I looked down from Glimpse, and sure enough, the tide was withdrawing rapidly. It was moving backwards at about the speed a normal man could sprint, dragging itself up into a massive wall of water that was sweeping towards us from the horizon.

No, it was much closer than the horizon. It had become the horizon, distorting my sense of perspective.

Glimpse, get Fay and the Coven into storage, and anyone else you can fit, but Fay and the baby are first.

And what about you, Ray? The crow sent back even as he peeled around and shot towards the army in the north, throwing a few fireballs as he went for good measure.

I'll be fine.

For once, I followed my own orders. Half a mile behind us was a low hill, maybe a hundred and fifty metres above sea level. It had been a bitch to fight our way up about forty minutes ago, and I slashed out through the bonds to push everyone nearby in that direction, then I slapped my haste amulet and blurred back and forth, sweeping my friends and allies into storage.

I didn't have a necklace of beads like the bird did. I had half a dozen in the form of rings and stone beads on a necklace under my armour. My sword and armour vanished; I didn't need the weight, and suddenly I was moving much more easily across the sandy surface.

I got most of the nomads in. Kril squawked indignantly as he saw me coming for him, having swept up the nomads who had survived our attack. Barely half of them had made it this far. While the legionaries had taken much lighter losses, they were too big to be able to store them away.

Giant footsteps boomed as they sprinted for high ground, throwing up gouts of sand. The enemy was stumbling forward in confusion. We'd been slaughtering them, slowly but surely, a moment ago. Their backs were to the sea, and they'd been fighting to the death, no more breaking and running. Now they launched a confused counter-charge and tried to close on us as we retreated, but even the Soulbound struggled to keep up with us. Once I had all the nomads, including my pissed off looking Fangs, I slowed my retreat and stood at bay to serve as a rear guard. When one got too close, I would flash forward and pulp or melt him with a smashing blow from my mace, then scurry back to join my retreating Huskar.

We slogged up the rise. The sand and dirt were slick with blood from our earlier fight, making the going hard. It didn't bother the Huskar. I was starting to think they had some kind of inbuilt magic to spread their weight, possibly linked to how they could move so quietly when the big bastards wanted to. Clumps of scarlet sand clung to my feet as I struggled to top and knocked my boots against the bottom of my mace to clear the crap off.

Glimpse was back overhead now. If you've never seen a tidal wave sweep onto shore, you've never witnessed the total utter indifference of the sea. Nothing can stand before it, a wall of salty goodness that is completely uncaring of anything humanity or geology can do. It will flow forward; buildings, dams, and defences mean nothing. All they do is channel the force in another direction. Nothing can stop Poseidon's wrath.

"Aresk! This bitch is fucking cheating! How about a few massive bronze shields to cover the army?" I yelled at the sky as I chugged another mana potion. Shit, I was getting dangerously low on the precious items. I should have bought more before they limited the purchases.

There is currently a rather fierce argument going on about this, Ray. I am not winning it. Kronos is annoyed to have lost his champion, and his voice carries considerable weight.

"You're the god of fucking war! How does this not fall within your control?" I snapped at the clouds, and the Huskar nearby shuffled away from me slightly, glancing upwards nervously.

I'm in the fucking synod now! Don't push me, mortal. You aren't in any real danger. Just your army. Good luck, kid.

Gods are dicks. I cast Shape Earth once again and began forming a V-shaped bulwark in front of your refuge. It was far too low, but it was all we had. I pulled the sand up higher and higher, forming a solid structure as I hardened the sand and dirt into something akin to granite.

Not high enough. I ran back and forth along the length. I could hear Bon bellowing orders to his mages to hold their magic, to prepare to use ice shields to support my puny defences. I had no time for them now. If they were going to live, I had to make sure this hill survived relatively intact.

I pulled up another layer; the wall was nearly fifteen metres tall now. I checked with Glimpse, and sure enough, the water that had seemed to run away from us was on its way back with a vengeance.

Mana potion. Multiple Shape Earth spells. A frantic cycle as I tried to build a wall tall and strong enough to resist what that scaly-titted bitch was sending at me. I began sculpting the upper levels with a protruding lip that curled over towards the sea and would hopefully help divert the water away, stop it from washing over us and swamping our little hill.

I smashed some idiot in iron undies with my death-mace as he leapt up to interfere with my work, and he spiralled away towards the coast with a scream as his skin boiled away from his bones.

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The sound of a tsunami is not something that can be compared to anything I have ever heard. It starts with silence, and that absence gradually builds to a gentle roar. It is the sound of inevitability. Nothing a man can do can hope to stand against it.

I was now swatting desperate soldiers off my wall with the mace as they scrambled to escape the coming calamity. It became clear that they were no longer a threat; they'd dropped their weapons, and most of them had hurriedly shrugged off their armour to make scaling my breakwater easier. I started catching the wrists of desperate men and tossing them over my shoulder to be taken into custody by the Huskar behind me.

