Angel Monarch

It has been nearly an hour since the island was devoured whole, but they were still just staring at the turbulent waters. Their minds were constantly trying to comprehend the monster\'s enormous size...

Eventually after who knows how long Sera calmed down enough to be able to think again.

They were currently in the middle of the Aegean Sea, with nothing around. Their plan was to spend the night on Skyros and the next day, head to another even larger island on the other side of the sea.

The journey would be 110 kilometers and they would probably have to fight a lot more.

They were all tried from the spending the day flying to Skyros and then exterminating a whole goblin camp.

There was two options in front of Sera, either move towards Lesvos, the island which was more than a hundred kilometers away. Or head back towards the mainland and try to find another route.

She was still in the process of deciding when something very strange happened. Her vision began to swim and her stationary flying became erratic.

Her eyes turned back towards the water. It was finally calm again, which meant she could see below the waves.

At first she saw nothing, but soon lights appeared there. They were small, really small, barely noticeable, which meant either the source was tiny... or the source was huge and really far away.

The previous trembling slowly returned to her body, but this time it was much more concentrated. The creature was staring right at her...

Her mind didn\'t work, but her body did. With a shout to the others all of them began to fly as fast as possible towards the other direction. Below them the Abomination didn\'t follow.

It seemed like the creature made the decision for her. They wouldn\'t be heading back to the mainland since that meant flying over the Abomination\'s territory.

Sera was hundred percent certain that the creature didn\'t use any power. It swallowed the island just by opening its mouth, then made her nearly pass out just by looking at her.

The powerlessness was immeasurable. She was hundred percent certain that nothing below Ethereal could survive a battle with a creature of that magnitude, but this also raised a very important question in Sera.

The creatures corrupted by Madness tend to be a lot weaker than their evolved counterpart. This meant if an Abomination had this much power...

How strong could an Ethereal be?

...

They had only been flying for an hour, but the exhaustion was already overwhelming.

At this point only Sera had the strength to actually fight. Well, Hector could do so as well, but he was basically useless in the air.

It becoming even more apparent to Sera who utterly awful choice she made two years ago. Just from the top of her head, she could name half a dozen ascended in her army who would be much better in the current situation.

"Hopefully he will die in that godforsaken siege... If not I will have to think of something else..." She whispered to herself, while she killed a pair of large featherless bird creatures. Both were corrupted and had a nasty shriek attack which nearly threw her out of the skies.

The two dead birds fell towards the water, but didn\'t even make it inside before a large sea monster plucked them out of the air.

For a moment she looked back towards the team. They were moving pitifully slow. She kept a distance of half a kilometer and killed everything that could be a threat.

This technique worked quite well in the past hour, but as time passed even Sera started to get more and more tired. Currently the only thought in her head was finding that stupid island and going to sleep.

The others closed in enough distance for her to start moving again. While flying she opened her watch\'s interface and looked at the map. It was outdated, it still showed Skyros as an island and not empty sea.

She zoomed out further and looked at the distance to the next island. Lesvos was still more than 75 kilometers away, which meant that they flew about 35 kilometers in an hour.

With this speed they would have to fly for at least two more hours, not adding the detours because of sea monsters that they can\'t even fly over. Also she didn\'t add the time spent fighting other flying creatures.

Moving like this they will only make it if she dies, but she was reluctant to do so.

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Dying gave her a strategical advantage that nobody could anticipate. Using it to get more powerful while trying to reach safe harbor didn\'t sit right with her.

Also it wouldn\'t solve the two hour journey and her power boost would only last an hour.

She was about to think of something else, when she saw a large swarm of giant hornet-like monsters heading straight for them. With a quick look she saw that most were either rotten or corrupted with no horror anywhere in their midst.

Her eyes brightened a bit with whitish-gold flames. Her hands became absorbed in its usual fire and she increased her speed heading into the swarm.

Using only her hands she sent the first few hornets crashing into the sea, then when she was about to get overwhelmed Sera spread her arms and exploded, killing the insects in one blow.

This type of attack was the bane of her essence. Each time it had cost close to 500 life essence. If her reserves wouldn\'t have been abnormally large, she would\'ve already fallen into the sea since her transformation was a constant drain on her essence.

