We were marching toward Blue Idol Island, and I was not in a great mood.
I had not been in a great mood for the past several days.
If Ku had opinions about that, he was keeping them to himself.
I appreciated that.
The thing about this entire campaign was that I went into it with a very simple idea.
I would walk up to each island, destroy whatever was on it, and repeat the process until the ocean situation resolved itself.
Then Green Idol Island ruined that idea within the first twenty minutes.
Progress since then had been what I would describe as mid, if I was being generous.
I was not feeling generous.
The problem was the feeling that I should be moving faster.
I could not entirely shake it.
I knew that the feeling was not productive. I was choosing not to listen to it.
Even so, it was still there.
'You are just salty about the Green Idol.'
I was.
A little.
The island was visible in the distance now.
It was the kind of visible that meant we had enough time to plan, but not so much time that planning could turn into procrastination.
I looked at Ku and decided to do something productive while we approached.
"What is this island's situation again?" I asked.
Ku floated beside me with the patient air of someone who was used to waiting for me to ask the right question.
Then he answered, "This is Blue Idol Island, kuu~. You should meet Trumbo too. He is the general stationed near this island, and he is a very good fellow. He makes the best sea kelp salad, kuu~."
I thought about sea kelp salad for a moment.
"And the Blue Idol's gimmick?" I asked.
"Ah, that one is very nasty, kuu~," Ku said. "The idol makes everything move in the opposite direction from what you want. If you try to walk forward, you walk backward instead. If you try to go left, you go right. If you try to go right, you go left, kuu~."
"What about attacks?"
"Those are affected too, kuu~. If you shoot something straight ahead, it may fly sideways, fly backward, or curve far away from where you wanted it to go. The closer you get to the idol, the stronger the effect becomes, kuu~."
I thought about that.
"So if I go inside its range, I cannot trust my own movement, my dodging, or my attacks. And the closer I get, the worse it becomes."
"Yes, kuu~," Ku said. "That is why trying to walk straight to the idol is very dangerous. You would need to fight against the water current and your own body at the same time, kuu~."
I looked toward the island.
"So a direct assault is basically asking to get killed."
"That is one way to say it, kuu~," Ku replied. "Although I would prefer that you do not die, kuu~."
We reached the coast.
I looked at what was arranged there.
Then I quietly discarded the assessment I had started forming and replaced it with a different one.
The situation on this island was not the same as Green Idol Island.
The difference was not subtle.
The Moglo fleet was the first indicator.
Their ships were arranged in a formation that had clearly been designed by someone who understood what a defensive formation was supposed to accomplish. They held the approach in a way that would make a direct assault considerably more expensive than it needed to be.
The positioning made it clear that they had thought about angles.
The Moglo forces on the shore were the second indicator.
They were denser than the forces on Green Idol Island.
They wore different armor.
They were positioned with the energy of troops who had been briefed on what to expect rather than troops who were simply assigned to a location.
They had also prepared crustacean opposition.
I had been told to expect that.
However, seeing it was different.
The crustaceans on this island were not fish.
They moved differently.
They stayed lower to the ground, and they were harder to knock back.
They were engaged in a standoff with the Moglo shoreline forces.
The tension between them had the quality of something that had been going on for a long time without being resolved.
'They caught on.'
Someone on the other side looked at Green Idol Island and made decisions.
Good for them.
Annoying for me.
"Dive," I said to Ku.
We dove.
The base, like Green Idol Island's base, was underwater.
I followed Ku down through the current until we reached the area where the crustacean forces had established their position.
It was a fortified area below the shoreline.
It had the quality of something built for a long siege rather than a quick strike.
That was where I met Trumbo.
Trumbo was a very large whale-like general.
He was indeed an excellent fellow, as Ku suggested.
He had a settled quality about him. It was the kind of quality that came from doing something for a very long time and making peace with most of it.
He greeted me with the warmth of someone who had heard that I was coming and was glad about it.
