TBATE| The Walking Catastrophe

Chapter 5 - Familiar face

Kastos Aurelius Pov

'God this is boring...' I complained to myself as I signed document after document. I had always hated the responsibilities that came along with being a highlord.

'I wonder how Aqua's ascent is going right now. I remember my prelim going fairly uneventfully, and I hope that his is pretty boring as well.'

Although, how tough could a relictombs zone be with a bunch of school children? Everyone knows that the zones scale to the power of the ascenders within them...

I stopped moving my pen as I realized something that I'd overlooked.

'Does that take the seal into account?' I wondered as I shot up out of my seat, slamming my hands on my desk.

'Shit!'

In all of my excitement, I didn't even stop to realize how the relictombs might affect the seal that his mother had placed on him when he was younger. If the zone recognized the dormant power within him...then one veteran ascender wouldn't be nearly enough to protect them.

My panicked train of thought was broken by movement in my peripheral vision. The trident was shifting around nervously, almost as if it had a mind of its own.

The trident that Aqua's mother had left with him for whenever he finally broke out of his seal was shaking back and forth, threatening to break out of the cage of strange magic that bound it.

I had tried to stop Aqua from looking at it...to just ignore it, but it wasn't any use.

Although I couldn't blame him, after all, he was bound to the weapon and it was only natural that he'd be drawn towards it.

To my horror, the trident completely disappeared from my sight, and only one thought went through my mind...I may never see my son again.

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Aquamarine Aurelius Pov

I expected the sweet release of death, or at the very least, a nauseating wave of pain to spread through me when I woke up, but nothing of the sort happened.

I opened my eyes, and I noticed the qualitative features I'd recently gained had receded back into my body.

I stared right at the conch shell that I had curled up into a ball around, protecting it with my own body. I almost thought I felt something holding onto me, providing me comfort, but I wrote it off as my own delusion.

I slowly stood to my feet, standing on the bright blue waves of the sea that were so docile, one would never have thought that they had just been involved in a raging thunderstorm.

Looking back down at the shell, I tenderly imbued mana into it and set it down. It began to shake, before finally forming into a multicolored portal.

I took a deep melancholic breath as I looked over my shoulder at the endless landscape of water. The ship was nowhere to be seen, as well as the bodies of my comrades and the dragon. I figured they were all probably sitting down at the bottom of the ocean.

I briefly pondered diving down to retrieve them...but I was afraid of seeing the mangled bodies of my only friends in the process.

Ultimately, I turned back around and took a step through the shimmering portal.

My foot was met with the squelching sound of muddy water, and I was instantly relieved that this new environment had water in it as I completely emerged into the zone.