Hiroshi’s first testing strike rang off one like a bell, and when a soldier tossed a broken shell fragment into the shallows, it bobbed there, riding the violet water as easily as the palewood had.
"Armor that floats," Hiroshi said, cracking his knuckles as the crab fields began to notice them. "I withdraw every complaint I’ve made today."
The crabs objected to the harvest with considerable violence, and the harvest happened anyway. Maya’s interlocking vanguard patterns turned the tide pool fields into an orderly production line, stunning and hauling, and runners started moving shells inland to Ainen’s fires by the dozen.
Ainen had set up in a clearing at the forest’s edge, and what he was running there was not a kitchen and was not a forge and was somehow completely both. The Grand Table did not care that a crab shell was not food. It found the form inside the shell that could be broken down, and Ainen rendered the glassy blue material into sheets and ribs and nails the way another man might reduce a stock, tasting the work with his fingers, adjusting, entirely in his element.
"Whoever designed my card," he said to a passing runner, "understood that cooking was always just polite violence. Tell Gopu the first hull plates are ready."
By the sixth hour, the skeleton of something enormous was rising on the high beach, and it was no longer a question of whether the Regalons could build a ship. It was a question of whether the island would let them finish it.
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