He mentioned sea kelp salad within the first thirty seconds.
I told him that I was interested.
He looked genuinely pleased.
I filed the salad away for later because we had an idol situation to deal with first.
Then I met Krak.
Krak was introduced as the general stationed specifically on this island.
He was a mantis shrimp.
I had been told that, but encountering it in person was still notable.
Krak was a very large mantis shrimp.
His eyes pointed in several directions at once.
His claws had the quality of things that had broken other things many times, were comfortable with that fact, and had no strong feelings about doing it again.
"You must be the one they call Josephine, kruu~," Krak said.
The warmth in his voice reminded me of the way people sounded when something they had been waiting for finally arrived.
"Maybe," I said.
I had learned to be careful about certainty.
"The one who will liberate us all, kruu~," Krak continued.
He said it with the conviction of someone who had not registered my maybe.
"We will see about that," I replied.
"Yes! We will see, kruu~!"
Krak agreed enthusiastically with the thing he interpreted me as saying.
That was not what I said.
However, the energy was good, so I let it stand.
Then he reached for a fist bump.
He had the specific energy of someone who considered it a perfectly reasonable greeting and was already committed to it.
Beside me, Ku made a very small and very urgent sound.
"Please do not. His claws. The force. Please do not do that, kuu~."
Ku said it in the tone of someone who had seen this happen before.
Krak had already redirected his claw.
It connected with the nearest piece of coral instead.
The sound was somewhere between a gunshot and a thunderclap.
The coral became two smaller pieces of coral before I could fully register what happened.
"Pan, kruu~," Krak said with satisfaction.
There was a pause.
"…Right," I said. "Mantis shrimp. The pistol thing."
"I would have liked to test how strong you are, kruu~," Krak said.
He sounded genuinely regretful.
"However, Ku is correct. Perhaps another time, kruu~."
'I like this guy.'
I was not entirely sure what to do with that thought because I did not usually like people this quickly.
Even so, there it was.
The sea kelp salad was probably excellent.
However, the Blue Idol was still the immediate problem.
There was only one reliable way to get information about something like this.
I had to go and find out personally.
"I am going to scout it," I said. "Alone. I will return with what I find."
Krak looked at me with several of his eyes at once.
"I trust you, Bear Knight, kruu~," he said.
He spoke with the serious tone of someone who said things with gravity.
I decided not to ask about the Bear Knight title.
We did not have time.
I was also somewhat afraid that the answer would be a long story.
Getting close to the Blue Idol was where the first thing went wrong.
It did not go wrong dramatically at first.
That was somehow worse than dramatic wrong.
Dramatic wrong announced itself, and then you could react to it.
This kind of wrong crept up while you were still telling yourself that everything was probably fine.
I took a step in what I intended to be a forward direction.
I moved slightly left.
I tried a test shot of magic aimed straight ahead.
It curved about thirty degrees in mid-flight before splashing into the island terrain far to the side of where I aimed.
Then a water-magic projectile came from a Moglo guard.
I dodged right to avoid it.
I ended up approximately where the projectile had been traveling.
'Oh.'
I tried to adjust.
The adjustment overcorrected.
Then I adjusted for the overcorrection.
By the time I assembled a rough working model of what the reversal was doing, I had taken four water-magic hits.
They were strong in the way that idol-adjacent magic tended to be strong.
I was thoroughly drenched.
I also had what felt like a significant bruise forming on my right shoulder.
I tried attacking the idol anyway because I needed to know what that felt like too.
The first strike I aimed at it connected with the ground behind me.
That was disorienting enough that I had to stop and process it for a moment.
The second strike was meant to account for the reversal.
However, my compensation was wrong, and it went wide.
The third strike actually got close to the idol.
However, close to the idol was still within its range.
It disrupted the strike before it landed.
I felt the disruption in the sword like a vibration that had nowhere to go.
Then a very large water-magic projectile hit me directly.
