Prism felt all manner of particle beams and long-range bullets move by him as he soared through the air with the ease of a bird of prey. He bobbed and twisted while he absorbed, dodged and deflected the attacks directed at him. He eventually settled on creating a warping field around his body that simply made anything harmful that was headed his way bend around him in a seemingly impossible way. The spatial distortion that he covered himself with was such a high level of magic that the ease in which he’d made it made him raise an eyebrow.

  “This is some potent stuff,” he thought to himself as he watched the dense stream of mana flowing around his fingers. If regular mana flowed like air then this area’s mana was like syrup.

  The autumn air high above the trees was cold as it blew across the dark exposed skin of Prism’s upper body. He paid the sensation no mind. It was no threat to him, so his barrier let it touch him.

  He made out the skyline of what he believed to be Zazi several kilometers to the east. Its tallest buildings had a strangely symmetrical formation that made the city look like an abstract, alabaster pyramid. His eyes then focused on a cluster of white lights flying up towards him from the Vines. The light-gray missile casings reflected the light of the morning sun like dew atop flower buds.

  Prism moved his body as though he was pushing himself off of a wall before slowly reaching his hands out in front of his chest towards the missile barrage. A tiny white spell circle expanded from between his hands until it was a massive incandescent ring that was shooting forth straight ahead of him. Once the ring of light flew around the approaching missiles, they all self-destructed in a spectacular display of concussive force that released shockwaves in all directions. Prism caused the kinetic energy to flow around him with an outstretched pointed finger.

  He then looked down at the rapidly moving white cloud that’s contained his team at its center. It was traveling down the thick blue line that snaked through the green that stretched around it. He heard the telepathic voice of his teammates being relayed back and forth through their shared link as they coordinated their attacks against the river-skitters. His thickening magical cloud had slowed the kamikaze machines enough for RED-1 and Wadaw to shoot them out of the air, but not without a great amount of marksmanship.

  A spectrum of deadly particles and radiations were trained on him, some of which interacted with each other to create strange visual effects. He was sure that It would be enough to cook, kill, or disable anything other than him. “These automated aerial defenses are no joke,” he sighed while he remained stationary, monitoring the battlefield below. Prism soon shook his head when he saw the large Sguvan river ship open some of its weapons ports. He flew down towards the Stalwart as it fired off dozens-more missiles up at him.

  “You idiots are doing your best to keep me from my boat, aren’t you?” Prism said aloud. “That ship is begging to be crushed by all this power at my command.”

  He sent a wave of disruptive magic at the rising missiles that caused some of them to fall back onto the Stalwart and some to fall into the waters around it. The same magic disabled the ship’s internal systems enough to cause the alarms of its interior to blare at its panicked crew. Prism watched the soldiers within rushing to and fro with his extended perception. Walls meant nothing to him when he was so grossly empowered.

  “I don’t want to destroy your ship or kill any of you, but I will if you insist on attacking me and my cloud.” Prism substituted the Stalwart’s alarm with his own voice. The soldiers stopped and looked at their ship’s walls with terror. Some of them even began to rush for the emergency exits with the certainty that their ship had been taken over by who they believed to be the Prince of the Faeries. “Fools…” Prism thought as he watched the undisciplined among them swimming out into the river towards the nearby sandy coast to the north.

  “Now that you’ve put an end to that, perhaps you might return to us now? We’re in a bit of a predicament, if you hadn’t noticed.” Wadaw’s voice rang through Prism’s head clear enough to snap him out of his morbid fascination with the Sguvan rivership.

  Four river-skitters had begun to hold a stationary position over the waters that fed into the conflux, waters that the shrouded Here Comes the Rain continued to barrel down. The golden discs hovered at a 60 degree angle to the water as they heated it up, creating a thick cloud of scalding steam that their spinning motion served to propel westwards toward the approaching boat. Leanna and Mela’s instruments detected the deadly temperature gradient in their path and knew that it could only be bad news.

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  “Is this magical cloud we’re in gonna save us from that super-hot steam?” Srell felt stupid asking Prism.

  “No…I didn’t foresee that much heat being sent at it…” Prism admitted before flying back towards his allies.

  “We’re going to collide with all that heat in about two minutes.” Leanna shared with her bio-computer’s graphical estimations of the steam’s thermodynamics.

  “Shit!” Prism said aloud as the air whipped around him. He could see the torrent of steam coming from the river-skitters, but they were making so much heat that a mirage distorted the air around them to the point that they weren’t visible to him. Prism knew that he needed to act quickly, but he also knew that a brash mistake would be just as deadly. As a bullet that was fired by a coastline soldier harmlessly veered around him, Prism remembered the spatial distortion field that surrounded him. He soared into the air in an extreme arc that brought him back down in only a few seconds directly in front of the jets of steam being fired down the river. He watched as hundreds of gallons of the vaporized water began shooting up and around him instead, creating a sight not unlike that of the chimney of an old steam locomotive letting out its exhaust high into the air.

