Noctarus barreled down the deck. No way he'd fit up the narrow stairs, but he'd probably just jump up. In my active Spellseer's Gaze, his entire body was thrumming with boiling black power. He was preparing a finishing move to destroy me.

So I triggered Divergent Strike to slow him down. I'd been saving my explosive area of effect spell for when his rune defenses had totally crumbled. With the rebound buff broken, hopefully I'd done enough that casting it wasn't a waste. More than anything, I needed to disrupt whatever death spell he was preparing.

I aimed the spell for the center of his giant chest, partially to maximize impact and partially to avoid destroying any of the rune script. The mind-boggling matrix was way too complex to risk damaging any of it. I had zero idea what backlash I might unleash if I did.

My spell detonated against Noctarus's chest just as his black mana swelled to a crescendo of casting. Like an invisible meteor, Divergent Strike pummeled him. The defensive rune script surrounding his body flared, then exploded into tiny shards.

The impact stopped the several-ton necromancer leviathan in his tracks and sent him stumbling back. The glow of his spell winked out, and he staggered as convergence mana sheathed his entire form, interrupting his ability to renew his casting.

"Don't, you fool!" Noctarus gasped, and the very real fear in his skeletal faces confirmed I was making the right choice.

"Say good-bye to this world," I growled as I pulled the energy crystal from my inventory and slammed it down onto the pedestal.

"Nooooo!" Noctarus screamed, launching forward like a giant missile, despite my convergence mana hindering his spell casting. I wasn't sure what he'd dug up from the depths of his black soul, but cracks appeared on his titanic body. Whatever he'd done had cost him a lot.

He crashed bodily into the wall of the higher deck and the entire ship shook from the impact. His long, serpentine front neck slithered over the high rail and elongated way farther than I thought possible, shooting straight at me. I might have snuffed out his magic, but he was pulling out all the stops to get to me.

Too late. I pushed all my mana into a bit of the script on the pedestal separated from the rest. All it did was link up the energy crystal with the broader matrix. I could do that without getting sucked in again.

A bright point of light flared deep inside the crystal, and a deep thrumming pulse seemed to shake the world. That's when I got an absolutely terrifying idea.

Would the script activate instantly and cast me across the multiverse with him? The crazy zen tree vision hadn't included a user manual. If I got caught in the teleportation too, I'd never see Tomas or Ruby or anyone I knew ever again. Never return to Earth.

Too late to back out. The crystal's light grew rapidly and the rune script all down the ship blazed with light. An eyeblink later, Noctarus's skeletal head drove right through Energy Ward and slammed into me, knocking me flying off the stern of the ship. Soaring out into the lake, the draining effects of the sleep spell started calling to me to relax and take a nap.

Not yet. Before it could dull my mind, I set my tether point and shot across to the next ship, landing high up on one of the spars that held the furled sails. That ship was one of the fully repaired ships and the runes covering half its deck also blazed to life. So did the runes across all of the fully repaired ships. On the 3 incomplete ships, lights flickered, then died. Apparently the matrix really wouldn't work until their hulls were repaired.

I set another tether point and shot across to one of those not-repaired ships to get out of the activating script. I held my breath the entire way, tense with the fear of getting sucked into a trans-multiverse portal, or something. Getting teleported to one death battle was more than enough. Another one? No thank you!

Back on the flagship, Noctarus had shoved his skeletal head down onto the deck. Mana flowed from him into the matrix like a river, but if he was trying to stop the runes from activating, he was failing. The energy crystal already blazed bright and the light kept intensifying.

His other head swiveled to glare at me and I braced myself for another necromantic death beam. He only shouted.

"You fool! We're not ready to leave yet, but this cannot be undone."

"I'm giving you a chance. Better take it. Even if you stay and kill us all, once the ships leave, you'll be stuck here forever."

Thankfully, it appeared the ships weren't going to teleport immediately. The rune matrix was powering up. Whatever he was doing seemed to be slowing the process, but not stopping it. His entire leviathan body shook with rage, but he needed to deal with the matrix. If he came after me, he'd lose the ticket home.

"You may have consigned my entire planet to die," he shouted.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"They would have died anyway. If you stay, I will kill you. This way, at least you have a chance. Don't waste it."

His body swelled again, but this time his voice boomed out like thunder, so loud I clapped hands to my ears and nearly fell out of the rigging, my head pounding.

"To the ships! We depart at once."

I shook my thoughts clear and sent messages to everyone to let the zombies go. Then I ordered the pack to join the zombies on the ships. I was tempted to keep them back on land until we could kill them all. That was a bunch of experience I was sending away.

I couldn't do it, though. I was their Alpha and they'd come to my call and given my team a chance to escape. The survivors of the brutal fight had won the right to leave.

Zombies by the hundreds came pouring out of the fog from both sides. I crossed to the farthest of the unfinished ships and landed in the crow's nest on top of the tallest mast to watch the process. I felt pretty safe there, and the fact that no zombies climbed aboard confirmed the still-flooded ships weren't going anywhere.

