The morning sun did not penetrate the war room of the Sombra Cartel’s flagship.
Deep within the mahogany hull, the chamber was illuminated only by the rhythmic, azure pulse of sea-lamps suspended from the ceiling beams.
A massive chart of the Caribbean Sea and the open Atlantic was pinned to a central table, its parchment weighted down by brass compasses and silver rulers.
Garrik Vane stood over the map, his long, dark hair tied back loosely, revealing the full extent of the gnarled, dragon-burnt tissue on the left side of his face.
His dark eyes were fixed on Leon, who sat across from him surrounded by parchment filled with dense geometric equations, vector diagrams, and astronomical charts.
“Well?” Garrik’s voice rasped, cutting through the creaking of the timber and the muffled thrum of the enchanted hull.
“Did the numbers yield a path? Do we have a heading for the Leviathan?”
Leon placed his quill into an inkpot, his blue eyes calm despite the exhaustion tugging at the edges of his vision.
He ran a hand through his short blonde hair and shook his head.
“No,” Leon replied, his voice measured.
“It is mathematically impossible to divine its present coordinates or project its trajectory using Arithmancy. I ran three separate probability matrices, factoring in oceanic thermal currents, lunar cycles, and known migratory lines. Every single sequence collapses into a non-Euclidean void the moment I attempt to anchor the creature’s magical signature.”
He tapped a finger on a drawn diagram representing a spiraling wave.
‘The creature isn’t merely swimming through the water,’ Leon thought.
‘It’s very presence warps spatial logic.’
“It’s as if a primordial shroud of magic wraps around the beast,” Leon continued aloud.
“A passive anti-divination field inherent to its nature. It renders even the logical frameworks of arithmancy completely obsolete.”
Garrik narrowed his eyes, running a scarred thumb along his jawline.
“A creature that defies logic… A rare prize indeed. Most beasts are governed by hunger or instinct. This one seems to exist outside the natural order.”
“Ah, but that is the beauty of our world, mis amigos!”
Don Alejandro Diego de la Vega leaned back against a brass-bound pillar, a silver goblet of spiced rum held delicately in one hand.
He was attired in a crisp, ivory linen shirt, a fitted crimson waistcoat, and polished leather boots that caught the ambient blue light.
With his free hand, he twirled the tip of his dark, immaculately groomed mustache.
“Magic does not submit easily to ink and parchment,” Alejandro said with a theatrical flourish, his heavy Mexican accent filling the cabin.
“The Leviathan must ancient, older than the borders drawn by men or Ministry clerks. But do not despair, Señor Vane! Do not let the numbers cloud your spirits, young Leon! We do not need a line on a map when we are already breathing its air. We are riding its current as we speak. We are close. Extremely close.”
“We had better be, Don Alejandro,” Garrik grunted, leaning his heavy palms on the table.
“My men didn’t cross the Atlantic for nothing.”
An hour later, the war room had adjourned, and the wizarding crew was spread across the main deck.
The weather above was deceptively calm, the tropical sun baking the dark mahogany planks of the three-masted warship.
The immense black sails—embroidered with glowing, silver protection runes—hung taut, drawing power from the etheric currents rather than the gentle breeze.
Leon stood near the starboard railing, his Cleansweep Seven resting against his hip, his dragon-hide coat unbuttoned to acclimate to the humid Atlantic air.
Suddenly, a harsh, echoing cry shattered the ambient sound of creaking wood and lapping waves.
“AHOY! BEAST OFF THE LARBOARD BOW!”
The lookout perched high in the crow’s-nest was shouting through a brass megaphone, pointing wildly toward the open sea.
“SHE’S BREACHING! THREE CABLES LENGTHS OFF THE PORT QUARTER!”
The deck burst into instantaneous, disciplined chaos.
Sorcerers from both the Wyrm-Breakers and the Sombra Cartel scrambled across the rigging and quarterdeck.
Boots thundered against the timber as men and women prepared the heavy equipment.
Leon vaulted onto the gunwale, gripping the shroud-lines to steady himself as he peered out across the shimmering azure water.
Even with all the reports, nothing prepared him for the actual sight of the creature.
Emerging from the depths was a colossal silhouette, easily eighty meters in length.
Its smooth, obsidian-black skin possessed no scales, gleaming like polished volcanic glass under the tropical sun.
