World of Women - World of Women – V4 – Chapter 38

The ground shook as more spells slammed into the island.

“Mom, we need to get moving.” I declared.

“Baby, just a little longer.”

“Mooom, I need to go emancipate the men.”

“C-can’t they wait?”

“No, I really need to go…”

“Sniff… my son is just growing up so fast…”

“I get it, mom. I’ll spent more time with you in a bit,” I said as I finished peeling mother off me.

She reached out tearfully, but I turned away from her and left. Of course, I didn’t head to the front lines. The first direction I went was back down into the underground. I had to check on Cornelia and Roxanne. I didn’t have time to cater to my mother’s whims. Thankfully, she came to understand once I treated her with a firm hand and she allowed me to leave.

I went back the way I came. Thankfully, I hadn’t made too many turns and was able to work my way back to where we started. It wasn’t too far away. From the moment Cornelia had been stabbed to my return, only fifteen minutes had passed. However, it felt like it was days ago. I walked into the familiar control room to see a woman I didn’t expect to see.

“Ash…”

As I spoke there was another boom, and the ground shook slightly. Ash was the first person I saw. The baby she was always carrying wasn’t with her. That was probably because she left it with her mother. She was examining Rebecca who was still nailed to the wall. As for the Roxanne, she was tending to Cornelia, who was sitting up with her eyes open. I let out a breath as I walked into the room. All of the girls glanced at me.

It was Roxanne who spoke up first. “Clyburn… I…”

“She’s dead,” I said, shaking my head. “I guess, she was the daughter of the woman who killed my father?”

Roxanne bit her lip and lowered her head. “She was in my unit. I should have known the truth. We will investigate-”

“How?” I asked, causing her expression to fall.

We were outlaws who didn’t have the support of Amaryllis anymore. How were we going to do something like investigate her credentials? For all we knew, the government had deliberately covered up her identity on purpose. In fact, she had almost said as much. The woman she had mentioned had to be Jinji. Since she was the head of the WRA, then she had her hands in the government.

I didn’t wait for another response from Roxanne. I knew it wasn’t her fault and I wasn’t specifically blaming her, but I had other things to concern myself with beyond her guilt.

“Ash?”

“I will… watch after her.” She gestured to Rebecca.

She appeared to be unconscious at this point, but I didn’t allow myself to believe that she was dead. I had seen her resurrect herself from the dead already, so there was no way she’d be gone. I knew what Ash wanted me to do with her, but I wasn’t sure if I could. Either way, it wasn’t something that was going to happen now.

“Cornelia… are you?’

“She… missed anything vital. I think.” She responded with a strained voice. “Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?”

I let out a breath and nodded. “I just wanted to make sure everyone was good before I went.”

Leaving them with those words, I turned and left. There was very little else to say. The plan that the government had attempted had failed. The only thing left now was to escape Amaryllis. I returned to the surface from another route and then went looking for the biggest fight. As it were, the battle appeared to have gravitated toward the front of the island. That made sense, as the airships pulling the island along were located there.

The island was moving with a fair amount of speed now. At least, there was heavy wind blowing to the point it made hearing and moving forward more difficult. In many areas, the buildings blocked the wind, but as I made it closer and closer to the front of the island, the wind was picking up. There were lines of women putting up barriers to block the relentless attacks from the airships. They were swirling around like angry bees. I didn’t know which ones were on our side and which ones were on theirs, but I could see some infighting.

There appeared to be more airships on our side. Either Hannah had managed to successfully capture some more, or some captains had decided to switch sides. The men were holding up the defenses right alongside the women. Such a scene could be seen by everyone. Not every woman was okay with attacking men. It went against their values. Thus, the entire battle had turned into a complete mess.

The person at the center of that battle was Lilith. Her massive mana reserves dwarfed any other girl. She was fighting with all she had to keep the tides of enemies back. The protective shield she had launched over the island had taken hit after hit and had shrunken to the point where it was only protecting the area around the front where the airships were. Her mana had run out, and she was only standing because she could.

“Clyburn!”

“It’s Clyburn!”

As I approached the front, several people let outcries. I knew I was popular among the men, but even some women cried out excitedly or whispered as I passed. Hannah walked up to me, surrounded by a group of women, and to my surprise, a man as well. She had dirt on her face, and blood dripping down her forehead. I looked at her wound.

“It’s fine,” she said, stopping me from touching it. “But we won’t be for much longer.”

“We can’t hold on?” I asked.

She turned and pointed. “We’re almost there. But it’ll be another hour. They’ll breach our defenses in another fifty minutes.”

