“Hmm?”

  Prism glanced down between his feet at the deck of the boat. He thought that he’d sensed something under the water, something large. He sat on a bench beneath the canopy, not far from Mela, Wadaw, and Ursun. Leanna stood at the bow of the boat collecting data about their surroundings. Lorias and Srell stood guard at the starboard and port ends of the stern respectively with their PAWs in their hands.

  “Something the matter?” Wadaw was the first to notice the alien’s sudden uneasiness.

  “I thought I felt something in the water,” shared Prism with a shake of his head. “There’s nothing there, though. I must just be on edge.”

  “Your magic fog…does its protection extend underwater?” Mela asked.

  “Yes. It extends 50 meters out from each surface of the boat and is unaffected by the water,” Prism reminded her. He ran the tips of his fingers slowly across the skin of his forearm. “I can sense all movement within it. The bullets feel like tiny pin pricks and the energy weapons feel like the heat from sunlight."

  "I've been getting some odd blips on radar for the past few minutes. I thought they might be erroneous, but now you've got me worried," shared Mela with a frown.

  "If they've got something down there shadowing the boat..." Leanna started to share before she, Lorias, and Srell were knocked down hard onto the deck by a sudden impact against the bottom of the hull. The boat would have been destroyed by the force if it hadn't been reinforced by Prism's magic.

  "What was that!?" Ursun shouted through their shared link. He would've yelled aloud if the air hadn't been knocked out of his lungs.

  Prism jumped up to his feet and stretched his palms out below his chest and pointed them at the deck. "I think there's a plasma beast beneath us, but I can't see it or even fully sense it," he shared.

  "A C-type..." Srell shared faintly after he and Lorias crouched down to steady themselves on their increasingly choppy ride. He thought of the powerful water-dwelling plasma beasts in his favorite show.

  Time seemed to slow around Prism as he magically heightened his enhanced senses and expanded his perception to the waters that flowed beneath all of them. Prism's eyes twitched in their sockets when he made out the outline of a contoured creature nearly the length and width of the Here Comes the Rain. He could barely tell that there was something there, as the entity was essentially invisible. The creature didn't displace the water around it, but instead had water move through it as though it was immune to the laws of physics. At that moment, Prism realized the true danger of what they were up against.

  "It's manipulating gravity," he shared in disbelief. "This thing is able to warp the space around it."

  "They're taking us quite seriously now." Lorias shared while he pointed his PAW into the water in case he caught a glimpse of the unknown creature.

  "You can handle it, right? You can alter gravity, too." Leanna asked.

  Prism pushed his hands out to his sides as his irises began to glow with a shade of dark violet. A dark aura appeared around him that made everyone on the boat feel faintly nauseous. The cloud they were all inside darkened and took on the appearance of storm cloud clinging to the clear waters of the Vines. All of them felt a painful pinch before they were teleported several dozens of meters ahead, then back, then back again. The sporadic blasts of spatial teleportation made Srell sick enough to vomit over the side of the boat. "Bare with it...I have to get us away from whatever that thing is before it kills all of us in a weird way that I can't defend against." Prism shared after using his gravity magic to warp them a hundred meters forward.

  "Did we lose it?" Ursun asked. He too was aiming his PAW at the water while he leaned against the wall around the front half of the boat.

  "No...it's slipping through space and catching up to us each time..." Prism shared. He tried not to let his terror infect the others, but his tone already told them how dire their situation was.

  "It's slipping through space!? The Queen shouldn't have technology like that...why the hell would she make a weapon that powerful!?" Leanna asked in a fever of confusion. She too started to panic as she realized how beyond her understanding their enemy was.

  "If she's deploying something this powerful against us, then she's desperate. Something this cutting-edge is probably the best she's got," shared Wadaw. He looked around at everyone on the boat with a cocky gleam in his eyes. "If you can take this thing out, then there's probably nothing that the Queen could use to stop you."

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  "Let's not go completely insane." Prism shared, unconvinced that the entity was indeed the best weapon in the Queen's arsenal. "I lied earlier; this boat is going to fly. Hold on everyone, I've got to catch this thing flat-footed."

  With an especially large burst of power, the darkened cloud and its contents vanished with a loud cackle like thunder and appeared with an equally terrifying noise a kilometer in the air. It was Leanna's turn to vomit over the side of the boat as the increased distance of the spatial warp gave everyone a severe case of nausea.

  "What about the air defenses!?" Srell shouted out to Prism while the alien leaned over the edge of the flying boat.

  "Link-comms only!" Ursun pointed at his own head with a brow furrowed to the extreme while he shouted into Srell's head. Srell covered his own mouth like a kid caught cursing and nodded apologetically to his commander.

  "The gravity cloud around the boat will protect all of us for a little while. I'll be back after I deal with this thing," shared Prism with a curt nod to his allies. Prism leapt into the air and flew below the Here Comes the Rain while he kept it suspended in midair. He soon saw the dark creature curled up a dozen meters below the exposed hull like a baby within its mother's womb.

  "Did he say us!? He doesn't plan on fighting that space-bending plasma beast that close to the boat, is he!?" Mela's voice cried out through their psychic link.

  "What can we do but wait and hope that he can stop it?" Lorias asked rhetorically.