I reconsidered my presence in that location.
I returned to camp looking exactly like what I was.
I was someone who fought water magic for fifteen minutes and did not win.
Ku looked at me.
Krak looked at me with several of his eyes, specifically the ones currently pointing in my direction.
Trumbo looked at me from a respectful distance.
His expression was the expression of someone who was very good at not saying, "I see that it went about as expected."
"I am fine," I said. "Sit down. We are planning."
They sat.
I dripped on the seafloor for a moment while I thought through what I learned.
"Okay," I said. "Here is the full problem. The flow reversal does not only mess with where you walk. It messes with attacks too. It messes with dodging. It messes with anything that has a direction."
I looked toward the island.
"And the closer you get to the idol, the stronger it becomes. That means getting close enough to damage it means dealing with the worst version of the effect. Anything I throw at it will behave unpredictably. A normal assault falls apart before it connects."
"Why not use very strong magic, kruu~?" Krak asked.
He asked it with the practicality of someone who solved most problems by increasing the amount of force.
"Two problems," I said. "First, these idols seem to have a limit on how much magic can get close to them. I noticed that on Green Idol Island too. I cannot simply throw something large enough to overwhelm the defense."
I paused.
"Second, even if the magic gets close, the idol can break it apart before it lands. So I cannot simply aim something big at it."
"A pincer attack would not work either, kruu~," Trumbo said thoughtfully. "If the flow reversal affects allies too, then a coordinated approach falls apart before the pincer closes, kruu~."
"Exactly," I said. "And the farther in we push, the worse it becomes."
The tent became quiet.
'Come on. You have seen harder problems. Think.'
I thought about the flow reversal and what it could and could not do.
It redirected direction.
However, it redirected direction one thing at a time.
At least, it redirected things by a finite amount over a finite period.
I saw those limits when it failed to redirect the third strike I attempted against it.
That strike got close because the idol was probably occupied redirecting other attacks at that moment.
It was not an omnidirectional and infinite-capacity redirection system.
It was a powerful redirection system.
It could handle a coordinated assault, a focused attack, or a tactical formation.
All of those things had one common property.
They involved a small number of things moving in a small number of directions.
What it probably could not handle was a large number of things moving in a large number of directions at the same time.
The smile that came to my face was, objectively, probably the kind of smile that would make Jane say that she was a little worried.
"We hit it with everything," I said.
"Everything, kruu~?" Krak asked.
"Everything. All at once. From every direction we have available. The volume needs to be so high and so random that the idol's redirection capacity is maxed out on the noise before it can deal with the signal."
I pointed toward the island.
"Every crustacean fires anything they have at the island. The Moglo forces do the same. Arrows. Water attacks. Thrown objects. Magical blasts. Anything that can travel a distance."
I looked at them.
"This is not a coordinated strike. It is not a formation. It is a flood. So much incoming from so many angles that the idol's redirection has to spread across all of it. Then it cannot effectively deal with any individual piece."
Krak looked at me.
Then he looked at the crustacean forces.
Then he looked back at me.
"This is a good plan, kruu~," he said.
He sounded like someone who expected something considerably more complex and was genuinely pleased by how clean the answer was.
"Thank you."
"It is very simple, kruu~."
"Yes."
"Chaos style, kruu~."
"Essentially."
I turned toward the crustacean forces and began applying buffs.
I was specific about it because this situation required the right buffs more than it required a large number of buffs.
[Strength Surge] went on first.
If their attacks were going to matter after they got through, they needed enough power behind them. A hit that the idol failed to redirect still needed to hurt something.
[Iron Carapace] went on after that.
The Moglo fleet would respond to an all-direction volume assault. I needed the crustacean front line to absorb the counterfire without breaking.
[Flow Anchor] was the buff I had been thinking about since returning from the scouting trip.
It was a stabilization buff designed to reduce how badly flow reversal affected their movement.
