On Cosmic Tides

General Mansfeln was not a man prone to hysterics. He had seen much and done more in his early career, fighting pirate incursions on the south coast. Keeping a calm head while under pressure was what had earned him a promotion to commander of Fort Sarken and a position on the king’s council. All of that was put to the test when he watched a sea monster coming for his city, swatting planes out of the air and shaking off explosions.

They had won, that was all that mattered, and now he had thousands of soldiers keyed up with pre-fight jitters and nowhere to go. “Listen up you lot” his voice carried out across the courtyard, silencing anyone except the very brave or very foolish. “It seems instead of a fight we’ve been given a gift! The perfect motivation to run emergency preparedness drills. You’ll be practicing scenarios M7 through M10 for the rest of the day. This fort will be ready to respond to anything that comes our way. Officers, fall in for orders.”

********

“Stars above and below,” Esther breathed out. The whole sect, including the support staff, were huddled together in the lounge. The younger members had spent their nights exploring the features in the enchanted dome, and they had just used the magnification and far-sight options to watch Laurel battle a nightmare-inducing monster. They were still watching where Laurel was floating just above the waves next to a man none of them had ever seen before. Suddenly, Laurel turned back in the direction of the sect and squinted. Her expression quickly changed to a smile and she waved while elbowing her companion. He also turned to look and gave a wave.

“Is she looking at us?” Lucy asked. “Hi Laurel!” she waved back as the cultivators turned to the carcass.

“We won’t be having any difficulties recruiting after that display, I don’t think” Adam announced into the general silence. The floodgates opened. The younger sect members began rapidly discussing everything they had seen during the fight, and speculating how long it would be until they could do something similar. Leander launched into a re-enactment, Rebecca playing the part of monster while Cooper joined in with commentary.

Esther hurried back to the kitchen. A good meal was in order after something like that.

********

Ridge hopped out of his plane and checked on his squadron. They were all shaken after seeing a fight so close to home, especially having been unable to influence it. Lieutenant Sharp had been taken to the doctors directly, but Ridge privately thought he would be lucky to keep the leg, given the same attack had turned a biplane into ash and scrap metal. He wandered over to where Trip was doing his post-flight check-in with the ground crew. The men walked a ways away to be less easily overheard.

“Do you have any insight you can give me into what just happened Captain?” Ridge asked.

“Not really, sir.” Trip responded. “It was so fast. I’m still not able to control ambient mana at all. I guess there’s a whole special process for that. Laurel was flinging attacks around like it was nothing. And each one had enough power to fry me, you, and both our planes to a crisp. I have no idea what that thing at the end was either but it looked like it could cut a mountain in half. Laurel told us about battle techniques but, I mean, I couldn’t have imagined something like that.”

Ridge grunted in acknowledgement. The final attack had been straight out of one of the two-penny novels publishers were churning out en masse. “So, you’re telling me you aren’t about to be able to fling lightning at our enemies?”

Trip snorted in response. “Maybe in another hundred years. The way Laurel describes it, I’d probably have more luck trying to make a gun that shoots lightning. That might only take me a few decades. Sir,” he tacked the last on belatedly.

“Best get started then, Captain,”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And Trip? I noticed the grenade you threw seemed a whole lot more effective than the rest. I’m thinking any ideas you have about that are going to be run past Captain Varska from now on.”

“Yes sir.”

*******

The university students clustered around the campus park. When alarm bells had chimed from the harbor, students had rushed to the cliff tops for a chance to see what was happening. They broke off when it was clear the confrontation was over, settling into small groups discussing the fantastical nature of what they’d just seen.

“Good luck getting anyone to sign up on a merchant vessel if that’s the type of thing out there.”

“Did you see that? How the hell did they do that with planes?”

“Is that the same lady that visited in one of those career panels, she could fly right?”

“What’s wrong with you Soren? You look like you’re about to be sick.” One group of students stood further back, having drifted towards the dining hall after the excitement died down.

“That was the woman who came here talking about a magic school, I’m sure of it.”

“Eh, maybe. Too far to tell. Why does that matter?”