  When the plasma beast sensed Prism drawing near to it, its serpentine eyes opened and flashed red so brightly that it nearly blinded the alien. The creature had the appearance of a humanoid dragon with a long, thick head without a mouth and a tail section behind its legs that ended like that of a dolphin. It stretched out its muscular arms and flexed the four fingers of its large hands, each tipped with a massive, glossy black claw. Its black skin was covered in numerous concentric circles that undulated and shifted. Prism saw the way that light seemed to become distorted around the beast that hovered meters in front of him.

  "What a strange metamaterial...could that be how its generating gravitational waves?" Leanna remarked after recovering from her bout of sickness. Prism shared the view from his eyes with his team.

  As if replying to Leanna's telepathic question, the beast raised its claws and swiped out at Prism with an attack that seemed to cut through space itself, closing the distance between it and Prism without the creature needing to fly over to him. Prism anticipated such an attack and easily dodged it. In fact, Prism was sure that he'd learned all he needed from the swipe to effectively deal with the beast.

  "Yes, it is its skin that's doing it." Prism shared. His eyes glowed with a dark light as he began to channel a large amount of power into his hands. He watched the beast begin to float around in the air like an agile fish swimming in water. "It thinks its a shark about to devour its prey," he shared as the beast picked up speed and began to fly in a downward arc around him. "It doesn't realize what kind of power I have access to right now."

  Prism teleported behind the beast, then watched it disappear and then reappear behind him with its claws ready to strike. Prism smiled and let the swipe seemingly rip him asunder. A gush of red was released from what looked like Prism's eviscerated body. The creature let out a metallic howl when it's sensors didn't detect any actual viscera upon its claws.

  Prism appeared above the beast and touched the back of its long head. He sent a wave of white light along the surface, causing the patterned skin to quickly petrify. The beast's eyes flashed red again as it howled with such force that Prism felt the sound in his bones. It caused its hardening, whitening skin to slough off of its body right as the patch of petrified material was engulfed in an unintended explosion. Prism cursed as he was thrown back while the beast slipped into a gravitational distortion.

  "Don't let it get away." Ursun commanded.

  "I won't," shared Prism before following the beast into the temporary distortion it had made.

  The elementeitan quickly found himself underwater and over a kilometer away from where the Here Comes the Rain continued to hover in the air. A vicious strike nearly knocked him unconscious before he could get his bearings in the depths of the river. He felt the air leave his lungs all at once and he felt his body flying deeper under the water. With one quick spell of healing and another spell of waterbreathing, Prism was able to stop his movement and fix his eyes upon his surroundings. He couldn't see the beast, but he'd not made the same mistake that he'd made with his previous beastly opponent.

  "There." Prism lowered his chin and lunged out at the moving figure that bore the mark of his tracking spell.

  Sensing Prism's awareness of it, the plasma beast became visible to conserve power and whipped its meaty tail at Prism. Prism rolled out of the way of the tail but was still struck by the resulting pressure wave. The tail acted like a whip, moving faster than the speed of sound even while underwater to create a cavitating shockwave like a small torpedo. Prism was knocked out cold by the attack, leaving him defenseless. His stilled body began to slowly descend into the depths like a dead fish.

  "Prism!?" Leanna shouted telepathically, but didn't get a reply. The rest of her allies tried to rouse him with their disembodied voices to no avail.

  "Hmm...not good. Not good at all." Wadaw shared as he began to feel the boat that they all stood upon shake. They were all still a kilometer above the ground.

  Lorias looked up and pointed at the missiles that were flying laps around the dark, magical cloud that surrounded them. The cloud was still almost completely transparent to them. "If the fall doesn't kill us, then the air defenses certainly will." said Lorias with a calmness that made Mela's blood boil.

  "Where is your faith!" Mela yelled to the others telepathically. She held her hands up close to her neck and frowned. "Hasn't he seen all of you through impossible situations? Hasn't he performed miracles time and time again?"

  "He's got the mind of a teenager," Ursun shook his head and shared. He saw the passion leaving Mela's eyes. "This was bound to happen sooner or later. I'm just sorry that I dragged all of you into this silliness."

  Wadaw walked over to Ursun and stared up at the commander for a moment while the deck of the boat started to shake even more violently. Ursun felt a hard slap across his face just as he was opening his mouth to ask what Wadaw's problem was. "Shame on you. After all you've been through with that boy...this is how you talk about him in his time of need?" Wadaw shared before shaking his head and walking back towards the edge of the deck to look down at the Vines.

  Ursun looked down at the deck in silence. He could feel a well of shame rising up past his chest like bile. He had been through a great deal with Prism. But in the last year of missions, plane rides, and roughing it in random places, Prism had almost never trusted Ursun enough to share anything meaningful about his alien past. Despite his efforts to be open and kind to Prism, Ursun had been shown little trust in turn, and that had worn on him in the past few weeks more than it ever had.

  "Wadaw, no!" Mela's voice shrilly yelled aloud.

  Ursun snapped his head up and caught a glimpse of someone falling overboard. In a daze, he ran to the edge of the rumbling boat while keeping himself from falling over. He and the others who rushed over watched Wadaw diving headfirst towards the thick blue line beneath which they last knew Prism to be.

  "From this height!?" Srell shared with eyes wide with horror.

  "He'll die the moment he hits the water..." Leanna shared with her hand over her mouth. "But only if he avoids the air defenses, first. He would need..."

  "A miracle." Mela shared with tears in her eyes as she gripped the wall beside Leanna.