FLOOD [Pokémon]

Chapter 42

^"Water-Shaping" (11-26-2020)

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NERO

Saturday, April 7, 2018

"I need more kelp," I rasped. "Jude?"

He handed me another length, his hand shaking — his whole body was shaking, in fact. My nerves were shot too, but I was burying it in my work, trying to keep the anxiety at bay — one more arrow and we'll go. Just one more. These can't stay inside her forever.

In fact, Mag's crossbow arrows were why we'd stopped — late last evening, her eyes had gone black, and abruptly she'd slipped right out of unconsciousness, going limp like a ship dead in the water. It had been hard to see why in the growing gloom, but luckily, my taste buds had made it abundantly clear: she'd been bleeding again, a lot, and if we hadn't stopped, likely she'd have ridden a red tide straight into the grave.

So Jude and I had wrangled her to the seabed, gotten a good five hours of sleep, and as soon as the first hints of daylight warmed the surface waters, we'd awakened and gotten straight to work, pulling these mermanmade thorns out of her sides and filling in the gaps with Akiva's expensive antiseptic sand. It worked, though — the silt's alcoholic content staunched the blood that burst up every time I removed an arrow, and in a couple of hours we'd managed to reduce Magdalene from a raging sieve to a very-injured, thorny Sharpedo. Jude was even managing to lay down some halfway decent stitches, the thread of which had been picked apart from a couple of spare shirts.

It was all slow going though, and was costing us time and the safety that came from distance.

From what?

I felt color drain from my cheeks as I gathered a pile of alcohol-drenched sand onto the kelp, and stuffed it into another hole in Mag's side from which I'd recently liberated a crossbow arrow. I'd prayed that Mag biting that soldier's arm off had driven them away entirely, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The soldiers from Coralora, captained by Festus, were the reason we'd been swimming furiously all last afternoon.

When I'd first spotted them, they had been a couple of miles behind us: a long line of red breastplates sweeping over the plains with a murderous intent I'd seen quite clearly from afar. We'd been at least a couple dozen miles west of Coralora at that point, a distance that spoke of their tenacity: these mermen were clearly determined to find Mag and end her once and for all, no matter how far they had to roam. Part of me couldn't blame them — if one of my friends had lost his arm to a predator like Mag, I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night knowing that the culprit was still out there, hunting for more.

All the same, we now had a tail, one that wouldn't easily be shaken off: we'd managed to put some more distance between us and them, but I had an unsettling feeling that it wouldn't be long before we saw red breastplates again, especially with Magdalene's suffering and Jude's weakness slowing us down. I hadn't seen any signs of the soldiers this morning... But then again, I'd left myself little time to study the terrain, deciding instead to put all my energies into getting the rest of these damned arrows out of Mag.

I gritted my teeth as I finished stuffing Mag's wound with sand and moved on to another arrow, this one piercing her hide just below her fin. Attempting to dress her injuries was not any less painful than simply leaving them in, but I hoped that, in treating them, the pain would slowly begin to ebb, and she would be able to stay conscious long enough for us to put a few more miles between us and our pursuers...

Mag twitched as I freed the arrow from her side on a red wake — quickly, I stopped the gap, and then pawed at my bag, looking for more kelp to band across her wounds. "Jude," I said tightly.