Chapter 1304 — The Rising Tide

His thoughts raced and his decision was instant. Bolken unhesitatingly spread the "hands" that looked like gnarled, intertwining withered branches, and an immensely powerful force of corruption and decay shot forth through the air as a gray-white spike. He held nothing back, determined to kill this creature—who looked human but could never possibly be human—in an instant!

Yet at that very moment, the sisters Lerna and Ferna beside him turned ashen, as though they had finally realized something, and cried out in one voice: "Don't kill her!!"

But their warning came a step too late—the gray-white spike, unleashed at full force by a legendary powerhouse and imbued with tremendous lethal power, needed only an instant to reach Coraline. And she, still suffering the aftereffects of tumbling over and over through the deep-blue pulse current, could not react at all in that moment. She only had time to raise her warblade slightly and cry out "Oh, Mom—" before she died on the spot in a flash.

A burst of blue water blossomed with a faint shimmer, then instantly dissipated into the air. The inexplicable "intruder" left no remains behind, vanishing before everyone's eyes as though she had evaporated on the spot. Bolken turned to the sisters Lerna and Ferna, who had suddenly shouted, and asked in bewilderment: "What did you just say?"

"We said don't kill her! Damn it, you..." Lerna glared, her eyes wide. In all the many years she had moved about in this mortal shell, she had rarely been so furious. But she quickly realized that rage was now useless, and that this unreliable freak before her was the only "ally" she could currently control. She could only force down her anger and say in a suppressed tone: "Our base here has been exposed, 'Archbishop.' Get ready—or rather, we no longer have any time to prepare for anything. All plans must be set in motion immediately!"

"I don't understand," Bolken said, his tone hostile; he was clearly deeply displeased with the twins' attitude. "I killed that intruder utterly, not a scrap left—you need not doubt my strength. On this planet, there is scarcely a mortal who can survive being struck by my withering spike. Not even a dragon could!"

"That is precisely the problem, 'Archbishop'!" Ferna raised her voice as well. "That was a siren! Only a very limited few kinds of soul-based powers could possibly kill such a creature—your withering spike could only temporarily disassemble her shell. She has now returned to their nest in the deep sea, carrying with her every secret she saw here! The situation is clear now: all these days, it has been the sirens intercepting the runestones we deployed. Whatever the reason, this ancient alien race now stands against us. Archbishop, do you understand the situation?!"

Sirens?!

Bolken finally snapped out of his vexation. The somewhat unfamiliar word "siren" quickly dredged up the scant intelligence he knew. He recalled the tales connected with the deep sea, tales describing those remote, profound abysses, the songs that echoed among the reefs and islands, and the frenzied, horrifying accounts of those sailors who in ancient times had narrowly survived the surging tides. He drew a soft breath: "The sirens you speak of—are they the ones that the Sons of the Storm over the past few centuries..."

"Begin everything ahead of time, Archbishop," Ferna interrupted the treant leader. "There is no point in continuing to bide our time and build up strength."

"But... we are still far from 'taming' the deep-blue netherways!" Bolken could not help saying. "And is the situation really that serious? The test we conducted earlier already produced observable phenomena across the globe. Our enemies cannot possibly fail to notice..."

"Exposing one's existence and exposing one's hand are two entirely different concepts, Archbishop. The civilization of those sirens is far more advanced than you imagine. That 'scout' has already seen many of the things we set up here, and from them they can deduce far more of the truth than those weak races on the continent ever could. And I am now deeply worried... that those deep-sea creatures may have already, at some unknown point, formed an alliance with the weak races on land," Lerna said, her tone severe. "The plan must begin ahead of schedule. It will cost us many advantages we ought to have had, but that is still better than letting the entire plan come to nothing..."

The ancient runaway AI occupying a duplicate's shell ground out these words through clenched teeth, her expression growing very ugly by the end. Clearly, this sudden turn of events had greatly disrupted the entire plan, preventing some arrangement of hers from being completed on schedule. But then Ferna, beside her, seemed to have followed another logical thread to a new branch: "Still, this is not entirely a bad thing. Those mortal nations living outside the wasteland are probably not prepared. If we begin our operations ahead of time, we should be able to catch them off guar—"

"Wait," Bolken said, as though he had suddenly sensed something. He swayed his withered, twisted crown of branches and spread two arms formed of coiled, crooked vines, his dark brown eyes full of wariness. "Do you not feel... that the moisture in the air is increasing?"

"Moisture?" Ferna frowned. The shell she now used was bound by the material form of a mortal, and her perception was not much stronger than that of an ordinary elf. The Archbishop, whose entire body had long since mutated into something half-plant, was evidently more sensitive than she was when it came to "moisture," so it was several seconds before she noticed what he meant by the "increase in moisture."

The air was growing damp, and a faint, briny, salty breath drifted into her nostrils.

Here, in this barren wasteland far from the sea, she smelled the breath of the ocean.

The sound of waves rose in her ears like an illusion, that splashing so clear it was as though the entire ocean lay right before her. Yet the essence of that sound was not a tremor in the air—it resonated with her soul and mind, creating a "sensation" that straddled reality and perception. The moisture grew ever richer; on the dry stones and cliff faces in the surrounding valley, layer upon layer of water droplets had begun to seep out at some unknown point. The salt-laden wind stirred the dry branches and leaves of the treants, and a soft, gentle song suddenly appeared amid the waves. That song began to link the minds of everyone present, instilling in their hearts a yearning for the deep sea, a yearning to dive down, a yearning to merge into one with the dark abyss.

This was the sirens' unique psionic song—

Pythia, Queen of the Sirens, was singing.

Through her song, the deep sea was descending upon this valley.

Without a moment's hesitation, the sisters Firna and Lerna raised their hands and pointed toward the spatial rift lying at the bottom of the pit not far away. Layer upon layer of halos emerged around them, and they began to manipulate the rift's boundary.

"Blow up this passage!"

They shouted in unison.

(End of Chapter)