The stone giant walked across the dark sea, cutting its surface with his wide chest. The seven humans were gathered on the circular platform of his severed neck, pressing themselves against the swaying stone. The cold water was spraying into their faces and the furious winds were threatening to throw them off the moving statue into the deadly waves below.
Nephis had long extinguished her flames, so they were surrounded by absolute darkness.
Empowering himself with his storm, Lucien managed to hold on to a crack in the stone. Somewhere behind him, Effie called Sunny's name.
Sunless waited for a moment before yelling, "Prepare yourself! We're going to be underwater for a couple of minutes, at least!"
Cursing under his breath, Lucien prepared to take a deep breath. At that moment, Sunny yelled out again:
"...Now!"
The black water rose higher and higher. The shoulders of the giant were already submerged in its lightless depths. The circular platform was going to be next.
As the stone colossus moved across the bottom of the canyon, the platform rose and fell. After another fall, it was finally lost beneath the waves.
The cold, salty water crashed into them and then swallowed the entire world. The members of the cohort desperately held onto the cracks in the stone, trying to prevent themselves from being washed away by the raging current.
No one would be able to save them if they were.
'We'll be fine, a normal human can hold their breath for a minute or two. We're at the pinnacle of human strength, some of us beyond that. We can manage a few minutes….right?'
Lucien tried to reassure himself. It wasn't working.
But there was nothing he could do. So he waited, holding on to the slippery stone with all his might.
But the water was not receding, and the giant was not coming up. At one point, his arms had started to burn, so he pumped his body with more storm essence. Instantly, it became a lot easier to hold on to the stone.
But at the same time, lightning began spilling out into the water around him. Endangering those close to him.
'Not good,' Lucien thought, 'If it hits anyone, they might lose their grip.'
Gritting his teeth, he commanded the lightning to stay close to his body. The storm listened, and slowly inched closer to his body.
Just then, his body was suddenly slammed against the platform with tremendous force, and his concentration was disrupted. The lightning he was holding together lashed out against the waves, dangerously close to the members of the cohort.
Using his last bit of will, he dismissed a portion of his storm, forcing the lightning to dissipate. But that came at a cost.
With the storm essence returning to his core and the sudden force pushing him down, Lucien's grip faltered for a moment.
And that was enough for the sea to pull him away.
A sense of weightlessness hit Lucien as he was pulled away from the center of the platform, flailing to grab something, anything. But he couldn't see, not in the pitch blackness of night.
His hand brushed against something, and his body moved before his mind could think. His arms wrapped around the pillar-like object, uncaring as to what it was. His life depended on it now.
Slowly, painfully slowly, the stone giant rose out of the canyon. His massive hands grabbed onto the edge of it, and with one devastating pull, the colossus threw himself upward.
After what felt like an eternity, the water finally receded. Lucien heaved in a desperate breath, finally tasting the sweet, sweet air again. After a few moments, he finally saw what he was grabbing.
It was a thigh, an incredibly muscular one. Lucien froze and slowly craned his neck up.
Only to see Effie staring at him, her face morphing from shock into one of perverted amusement.
"Lucy, if you wanted to get a feel, you could've just asked."
Lucien immediately let go and skirted away from her.
Effie grinned, "What? Too shy to do it where everyone can see?"
"Fuck you." He spat out, he should've just let the waves carry him away.
"You'd like that wouldn't you."
Glaring at her, Lucien was about to retort when he suddenly froze. There was something below them, hanging onto the stone giant.
It was a Fallen.
"We're not alone," He whispered, summoning his spear from within his soul sea.
As if on cue, Sunny walked up to them and kneeled by Effie's side. Taking the huntress by the hand, he put something into her palm and said:
"Do you feel the colossus moving up and down? That's his steps. I need you to start counting them. If I'm not back after thirty steps, throw the thing I gave you in that direction as hard as you can. Alright?"
Effie gave him a nod. Her usual humor was gone, replaced by grim determination.
"Good. Well… wish me luck."
The huntress lingered for a moment and then said:
"Good luck."
Lucien wanted to help; facing a fallen abomination was not something any one of them could do alone. At least not yet. But he couldn't see in the dark, and his abilities were bright. Who knew what abominations he would attract from the dark sea if he summoned lightning?
All he could do was watch as Sunny jumped down to fight the fallen abomination. He could vaguely keep track of them using his storm sense to check if they were still alive and their position. But nothing else. He couldn't tell how someone moved, if they were about to kick or punch, only that they moved.
That was beyond him…Or was it?
'Why should I assume I can't. Can I not just learn?' He narrowed his eyes as he stared into nothing, 'If I can tell their position, I can tell what they're doing.'
With that, he closed his eyes and restricted his storm sense down to where Sunny and the monster were.
He sensed Sunny moving across the giant's body, while the monster came closer and closer. And then Sunny jumped, surprising Lucien, who only barely managed to stop himself from calling out his name.
Sunless moved in an arc as if connected to something and swung up to a moving surface. Whatever he was standing on was constantly moving back and forth.
'The arm, he's on the statue's arm.' He realized, as the monster began moving towards Sunny.
The monsters' advance slowed down as it got nearer to Sunny, and to his dread, began pushing Sunny away. Lucien didn't know how much surface Sunny had left to stand on, but it couldn't be much.
