Page 29 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

But Alphonse had already grabbed me and plunged us underwater, with debris hitting down everywhere from the creature’s attack. We surfaced in time to watch the latest group of guards who’d just come in turn around and flee. Along with half of the ballroom, who looked like they’d lost faith in this particular goddess, and they knew the monster better than I did.

“Shit!” Alphonse said, grabbing an abandoned trident off a small, floating table. “Stop time!” he yelled.

And, yeah, I could do that, but that was one of the hardest Pythian spells. It would sap my energy for the rest of the day, no portal needed. So, if I pulled that trick out of the bag and it wasn’t enough. . .

“Damn it, do something!” Alphonse yelled because the colossal creature had just spotted us again.

“Chimera!” I said, defaulting to a slightly less taxing spell, and felt the intensely creepy sensation of my body splitting into two identical Cassies. We could only channel half of the power each this way, but half was better than dead.

My doppelganger broke away from me, and we went in opposite directions, with Alphonse grabbing me and swimming below a mass of small, floating tables that obscured the world above us like water lilies on a pond. But it must have also obscured the view from up top since Cthulhu turned the other way. And started even more waves crashing about as it searched for my double.

We surfaced to see the other Cassie fire off a spell and miss and then show off some of the next-level shit Gertie had beaten into me, sometimes literally. So many times, I had gone to bed aching in every muscle, feeling drained and inadequate, and sometimes having to get up again to puke my guts out, but I had learned. As demonstrated when I watched myself disappear, but not because I’d shifted.

“What happened?” Alphonse said. “Where’d she go?”

“There,” I said as my doppelganger reappeared after speeding up time for her and her only and covering half the length of a football field in an eyeblink. And firing again from behind the behemoth.

And this time, she hit.

One of the biggest limbs was erased in a storm of ash, and with the next blow, she tore a furrow across the huge head because it hadn’t quite knocked her spell aside fast enough. She disappeared again before another leg splashed down into the water where she’d been floating, and three more limbs vanished in seconds, with her firing while still in quick time. It was an impressive display, not least because it had taken maybe five seconds from our perspective.

Throughout training, I’d usually been eating Agnes’ dust, but as it turned out, I wasn’t so bad myself. I grinned. Wonder what two of us can do, I thought, preparing to join the fight—right before a spell flashed across my eyes.

I got a shield up in time—just—because I’d been trained to feel magic coming at me. When you’re blindfolded and surrounded by a bunch of gleeful initiates who have been given carte blanche to beat the hell out of you, you learn fast. I’d had welts on my body for days from that particular piece of fun, but it had sharpened my instincts considerably, as had the many subsequent repeats.

So, yeah, I got a shield up, but there wasn’t one spell coming at me; there were a dozen or more, all spattering the shield’s surface with a multitude of colors in the red-to-orange spectrum, cutting off my view. Somebody meant business, and apparently, I wasn’t dying fast enough to suit them. And then I was diving again and taking Alphonse with me because I had shielded him, too.

“Fuck!” he stared at me as we shot away underwater, using the debris field as cover once again. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“You have vampire eyes,” I snarled, already feeling the heat of the rapidly depleting air inside the shield, because I hadn’t made it big enough, damn it! “What direction?”

“Don’t know. Multiple. I didn’t know what was happening ‘till your shield closed over us, and the next second, the bastards were hitting us. But somebody’s got good aim.”

And they still did. We’d been close to the staircase, and the crowd clogging it, meaning the blows had probably come from there. We’d put some distance between us now, but the spell light followed us, blooming on the water’s surface like distant suns.

Or not so distant, as I felt the impact of several more blows and the subsequent drain on my power to support the shield. And considering that spells are like bullets in a way, namely that water usually stops them after a short distance, somebody was putting some power behind those bolts. Or using water magic for all I knew, which was nothing as I hadn’t studied elemental!

I’d barely had time to learn my brand of magic, but I did know it. Which was why I let the next spell penetrate the shield, just far enough for my magic to loop around it and catch hold. And then I did a return to sender that would have made Gertie proud.

I didn’t hear anybody scream because everyone was, but the attack abruptly cut out, allowing Alphonse and me to surface. I watched water bead on my shield and stared around, looking for another problem. Only we didn’t find one—except for the massive monster that was trashing the room and, a moment later, took out the surviving lights overhead.

Someone had gotten smart and spelled them to shine directly into its one eye, or maybe they were designed that way, to highlight whatever the big deal was at the moment. Either way, our current big deal didn’t like that and had swiped them off the ceiling with one gigantic arm, plunging them into the depths and us into darkness. For about ten seconds, I blinked with only multicolored after-effects strobing my vision.

And then we got a new and much more deadly form of light.

Pritkin took advantage of the cover of darkness and started throwing firebolts like they were going out of style while constantly moving, having the creature attack where he’d just been and where the residual spell light was still lighting up the night. But the creature’s spell resistance threw off the effects of some of the blasts, and it dodged the rest. Until he hurled something substantially bigger, something that had all the staring faces around the hall illuminated in bright red, including that of the creature.

Which flung up an arm at the last second to save itself, and spell-resistance or no, the massive limb promptly burst into flames.

“Looks like it’s got a new enemy number one,” Alphonse said, as it started after Pritkin, not by finding him but by using the telescoping tentacles to attack on all sides, all at once.

So, I sent a bolt of the Pythian power in an attempt to regain my title, but barely clipped it because those arms were moving like lightning. And it seemed to be able to sense magic, too, anticipating my bolt. But a time spell from the other direction finished the giant arm off, with my doppelganger coming in clutch and then yelping when the creature turned on her in a fury.

I heard my voice abruptly cut off, and a second later, the other half of my soul slammed back into me like a freight train, indicating my spell’s demise. My double must have dropped her shield to up her firepower, and it had been a mistake. One that caused me to stagger as my two halves knitted themselves back together, something almost as uncomfortable as the ripping apart had been.

And then I heard Pritkin scream.

My head jerked up because that was not normal. Pritkin could be loud, and I’d heard enough yelling, bitching and weird profanity from him to fill a good-sized library. But he didn’t scream, and certainly not like that.

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