He Who Fights With Monsters 7

5

Jason opened a portal from his spirit realm and he and Farrah finally set foot on Farrah’s home world. It was not a friendly welcome. They were immediately blasted with horizontal rain and the powerful wind that was tearing up the plants and trees of the tropical jungle in which they found themselves. They could barely stay on their feet despite their silver-rank strength because they didn’t weigh enough. Farrah had to conjure her heavy stone armour while shadow arms reached out to anchor Jason to nearby trees and rocks.

Barely able to see through the wind and rain, they moved downwind of a rocky rise, hunkering down as the storm raged past them. Their clothes were already drenched, clinging to their bodies as they crouched down, out of the worst of the wind.

“I wish I still had my magic umbrella,” Jason said through voice chat. Trying to speak over the howling wind would be pointless. “I left it with Emi.”

“It was iron rank anyway,” Farrah said. “It would have a hard time with a storm this strong. We’re in a high magic zone and this storm has soaked up some of the ambient magic.”

“What kind of luck do we have to arrive in a place like this?” Jason wondered.

“It depends,” Farrah said. “We might be in the Sea of Storms, which is an accurate, if unimaginative name.”

Jason pulled up his map power and zoomed out to a global scale. Their location was marked as somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. As he had never been to this world's equivalent, he saw no details, only the outlines of landmasses. There seemed to be three additional major islands compared to Jason's world, south of the Greater Antilles. Jason and Farrah were on an island sufficiently minor that at the current scale it didn’t even appear on the map. Jason shared the ability to see the map with Farrah. As Farrah had guessed, their zone was listed at the top as Sea of Storms, Storm Kingdom.

“You weren’t wrong about the unimaginative names,” Jason said.

“We’re in the Storm Kingdom,” Farrah confirmed. “It rules the Sea of Storms, all the islands on it and all the coastal regions that surround it.”

“Your world doesn’t have Christopher Columbus or cruise lines, so it’s probably nicer here than the equivalent region of Earth,” Jason said.

“Don’t be so sure. We have magic and it’s called the Sea of Storms for a reason. Storm season is two-thirds of the year and this is a high magic zone. They have special measures to prevent the storms stripping towns and cities down to the foundations.”

“But it’s nice otherwise?” Jason asked cheerfully, drawing a laugh from Farrah.

“So I’ve heard, but I’ve never been here before. Emir has, but he’s not allowed back. He stole something from the royal family a few years back.”

“That rings a bell,” Jason said. “I think he told me about that once. Speaking of Emir, how about we find the coast, pull out a cloud ship and change into some dry clothes?”

“I like this plan. Just use that map power to make sure we aren’t going in circles. I have no interest in doing laps of a jungle in the midst of ripping itself out of the ground.”

“Shade, what do you have for us?” Jason shouted into the wind.

Darkness spilled out of Jason’s shadow, taking the form of a beetle the size of a short passenger bus. On the beetle’s back was a dome of translucent chitin, the inside of which was hollow. The beetle had a pair of large, multi-jointed arms that were longer than its other legs.

The translucent chitin opened a gap as the hard substance turned to liquid and flowed to make a round hole. The long arms picked up Jason and Farrah and deposited them inside; climbing or jumping in the blasting wind would be a difficult proposition. The gap closed behind them, shutting out the wind, rain and noise. Chairs made of soft, comfortable shadow-stuff rose from the dark chitin under their feet.

“Nice one, Shade,” Jason said.

“It seemed appropriate for the terrain,” Shade said.

“This is a treasure beetle, right?” Farrah asked as she started stripping off her wet clothes and pulling dry ones from her dimensional bag. “I’ve heard of them but never seen one because they get hunted down as soon as they’re found.”

“I'm assuming that's something to do with the reason they're called treasure beetles,” Jason said, turning to look away despite Farrah's unconcern. He changed his clothes using his inventory system, dark mist emerging and swapping his outfits before dispersing again.

“They're very sensitive to materials with large amounts of magic,” Farrah explained as she pulled fresh clothes from a dimensional bag. “Ores, magic herbs, items left behind when some adventurer died alone. They can burrow very well and harvest herbs without damaging them using those big arms. They store them in their hollow, see-through shells, which preserves the magic.”

“They’re a walking treasure trove. Not a fantastic survival trait.”

The skyship shuddered as it pushed its speed while also running on jury-rigged modifications to handle the disrupted ambient magic conditions. Anyone not an adventurer or crew member had been banished below decks, although there had been few complaints.

