Day 172 - The Hurricane (Patreon)

3/3

“Here I come, to save the day!” The Hurricane sang to herself, pirouetting through the still air at the center of the storm she’d gathered. It had taken forever to convince Harus, and for Harus to talk to the Leviathans, but they finally gave her leave to go back Tarnil up. Well, Blue, really. She didn’t much care about Tarnil itself, but she really wanted some extra rewards from the dungeon.

Now that she was Purified, she was more powerful than ever, and she’d even gained a level recently! That hadn’t happened in a while, so she was literally up in the clouds with happiness, and the fact that she had the chance to make her namesake storm just made things better. The power thrummed about her, feeding into her Skill and back out again as she directed the path of the winds, accelerating toward Tarnil.

Iniri hadn’t actually requested help, and while The Hurricane was not much for politics she did understand why. It took time to deal with the logistics of troop transport and what favors support might carry and blah blah blah. Not that anyone would send troops when the mage-kings could just throw Depletion at them and make them useless. For a Purified fourth-tier, that wasn’t a problem, and when she was out by herself she could move pretty fast.

She had swooped in behind the fortresses and spent two days building up the hurricane, dragging water from the ocean and spinning up a massive vortex. The huge wall clouds formed a perfect circle around her, all nice and ominous like she preferred. Lightning crackled deep within the storm, and she pointed her hand at it, pulling the bolt to her. The jolt gave her a nice infusion of mana, topping her up and letting her push harder at the wind.

The front edges of her hurricane were already passing Tarnil’s shores, and while it was smaller than some, it was still big enough to hit all four fortresses where they hovered about a mile above the ground. She was actually pretty excited about that, since she’d never really had the opportunity to go against such large targets before. Her Class made her an army-killer, but there was a sad lack of armies to kill most of the time. It was a bit of a waste.

“Da da daaa da daaa!” She sang louder, off-key but to the tune of the Battle Anthem of Haerlish, hands waving as she conducted the swirl of wind and cloud around her. Her Stormforged Staff swayed beneath her feet, and she gripped the metal with her toes as she did a lazy roll in the air, racing a circle around the eye to keep up the wind speed. 

The wind finally started to smash into the fortresses, making some of them wobble. Her razor rain chewed into the stone where it got past the wards, and the howling deluge drove whatever monsters were still in the courtyards to cover. The rain also extinguished the fires that covered a good portion of the landscape, but that was less important. She already knew Blue could handle fires.

Another effort of will smashed a massive bolt of lightning into the closest flying island, the crackling energy driving through the stone and then coming out of the bottom to finally reach the ground below. Vaporized metal and stone plumed into the air before the rain swept it away, and The Hurricane cackled as she told another lightning bolt to hit the central tower.

Whichever mage-king or kings were inside it tried to reply with a massive glowing blue bolt, but the storm chewed it away to the point where she barely had to dodge by the time it made it to the eye. She stuck out her tongue in the direction of the fortress, then flicked her hand to smash a bolt into the next one. She might as well let the wind and water tear at whatever the lightning had weakened before repeating the attack. Besides, she was familiar enough with wards to see that there were lightning protections up now. She might have to go in and beat on something with her staff to break those wards, but that’d be a lot of fun.  The mage-kings had no idea who they were messing with.

The other fortresses decided to try and get it on the action, flinging bolts and balls and webs of different colors and Affinities at her, but they were all so slow. One idiot even tried to use fire, which got maybe all of five feet before her storm snuffed it out. Now that they were in the thick of the storm, she slowed it down, hurling the wind against the floating lumps of rock. She’d teach them who owned the skies.

Down below, the forests and grasses regrew, then were flattened by wind and razor-sharp wind, only to grow again. She didn’t notice it the first time it happened, but the next time that the forest popped up after a couple hours or so, she found it pretty entertaining. Usually she could only flatten the landscape once. Combined with tearing bits and pieces off the stupid fortresses with her wind and rain, and she was having fun!

“Fear my storm, I’ll throw lightniiiing up your buuuutt!” She put her own lyrics to the battle hymn while she battered at the fortresses. When the sun went down, lightning kept things illuminated. Mostly it kept the islands illuminated, as she smashed them with lightning and occasionally fried, shredded, or drowned monsters that were thrown her way. It took time for her to really get going, that was true, but The Hurricane had days of thunder and fury in her once she had a big storm under her control. 

This was a really big storm.