In broad daylight, a ship drifted into sight and dotted the ocean much to Tavras’s ire.

“I only wish that I could destroy that ship without causing a mess,” Tavras grumbled as he paced the length of the sandbar. “Can the mortals show a little respect?”

“It’s just a ship,” Val said in attempt to soothe him.

Twisting around, Tavras yelled, “That’s an oil tanker, Val! There is absolutely no reason for it to be getting this close to the reef.”

While Tavras had been distressed at its appearance, the ship had only sailed closer to land in the direction of the Bibashie Reef.

“Oh, fucking Nether, Arius,” he whispered. Pointing out to the reef, Tavras had changed from visibly stressed to markedly distressed. “I have to go now. You need to hold your ground for five minutes!” Without further explanation, Tavras blasted out across the water and made his way towards the reef with a spray of water in his wake.

“Wait—” Val said, hand extended. Her fingers curled around, and her arm dropped back to her side.

She almost could not believe that Tavras had left her alone, but then again, he seemed to care about the welfare of marine habitats more than anything else.

Her heart had jumped to flutter away in her throat, now dreading that Arius would appear before her at any second. “Foofy,” she whispered, “be on your guard.”

With a growl, Foofy glared in the direction that Tavras had gone towards the ship. He had been napping for the majority of the morning, at least until Tavras had started up in his rave about the oil tanker.

A tense moment of silence hung in the air and snapped with the uproar and colors of an explosion.

Flames gushed outward from the ship and poured across the surface of the ocean. The boom of its metallic sides crashed outward. As it turned out, Tavras had not just been paranoid about that oil tanker. The ship had really been weaponized against him.

The fire reflected in Val’s eyes as they surely narrowed from fright.

Within the next minute, Arius descended from the sky and tapped down on the sandbar. Handsome as ever, his presence repelled Val as much as she found him attractive. Those eyes belied no hostility or happiness either—plain, brown, and steady.

Arius gestured his thumb back over his shoulder so that he could causally say, “When it comes to protecting you or the reef, you saw which one Tavras just chose.”

Val’s teeth drove into her lip out of anger, followed by shouting, “What is actually your problem, Arius?”

The expression on his face fell, and he shot a frantic look behind him. “That’s not my problem, at least. Tavras is dealing with that one.”

She could literally scream at him but curbed her hate to snap, “You know he is going to be right back here, right?”

Arius tilted his head with a weirdly pleasant smile. “Yes, and we’ll be gone by then. Val, I know everything came across poorly the other night, but let me apologize now.” His blinks seemed innocent enough, but Val only narrowed her eyes at him.

Is that what this was all about? Did Arius really think that she were foolish enough to care about an apology from him?

“Okay, fine,” Val said. As Tavras had instructed, she just needed to stand her ground against Arius for five minutes.

Sadly, Foofy did not react to the newly arrived threat by attacking at once. Arius had earned a status of watchful familiarity, Foofy merely taking up a defensive stance between them. His chest rumbled in his growls.

Behind her were the swirling waters of Charybdis lying in wait. She took one step back and orientated that foot so she could later pivot in the direction that she would need to go.

“I know exactly what you’re about to do,” Arius said with one hand up. “Please don’t. Seriously, I’ve come to apologize properly this time. I just want to talk to you.”

“Let’s talk over here!” Val shouted with a backwards leap. Aura Manifestation caused the white energy to pour out by her conscious will, and Forcefield shaped her aura into a flat disk. Like she had been doing yesterday, Val jumped onto the disk as a platform.

The momentum from her jump carried the disk over ocean waters, and Val used a Mind Blast to launch her further out to sea.

“Val!” Arius called, leaping to the sky after her.

Though Foofy jumped vertically to bite at him, Arius had zoomed just high enough to avoid the Dobie’s snapping jaws. Both god and demigoddess left him helpless to fret on dry land, constantly pacing and barking.

Before Arius could catch up to her, Val had made it to the edge of the disrupted waters that revealed Charybdis’s presence below.

Nothing aside from a darker shadow could be seen through the revolving water.

Unsure if this would work, she tried to call out to the sea monster of legend. “Charybdis!”