“Why?! It matters because we called her a liar to her face, and then dragged her in front of the king to make her explain herself. Apparently she can do some sort of lightning anti-monster attack! We laughed at her! I laughed at her! My family needs to send an apology gift. What do magicians like? Fruit baskets? Scarves? Come on, we need ideas!”

“Calm down, she seemed nice.”

Soren threw his arms up and stalked off from his friends, muttering about making amends, and calligraphy infused with squid ink.

*******

Laurel looked across a carcass at her oldest friend in the world. A man who had stood by her through more than their share of danger, who she considered her brother. “So, not dead?” she said.

“Not dead.” Martin confirmed. “Got stuck in a stasis chamber for a few hundred years, woke up a few months ago. Same for you?”

“Yep. Betrayed by the Tranquil Mountain and stuck in a box. There’s a closed door cultivation joke in there somewhere.”

He let out a roaring laugh, and it struck her in the chest far harder than anything from the monster. It wasn’t a sound she’d expected to hear again. “We might have to hunt down if any of them made it through.”

Laurel grunted in agreement and looked at the dead leviathan next to them. “This is going to be disgusting” she said as she dropped onto its back.

“You’re not wrong.” Martin said, joining her. “I’ll pull scales, hide, and coral. Your kill, so you can dig for the core.” She eyed him up and down. He looked the same as always. Much taller than Laurel, with broad shoulders and smiling eyes. And just as devious. “Fine, but you’re digging next time no matter who finishes it.”

Laurel trudged off, pulling a large ax from storage as she went. She prodded with her spiritual senses to find the closest point to the beast core and started hacking away. Spirit beasts couldn’t be flayed with mana, something about how they existed partially in the physical world and partially in the mana flows. Instead harvesting anything useful meant getting their hands dirty. Some cultivators of a philosophical nature would argue why this was, and that it was some sort of cosmic balance. Laurel just knew what had to be done. After all, she had promised her sect cultivation resources and a master-level monster didn’t come around every day.

They spent the time harvesting the useful parts of the creature catching up on what had happened to the both of them. The stories were almost identical, with being tricked and then trapped by the people they thought they were helping.

“I went to the old Citadel, but the place had been ransacked.” Martin said. He had cleared a section of scales and taken out a huge sword to start in on the skin.

“Ah, that was actually me,” Laurel admitted. “I didn’t think anyone else would be left at the time, so I took everything I thought might help me rebuild.”

“At the time, but not anymore?” Martin honed in on her wording.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think in the last couple of years. The trap obviously went way beyond some third-tier sects we were sent to help. If they just wanted to keep us out of the way while they destroyed the world, why not kill us after they had us trapped? I’m thinking maybe they always knew the seal would fail and mana would come back. They were keeping us around for exactly this.” She gestured all around to the field of blood and meat she was currently thigh-deep in. “Maybe not exactly a coral leviathan, but the things like it. Weak mana means any cultivators won’t have the training to recognize or deal with this kind of threat. So they put some masters on ice, to trot out when something dangerous showed up. I’m not sure how they expected to control us, or if they thought we would just accept the new situation, but they must have had an idea.”

“It's not a bad theory.“ Martin acknowledged. “I hadn’t gotten around to the why yet, I’ve mostly just been in survival mode. But if you’re right, I wonder why we weren’t met with a gun in the face when we woke up. Guns are awful by the way, a huge pain to shield against.”

“I’m aware, I got shot the first time I used mana publicly in Laskar. Maybe the seal lasted for longer than they thought, or maybe something happened to whoever put it in place. Because the place I woke up in was a ruin.”

“Do you think the others…” Martin let his sentence trail off.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe there are masters from some of the other sects, but I just don’t know. I’m almost afraid to hope.” Martin and Laurel had been part of a larger team that would complete jobs for the sect or travel around hunting down resources or competing in tournaments. Best friends that experienced the highs and lows of a life of adventure at each others’ sides. They worked mostly in silence after that, filled with joy at a reunion, and the melancholy of conspicuously absent friends.