A moment later, the boy was thrown backwards, and Lucien was sure he'd fall into the dark sea. But he persevered and stood up again.
Just then, a loud voice sounded from close to him, screaming as it moved away:
"Thirty steps!"
That got the monsters' attention for a moment; in that moment, another presence made itself known beside Sunny. Stone Saint, it had to be her. She shifted, and something about the monster changed.
Instead of going closer to Sunny or chasing the voice, it began slipping down the statue's body and fell. The dark sea washed it away, far from them.
Sunny had won; he had defeated the fallen abomination. Heaving a sigh of relief, Lucien opened his eyes.
Only to find the rest of the cohort staring at him expectantly.
"What?"
"Lucy, you can sense them, right?" Effie asked.
"Yeah," He nodded, "Sunny won. Somehow, he managed to make the monster slip and fall into the sea."
The cohort sighed in relief at that and sat down at the center of the platform. A few moments later, Sunny finally crawled up and sprawled down beside them.
"What were you fighting?" Nephis asked after a while.
Sunny grimaced.
"A big ugly worm. I threw him back into the water."
With that, he reluctantly sat up and looked at the surface of the dark sea, which was already flowing over the shoulders of the stone giant.
Its surface was black and tranquil. No one was pursuing them.
"It's gone now, so rest up. I'll keep watch."
Sunny woke them up in the crack of dawn and finally went to sleep. And the cohort got to work. Lucien, Effie, and Kai got to work with the remains of the iron spiders that Effie had stored in her bag.
Using Cassie's golden rope, they tied the plates together to form a crude fence around the platform. Effie rolled some other plates into rods while Lucien got to work making spearheads to attach to them. They would come in handy if they were attacked from the skies.
With every passing hour, Lucien was growing paler and paler. On the bright side, he was able to infuse the fence with some of his storm shards to electrify it. He wanted to do the same for the javelins, but he had run out of shards.
After a while, the weakness started to hit him. Even with how fast his blood replenished, he had simply been making too many things too fast.
It had gotten so bad that Effie had noticed and pulled him aside.
"You need to stop and rest." The huntress said, physically pushing him down until he plopped down on the cold stone.
"Leave the rest to us."
"But-" Lucien wanted to protest, but Effie had already gone to help Kai work on the right shoulder. Sighing, he looked down at his arms, surely it couldn't be that…
His hands were alabaster white, so white that for a moment he thought they belonged to a stone child.
…bad.
On second thought, maybe he should take a break.
For the next few hours, he did nothing but recuperate. Slowly, the colour seemed to return to his skin, until he didn't feel like he was filled with wet sand.
But that peace would not last for long. A familiar buzz droned in his mind and he frowned, expanding his storm sense. And there it was, the source of the buzz. A storm.
At the same time, Cassie suddenly turned south, drawing everyone's attention.
Nephis turned to the blind girl and frowned.
"Cassie? Do you feel something?"
Cassia lingered for a few moments and then said, her voice uncertain:
"I think… I think a storm is coming."
"She's right, a storm is approaching. And it's a big one." Lucien said, cursing under his breath. That was a particularly violent one, the buzz in his head was getting stronger by the second.
Lucien himself would be fine in the storm; in fact, it felt like home to him. Every storm on the forgotten shores did. But the other members of the cohort did not have that luxury.
But that was not their only issue. A storm meant that the cursed sea would rise from the depths earlier than usual. It also meant that there would be rain and lightning, which would make the behavior of the dwellers of the depths unpredictable
But that wasn't it, of course, that wasn't it. The storm was not the only thing approaching them.
Lucien stumbled at the sheer number of monsters that were approaching them. All of them were awakened, but there was a lot.
Nephis gritted her teeth.
"You heard her. Prepare…"
However, the blind girl interrupted her.
"Wait. There is something else."
"Not just something," Lucien growled, summoning his bow and arrows, "A lot of things. It's a swarm, two of them in fact."
Kai paled and spun around, summoning his bow. Together, the two of them shot into the sky, and a dark shape forcefully crashed into the stone platform, smearing it with blood. A black and a white arrow was protruding from its body.
The creature looked somewhat like a giant locust. Its body was covered in black chitin and comparatively small, no bigger than that of an adult human. Its wide wings were thin and transparent. As it convulsed in death throes, the wings moved, threatening to push the members of the cohort off of the platform. Nephis dashed forward, grabbed the disgusting creature, and threw it down.
"This is gonna be hell," Lucien said as he summoned another arrow. A look of panic smeared his face.
Suddenly, a black dot appeared in the grey clouds and swiftly fell down, covering the distance to the neck of the colossus almost instantly. Before it could attack, though, Effie's spear collided with it. The giant locust practically exploded, sending a rain of blood splattering against the stone back of the colossus.
But by the time the huntress dismissed her spear and before she had the time to summon it again, there was another dot, and another, and another…
Kai shot one more creature out of the air, while Lucien shot an arrow wreathed in lightning, hitting one of them and momentarily paralyzing another close to it. As the three bodies fell, more and more dots marred the sky. And below them, another horde was climbing up the statue's legs, getting closer and closer to them.
A/N: This is the end of daily updates, uni just reopened, and I no longer have the free time I did. I'll try to upload 2-3 times a week, but if uni decides to fuck me raw then I can't promise anything.