Heretical Fishing

The god-empress choked on her anger. She read the screen again, and again, and again, but the message remained the same. She raised a hand, forestalling the attack she herself had ordered to take place should she lose her temper again. The Seers skidded to a stop on the deck, one of them holding their gathered power, refusing to let it go.
The god-empress’s mask cracked for but a moment as she sneered at Eustace and the divine power glowing in her fist. “Do not test me, Seer. Force me to strike now, and it will be your head that flies.”
Eustace dismissed her gathered chi, so the god-empress dismissed her in turn, loathing that her emotions had cracked through the mask again. She appeared at the front of her galleon in a flash, teeth gritted, hands clutching the ornate balustrade. She’d been so sure this enemy force was sent to challenge her, placed in her path to facilitate growth. For that reason, she’d taken her time crossing the ocean, knowing that any advancements her adversary achieved in the meantime would only prove her righteousness when she eventually prevailed.
Though she couldn’t hear them, she could sense the complaints of the old her—Aletheia—as the girl she’d locked in the depths of her soul seized the moment of doubt. The balustrade groaned ‌within her grasp, and she let go of it before the wood cracked. She couldn’t think straight. She could scarcely control her body, let alone her mind.
Desperate, the god-empress reached for her ideal. Aletheia Victus, the girl she’d once been, pounded at the metal door of her prison. But the mask knew what to do. This doubt served neither her nor humanity.
The vexatious girl screamed from within, the mask’s doubt granting her strength.
It was the exact wrong thing to say. The mask already knew the answer.
Silence. Blessed silence descended upon the god-empress. A lesser woman would have wept in relief. The god-empress didn’t. On the deck behind her, she heard her Seers and the Prime Cadre discussing the messages on the screen.
“This can’t be correct…”
“The artifact is divine! It is
“What does that error mean…?”
“Alternative reward?”
“How large is their force if they can captain so many?”
The god-empress read it again.
What should she do? Should she rush there and attack them before a reward could be assigned? Or was it better to wait and see what the reward was, then react accordingly? Her thoughts were mired in shadow.
Before she could reach a decision, the screen flickered, rapidly powering off and on again. When it stopped, the lines had changed, their contents even more terrible.
Yet more messages arrived. They almost drove the god-empress to her knees.
Sensing the god-empress’s shock, the foolish girl within chose that moment to strike. She rammed against the metal seal with all her might. Rather than earn her freedom, all it did was recenter the mask’s purpose.
The god-empress hammered against the seal to send Aletheia hurtling away, then latched onto the horrible information revealed by the screen. It didn’t matter what Tropica did. They were a threat to the Kingdom of Light, and humanity as a whole. No matter what, she would destroy them.
And she now knew where to strike the first blow.
“Gods above,” Anius was saying. “They have a sentient boat!”
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Eustace had turned white as a ghost.
“Empty heavens…” Evan swore, showing just how addled he was. Never before had the god-empress heard him utter such vile filth.
The rest of the Prime Cadre looked to her for an answer.
She ignored them all.
“Return to your ships.” Her words were a command. “I will shield Theoris, Elegos, and the entire left wing of the fleet. It is your task to shield the others.”
She didn’t wait for their acknowledgement; they’d either do so, or prove themselves unworthy of being brought along. If they failed to protect the right wing and all the souls aboard, so be it. She had to strike now, no matter the cast.
The god-empress lifted her arms and drew from the vast stores of divine energy held within the containers covering each ship’s hull. The Seers and the Prime Cadre repeated the same across the rest of the fleet. She felt no joy that half of her forces would survive—she couldn’t spare a single thought for anything other than the task at hand.
She grabbed hold of yet more condensed chi, then sent it racing ahead across the ocean, charting a path across the ocean. All became a blur over the next few seconds. The ships sailed along as streaked lines of light, everyone on their decks shielded by her and her most powerful followers. The god-empress mark on her soul called out to her as she strained, begging to be used. She denied it. Now wasn’t the time.
She gritted her teeth and focused her will, sending her awareness even farther forward, stopping only when she reached the heretical village named Tropica.
Geographically, it was almost identical to the map she’d found in the royal library.
The bay was the same, as were the headlands to the north and south. The layout of the village had grown, but still it seemed… insignificant. Barely a tenth the size of Phostheia. Its squat buildings were obviously System-made; they were composed of the same bricks as her castle. The wooden dock extending from Tropica’s seawall was also constructed by the System, its dark wood unweathered despite the coastal elements.
