Things happened fast. A lot of things. Very fast.

In the depths of the fog that concealed the Shogunate navy, aboard a nameless ship, a four-metre-tall giant of a man with bright sapphire scales covering every inch of the exposed skin of his torso opened his reptilian eyes. Raising one clawed hand off the armrest of the throne he was lounging on, he pressed his palm down in the air. The thick knots of muscle of his arm shifting and straining underneath his skin as though suppressing some invisible force.

Starting from the edge of the bank of fog, the surface of the rough sea smoothened out into a perfectly still mirror of the sky. As the stillness radiated outwards, it encountered the whirling vortices of Isabella’s creation, erasing them as though they had never existed.

A bead of sweat rolled unchecked down Isabella’s brow as she strained against the sudden challenge to her sovereignty over the sea.

The two Demigods took each other’s measure. The sea a proxy for the war raging between their souls. Isabella might have been a young Demigod but the one whose inheritance she had accepted, wasn’t. Despite the several decades of experience the Ryu-o Demigod had on her, it wasn’t long before the rough seas of her creation and the mirror-smooth waters of his making had stabilized across a sharp divide that demarcated the edges of their respective Domains.

Dense mist evaporated off the smooth surface, steaming up to the sky and obscuring the sight of anything within.

On the other side, the ominous thunderclouds swept across the sky towards the Regiis fleet, their advance halting suddenly as they too met the edge of Isabella’s Domain.

If one were to look at the battlefield from above, they would find half the region covered by storm clouds and the other half by fog. The only clear section of the sky was a gigantic circle centred on Isabella and the Marine Palace under her feet.

After a few minutes of the continued deadlock, the fog suddenly surged onwards, coiling its way into Isabella’s Domain. Isabella sighed. The second Demigod had made his or her move. She immediately ordered the warships to beat a hasty retreat to the Marine Palace, cautioning them to avoid contact with the twining mists at any cost.

Unfortunately, one of the ships was too close to the edge of her Domain and a serpentine tendril of fog surged in and engulfed it and Isabella, tied down by her struggle against the Ryu-o Demigod as she was, could not prevent it.

The soldiers aboard that ship immediately felt like they had ceased to exist. They couldn't see anything but darkness stretching out in all directions. They couldn't hear any sounds… not even the near-constant rumble of thunder. And to their growing alarm, with every moment spent within this senseless darkness, they could feel their sense of touch slowly being stripped away.

Isabella’s red lips turned pale as she pressed them together into a thin line. The second of the Shogunate's Demigods had made a move. He or she had to be from the Tengu clan. That impenetrable darkness within the mist was unmistakable.

She clenched her fists. The first casualties had occurred so swiftly - within moments of her first engagement with the enemy. She had no doubt that the ship that had been swallowed by the mist had found its way deep within enemy lines by now. Surrounded, it was only a matter of time before all aboard were either killed or captured.

Over fifty brave soldiers lost so ignominiously...

She immediately wanted to mount a rescue. Badly. But, taking a deep breath, she restrained herself. Up against two Demigods, it was all she could do to hold on tenaciously till her colleague arrived to save them.

She could only hope that, by that time, there would be an army left to save.

//

Standing atop the dark clouds Ragyo Kirin took a deep breath and exhaled. But instead of air, he breathed out lightning. Violet streams of liquid light jetted out of his mouth, his eyes... from every pore of his body and wrapping around him, layer upon layer. Thin tendrils of violet electricity crackled and snapped like whips as the sphere of power grew larger and larger and gained a definite shape. A dragon’s head, a stag’s antlers, a lion’s mane. A kirin.

With a blast of light, the elemental construct galloped down from the clouds towards the line-up of Regiis airships. Each of its hoofbeats upon empty air sent out the rumbling boom of thunder.

Close behind it followed another. Then another. The three lightning beasts split up and charged at the airships from three separate directions. As though attracted by them, the streamers of lightning leaping from cloud to cloud or joining the sky and the sea turned into three horizontal streams of bright destruction that swiftly overtook the galloping kirins and slammed into the airships as forerunners of their assault.

Every wind mage aboard the airships familiar with the Aspect of Lightning drew upon their mana reserves, redirecting and attenuating the might of the lightning strikes as far as possible. The rest of the mages got ready to take on the three elemental constructs, each the equivalent of a late stage Tier 4 mage, each with a life of its own.

Ragyo, pale as a sheet of paper from suddenly emptying nearly half his mana reserves to create those three doppelgangers, paused to regain his breath before pulling out his comm crystal and barking out a rapid set of orders.

Over hundred streaks of lightning shot up from the various ships of his fleet, consisting of the corsairs the Kirins had arrived in as well as the Regiis ships they had managed to gain from the Southern District port they had taken over. The streaks resolved themselves into the warriors of the Kirin clan, who fanned out into three teams, following the trail blazed by the rampaging kirins.

The Kirins did not have airships, but the sky was their domain. With unparalleled flexibility and speed in the air and the ability to command thunder and lightning, they were the perfect crack troops for aerial combat. Any Kirin soldier Tier 4 and above could pose a significant treat to an airship.

The Kirins had brought three Tier 5s in total to this expedition. One had stayed back on land to supervise the inevitable war there while another and Ragyo himself had set sail for the naval war. They had brought along with them fifteen Tier 4s – half of the thirty that had sailed here from the Shogunate. Ten of them were now engaging the Regiis airships, each with ten Tier 3s under their command. The rest staying back to guard the ships.

Recovering his breath, Ragyo discharged yet another quarter of his mana into the clouds beneath his feet, briefly turning into a small sun of violet electricity in the process. The thunderclouds grew even denser and the lightning sparking from and in between them grew even more frequent and frantic. Having primed the battlefield into one advantageous to his side, he flew back down towards his cabin, leaving the other Tier 5 in charge.

He had a Tier to bridge. The next time he stepped out of his cabin, he planned to be a Demigod.