Our strategy was volume rather than coordination, but I still did not want our forces stumbling sideways when they meant to move forward.
It would not completely neutralize the idol's effect.
However, it would make it manageable.
Manageable was enough.
[Battle Fervor] came next.
Volume assaults required sustained will. The forces needed to keep pushing when the counterattack came back at them.
[Mana Infusion] added extra energy behind the magical attacks.
That way, they could still hit hard even if their trajectories were bent.
[Swift Current] increased reaction time.
Fighting in a flow-reversal environment required constant micro-adjustments.
Faster reactions helped.
Finally, I placed [Holy Barrier] around the advance forces.
Those were the crustaceans who would push deepest into the idol's range.
I wanted a layer of protection around them that could absorb some of what the idol threw back.
By the time I finished, the crustacean forces were glowing in about four colors at once.
That was a visual I did not entirely anticipate.
However, it was objectively quite impressive.
"Just hit them with anything," I told the assembled forces. "Ranged attacks. Everything ranged. Do not try to aim perfectly. Volume, speed, and randomness. Keep it coming from every angle you have."
Krak nodded.
The nod had the quality of a natural principle being confirmed.
"Volume, kruu~," he said.
They fired.
When I say they fired, I mean the crustacean forces attacked with the specific enthusiasm of a defensive line that had been waiting for an offensive moment for a very long time and was extremely relieved to finally be in one.
The Moglo forces on the island suddenly received incoming attacks from more angles than their formation was designed to handle.
Their front line buckled before they could consolidate.
The ships began maneuvering.
However, there was too much incoming from too many directions for the maneuvers to accomplish much against all of it.
I looked up at the space above the island.
Then I opened the gates.
They came out gold.
They always came out gold.
Apparently, that happened when you had a certain ratio of divine authority and alchemical enhancement operating inside the same body.
The gates arranged themselves in the air above the island.
They spread across different points and different angles.
Each gate was aimed slightly differently.
Each gate held a different type of projectile.
Then I began firing through them.
Compressed mana lances came through the leftmost gate.
Bolts of condensed holy light came through the center gates and spread across a wide arc.
Channeled wind pressure came through the right-side gates at a lower angle to catch anything taking cover near the ground.
I also fired a few experimental combinations that I had been developing and was not entirely certain about.
The current situation was a reasonably safe environment for uncertainty.
Volume was the strategy.
One more thing going sideways would not significantly change the overall picture.
'Take this, you mongrels.'
I was laughing.
I will admit that.
There was something deeply funny about the image of a former villainess standing on the ocean floor and firing golden gates at a magical boss construct.
Either you found that funny or you did not.
I did.
The island became loud.
It became full of light.
It was thoroughly occupied with processing everything we threw at it.
The flow reversal was maxed out trying to redirect the chaos.
It was not succeeding at all of it.
I placed a barrier around the advancing crustaceans.
Then I let them push through while the disorder covered them.
We were moving.
It was working.
We were close to the idol when they appeared.
Two of them came through the Moglo formation as though they had been kept specifically for that moment.
I was fairly sure that they had been.
Someone on the other side watched Green Idol Island and made a very specific decision about what to hold in reserve.
They were large.
They were not large in the way that regular Moglos were large.
They were large in the way that things became large when they were purpose-built for a specific function.
Their function was to answer whatever the attackers were doing.
Both of them had a quality that the regular forces did not.
They moved like they knew exactly what they were going to do.
They moved like they had done it before.
Krak stepped in front of the crustacean advance line.
He did not move to the side.
He moved directly in front.
He placed himself between the two elites and the path the crustaceans needed to take.
"You want to get past me, kruu~," Krak said.
His claws spread.
Then both claws discharged at the same time.
The sound was familiar now.
It was the crack-bang of maximum force being applied to the air.
However, using both claws simultaneously was considerably louder than either claw alone.
"Then you have to defeat me, kruu~."
The Blue Idol responded by buffing both elites.
