anovelconsole Chapter 428: No Eating Yet
Chapter 428: No Eating Yet
Cecilia had taken fifteen bottles of Four-Star Mana Potion at the beginning.
The number was almost absurd in retrospect, a quantity of magical energy that would have killed most people, or at the very least left them vibrating out of their own skin.
Perhaps Cecilia was not most people, after all.
If one bottle of Four-Star Mana Potion was enough to replenish a Black Wolf King from his near-death mana deficiency to his full capacity, a fact she had learned through harrowing experience in the real world, watching Arkai gasp back to life on a volcanic slope...
...then Cecilia, at this moment, was approximately fifteen times as strong as Prime Arkai Dawnoro.
The calculation was crude, of course. Probably inaccurate.
There were variables she had not accounted for, differences between this world and her own that she didn’t fully understand. But it was enough.
And to maintain that, she had to drink more potions or pop a head-sized magic stone every three minutes.
The drain was just relentless. The egg in her womb was greedy too, while the pressure was constant.
Every three minutes, another bottle or another stone. Another surge of borrowed power flooding through her veins and pouring out through her fingertips.
Cecilia didn’t know how this world’s Arkai Dawnoro compared to the real world’s. But Oathran could be a good measure.
His leisurely flying speed was approximately the same as in the real world. His urgent flying speed, while carrying her, was also the same.
But that man could fly much, much faster when she was not with him, his dragon body cutting through the sky like a rocket when he didn’t have to worry about a fragile human passenger.
Which meant her husbands in this world had approximately the same strength as they were in the real world, just before they bonded with her.
Twelve Mana Potions and ten Magic Stones consumed every three minutes later, approximately an hour had passed—
—when the fucking dam collapsed.
Mind you, Cecilia didn’t control the entire one hundred billion cubic meters of water. The pumps had reduced the volume by a fraction, and the reservoir had not been completely full when she started.
Not to mention, the pressure from upstream had been reduced significantly thanks to the temporary dam the werebeavers had thrown together with wood and mud in desperate speed.
No, she didn’t control that much.
She also only controlled the thin portion of water closest to herself, the part that made a wall between the air and the rest of the reservoir.
And it was not stationary. She rolled it into itself in a vertical, smooth, tall whirlpool-like movement, the water spiraling toward itself as she pushed it back.
As the movement created energy, she didn’t need to hold the full pressure of the reservoir. The pressure of the water itself gave it momentum to create its own wall.
She just looked impressive while she used only some physics and fast gravity waves, transferring the kinetic energy to the water itself.
Which was why, clearly, this delicate balance would collapse the moment the jet-like pressure from the corrupted ocean depth rushed out of the four-meter-diameter rift.
So her first instinct was to turn and extend her left hand backward, creating a second wall.
CRACK—
Her forearm bone—
"CECILIA!!!"
BURST!!!
The jet-like pressure flew to the sky, deflected away by her power, curled into a new, severely more chaotic arc.
ROAAAAAAAAR!
BOOM—
A giant white dragon landed before her, his massive body shielding her between the arc of the corrupted ocean and herself.
Wind surged, pulling itself into the reservoir, folding and rolling the black water into a new shape. A water tornado formed, twisted and terrible, a corrupted black pillar that rose into the sky.
As it happened, everyone on scene could see—the water was black, not the clear, cold blue of a normal ocean, but the dark, oily corruption, an ocean that had been poisoned for millennia.
"Oathran..." Cecilia whispered, her voice barely audible over the roar of the wind and the water.
"FOCUS!" Oathran, in his full dragon form, roared. His wind magic sucked the black ocean into the steadily growing water tornado in the middle of the dry half of the dam bed.
Meanwhile, Eastiel, Swanson, Miss Rachel, and the team of Polar Werebears landed on the still-dry basin, battered and bruised after Oathran had thrown them away from danger.
Eastiel didn’t waste time. He landed on his feet and ran back toward the two rift openings. Back toward the thing that was coming through.
Arkai had said there were claws. He had said it with just one scan of his sonic boom that had mapped the shape of the rift and the horror waiting on the other side.
But what Eastiel saw were not claws.
They were beaks. Beak-like teeth. The hooked, razor-sharp mandibles of something that belonged in the deepest trenches of a corrupted ocean, something that had never seen sunlight and had no business existing in this world—
A Kraken.
GRRRRRR—
Eastiel saw the tentacles surrounding the opening, massive and sucker-lined. They were ripping the rift even larger—six meters, seven, ten, fifteen—
The fabric of reality tearing under the strength of something that had been waiting a very long time to break through.
ROARRR!!!
The land rippled with Eastiel’s roar. Jagged thorns of stone erupted from the dam bed, massive and sharp, trying to stifle the opening with rocks and earth. But—
GRRROAAAAAAAAAAA—
CRASH—CRACKLE—CRASH—
It was futile.
The tentacles and water pressure shattered the stone thorns like matchsticks. The beaks snapped and tore and kept coming.
"OATHRAN! THROW THE WATER BACK AT IT!" Eastiel roared, stacking more and more thorns and bridges of giant boulders, trying to stuff the opening, trying to hold the line.
"WHERE IS THAT FUCKING OLD MAN?!" Oathran cursed as he pushed and bent the tornado, aiming it back into the opening, trying to turn the corrupted ocean against the thing that had spawned from it.
"CECILIA!" Arkai screamed.
The wolf felt the pressure against his back lift, the weight of the water, the strain of pushing forward, and he turned, his eyes going wide with horror.
Cecilia had started to float. Her body had left him on the ground. Her arms were extended and her blonde hair whipping around her face.
"Please help Eastiel. I can handle this part alone. Quick," she said.
"But—"
"GO!"
Arkai hesitated for a split second, one breath of weighing his mate’s command against every instinct that screamed at him to stay, before he turned and leaped.
His massive wolf body cut through the air, claws finding purchase on the broken concrete, muscles screaming as he hurled himself toward Eastiel and the rift and the thing that was tearing its way through.
But Cecilia—
The arc of corrupted ocean behind her continued its chaotic spiral into the tornado Oathran was still fighting to control, and the reservoir she held together in front of her was still folding itself toward the temporary dam.
And yet, in the middle of all of it, Cecilia Araceli glanced down at her own belly.
"Baby..." she whispered in a gentle scolding. "Mother said no eating yet."