  Prism felt nothing as the river-skitters continued to shoot the steam at his distortion until the high-flying vapor began raining down as simple water droplets upon his head. Prism then destroyed the mechanical discs in front of him with a fast sweep of his right hand that sent out a slice of pure kinetic energy with it. The river-skitters shattered in a spray of blue plasma and delicate parts. Prism simply floated backwards until he was enveloped in the cloud of his making. The low wall around the front of the Here Comes the Rain warped around his body as his feet soon rested upon its deck. He looked around at his annoyed allies as though nothing strange had happened.

  “The coast is clear.” Prism shared over the incessant chatter of the others in his head.

  “The hell it is!” Ursun shouted. His massive arm stretched out towards the river’s northern coastline and pointed at the soldiers and equipment dotting it as their boat sped by.

  “It’s a figure of speech…” Prism waved off Ursun’s angry gesture with the dismissiveness of an aristocrat to a servant. Prism’s wave was followed by a flick of his wrist that sent a powerful gale of wind across the coast Ursun pointed to. The wind swept away the gear and personnel there so violently that many of the soldiers were killed before they were even blown into the Vines. “Oops!” Prism exclaimed when he saw how destructive the spell had been. A large wave was even created that surged forth from the north riverbed into the conflux ahead of their speeding boat. The fluvial tsunami began to ferociously overtook the Stalwart and the soldiers that were still swimming in its vicinity.

  “You’re going to kill those men after you left their ship dead in the water!?” It was Leanna’s turn to shout angrily at Prism as they all witnessed the grisly scene unfolding a kilometer ahead of their boat.

  Prism gulped hard and tried to finesse his effect on the turbulent mana that he’d carelessly riled up too many times already. He sent out a few of his cloud’s spell circles out ahead of the Here Comes the Rain to the fast-moving tsunami, then caused the circles the create a stream of large bubbles using the water near the Stalwart fired directly at the large wave that approached it. When the bubbles struck the length of the wave nearly simultaneously, the tsunami was reduced to a large hump of water that merely caused the area around the Sguvan rivership to harmlessly rise into the air for a few seconds before it returned to normal.

  Prism nearly keeled over from the precise work he’d performed to prevent another random burst of unintended magic from occurring. He fell to his knees at the bow of the boat and heard a voice emanating from deep within his being say, “All life is precious.” He felt hot tears streaming down his face and a warm hand touching his shoulder. Prism looked up and saw Wadaw smiling warmly down at him while they motored past the Stalwart.

  “Those idiots are still trying to hit us with whatever they can.” Leanna shared. She monitored the soldiers that remained on the coastlines of the wide waterway from the edge of the boat, keeping a finger on the side of her smart visor as she typed away with her other hand on a virtual keyboard that only she could see.

  “It’s crazy how this white fog is stopping bullets and death rays.” Srell shook his head and shared before slowly running his palm down his face. He watched the usually-unerring projectiles from driver rifles freeze the moment they struck the outer edges of the protective cloud. Colorful auroras undulated above them as a result of the weaponized millimeter waves and other harmful energies being directed at them being harmlessly converted into light. “I’m sure their nerds are scratching their heads like Leanna does when she tries to analyze our combat data,” added Srell.

  “The important thing is that they’re finally keeping their distance. For now, at least.” Lorias shared.

  “Another hour at this speed and we’ll be meeting our allies on the outskirts of Zazi,” shared Mela without taking her eyes off of the radar screen beside her steering wheel. She wasn’t convinced that the military had given up on its frontal assault on her boat. She figured that there were still so many ways that the Here Comes the Rain could be stopped by threats hidden under the waters’ surface. “These soldiers’ commanders haven’t given up trying to stop us yet, even if all they see is a boat-sized cloud on the water,” she said with certainty. She thought of her husband, a determined officer who would move heaven and ?b to fulfill his duties.

  “Are you up to another hour of this?” Wadaw telepathically asked the elementeitan still kneeling in front of him.

  Prism looked up at him, grabbed the top of the metal wall in front of him, then pulled himself up with the groan of an older man. Wadaw pulled his hand away, instead placing it on his hip as he watched Prism turn to face him. “I have to be,” Prism shared with Wadaw and the rest of their team. “We can’t be stopped, not with the level of magic at my command.”

  Wadaw noticed an opalescent sheen that danced across Prism’s dark brown skin and that occasionally flashed across his irises. Wadaw could even make out a wispy field of rainbow lights fluttering in the air immediately around Prism. It was a sign of the awesome power that surrounded the alien, a power that was as deadly as it was beautiful.