Chrysalis

Chapter 1198: Anthony On Tour – Black Sun

The stone shatters down the middle, shards flying in all directions, then slowing, freezing, and reversing, as they are pulled back to the force of the spell which had sent them flying in the first place.

Now exposed to the air, the bomb makes itself known in the familiar, terrifying way.

I can’t even describe it as a howl, or a shriek. It goes well beyond anything I have experienced before. The air around me is simply ripped away, and the next instant, I’m caught within a hurricane.

The ship creaks and groans worryingly as the winds rip and tear at every loose scrap of cloth, rope and sail. Barrels are whipped straight off the deck, smashing into the railings and tipping right over the top.

The water around us is even worse. Even before the bomb expanded, it was frothing and thrashing, but now it’s straight up storming. Waves rise seemingly at random, smashing into each other. Before I can twitch, the fleet finds itself rising and falling on colossal waves that threaten to capsize the ships at any moment.

Thankfully, more and more of the bubble shields are popping into place as the brathian sailors work their magic, so even if they flip over, the water won’t rush in and drown the ants. Well, so long as the ships don’t rip apart, which is a serious concern!

The unspeakably large chunk of rock is no longer my concern, as above my head, it is being devoured by what I have made.

I’m almost glad I can’t hear anything over the wind, because the noise up there must be dreadful.

No longer caught by the gravity of Pangera, the rock is now falling toward the epicentre of the Gravity Bomb, which hangs in the air like a black sun. It’s hard to even look at it. A black sphere of indeterminate size, the light around it bends and warps in dizzying ways, replicated in each of my thousands of lenses until the image becomes headache-inducing. What is easy to see, is the rate at which it tears the stone apart.

Huge, building-sized chunks are ripped away from the mass, hundreds every second, smashing into each other, tumbling through the air, then falling into a spiral around the void. Like soap suds circling the drain, they whip around and around, torn and shredded over and over again until they vanish into the dark mass, never to be seen again.

At the rate it’s going, it won’t even take that long for the spell to consume the entirety of what the golgari attempted to drop on us. How long is it going to take for the thing to snuff out?

Please, Gandalf, don’t let it last too long.

From the thrashing and frothing waves, spinning towers of water begin to rise as the winds shriek around them. Twisters of dizzying size and power begin to form, sucking the water up, rising higher and higher toward the source of the horrific pull.

It’s already hard at work on me, my legs are locked into place under the railings, and I am struggling to hold on. The main issue I have is that the railing is likely to break well before my legs do, and even then, the boat is going to get pulled up with the water soon!

All in all, things aren’t going well.

I can feel my siblings hard at work in all of the ships around me, adding weight, trying to strengthen and bolster the ships, and some have even begun creating and moulding huge anchors of stone, extending them down beneath the ships, seeking to reach the bottom of the lake. I hope it’s enough.

I myself am frantically trying to put a gravity well together, my exhausted brains limping along, but gaining speed as the fatigue is gradually washed away by the nourishing energy of the Vestibule.

If I had a million ants within range, this would be so much easier, but with only ten thousand, it takes time to recover from exertions like the one that created this mess.

Despite all the chaos that surrounds me, I’m still aware enough to notice when the mountain of Greystone itself begins to take damage. No matter how densely they packed that stone together, there’s no way it can resist the kind of forces that are coming to bear against it. Fracture lines begin to appear up and down the face of the mountain, stone tearing loose and floating up to the waiting maw that is the void.

I’m so glad the bomb went off so far away from the roof of the stratum. If it started ripping into the base of the third, goodness knows what might happen.

Whoops! There goes some of the railing, torn straight off the ship. Not a fan of this development. In an instant, my body starts to rise on one side as my legs wiggle free in the air. Thinking quickly, I bend my legs on the other side, hooking the joint around the wooden beam, then latch my mandibles onto it.

I’m not going anywhere until this railing goes with me! Which won’t be long, let’s be honest.

Come on, brains! Let’s get this show on the road!

The waters around the ship have reached a point where I can’t even see half the fleet anymore. Between the ever-expanding twisters of water and the vicious whirlpools that have formed, not to mention the towering waves that crash over the bubble shield, I’m lucky I can see my own mandibles!

I hear wood buckling and I groan internally as I see the railing begin to rattle and tear, rising up from the deck it’s nailed to.

Well, nards.

Desperate, I check on the progress of the gravity well, and I can’t say I’m pleased with what I see. My brains have been doing their best, but creating a well strong enough to counteract the thing overhead, which I dumped all of my own personal reserve of gravity mana into, simply isn’t going to happen. I’m just going to have to let it rip and hope for the best.

Which is what I do, unleashing the Gravity Well and empowering it with the little dregs of the energy the Altar has been able to gather from my siblings in this short time frame. The spell snaps into place, covering the entire fleet.

Let it be enough.