I squinted in the distance to see a thin line of blue. That would be the ocean and the end of Amaryllis. At that point, we’d be in international waters. Well, it wouldn’t stop them from attacking us, but if we reached that point, there would be hope.

“It sounds to me like you need another ten minutes,” I said.

My smile dropped as another hit struck the defenses above. Alright, it was time to get serious. I needed a spell that could protect us for another ten minutes. Amaryllis was growing more aggressive by the second. The closer we go to slipping away, the more they’d be tightening their fist, willing to risk even the lives of the men to get what they wanted. How could I protect the island for another ten minutes? The wind was so fast, it was making it hard to think.

My eyes widened. I was thinking I needed to protect us for ten more minutes. How about I make our journey take ten minutes less? Wait, I needed to think about this. How could I manage to move an entire island? There is no single inscription that would work. To do what I was thinking about doing, I’d need a rune nearly the size of the island. A rune nearly the size of the island?

“Of course!”

She narrowed her eyes. “That look in your eyes. I don’t like it. It’s the same look you have whenever you do something stupid.”

“Then, isn’t that the look that’s always on my face,” I smirked at her.

“At least you understand.”

I ignored her, as I turned back away. “Give me those fifty minutes.”

“Ah! O-okay!”

“I need a map of the island.” I tapped on the shoulder of Lyra as I passed by.

“Cl-clyburn?” She jumped and then put on a thoughtful expression. “A map, you say?”

At this point, the mantle of Faerie had been put aside, but both Hannah and Lyra were working hard to keep everyone together. They became the ones who were in charge for one reason or another. It was a mixture of Lyra’s charisma and Hannah’s daring that seemed to make things work. It only took her a few moments before she was able to get someone to bring me a map. I looked over it and nodded. Before she could ask me what I wanted with it, I had already left.

I ran through the hallways under the facility, using the map to guide me. The rune was already there, but it wasn’t set up to do what I needed it to do. For that, I started mapping out what I needed in my mind. I ran as quickly as possible, moving the capillaries filled with blood when necessary. Just because the medium had been tainted by my blood and could no longer summon demons didn’t mean that the strength of those sacrifices was nay less.

I moved as fast as I humanly could, doing a circuit around the island as I adjusted the rune to my purposes. It was many times harder doing it this way. The majority of the rune, I wasn’t able to change at all, so I needed to make just the right adjustments to turn what should have been a summon into something else. That something else also needed to be able to help us. I pulled on the knowledge I had, and this was all I could come up with. If I messed up, then it would be game over. At best, everyone would end up in prison, although I imagined the fate of me and my family would be worse than that.

“That should do it…” I said, sweating slightly.

The shaking was non-stop now. Their attacks had started to grow more desperate. If I didn’t do what I needed to do soon, we would end up crashing in a fiery death. I ran back to the surface. I needed a clear sight to be able to run this, so I returned to where I started. The ground was pockmarked now, and there were half as many people out. The rest had been knocked out or passed out. Lilith was gasping for breath, and Mia was holding her to keep her from dropping.

“We’re not going to make it.” Hannah cried out as soon as she saw me. “They have a blockade.”

She pointed once again to the ocean, which was closer now. However, nearly two dozen ships were waiting on the border, facing us. That didn’t even include the airships flying around above us. Perhaps, they had found too many dissenters, and so they decided to concentrate the last of their forces in a blitz attack. This was looking bleaker by the second.

“Alright, everyone, hold on!” I ordered.

I ran to the edge and jumped off the front of the island. The girls let out cries, but I needed to get back onto the airships below. Specifically, I needed to be able to touch a part of the rune. Thankfully, a part of it ran under the island. I used a wind spell that blew me to the side. I timed it so I ended up flying onto the airship below. I landed with a thud on my knees. Angela was standing nearby. She rose an eyebrow.

“Remove the chains,” I ordered.

“Are you sure?” She asked, abnormally cautious.

“Do it.”

“Alright… you heard the man, cut the chains!” Angela cried out.

The sailors immediately did as she asked as I grabbed her arm and pointed to a certain spot. “Take me there.”

With the chains cut, the island started to slow its movement. The airships that hadn’t been expecting this ended up passing in front of the island for a moment, giving the ground above a few moments of reprieve. Angela gestured up as the woman at the wheel brought us toward the rune. I jumped onto one of the poles and started climbing, reaching the top of the lookout, and the highest point of the airship.

Closer, closer… just a little closer…

“There!” I grabbed onto the rune and began to inject power into it.

Waves suddenly started to break out across the island. It started moving again, yet even though it was moving relative to the ground, the air had seemingly stopped moving. As the waves became more and more intense, people started collapsing, feeling a sense of vertigo. I burned through the mana, using every drop of blood provided by Rebecca and my rich power.

