Silence fell.
It lasted for five seconds.
Then the ground ahead erupted.
A column of steam punched through ice, white vapour rocketing upward in a huge pillar, spreading outward in both directions.
Artoria's hand dropped to the handbrake.
Click.
Rear tires locked. Mustang's trunk swung outward, front drifting right along the geyser's perimeter, passenger door an inch away from billowing steam. Paint on that side boiled in blisters that swelled, popped, and peeled from the chassis in black flakes.
Artoria's other hand shot to the seatbelt buckle to brace. Her fingers touched it and jerked back, the metal there had gone from frozen to burning in an instant. She clutched her hand against her breastplate, gauntlet red, fingers spasming.
I held the drift.
Left tires traced the geyser's edge, rubber clawing a surface that was nearly slush, throwing steam behind with every scrape. The car shuddered on its axis mid-slide, one side cold, one side burning. Our windshield cracked along its center in a line that followed that exact boundary.
Two seconds.
We cleared that column.
Mustang straightened, and Medusa pressed herself against Medea, the seat where she'd sat moments ago now fuming, thin wisps drifting upward to the roof.
"Master! What do we do here!?" Medea pulled Medusa closer, her voice cracking and hair ruffled, one strand sticking to her forehead.
"Hold yourself together," I said, my grip on the steering wheel tightening.
She opened her mouth to reply—
Five geysers exploded behind us.
Ice disintegrated around their edges in car-sized chunks that launched up and rained back down. I wrenched the wheel left, slotting our car between two slabs that slammed down on either side of us. Medea's mouth snapped shut, teeth biting into her tongue.
Artoria snapped toward her side mirror and seized my sleeve. "Master!"
I looked back through the rearview mirror.
Something else was raining out of those geysers, silhouettes that tore through the steam around them, riding on those chunks of melting ice.
Animals. Penguins.
Dozens on a single slab. And hundreds of those same slabs arcing behind us. Some poured from those geysers' edges in a black torrent, others sailed through air, bodies ripping off the slabs, wings flung wide.
Nearby, a slab crashed down, its base crushing into a second one already crowded with penguins. Those animals vanished in the collision with a crunch, their screams lost under the stampede's roar.
Other penguins ran for their lives.
In the same direction as us, and caught up in seconds.
Bodies swarmed around Mustang's sides, ahead, on the roof, just behind the trunk. Thud-thump-thump. Penguins scurried across our roof, one pressed its belly against my side window, raking its beak across glass.
"Master! Let me reapply magic circles on the car!" Medea's hand dug into my shoulder, her grip bruising. Each impact that shook the chassis passed through her fingers into my collarbone, her other hand on Medusa, who had an arm over her eyes.
"Justeaze, pull your threads back."
Ice began to split in another dark valley ahead. A cluster of twenty penguins in front scattered right, bellies skating across frost. I swung right, then right again, Mustang following them, carving between two lines of birds running alongside us.
"Done," Justeaze replied, and Mustang's speed took a dive, the engine's note dropping to a growl.
A geyser blew open.
Steam erupted directly beneath the stampede's far flank. Penguins caught in its radius wailed. One instant they were scrambling, the next they were gone, punched upward in a column of white, bodies spiraling inside vapor like leaves in wind.
Dozens. Forty, fifty, a whole section of the stampede simply lifted off and didn't come back down.
Medusa peeked, her eyes cracked open, barely a sliver, gaze landing on the side window for less than a second. Ripples bloomed across glass there in a thin grey film, stone-colored, spreading from where her stare landed before she screwed her eyes shut again.
Medea's hand loosened on my shoulder, then pulled away, palm coming to rest against her side door. "Give me a minute, Master."
Violet circles revolved around her arm, extending across Mustang's length with each breath.
"One minute," I said.
The penguins beside us surged faster.
A seal larger than our car launched itself sideways into our lane from the east toward our wheel, plowing through birds like a bowling ball.
I braked and Mercury answered instantly. Mustang's rear tires skid, chassis skating sideways, and that seal passed our hood with centimeters to spare, its whiskers skimming our headlight before tumbling back into the stampede.
Artoria's hand lashed to the dashboard, other flying over to brace me. Her gauntlet caught my arm and held me steady through our drift. When the tires found grip and Mustang straightened, she didn't let go.
More geysers ahead. Three of them, erupting in a line, evenly spaced, their steam pillars merging into a detonation of white that blocked our path.
Left. Right. Left. A penguin darted left; I was already left. Another broke right; I was already right. Reading shoulder tilts and weight shifts before they committed, every bird telling me its next move seconds prior.
Another geyser blew to our right. I banked left. Penguins scattered left with me, their panic and my instinct aligning for one second, Mustang and a thousand birds dodging the same threat in the same direction.
A penguin beside us stumbled. Its feet found ice that was soft, then wet, then not there at all. It fell without a sound, engulfed by water that was seeping from hairline fractures across the ice sheet beneath us.
None of the penguins looked back. They just dashed.
I checked the rearview mirror.
Something loomed behind the whole stampede.
A far mountain behind us, the one that had exploded earlier, its ice tore loose.
Kilometers of glacial sheets peeled from its surface at once, exposing stone that hadn't seen light in millennia.
That mountain shuddered from foundation to melting peak, magma freezing like tears etched across its face.
One inhale. Two.
The shuddering stopped.
Artoria's breath hitched.
And the mountain crumbled in silence, peak tilting sideways and vanishing under a rising tide that stretched from horizon to horizon, erasing the distance between us.
The penguins weren't running from the geysers.
They never had been.
They were running from this.
A tsunami.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Writing these apocalyptic scenarios is a really new experience for me, not gonna lie. Usually my biggest "life or death" stakes involve someone fighting on one on five scale, and now I'm out here nuking a whole continent and putting several thousand fictional penguins through what I can only describe as their worst day ever.
I want it on record that I didn't mean for the penguins to become main characters. They were supposed to be scenery. Environmental flavor as they say. "Oh look, wildlife, very immersive, very Antarctica." And then I wrote one sentence about them getting punted into a geyser and suddenly I cared way too much about the collective wellbeing of a fictional penguin stampede. There's a slab-crush death in there that I rewrote four times because I kept feeling bad for them. For animals I invented that don't exist, in a chapter where I also crumbled a mountain.
Anyway RIP to those boys, you ran bravely, dodged well, several of you got launched a truly unreasonable distance into the sky and I think about that.
This does directly transfer over to deep floors in the dungeon though, the idea of showing scale through a swarm, not the threat itself, is way too good a structure not to reuse. Just, uh, hopefully with fewer casualties next time. No promises, though.