Our time in the baths ended with a real bang.
No, literally. Something exploded in the changing rooms, eliciting screams and a panicked frenzy from most of the girls.
I bolted out of the water, running towards danger and fearing the worst. Only to find a very small fire in one of the little shelves holding someone’s clothes. Thankfully, fire was one thing I had little fear of. I just took hold of it with magic and told it to stop.
In the center of the charred clothes was a single charred cell phone.
Then I felt the hum in the air.
[Sonic Cannon] came together with a thought, and I projected my voice across the whole castle with a very dangerous level of power.
“Phones off. Emergency. Magic Storm!”
I’d likely deafened every girl nearby and broken a few windows, too. Still, I started rifling through the shelves, turning off any cell phones I could find. There wasn’t enough time to stop more of the devices from swelling and erupting before I could get to them.
“Lady Mage Hero,” I turned to find Minion #1 entering the changing room with a hand over his eyes. “The queen is not present to raise the shields over the city to weather the storm.”
That made me want to curse the fool who’d keyed the defenses to only operate at the command of one person. Then it occurred to me that the king, miserly as he was, probably could’ve done the same, but Minion #1 didn’t want to sound like he was blaming me for removing that option.
“Population?” I asked in a rush as I pulled on my undergarments and shrugged my coat on, minus the other layers that went beneath it.
Bless competent underlings, because the mage knew what I wanted. “Five hundred thousand in the city below.”
That was a horrifying number. I wasn’t sure if my hero cover would survive protecting a whole city of that size. I didn’t stick around to dwell on the concern.
I bolted out, leaving the women in the baths still scrambling to dry off and get to their clothes. Ten of them would have slightly burned clothing, too. My phone? In my changing room back at Tokyo Big Sight.
Dragging my minion behind me as I left, I tried to get a game plan running. Magic storms, on worlds that had them, often gathered as a sort of aftershock from large rituals and spells as the world balanced the magical energy that had been drawn together for whatever spell was used. They also created monsters in the region, too.
I mentally kicked myself for not making the connection when the conversation about the glitching phone signals came up.
Outside, a mass of dark clouds was gathering, and the center was over the castle, with the magic rippling out in a sort of churning mass that wanted to cascade over itself in an attempt to disperse. Each violent entangling of magics began to create new phenomena.
“Get everyone to hunker down in one place!” Those were the best orders I could think to give to Minion #1. Then, I pushed the man towards the main castle building.
For my part, instead of opening a channel to the plane of air, I just ripped the energy I needed out of the storm. It answered, and I coiled a [Fly] spell around my hips and shoulders. A slapdash spell would really hurt my bones if I needed to do anything at high speeds, though.
I flew up over the castle, then took in the sprawling city below. People were sprinting for cover as they realized no shield had been called to blunt the storm. The magic above rippled, and then rain began to pour down in great torrents, soaking everything and obscuring all vision.
My poor, warm bath. Replaced with frigid rain.
I closed my eyes, shifting my attention to cover the city with my natural feel for magic. I could feel the shifts in pressure. I could taste the flavor of each strand. I could smell the intensity as the energies began to lash out.
I knew where lightning would strike before it did, and I reshaped it.
The violent levinbolt shifted, arcing out into the forest beyond the city instead of toppling the belltower of a church.
I stole the rippling thunder from the strike and held it like a ball of concussive force in my hand, then opened a small window into the elemental planes, letting the sound erupt there, sparing the windows of a hundred homes.
The endless rain gathered up in gutters and sewage drains that were clogged, threatening to flood the city’s poorer districts. I had to divert the rivers of rainwater and redirect them into other paths.
I felt a fire from an exploded cell phone somewhere in the castle, and snuffed it out with a thought.
More.
More lightning. More thunder. Endless tides of torrential downpour. All of it diverted with incredible inefficiency as the storm kept building, like a knotted string tied to opposing magnets. I desperately fought to keep ahead of each new calamitous event, acting as a one woman bulwark against the fury of the storm.
Then the monsters began to form, and the equilibrium broke.