They became considerably more dangerous within about four seconds.
Krak looked at what they became.
Then he planted his feet and began punching.
That was what Krak did whenever the situation required escalation.
I did not have constructive notes on that methodology.
It appeared to be working.
The Blue Idol was ten meters away.
I went for it.
The flow reversal hit me immediately.
For about five seconds, I let it do what it wanted to do.
I learned from the scouting trip that fighting the reversal immediately and directly was not the correct first response.
The correct first response was considerably less instinctive.
I had to observe what it was actually doing.
I thought about something I read once in a story about soul reapers.
There was a character whose ability inverted his enemies' senses.
Up became down.
Left became right.
The direction of cuts was flipped.
The enemy who got through it was not the one who resisted the inversion.
The enemy who got through it was the one who figured out the pattern quickly enough that the inversion became a new baseline to operate from.
I died against Ashkart more times than I could count.
Those deaths gave me more than techniques.
They gave me more than the move sets that eventually crystallized through repetition.
Underneath all of that, they gave me something that I did not have a precise word for.
It was a kind of structural adaptability.
It was the ability to have my assumptions about how the world worked demolished and then rebuild them quickly while still functioning.
In the Ashkart corridor, the window for rebuilding was extremely small.
If you did not rebuild fast enough, death happened.
Death happened anyway.
It happened many times.
Eventually, the rebuilding became automatic.
Thirty seconds.
That was all I needed this time.
I had to stop fighting the reversal and start operating inside it.
I watched the direction the flow was currently running.
Then I built a model of how it would redirect my movement and attacks.
The model updated in real time whenever the idol shifted its current.
I continuously adjusted my read of the space.
After thirty seconds, I was moving in the right directions.
They were not the intuitively correct directions.
They were the actually correct directions within the inverted space.
'Okay. Let us go.'
I thought about Ashkart while I fought.
The connection was worth thinking about.
Those million deaths did not only give me technique.
They changed how quickly I could incorporate new information under pressure.
What was happening now was that I was incorporating the flow reversal's pattern faster than a normal person could manage.
That was probably the difference between thirty seconds of adaptation and several minutes of adaptation.
Several minutes in this fight would have gone badly.
'Is that cheating?'
Maybe.
Or maybe it was simply what happened when you trained hard enough in bad enough conditions.
The line between those two things was difficult to see from the inside.
The Blue Idol fought well.
I am being honest about that.
It was not easy.
There were moments that were genuinely difficult.
The water magic it threw was strong.
The reversal kept catching the edges of my new calibration and throwing off my strikes.
I took more hits than I wanted.
My right shoulder was going to have feelings about this tomorrow.
However, I had a calibration.
It was updating.
The gap kept closing.
I raised my sword.
The form came through me the way Ashkart's forms came through me now.
The body moved first.
The conscious mind followed second.
My body knew the shape before I decided to use it.
I took one breath.
Then I named it, because naming things when they mattered was something I had gotten into the habit of doing.
"Ashkar Sword Style, First Form: Hundred Flash Storm."
One hundred strikes were delivered in the interval between one instant and the next.
The Blue Idol's flow reversal was designed to redirect direction.
It could redirect one direction.
However, it could not redirect one hundred directions delivered simultaneously within the same single moment.
Redirecting required an interval.
There was no interval.
The crystalline form came apart in the light that followed.
The flow reversal stopped.
In the sudden quiet where the idol had been, I stood and breathed.
Then I heard a sound from Krak's direction.
It was both of Krak's claws discharging at maximum capacity simultaneously.
That sound was, if anything, larger than it had been during the rest of the fight.
I turned around.
Krak had been fighting the two elite Moglos in the manner of someone who decided that his function was to remain in place and hit whatever came at him.
That approach had costs.
I could see them in the marks on his body.
I could see them in the way he held his left claw differently from his right.
His stance had the specific quality of someone who was holding up rather than winning.