The demon summoning spell was essentially a spatial rune. It opened up a hole in space, allowing the demons through. Since a hole could be opened in space, then a small modification would instead make it bend space instead. I used a concept I had once heard about on television. I bent the space in front of the island and expanded the space behind it. In short, I was moving the island distorting space around it.

The speed continued to pick up, the island moving faster and faster. The air, the airships, and the island were all caught in the distortion. I couldn’t make it selective given the circumstances. We moved faster and faster toward the ocean. The blockade came closer and closer.

“Come on…” I muttered under my breath. “Come on… just a little more.”

The pressure it put on me was enormous. I felt like collapsing myself, never mind the feeling of space bending that made me want to vomit. Just a bit farther. We were almost there. We reached the blockade, and hundreds of lightning bolts, fireballs, and bombs were tossed our way. The strange space crushed the energy of the spells at first, allowing us to break through the first round of attacks, but the people on board didn’t give up. Their orders were different than the group above the island. They were shooting to kill, and they weren’t even caring about those that were still fighting on the front lines. This blockade had only one purpose. It was there to stop us.

More and more spells moved, and as they started hitting us from the sides where space was being bent the least, the spells started to hit the island. Gashes broke apart the landscape and the ground collapsed. Any building there collapsed and slid off the side of the island, falling to the ground below.

“We can… we can make it!” I cried out.

My hand slipped and the island quickly slowed to a stop. The one side effect of bending space to move was that there didn’t appear to be any momentum. Technically, the island hadn’t been moving, it was just the space around it that had.

The airship suddenly went up, breaking the tower I was standing on. I let out a shout and jumped off. I just managed to activate a safety spell before hitting the deck with a thud. I was just about to curse at Angela when I realized the airship wasn’t going up, the island was going down. They had destroyed the engines successfully. The island could no longer remain airborne. The pilot dived the airship down, trying to get us out from under the falling island.

The blockade was right behind us, but for some reason, they had stopped firing. I looked around in a daze, and that’s when I saw another line of airships and ocean ships, approaching the border to Amaryllis desperately.

“What is that?” Angela cried out.

She pulled out a telescope and looked at the largest ship, the one that was leading this fleet.

“What is it?” The other girls asked, clearly frightened, but also a bit hopefully.

“I’ll be… it’s… it’s…” She had put down the telescope, which I took from her, and looked for myself.

I already knew what I was expecting to see, but I wanted to check for myself. A woman was standing on the bow of the ship. She had dark skin, black, hair, and a bold complexion. She was a beautiful woman who exuded power. It was Queen Talitha.

“Matahari…”

Standing next to her was Kemala, who I had sent away with the aimless hope that she would be able to reach her mother and get us aid. With Matahari right there, Amaryllis was forced to stop their attack. We had passed out of their territory and were in international waters. If they pursued, Matahari would defend. The defense of men was protected under international law. In short, we had made it!

That was what I was thinking, but a moment later there was a massive boom. A wave five hundred feet high erupted into the sky. It then began to rain down, even reaching our airship. The island had crashed into the water. It had made it about half a kilometer out from the beach before it hit the water. I let out a breath. We had made it.

I didn’t need to direct Angela for her to fly the airship down. As soon as we reached the island, I threw a rope over and slid down. As I reached the surface, I could hear shouting and cheering. Whether it was from our previous speed or perhaps the tides, but the island was still moving. It floated on top of the water, getting progressively farther and farther away from the shore and Amaryllis. Meanwhile, the ships of Matahari arrived, creating a protective barrier around us.

We had made it. We really had made it. All the men of Amaryllis, or at least a large amount of them, had managed to escape the nation. With Matahari’s protection, or emancipation was complete. As shouts of joy and happiness erupted over the floating island, the people who had been hiding came out of the buildings or up from the tunnels underneath. More and more people surfaced. There were men and women on this island, and given the nature of the island, there were about as many men as there were women. On this island, at this time, it looked like a normal world of equal sexes.

As the people crowded, hugged, and slapped each other on the back, I saw my family gathering. They looked shaken, but they were alive and well. I started to head toward them, but I didn’t make it far before shouting started to rise.

“Clyburn! Clyburn! Clyburn!”

I didn’t know who had started it, but suddenly, the entire crowd started shouting. Two women grabbed me and then hoisted me up onto their shoulders. I hadn’t even been in the city when this revolution started, but somehow, I had become the icon for it. The world would never be the same again. Things were changing, and the world of women was breaking. I held my fist up high, and the people cheered.