The other 5 ships rose to the surface of the lake, water gushing from every porthole. Zombies piled onto them, scrambling with desperate speed to get aboard. They filled the holds, packed the decks, and swarmed up the railings. The werewolf pack leaped aboard the flagship and crouched in the bow while zombies piled on so thick it seemed impossible the ships didn't just sink.

Even as the zombie tide was still fighting to get aboard, great sheets of black sails appeared already hanging from the yards on each ship. With great booming of canvas, they billowed out and caught an invisible breeze. Timbers creaked as the great ships began moving.

"Hurry!" Noctarus shouted, and scores of zombie voices rose in a panic of shouting and calling as they redoubled their efforts. Some got trampled under the press as zombies hurled themselves at the slow-moving ships.

Riding high instead of half sunk, the ships looked far grander, despite their derelict disrepair and covered in flailing zombies. With the flagship slightly in the lead, they slid out of the lake and onto the shore. Water flowed out of the lake with them, like a moving channel. It looked way too thin to keep the heavy ships afloat, but somehow it worked.

"Wait!" Dozens of zombies screamed in fear, sprinting after the ship and grasping at long lines thrown out by crew already aboard. Many caught the ropes and pulled themselves up as the accelerating ships pulled them off their feet. Others fell behind, while even more lost their grip and tumbled off the ships, bouncing across the hard ground when they landed.

The ships continued to pick up speed and Noctarus shouted a string of curses at me, blaming my mother and the day I was born as he was forced to leave at least a hundred zombies behind.

The grand ships wheeled to the north, heeling far over. More and more water drained from the lake, getting sucked along to form the glittering path for the ships to sail. As the ships straightened out heading due north toward the giant cliff, they started climbing into the air on silver streamers of water.

The fog parted as if Cyrus wanted us to enjoy the spectacle, and as much as I hated Noctarus and his zombies, I still whistled softly at the majestic sight of the giant ships climbing into the sky.

They headed straight for the 2000 foot waterfall plunging down the cliff from the third stage. Not slowing, they plowed into the great sheets of falling water, and as soon as the bow of the flagship touched the water, every ship pivoted skyward and shot upward at ever-increasing speeds. Gravity must have shifted for them because none of the monsters fell off or even seemed to struggle to hold on.

"Mozart, Beethoven, Amadeus," I swore softly as I watched, transfixed as the ships accelerated like rockets off a pad.

Water drained from the lake in a rush and the ship I rode rocked slightly to one side as it settled deeper into the bottom. Within seconds, every drop of water disappeared, sucked along the path the ships had sailed. That revealed the entire rune matrix made of huge stones spread out through the lake, every elegant curve and twisting pattern plain as day.

Just as the ships reached the top of the giant waterfall, the stones of the rune matrix in the lake exploded in blinding silver light that shot up the shimmering path of water after the ships. In a flash, the light caught up and detonated in the air above the waterfall.

The silver explosion of light formed a tunnel as air shimmered around it and the ships shot up through the tunnel of light and into the night sky. Just as they left the tallest mountains behind and soared into the air, the trailing ship exploded in a magnificent ball of crimson fire.

For a second, I wasn't sure what happened. Was that part of the teleportation? Or had the repairs failed on that ship somehow and it failed to withstand the incredible pressures they had to be experiencing?

Nope. A message from Burns caught my attention.

Burns: "Yes! Timed charges worked perfectly. Watch for it . . ."

I looked up again in time to see a second ship detonate into a massive fireball. Zooming my vision up onto the conflagration, I clearly saw flailing and burning zombies tumbling away from the fireballs in the sky.

"Ha!" I laughed as a third ship exploded, but that one fizzled almost immediately, leaving the ship damaged but not destroyed. Noctarus was really having a bad day, but the crafty old necromancer had countered the blasts. Still, Burns and his teams of saboteurs who had planted those bombs had taken out a lot of zombies.

More lights blazed above the retreating fleet like a living constellation, as if the entire night sky condensed above them, stars whirling in ever-faster patterns, forming heavenly runes that made my eyes ache to look at too closely.

The black moon suddenly glowed with silver light, somehow appearing directly above the path of the ships. Had it been there all along, just missing the glowing edge that made it visible?

The tunnel of silver light shot up into the sky and pierced the center of the black moon, forming a ramp to the heavens for the ships. They accelerated up it like reverse shooting stars, moving so fast they disappeared into the moon in seconds and disappeared with a thunderclap that shook the world.

The moment the ships disappeared, I swear the moon flickered, and for a second it really did look like a giant maw snapping shut. Had they just sailed down the gullet of a giant monster that could teleport them across the multiverse? I shivered and laughed at myself. That would be ridiculous.

Echoes of that thunderclap bounced back and forth between the mountains for a long time before fading away to nothing. The fog rolled back in, thicker than ever, and absolute silence descended over the world.

Then the cheering began.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.