However, he was holding up.
The two elites clearly hit him several times with significant force.
Each time, Krak remained there.
That was the only thing that needed to be true for his plan to work.
His plan was working.
The crustacean advance forces got through.
The path to the idol stayed open because Krak kept the elites' attention on himself.
Then something shifted in his posture.
The two elites seemed to notice it.
What shifted was the quality of someone who had been holding a position and was now preparing to stop holding it.
"Crab Blaster 3000, kruu~," Krak announced.
The two elites tried to move.
They did not move fast enough.
Both of Krak's claws discharged simultaneously at maximum force.
They aimed at two targets that were close enough together for the combined blast to cover both of them.
The sound was approximately what the ocean sounded like when it stopped being patient about something.
The two elite Moglos were sent several meters farther away from Krak's position.
They did not get up.
Krak sat down.
He did not collapse.
He sat deliberately.
It had the controlled quality of someone who decided that sitting was what they were going to do now.
He was hurt.
I could see it.
I could also see the glow of the buffs I placed on him earlier.
They were still active at the edges.
They were keeping things together that would otherwise not stay together.
Without [Iron Carapace], the second hit would have broken something.
Without [Undying Will], which I slipped into the Battle Fervor stack at the last moment, he probably would not have remained standing after the third and fourth hits.
Krak looked at the space where the elites had been.
Then he looked at me.
He made a small nod.
On a face with more conventional features, it would have been recognizable as the nod of someone who understood that the outcome was a collaborative result.
"As expected of Lady Josephine's preparations, kruu~," Trumbo said from farther back.
He spoke in the thoughtful tone of someone who watched the entire thing and reached conclusions in an orderly manner.
The crustacean forces cleared the remaining Moglo presence from the island.
The fleet retreated.
The flow reversal stopped because the thing producing it was in pieces.
The island settled into the particular quiet that islands entered after something significant stopped happening on them.
I looked at the Blue Idol.
Then I thought about Ashkart.
I thought about the million deaths.
I thought about what they put into me and what I was able to do with it today.
If someone had told me, at the beginning of all this, in the chapel with the blood on the floor, that this would become my life, I would have had several questions.
Most of them would have been variations of why.
I still had those questions.
I was starting to think that they would not be answered soon.
They might not be answered at all.
I was trying to make peace with that.
The alternative was spending a lot of energy being bothered by something I could not change.
That was not a good use of energy.
The gods made me very powerful for reasons that I did not fully understand.
I was still struggling.
That was the thing.
I kept expecting that the power would eventually smooth out the struggling.
It did not.
I was beginning to think that it was not going to.
I was also beginning to think that this was probably the point.
The strength was calibrated to a problem.
The problem was calibrated to be harder than the strength.
What happened on this island was warm-up.
That thought was both motivating and deeply inconvenient.
I raised my head.
The crustacean forces gathered around the island.
Krak had been helped back to his feet.
He was standing in the way of someone who intended to remain standing even if everything hurt.
Trumbo was there.
Ku was there.
They were all looking at me with the particular quality of people waiting for something to be said.
I thought about what to say.
Then this came out.
"The one who will liberate the ocean from the tyranny of Mokotua is finally here."
It was a little dramatic.
I was aware of that.
I chose not to care.
I had just fought a magical construct that made me walk sideways for most of the fight.
I thought that I earned a little drama.
Krak made his victory sound.
Several nearby rock formations rattled.
The crustacean forces answered him.
The ocean around the island became loud in the way oceans became loud when something was finally resolved after a long time of not being resolved.
I stood there and let it happen.
Then I thought that the sea kelp salad was probably very good.
I was looking forward to finding out.
I looked at Ku.
He was floating beside me with the satisfied quality of someone who believed this would work and was glad to be right.
"Tell Trumbo that I want to try the sea kelp salad," I said.
Ku looked as though he was trying not to visibly light up.
"I will tell him immediately, kuu~," he said.