But beneath that dark epidermis, a radiant, bioluminescent light pulsed—a vivid, underwater aqua-blue that surged in rhythmic waves from its head down to its massive, bifurcated tail.
As it glided through the ocean, the water around its sweeping fins distorted, refracting the sunlight into dazzling, mystical geometric patterns that defied natural optics.
‘It’s magnificent,’ Leon thought, his eidetic memory instantly cataloging the creature’s breathtaking scale.
‘A living force of nature.’
“ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS!” Garrik’s roar boomed across the main deck, effortlessly cutting through the noise.
“YOU KNOW THE PLAN! WORK THE REGIMENT!”
Garrik swung around, his scarred face hardened into a focused expression.
He barked at Alejandro, who was standing on the poop deck near the massive, runic ship’s wheel.
“Alejandro! The vessel is yours! Keep her steady on its flank!”
“She is in good hands, Señor !” Alejandro replied, drawing a slender, silver-hilted rapier from his hip with a sharp ching.
He struck a flamboyant pose, pointing the tip toward the horizon.
“We shall dance with this monster!”
“FLYERS, ON ME!” Garrik commanded, unstrapping his own heavy broomstick.
Around him, wyrm-breakers and Cartel elites mounted their brooms.
Leon kicked off the wooden deck, the Cleansweep Seven shooting smoothly into the air.
Beside him, Vanya launched her broom with practiced grace, her dark leather coat snapping in the wind, a wicked grin playing on her lips.
“Try not to get eaten, my little bird,” she called out over the rush of wind.
“Worry about your own broom, Vanya,” Leon replied coolly, adjusting his grip as the aerial squad accelerated into formation.
The airborne strike team banked left, swooping down toward the ocean surface to match the Leviathan’s trajectory, flanking the massive shadow on its starboard side.
Simultaneously, the three-masted warship shuddered.
Alejandro slashed his rapier through the air, activating the vessel’s Ward-Sails.
The black canvas flared with violent violet light, and the ship accelerated unnaturally, cutting through the swells like a speeding blade until it pulled abreast of the Leviathan’s port flank.
At first, the giant beast simply ignored them.
It glided through the water with effortless majesty, its massive tail sweeping slowly, indifferent to the wooden ship and the flying wizards hovering like gnats around its head.
“DEPLOY THE HARPOONS! MARK THE HIDE!” Garrik roared from his broom, raising his wand.
“NOW!”
From the ship’s bulwarks, four massive, brass-bound ballistas groaned as heavy enchanted harpoons were launched.
The iron-tipped projectiles, trailing thick, glowing chains woven with binding runes, slammed straight into the beast’s obsidian flank.
CLANG!
A deafening metallic ring echoed across the water.
The harpoons didn’t penetrate.
The magical shockwave rebounded instantly off the Leviathan’s skin, sending the massive iron spears tumbling harmlessly into the sea.
“Direct spells! Fire at the blowhole and eyes!” Vanya yelled, leading her squad into a steep dive.
A volley of concentrated curse-fire—red Reducto blasts, emerald cutting spells, and blue lightning—rained down from the airborne wizards.
But as the spells struck the beast, the bioluminescent patterns under its obsidian skin flared bright blue, absorbing and dispersing the magical kinetic energy like ripples on a pond.
The Leviathan had felt that.
A low, resonant frequency vibrated through the ocean floor—a deep, subterranean hum that rattled the teeth in Leon’s skull.
The creature’s rhythmic blue light abruptly turned a harsh, violent crimson.
It turned its massive head toward the ship and began to accelerate.
Within seconds, the peaceful tropical sky vanished.
The sea swelled into violent, churning hills of water.
Dark, unnatural storm clouds gathered at impossible speed overhead, swallowing the sun in a mantle of pitch-black swirling vapor.
“STORM BRACED!” Alejandro shouted from the quarterdeck, his voice amplified by a Sonorus spell.
“HEAVE TO THE WEATHER TACK! ALL HANDS, HOLD THE LINES!”
The ship’s magical shielding kept the deluge of tropical rain off the deck, but it could do nothing against the gale-force winds.
The wind howled with the screech of a dying dragon, tearing at the rigging.
For the aerial squad, it was pure hell.
Leon gripped his Cleansweep Seven with white-knuckled intensity as a violent downdraft slammed into him.
The wind was a living wall, forcing the wizards to fly almost sideways.
