Chapter 762: The True Power
Despair spread across the Mayflower.
The professors’ faces had gone chalk white, and the students reacted in all different ways.
Some wailed. Some screamed hysterically. A few of the weaker-willed young wizards took one look at a head bigger than the ship and fainted on the spot.
Facing a monster the size of a walking island, everyone was swallowed by the shadow of death. They were all underage wizards, so it was only natural. Even the ones still on their feet had trembling hands and knees.
Tom was standing higher up, and he could see farther. With his sharp eyesight, even through the fog and the storm he could make out the whole beast.
It was over a hundred meters long, its body covered in layer upon layer of hard, overlapping scales like tightly interlocked shields. Its two widely spaced eyes glowed like the first light of dawn, like a pair of lighthouses on either side of a small island. The breath from its nostrils carried sulfur and fire, and under the pounding rain it quickly turned into yellow mist. Inside its gaping mouth sat an enormous jaw lined with rows of sharp, dense fangs.
The moment he saw that shape, Tom knew exactly what it was.
Leviathan.
The sea monster from the Book of Job. The signature armored scales and sheer size matched the legends perfectly.
He could feel the raging magical energy coming off it, so it was undoubtedly a powerful magical creature. But the wizarding world had no records of anything like it. Otherwise the XXXXX classification for magical beasts could never have contained a monster out of legend.
A thought, and Tom connected to the study space, projecting the scene onto the sky there.
Hearing the commotion outside, everyone who’d been busy with their own business ran out and saw the spectacle.
"What the hell is that? There’s a creature that big in this world?" Grindelwald stared at the scene in shock. For all his experience, he’d never seen a beast this ridiculous.
Next to the Leviathan, a fire dragon was a baby chick, and a giant basilisk laid across its back would be about the size of a creek.
"I don’t know its proper name yet, but for now I’m calling it Leviathan," Tom’s voice echoed through the space. "Has anyone seen this guy before? It popped up out of nowhere and attacked the Mayflower, so I had to make a special trip."
Ravenclaw studied the beast on the projection. "It fits the legends well enough. But I thought those were all made up by the Church. It actually exists?"
Ariana wasn’t nearly as surprised. "Even Quetzalcoatl turned out to be real. It’s normal for some of the legendary monsters to exist too, right?"
...
Outside, the storm kept growing. The Leviathan let out another long, horn-like drone, and its open maw worked like a black hole, swallowing endless amounts of seawater and creating a monstrous suction.
The Mayflower’s barrier gave a mournful groan, held out for a moment, and then shattered with a boom. The ship was dragged helplessly along the current toward that bloody maw.
Seeing this, Tom reached out and tapped a finger, and the ship floated up. It wasn’t enough. The gale in the sky was still blowing, and in just a few seconds the ship was thrown back a hundred meters.
"What a pain." The boy frowned. If it were just him, he wouldn’t care about a little suction. But he had to protect a ship this big. With a thought, he had a plan.
Tom slowly pushed his palm forward. At once, a gale blowing the opposite way appeared out of thin air above the Mayflower, canceling out the suction perfectly, and the ship’s forward drift finally stopped.
Tom nodded, pleased with himself. "Not bad, huh?"
"Definitely not bad." Ravenclaw chimed in right away. "That level of precise control would be hard even for me."
The others nodded too, and her praise wasn’t just flattery. Any of them could have whipped up a gale. But matching the Leviathan’s storm so exactly was another matter. And that storm was dynamic, sometimes fierce and sometimes gentle, its strength constantly shifting, so canceling it out meant tracking every change.
Magic with that kind of delicate control was beyond most Legends, let alone ordinary wizards.
Even Morgan acknowledged the move.
Mystryl alone was the exception.
"Tom." Her voice was gentle, as if she were making a casual reminder. "You forgot to suppress your instincts and use knowledge again."
The smile on the boy’s face turned into a grimace. "Mystryl, you know how it is. The situation was urgent just now..."
"I understand, but that’s exactly when you should keep what I taught you in mind. Otherwise the habit will set in and be hard to break."
"Next time for sure." Tom nodded rapidly. "But let me cut loose just this once, okay? I’ve been bottled up for days."
Seeing him like that, Mystryl couldn’t help a small smile. She thought of how awkward even a simple Hover Charm had felt to him these past days, and relented. "Fine. Just this once, and never again."
He was only a fifteen-year-old kid, after all. She’d watched how hard he’d been working these days, and it was time he got to blow off some steam.
"Okay!"
A brilliant grin spread across Tom’s face. He really had been bottled up. Magic that used to obey his every thought had become a stranger, clumsy and awkward in his hands, and his mood had been sour. And then this fathead fish had come along asking for it.
Tom held out a hand, and the slender staff Hakuna Matata appeared out of nowhere, wreathed in a layer of golden light.
With a light shake of his wrist, the staff gave off fine mechanical clicks and quickly stretched and transformed. The slim wand became an ornate longbow, its limbs flaring outward, two thin rails extending along the top. Silver energy flowed along the rails as though countless tiny stars were hidden inside.
"So pretty!" Ariana fell for the bow’s design and color scheme at once, and Morgan’s eyes lit up beside her.
Only Andros and Grindelwald didn’t care about the bow’s looks. They were just wondering why Tom had turned his wand into a longbow.
In high spirits, Tom announced rather smugly to the crowd, "I told you before that Rayquaza is the god of the sky, but strictly speaking it’s also the god of weather. Today I’ll give you a little show."
"Mist Clearing!"
Tom raised the longbow high, and at his command, the mist across dozens of miles snapped under his pull.
The sea mist broke away from the storm first. Then the vapor in the clouds was forcibly drawn out as well. Great sheets of gray-white fog rushed in from every direction and formed an enormous vortex above the Mayflower.
The vortex kept tightening, then poured into the silver rails beneath the bow and was drawn into it. From the moment the vortex formed to the moment it was fully absorbed, only a few seconds passed.
As the mist flowed in, the stars around the staff multiplied and grew brighter, like a whole night sky projected down.
Visibility over the sea cleared at once. Only then did everyone realize that all the fog around them had been sucked dry. The storm still raged, but the area around the Mayflower looked as if it had been cleaned out on its own, and even the Leviathan’s yellow sulfur haze had been pulled into the bow.
Tom drew back the invisible string, and a golden arrow appeared. Starlight flickered inside the shaft, and a flowing layer of mist wrapped its surface. The mist didn’t blur the arrow. If anything, it made it look sharper.
The arrowhead gave off a keen edge. The Leviathan, which had been steadily gulping down the ocean, finally stopped, as if it sensed a great danger, and let out a howl of wind.
But oddly, Tom didn’t aim at the colossal beast. He aimed at the storm-covered sky and drew the string back slowly.
Once the string was fully drawn, the mist on the arrow melted completely into it, leaving only pure starlight. A thin aurora then rose from the bow and cut into the clouds ahead of the arrow.
.
.
.