Breathing heavily she looked at her status and stared at the dreaded number slowly decreasing.

Life Essence Absorbed: 3401/8739/10000

The first number showed her current essence count which was going down by two points each minute without using any power. The large expenditure also increased how fast her physical body was feeling exhaustion.

Technically she still had loads of essence, but her body was the conduit which used the essence. It is a well known fact between evolved that if you try to burn all your essence in a moment your body would literally spontaneously combust.

As an ascended with a giant reservoir Sera had to be especially careful with her usage. For example if she tried to do her previous explosion with even a little bit more than 500 life essence, that would be a death sentence to her too.

Luckily over the past two years she had gotten used to her powers, so her expenditure calculations worked at the back of her mind without her supervision.

Still her tired body just wanted to give up and lie down. Even floating atop the sea would be nice.

These thoughts kept appearing in her mind, but every time she just closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When they opened again, they were full of determination and defiance.

Slowly they moved on. In another hour, they were already 30 kilometers away. They had gotten quite lucky with the enemies Sera had to fight off, which meant their speed could increase a bit.

Currently her usable essence count sat at just below two thousand. If they could keep up the pace and have the same luck, they would make it back to the island just fine.

Sadly it seemed their luck had finally ran out...

Sera suddenly stopped and looked a few kilometers ahead. There, she saw something floating in the water.

Her speed slowed down quite a bit as she went further trying to determine what it was.

She was already just about a kilometer away when she finally realized what the object in the sea was.

It was a corpse of some dead monster. What was really strange that nothing snatched it up or down. The monster didn\'t look anything special, she judged it to be of the rotten class, maybe of the third tier.

She waited for a bit so the others could catch up, then continued her scouting. After travelling for another few minutes she found even more bodies floating in the water.

Her suspicion grew and a strange shiver went down her spine. Something was very wrong here, but she had no clue what.

They travelled another ten kilometers. Below them the surface was full of corpses. A lot of them were flying monsters, but there were ones the lived in the sea as well.

At this point Sera already knew that going further into this graveyard was a mistake, but her essence began to run dangerously low.

She had to use her explosion two more times in this last ten kilometers, which meant her essence was already below a thousand and decreasing every minute.

The others were fairing even worse than she, which also caused alarm in the team. They needed to get to Lesvos and fast!

After another ten minutes they finally spotted the island on the horizon, and in that exact moment the keeper of this graveyard finally showed itself.

The creature, monster, thing... whatever it was supposed to be, was just as Sera thought, a horror.

It looked very strange and incomprehensible. Like a large floating pulp of flesh with tentacles and eyes all over it. Its form was in constant change, it was like something from a different dimension.

Even looking at it caused a trickle of blood to run down from Sera\'s nose and eyes. Her vision began to swim and a mind splitting migraine caused all her movements to stop.

Her mind went blank, she heard someone\'s voice inside her skull, but couldn\'t determine its owner or what he said.

Slowly some strange sensation appeared right in her heart. Something she had lost, something she never remembered having, something awful, something that could save her life... Fear...

Sera who was an emotionless machine, felt a deep terror looking at the brain-like horror.

Instead of trying to overcome it, or trying to send it away, she used it. The fear gave her back a small amount of thinking ability which she used to its fullest.

Suddenly she remembered who spoke inside her head and on the same channel with a lot of effort she sent one mental command...

"DISTRACTION NOW!"

Seemingly out of nowhere a comet made of whitish-gold flames hit the large fleshy monster in the middle. With a large explosion of flames the horror got stunned. The comet didn\'t even lose its speed as it exited on the monster\'s other side.

The brain terror tried to catch it, but it was way too fast. After a few seconds of having left, it did another hit and run, then another...

While the distraction was working admirably, Sera was ushering her team to the island. She had a feeling the flying flesh thing wouldn\'t follow them there.

When they had finally reached solid ground they didn\'t stop. Only when they were in the middle of the island did they actually land on the grassy floor.

Sera\'s essence was nearing its end, but before she had passed out from exhaustion she sent another mental message through the connection...

"Thank you... friend..."