Massive, sixty-foot waves crashed around them, throwing up blinding sprays of sea-foam.
Monstrous waterspouts—spinning columns of ocean water—were ripped directly from the sea into the sky by the Leviathan’s ambient magic, spinning like liquid tornadoes across their flight path.
The sky turned as black as night.
The only illumination came from the violent jagged flashes of lightning tearing through the clouds and the angry, crimson-and-blue light pulsing beneath the Leviathan’s skin.
“AGAIN! AIM FOR THE JOINTS OF THE FLIPPERS!” Garrik bellowed, his broom spinning dangerously in a gust of wind before he stabilized it with raw physical strength.
“CANTONA! FIRE THE KINETIC CANNONS!”
Below, the ship’s brass side-cannons thundered.
Instead of iron balls, heavy spheres of compressed kinetic energy erupted from the ports, slamming into the Leviathan’s front flipper with the force of falling mountains.
The impact forced the beast’s head down, causing it to thrash wildly.
A colossal wave created by its thrashing surged twenty meters into the air, swallowing three Cartel flyers whole and sweeping them into the black sea.
“VANYA, WATCH YOUR FRONT!” Leon shouted through the howling gale, his sharp eyes calculating the trajectory of a rising waterspout directly ahead of her.
Vanya swung her broom hard to the left, dodging the spinning column of water, but a stray blast of compressed wind ripped from the vortex clipped her broom’s tail-twigs.
Her Cleansweep flipped violently.
Vanya was hurled from her mount.
A sharp crack sounded as her head slammed against the broom’s wooden shaft during the ejection.
Stunned and disoriented, her wand slipping from her limp fingers, Vanya began to free-fall straight toward the churning, foam-crested abyss below.
‘She’s going to drown!’ Leon’s mind raced instantly.
He slammed his body down against the handle of his Cleansweep Seven, diving into a near-vertical nose-dive.
The wind tore at his face, blinding him with salt spray.
He pushed his broom to its absolute limit, tracking her falling form through the darkness.
He reached out an arm, his fingers straining to grasp her coat—but the sheer force of a rogue air current buffeted his broom off-course by two critical meters.
He was too late.
She was a split-second from hitting the raging ocean.
Suddenly, a thick, tarred rigging rope from the ship’s foremast shot out like a striking viper.
It moved with fluid, unnatural precision, snaking through the roaring storm wind, wrapping tightly around Vanya’s waist just feet above the cresting wave.
With a sharp jerk, the rope arrested her fall and hauled her limp body upward, slinging her safely onto the ship’s main deck.
Leon banked his broom hard, looking back toward the poop deck.
Standing atop the railing, drenched in rain that bypassed the ship’s wards due to his exposed position, was Don Alejandro.
His ivory shirt was soaked, but his posture was rock-solid.
He held his silver-hilted rapier extended toward the sky, the tip glowing with a brilliant violet aura.
He had animated and guided the heavy ship’s rope with a single, lightning-fast flick of his rapier blade.
Alejandro caught Leon’s eye through the storm and flashed a brilliant, white-toothed grin, tipping his wet hat with his off-hand before returning his focus to the helm.
The flamboyant Mexican had not lied—his wand-work with the rapier was terrifyingly fast.
“DON’T LOSE THE TARGET!” Garrik’s voice thundered through the gale.
“IT’S DIVING!”
The Leviathan thrashed its massive tail, creating a whirlpool that nearly spun the warship on its beam-ends, and plunged deep into the black water.
“WHERE IS IT?” a breaker screamed from a broom near Leon.
“WHERE DID IT GO?”
“LOOK AT THE LIGHT!” Leon called out, pointing his wand into the dark depths.
Beneath the raging black surface, the crimson and blue luminescence of the creature was clearly visible, moving down like a falling star.
It sped forward, moving away from the ship at incredible speed.
“It’s retreating!” a wizard yelled over the wind.
“No…” Leon muttered, tracking the glowing arc beneath the waves.
‘The speed isn’t decreasing…
its radius of curvature is changing.’
The glowing shape under the water suddenly swung in a massive quarter-circle.
It wasn’t fleeing.
It was banking.
“HARD TO STARBOARD!” Leon roared at the top of his lungs, channeling his voice with a quick Sonorus.
“IT’S NOT RUNNING! IT’S CHARGING THE SHIP!”
Panic erupted on the deck below.