At once, a roar of water sounded beneath her as the currents quickened. A dash of spray doused her person until the waters receded, too low to reach her. The ocean surface had sunken inwards by the completion of the whirlpool—Charybdis’s open maw.

Val found herself gazing upwards against a cascade of water. That current rushed around in wide arcs, hastening as it collapsed lower towards the center of the sea monster’s throat. Part way down Charybdis’s mouth, Val determined that she was safe given how she floated above the tumultuous waters below.

She just had to make sure that she did not look down. Hence, her eyes squinted up at the sight above.

Framed at the crest of the whirlpool’s edge, massive teeth pointed upward that would put a sea serpent’s gnashers to shame. Each tooth rose up from Charybdis’s lips like a spire to pierce the sky.

A shudder ran up her spine, but Val reminded herself that she could not afford to look down right now.

“Val!” Arius’s voice could be heard hollering. “Are you all right?” A flash of red brought him to stand between two of Charybdis’s teeth which dwarfed him by their size.

One of his hands rested on a tooth, but the other hand stuck up to his face in resemblance of a blinder. Like that, Arius prevented himself from inadvertently looking down towards Val.

“I’m fine,” she said, trying to keep the waver from her voice. “You said that you wanted to talk, right? Why don’t you look at me?”

“You are not tricking me to look into Charybdis’s mouth. I just wanted to talk to you!”

“I thought that you would prefer to shout over the roar of the falls, since I know how much you like to yell at me!”

Hardly able to see his reaction with his hand in his face, she could still tell that Arius did not react favorably to that. “You need to get back up here now, before you get yourself killed!” Arius was actually screaming at her, a note of terror evident in his voice.

Val’s heart reeled. If Arius sounded so extensively concerned, then she only now realized how risky her plan had been. Too late for second thoughts, she had already made herself a sitting duck—a demigoddess sitting on a disk of aura just above Charybdis’s maw.

That was so much for trying to get Arius to look down the whirlpool and suffer his own fate.

“I just want you to leave me alone,” Val cried out.

“I’ll leave!” Arius said. “I’ll leave you alone as long as you want, just get back up here!” He was not just concerned but begging with heavy exasperation in his raw shout.

A tight swallow slid down Val’s throat. Unable to look down, she could still feel the aura beneath her feet wavering against the immense suction that Charybdis created. Her body felt paralyzed, as one mistake could truly end her life. Val only wished that her Forcefield could hold up until Tavras had made it back. That way, she could squeeze her eyes shut and wait for him to save her.

Opening her eyes, Val focused on Arius who stood along Charybdis’s teeth, his eyes deliberately cast off to the side. Against the downpour of water, she had no idea how to reach him.

Each ability, she ran over in her head: Keep the Peace, Past Insight, Mind Blast, Mind Shield, Aura Manipulation, Forcefield, and Divine Judgement. None of her prior abilities would help her in this situation, and the new ones were not strong enough to get her out.

It was not like she could use Divine Judgement as her exit ticket either. Val had gotten into this mess all on her own accord.

Her weight began to press through the fading forcefield. Though she tried to produce additional energy, the forcefield was fading faster than she could replenish it. “Arius, my aura is dissolving!”

The more that she tried to rebuild and reinforce her shield, the more destabilized her aura became. Her breath hitched, but hope swelled in her heart as Arius turned to look at her.

His eyes, red with anger, flashed down to her, thereby causing him to look down into whatever was the sight of Charybdis’s maw. He blasted down with his red aura all about him and grabbed ahold of Val’s arm. Even as he twisted around to fly up, his gaze stayed transfixed on Charybdis’s throat.

“Arius!” Val said, slapping both hands to his cheeks. She forced his head to turn her way as she shouted at him, “Look at me.”

Unresponsive, the emptiness of his eyes faded back to their natural, brown hue. The light of a god’s power leakage had faded just like that, and it showed how deeply a single glance at Charybdis could affect the mind.

Val’s aura had completely disappeared anyway, so it was not like Arius had done anything to hurt her. Instead, he had chosen to plunge alongside her into the throttling whirlpool.

“I’m sorry, Val,” were the last words that she heard from Arius’s lips before her ears became waterlogged.

When Tavras came back, he would find Val, Arius, and Charybdis all gone. Only Foofy would remain on the sandbar in his desolate barks.