Against the battle-tossed horizon, Kaelor's massive form was a dark silhouette, standing waist-deep in the churning ocean water. He tilted his head, his focus fixed on the monstrous, surging body that moved and rippled just beneath the waves.
Over the comms, Sorrowclaw began to speak, adopting Kaelor's gravelly, powerful voice with absolute sincerity. Harmony, meanwhile, covered her mouth to stifle laughter at the sheer earnestness of the imitation.
"'This is an ancient, arcane, elemental spell,'" she intoned dramatically, "'unique to my people.'"
"Seriously, is he narrating this now?" Harmony asked, sounding a little annoyed with a hint of amusement.
The water around Kaelor erupted into motion. Ten massive spiraling tendrils of ocean surged upward around him, each twisting into sharpened, drilling shapes. They rotated faster, weaving tighter until he was at the center of a roaring vortex. Kaelor's hands spread wide, his muscles straining visibly, teeth gritted with raw effort as the tendrils compressed toward him, tighter and tighter. The entire formation pulsed rhythmically with each beat of his heart, visibly fighting his control, resisting the unnatural density he commanded.
With a deafening roar, he clasped his hands together and shouted, his voice cutting clear even over the fury of the ocean. "Oho Magic: Cryokymm Bore!"
There was an instantaneous crystalline snap as the dense, swirling water abruptly froze, transforming into something transparent and glass-like, a drill made from an unnatural, otherworldly ice. For one fragile moment, the towering drill hung perfectly still, glittering in the sunlight, refracting rainbows across the chaos below. Then it spun violently, Kaelor at its very tip, and dove downward with a tremendous cracking boom.
Beneath the waves, the monster caught the shape of the strike a fraction before impact and threw its immense body sideways, forcing the sea around it into heavy rolling swells that raced outward through the dark. Kaelor came after it through the churn with the drill locked steady in both hands, guiding the spinning head through the current with such ruthless precision that the creature's evasive turn only carried it deeper into the line of attack. When steel hit the great glaring eye, the sound came through the water as a sick, thick crunch, and then the bit was in, grinding forward through the socket as shattered bone peeled back, strands of sinew tore loose, and dense muscle opened around the relentless spin.
The scream that followed did not stay inside the creature for long, it spread through the sea in a punishing thrum that passed through flesh and shell alike, striking every nearby body hard enough to jar the teeth and ache in the skull. Inside the drill, Kaelor guided the tip, holding it steady on its path and driving it deeper. Blood surged from the wound, staining the surrounding water a churning black-red. With each layer met, the weapon bucked in his grasp, resisting before ultimately giving way. That trembling drag ran up through his arms, rough and uneven at first, then smoother, then suddenly gone, and in the same instant the spinning point tore free through the creature's upper flank and drove a violent plume of blood and seawater upward toward the light.
Kaelor launched free of the surface in a scatter of frozen spray, shards of ice whirling away from him as he rose into open air with the wound below laid bare for a single sweeping glance. Wind and salt tore past his face while his gaze traced the ruin he had driven through the creature, from the shattered eye to the ragged channel punched through its upper mass. Even with blood pouring into the sea and its body twisting under the damage, the thing kept hauling itself upward with a stubborn, monstrous vitality.
A slow shake passed through him, disbelief and admiration sharing the motion. "Incredible," he said, the word nearly lost to the roar around him. His eyes stayed on the beast below. "You endured that." Regret touched his mouth a moment later. "If only I could use the Orb of the Ferqa, this would already be finished."
Below him, the ocean heaved upward with the wounded monster inside it, a towering surge of flesh and water driving straight for him so fast that the spray rose in sheets around its ascent. Kaelor dropped onto the slick armored hide just before the full force of the collision reached him, letting the creature's upward momentum run through his legs and spine as he settled into the impact instead of fighting it head-on. For a breath he rode that violent lift, balanced on the rising mass, then turned the force beneath him into his own answer and kicked away with enough power to send himself knifing back down toward the sea.
Water closed over him at once, and the currents came alive around his body, winding themselves into tight spiraling tubes that caught him and drove him forward harder with every turn. As he shot through them, more of the creature hauled itself into view, the sea coughing up fresh appendages in a frenzy of thrashing motion. Tentacles whipped and curled through the spray, hooked claws struck sharp against wet shell, and jagged plates rolled under the light with a warped shine, while strips of mismatched flesh stretched and flexed across thick ugly seams that held the whole monstrous patchwork together.
Across the open channel, Tranquility's voice came through stripped of its usual calm, bewilderment cutting clean through every word. "This thing looks stitched together from a billion monsters. What the hell are we even looking at?"
On the bridge, Serenity had already narrowed the chaos down to the part that mattered most. "Kaelor," she called, her voice carrying clear over the comm without losing its edge, "make space for us. Push the Nightshatter clear."
He reacted with a single rising motion of his arm, and the sea moved with him. Water surged beneath the battleship in a hard lifting swell that seized the Nightshatter's vast weight and drove it fast across the surface, opening a wide stretch of churning water between steel hull and rising abomination.
Then he threw himself back into the fight with a roar brightened by something close to joy, crashing into the creature again and again with blows that rang through its enormous frame. The first blazing rush of power had already begun to wear down, yet every strike still landed with enough force to jolt flesh, shell, and bone, the effort in them turning heavier and harsher as the cost worked deeper into his body.
Near the bow, Sorrowclaw moved across the turret with fast, precise steps while illusions opened and collapsed around her in fading bursts of light, each one flaring vividly before dissolving into the air. Sweat glistened on her skin. Each subsequent breath was a struggle, raggedly heaving her chest and shoulders as she forced more mana through a system already straining under the rapid creation of illusions. The drain had worked its way deep into her arms, leaving weight and tremor behind, yet her hands never stopped, still shaping one dying vision after another into the fight.
Serenity switched to a private line with Roy, and when she spoke, tension rode beneath the control in her voice. "Roy, a full arcane railgun charge could kill it, if everything lines up. We need you here."
His answer came at once. "I can send Eryndra right now. Do you need her?"
"Give me a moment," Serenity said.
Another channel cut in before she could make the call. Alejandro of the Triplets came through sounding caught between caution and outright disbelief. "Uh, Serenity? Do we need to worry about the gigantic monster coming at us over the horizon?"
Serenity pressed the calm harder into her voice. "No," she said, firm enough to cut through the noise on the bridge. "I have it handled."
The channel went dead a breath later. Her attention stayed on the monitor, on Kaelor driving himself back into the chaos with the same relentless force as before. Each strike hit hard enough to crack shell and tear through rope-thick flesh, yet the creature kept coming, its vast body powering forward through punishment that should have crippled it. Sorrowclaw's fading illusions still pulled at its outer limbs, drawing tentacles and hooked appendages a fraction off course, though the strain in those flickering distractions had become impossible to miss. Even together, they were losing ground.
After noticing how winded Sorrowclaw was, Presidroid Harding climbed the turret Sorrowclaw was dancing on with sudden purpose and raised a metal hand in formal offer. "Might I have the honor of this dance?"
Sorrowclaw turned toward him in the middle of a hard breath, the nearest of her illusions quivering around her like a dim halo on the verge of going out. A faint glow still clung to her eyes, though the effort of holding it there had already hollowed something out of her face, and when she gave a small shake of her head, a sad little smile followed with it as though she wished the answer could have been different.
"A golem cannot unite minds when it has none," she said, quiet and worn thin from the strain. "It wouldn't work."
Presidroid Harding's hand lingered between them for a beat before he lowered it with a slight dip of his head. "Ah," he murmured, the word softened by something close to embarrassment. "Of course."