Belinda and Clive were working with the engineer in the bowels of the ship while the rest of their group watched the manifestation they hoped to escape before whatever was coming out of the rainbow light appeared. They realised that they had underestimated the size of it as they moved away rapidly while it continued to loom large in the sky above them.

“On the bright side,” Gary said, “this means Jason and Farrah are either here or will be soon, right?”

“That’s what Clive said,” Jory confirmed. “Then it’s just a matter of finding them.”

“It’s going to be a mess getting information with a monster surge going on,” Humphrey said. “Especially this one. The Adventure Society is going to be tying up all the public water-link chambers, making long-range communication tricky. My family always has a private link chamber in our family compounds, although they will no doubt be busy as well.”

“Church of Knowledge?” Neil suggested.

“Jason had a way to come back before he left,” Sophie said. “If she didn’t tell us that after he died, why would she help us now?”

“It’s worth trying anyway,” Humphrey said. “Our best bet is the Adventure Society, though. If Jason checks in with any branch, his status will be updated across every branch. Then we’ll know where to go.”

“Look,” Neil said, pointing. “I think it's happening.”

The rainbow light started to fade and something was appearing in its place, shimmering into being like a ghost.

“Dawn was telling the truth,” Sophie said weakly. “It really is a city.”

An entire city was coming into being in the air, floating high above the ground. The underside was all rock as if the city had been ripped from the ground, while the rest was a stone city surrounded by high walls, with towers jutting out over the top.

“Well, damn,” Neil said.

The island Jason and Farrah were on proved to be both small and uninhabited. Shade’s treasure beetle form navigated the jungle terrain handily and they soon reached the coast where Jason opened his cloud flask. The clouds streaming out were teased by the wind but no more, the cyclonic power of the storm insufficient to disrupt the cloud flask’s magic.

Soon, a massive pleasure craft was resting calmly on a sea that was anything but. The boat was the size of a superyacht, but wasn’t in the Earth design style, being more like the ones Jason had seen at the Greenstone marina. He had spent a pleasant day with Cassandra Mercer on such a boat, not that long before she dumped him. Jason and Farrah went aboard and several Shade bodies took the role of crew.

“My map is a blank other than raw geography,” Jason said. “Should we just steer towards a big island and see what we get?”

Jason brought up a map of the Sea of Storms on the wall. Because the cloud flask was soul-bonded, it was able to replicate his map ability, at least to display a map. The more tactical functions, like enemy tracking, were still restricted to Jason himself.

“These islands here,” Farrah said, pointing off the coast of what on Earth was Venezuela.

“I think one of those is Aruba,” Jason said. “Works for me. I’m pretty sure the boat can handle the weather, so you can set out, Shade. What is this place we’re going to?”

“The capital of the Storm Kingdom, Rimaros,” Farrah said.

“Rimaros?” Jason said. “I met a woman named Rimaros. I heard she was the princess of something, which I guess is here. Hey, I know a local.”

“How do you know a princess of the Storm Kingdom?”

“You know how it is,” Jason said, putting his hands on his hips and looking off into the middle distance.

“What are you doing?”

“A beautiful young princess, cloistered away her whole life. On her first real expedition into the world, she meets a dashing young hero with a wide selection of confectionary slices…”

“That is not how they raise princesses in the Storm Kingdom.”

“A delicate flower, waiting to be plucked by gentle yet masculine hands…”

“Okay, that needs to stop right now. And you might want to avoid leaning on that connection. We should keep our heads down and not make trouble. Which, I’ll remind you, is kind of not your thing.”

“Oh, I learned that lesson,” Jason said. “I got to be a famous superhero and it turned out to suck. I say we find the nearest Adventure Society branch, quietly do our part with the monster surge, find our teams and finish up this magic bridge without making any waves.”

“You know it’s never going to be that simple,” Farrah told him. “You don’t seriously think you can avoid being caught up in the Builder invasion, right?”

“A bloke can dream, can’t he?”

“Even if you can,” she said, “you’re still you.”

“What does that mean?”

“What’s that?” Humphrey asked. “Are those airships coming out of the city?”

One of the adventurers around them cast a spell and the air in front of them shimmered. When it settled, everything seen through it looked much closer and they could clearly make out the skyships. They rose over the walls of the city and even emerged from tunnels in the rock underneath.

“Am I mistaken in thinking that it looks like two of those things are coming right for us?” Neil said.

“No, you’re not,” Humphrey said. “Sophie, go get Lindy and Clive.”