I tried to throw the bolts of lightning at the hounds in the forests. Tried to sweep away the slimes in the sewers with the raging waters. I let the thunder loose in clusters of insects the size of adult people.
I missed a bolt, and it struck a house, detonating the brickwork like it was made of twigs. I only barely caught and used the thunder from it to shatter a blockage in the drains that had formed, alleviating some of the backed up water.
Missing one bolt had been bad enough, but the scramble to pick up the pieces from that made me lose the next, aimed to hit something above the castle.
Shit!
That something was me.
Just as the web of light speared through the sky, another presence reached out and caught the lightning in a long tress of hair that held open a tiny gateway into the plane of air. That was an impressive display of minute control.
I opened one eye to find the blond chef woman flying beside me, having somehow snuck up on me for the second time in as many hours. “I’ve got you. Keep going!”
Back to it, then.
With someone to cover my blind spots, I turned back to maintaining the storm.
There was no way I could still halt all the monsters, though. Normally, a city would raise a shield to drain the storm while stopping monsters from hitting the walls. Instead, I found them literally knocking at the gates, with wolves the size of houses digging claws into wooden barriers.
I felt one gate begin to break open, so I ripped more power out of the storm and threw it at the plane of earth, stealing a chunk of raw iron around the size of the broken gateway, and wedged it into the opening. That was horribly crafted magic, though. I felt the stinging pain of a headache warning me that I was damaging my mortal shell.
“I’m losing this battle!”
The blond archmage contained another bolt of lightning with her magic, then responded in a shout over the raging cataclysm. “Leave the monsters to Fukushi and the knights!”
The timing was solid, as the woman in question erupted out the front doors of the castle in her full armor, running at superhuman speeds towards one of the other gates.
I grunted as I felt the makeup of the storm shifting, finally splitting off some of the weaves of earth magic that had held together in the core of the storm before. Crusty spikes of sand, dirt, and metal joined the rain, coming down like dark bits of hail.
Goddess of magic I may be. But I don’t do barrier spells!
The new mess required my favorite kind of spell. A certain use of the elemental variants usually allowed for some flavor of disintegration spell. I loved those dearly. Give me an opportunity to reduce a thing to its constituent atoms, and I’d be giggling with glee.
I used rays of dark and light spells to pinpoint the devastating hail of earth and void some into nothingness while others were simply unmade by a purifying glow. Each time that one of my spells made contact with magically manifested earthen spears, the spear would discorporate back into loose magic again, which I recycled for the energy needed to unmake more of the downpour.
The shift meant I leaned on the chef woman more and more for the lightning strikes. She was somehow learning, too. A complete prodigy, she was tapping into how I had reshaped the lightning to make it strike elsewhere, and was guiding each flash into the tiny holes at the tips of her hair-hands, depositing the raw energy into the plane of wind in rapid-fire.
I could really love a woman with that sort of skill.
We must’ve continued in that manner for hours. Fukushi, below, zipping from one monster crisis to another as she displayed completely incomprehensible physical prowess. The knights rallied and fortified the gates while the city guard deployed into the sewers to slaughter the weak newborn slime population.
All night long, apparently, I kept shredding through stone bolts from the sky as the chef conducted an orchestra with her many limbs of hair. When the clouds were thinning, dawn’s light shone through, and we finally let ourselves rest.
“Eileen.” I held my hand out to the archmage in a weak introduction.
“Daniella.” Instead of shaking my hand, she took it and kissed my knuckles. “A pleasure to meet someone with such a talent for the Gift.”
The woman spoke with an alluring accent, each word sounding sultry, even with her voice not going low to try for that effect.
My headache seared in over my thoughts, blanking out my moment of appreciation. I’d taxed my mortal body far more than I should’ve, and even if the magic had been simple enough, it needed rest. If it had broken, I would’ve been forced to appear as my true self, without the limitations of the flesh.
“I think I need a break.”
Daniella nodded, and I barely registered her, gathering me up in her arms and flying me down towards the castle.
I was asleep in her embrace before we landed.