She couldn’t see any of her enemies, only the physical layout, as was expected when projecting one’s awareness. Sensing no threat from the village proper, she returned to the bay. Her fleet, her forces, and her physical body would arrive there in a matter of seconds. Before they did, she would annihilate Tropica’s greatest weapon against them.
All of her newly chosen mages had awakened by refilling the ancient containers with divine chi, but they were still weak. They would stand no chance against powerful spirit beasts in physical combat. Which was why she’d had them fill the containers in the first place. Those ancient relics once more lined the fleet’s hulls, flooding the Kingdom of Light’s divine essence out into the surrounding ocean. It was a death sentence for any being stupid enough to approach from underwater.
Her plan was to wage war from atop the bay, raining down holy judgement on their enemies while staying far from shore. Their attacking formation would be the same ‘V’ they sailed in, with Theoris and Elegos at the tip, pointing towards Tropica. The two-hundred mages of the Forty Hands might be weak—especially those had recently awoken—but they were still incredibly dangerous. They could attack unimpeded from their arrayed ships, knowing both that none of Tropica’s forces could reach them, and that she, the Seers, and the Prime Cadre would protect them from above.
But only if Tropica didn’t have boats of their own.
If the enemy vessels remained intact, their spirit beasts and cultivators could simply sail closer, surrounding them. If the leaders wielded abyssal chi as she feared they did, keeping distance was the key to victory. Even the royal library’s books, whose pages were dedicated to the divine, repeatedly stressed the dangers of fighting close-quarters with an abyssal cultivator. Small wonder that spears and arrows were the hallmark weapons of the heavens.
She allowed her spirit a smile as she assessed the bay one last time. These heretics had no idea what was about to hit them. The Divine Fleet was less than a second away now, so she reached for her god-empress mark, which had been calling out to her this entire time, begging her to make use of it. Finally, she acquiesced. She’d not used a drop of her own chi in transporting her fleet here, so the mark latched onto all the essence suffusing her core, condensing it, sending it out beneath the waves.
She couldn’t see Tropica’s boats. They were invisible to her projected awareness. But if they were anywhere in the bay, they had no hope of escaping this strike. Her god-queen mark sent out a command along the thousands of divine lines drifting beneath the bay. Countless golden spears sprouted as one, rocketing skyward.
The Divine Fleet arrived, and the god-empress shot back into her body. She opened her eyes to a scene of holy devastation. Each golden spear was two stories tall and ended in a deadly tip, some of which protruded harmlessly through Theoris’s deck, as she’d known they would. She glanced behind herself and saw the same happening to the rest of the Divine Fleet.
She paid it no mind. The spears would only hurt cultivators and spirit beasts without divine chi.
she thought, gazing across the golden sea toward Tropica’s seawall.
The System-made dock was no more. All that remained were splintered and broken sections of plank skewered atop the spears where it’d once been. Her god-queen mark had tripled the spear density there, knowing it was a likely spot for Bob the Boat to be docked. Did some of the skewered wood belong to that Prime Vessel?
Her mark called out to her again and she grinned. Unlike the last impulse it had sent her, she agreed to this one immediately. The mark drew hungrily from her core. She had only regenerated half of her essence since last time, so this strike would be weaker than the spears littering the bay. That wasn’t the only difference between the last attack and this one, though—this one was aimed at the city. Non-cultivators might not be harmed by the spears themselves, but they would be harmed by the destroyed buildings that came tumbling down atop them.
Her strongest followers had rejoined her on the deck of Theoris. When they sensed her intent, spikes of horror came from some of them: Evan, Grace, Esmond, Seer Eustace and Seer Anius. The god-empress pushed down her disgust at their weakness, lest it make her ‌remove their heads. Everyone in this village was complicit. What did her Seers and the Prime Cadre think would happen here? When abyssal chi was involved, not a soul could be left behind. The quest made it clear. Tropica, and those within, were to be
She unleashed the attack. A hundred arrows of divine judgement fanned out as she loosed them at the village. Perhaps this would end the battle. She smirked as she watched the arcing shafts reach the village, imagining them passing through the System-made buildings like they were made of the same paper as Anius’s fan.
But then the arrows all changed course. They curved up something barely visible—a shimmering ramp of light. Each projectile only just missed the first row of structures, and as they trailed off into the distance, they fell apart, dissipating into motes of light.
“Mate…” came the booming voice of a strangely accented man. His tone was conversational and sickly sweet. “Do you frackin’ mind?”