Beneath the water, the glowing crimson mass expanded rapidly as it rocketed upward at terrifying velocity, heading straight for the warship’s wooden keel.
“ALL HANDS, ABANDON SHIP! FLY! JUMP!” Garrik barked, his voice filled with urgent rage as he wheeled his broom around.
Sorcering crew members scrambled over the bulwarks.
Dozens launched on brooms, while others cast Impervius or cushioning charms on themselves and leaped blindly into the raging, tempestuous sea.
The airborne wizards swooped down desperately, snatching swimming crewmen out of the water by their collars.
Then, the ocean exploded.
The Leviathan breached the surface directly beneath the Sombra Cartel’s flagship.
Eighty meters of black obsidian hide and surging magical energy vaulted into the stormy air, lifting the massive, three-masted galLeon entirely out of the water on its head and back.
With a sickening, deafening CRACK that sounded like thunder rending the earth, the ship’s main keel snapped.
The heavy acajou wood, reinforced with dragon-blood and ancient wards, shattered like cheap tinder.
The Leviathan reached the apex of its leap and crashed back down into the ocean, bringing its full, monstrous weight directly onto the ruined vessel.
The ship was split cleanly in two.
A massive plume of water, foam, and wooden splinters erupted into the sky.
The stern and bow sections inverted, swallowed instantly by the roaring whirlpool generated by the creature’s descent.
Screams were cut short by the roar of the sea as the wreckage plunged into the black abyss.
Dozens of wizards were dragged down into the undertow, while those on brooms fought desperately against the chaotic winds to fish survivors from the churning water.
Above the wreckage, Garrik Vane hovered on his broom, his scarred face twisted in absolute fury as he watched the joint fleet destroyed in minutes.
“GARRIK!” Leon shouted, flying up alongside him.
“WE HAVE TO FALL BACK! THE VESSEL IS GONE!”
“NOT BEFORE I MARK THIS BEAST!” Garrik screamed, his dark eyes ablaze with madness.
He drew a heavy, silver-inlaid harpoon bound to his broom by a thick, enchanted steel cable.
Banking into a steep, reckless dive, Garrik drove the harpoon deep into a soft crease between the creature’s dorsal plates with a surge of dark magic.
The harpoon held, but the kinetic recoil was catastrophic.
The steel cable snapped taut instantly, yanking Garrik clean off his mount.
He slammed hard against the beast’s obsidian hide, his hands instinctually locking onto the runic chains around the harpoon’s shaft to avoid being thrown into the thrashing sea.
Leon, flying low to calculate the Leviathan’s trajectory, saw the danger a fraction of a second too late.
As the colossal beast arced its back to plunge, the whipped slack of the enchanted steel cable snapped through the air like a striking viper.
The heavy metal line coiled violently around the tail-bristles and handle of Leon’s Cleansweep Seven, crushing the polished oak instantly.
“Damn it!” Leon hissed.
He reached for his silver hunting knife to sever the cable, his mind instantly calculating the milliseconds he had left before submersion.
But the Leviathan’s massive tail thrashed, generating a sudden, terrifying downward vacuum.
Before Leon could slice through the enchanted steel, the drag pulled his ruined broom down into the vortex.
The force yanked Leon forward off his seat.
He barely managed to ditch the broken broom and plant his boots onto the creature’s slick, obsidian back right beside the harpoon mount.
Garrik looked up through the sea-spray, his scarred face twisted in dark surprise as Leon landed hard next to him.
“What are you doing, boy?!” Garrik roared over the rush of wind.
“The cable caught my broom, you idiot!” Leon snapped back, his voice devoid of any heroics as he seized the heavy iron anchors, securing his footing.
Before either of them could utter another word, the Leviathan plunged straight down into the pitch-black ocean depths.
The force of the sudden submersion was like hitting a brick wall.
The roaring ocean closed over their heads, the sheer drag of the water tearing at their limbs.
Acting purely on cold, hard survival instinct, Leon wrapped his arms and legs tightly around the heavy runic chains, anchoring himself to the beast’s back alongside Garrik to avoid being ripped away and crushed by the ocean currents.
The storm above vanished in an instant, replaced by the freezing, silent, crushing pressure of the abyss.
Down, down, down they went, dragged into the sunless depths by the glowing monster, swallowed whole by the deep Atlantic.
Well, that was a long chapter, I hope you liked it.