The humans looked pathetically grateful, hugging the ankles and knees of the armoured giants that towered over them and corralled them towards the front of the hill. Not smart. If the tide washed over us, having 80 kilos of idiot smash into your knees was probably not going to help you keep your feet. But whatever, I was busy chucking them towards safety. I'm not a monster, whatever Poseidon might have told my fellow competitors.

I checked with Glimpse.

Shit.

I rose up on a spire of stone from the pinnacle of my impromptu dam. The sea was coming back in force, sliding up the coast and obliterating the parts of Motrimer's army who had run the hardest and were closest to the shoreline.

It was like watching a spillage in slow motion. It seemed to creep, slowly but inexorably, from above. When I switched back to my own eyes, there was nothing slow about it. The water surged inland, swallowing the beach and what remained of Mortimer's army.

Did you get them? I sent to the bird.

Yes, Raymond. Fayala, your son, and the coven are safe.

If I die, find my body and let the nomads out of my rings?

You will not die.

I wasn't so fucking confident. I recast the spell and drank part of one of the pure mana potions. Sand and dirt flowed in from behind me, forcing the Huskar and our prisoners to retreat to the west. They didn't retreat very far because the water soon surrounded us and began sucking away to the high ground like a pensioner with a boiled sweet.

The breakwater was holding, but it was bugger all use to the poor bastards who used to serve Mortimer. Frantic fingers clawed at the wall I'd thrown up before they were swept away, either by the tide or by the bodies of their comrades bouncing off them and knocking them loose from their fragile hold on safety.

I was reinforcing the bulwark, pulling up dirt from beneath the ground and packing it in to replace the outer surface as the torrent wore away at it. I could feel the threads in my mind snapping as hundreds, thousands of my soulbound were snuffed out by the bubbling death Mortimer and Poseidon had unleashed on us.

In the distance, halfway to where the shore used to be, a water spout rose up, a match to my stone one and began moving towards us. I could feel the bastard at the top of it. He practically glowed in my mind, and if I shut my eyes, I could track every wobble and shift as he drew closer to me.

The bodies swirling past us began to reverse direction, flowing back towards the water spout. Corpses flowed up it, melting and merging together until a fifteen-metre-tall version of Mortimer stood atop his watery spike, drawing ever closer to me. The skin was still pink and brown; these corpses were all fresh, and rot hadn't had time to set in yet.

"Fucking necromancers," I grumbled. Necro-Mortimer stopped a dozen emtres away from me and glared down at me.

"Failed immortal. My lady has lent me her strength with which to smite you!" he cried, raising a gigantic fist and shaking it at the sky. What a dickhead. I unleashed a barrage of fireballs from my rings, completely depleting them as a dozen burning orbs flashed out.

Tendrils of flesh whipped out to intercept most of them. One sank through and obliterated the hand he threw up to keep it away from his core.

"You think such pathetic magic can affect me? I am the Chosen of the Waters! Destined for godhood! I will–"

"Christ, bloke. What the fuck happened to you? I knew you from Earth, remember? Fat, balding, up your own arse and sufficiently evil I'd have happily offed you."

"You were the worst of them! I negotiated with the soldier, struck an accord with the scholar and the narcissist. I even tamed the warrior!"

"You held his wife and kid hostage," I yelled.

"And you killed him! Probably them as well! How many cities have you burned? My cities, you fuck! You stole them from me!"

You can't play chess with a pigeon. It will knock all the pieces over, shit on the board and still think it won. I was done talking to him. Whatever he'd gone through since he came here, he was a fucking lunatic now. No trace of sanity remained.

I tensed as I prepared to attack, but beams of light and darkness shot past my spire and sliced into his augmented body. He hadn't been expecting the magic from my Huskar, and chunks of his corpse-form were blasted away, holes punched through in places that gradually began to close. He screamed in rage and rushed forward.

I spun my mace in one hand as my midnight black armour appeared over me and crouched. Three grey blurs shot past beneath me, rising up to reach my enemy. Huskars in grey robes and matte armour flew into the corpse-god. They didn't make a sound, like all good Umbrati. The secretive and silent guardians of the legion met the monster and latched on with their free hands, short swords the length of a man flashing faster than mortal eyes could follow.

Mortimer screamed in rage again and started trying to pull the tenacious giants off, cursing as he crushed the first one into pink ooze that he then absorbed into his body. That was not good. The amalgams had had a similar ability, but he was much faster to incorporate the bodies than they had been.

I pulled a stone out of the belt pouch that hung on my sword belt. Just a pebble. A simple rock that I had enchanted with my highest-level fireball spell. I bounced it a couple of times in my palm as I waited for my opportunity. He cast off the second Umbrati, who fell into the water and was washed away inland by the now ebbing tsunami. The third was viciously stabbing him where his balls would be if that were a real body. I respected the effort and the commitment to fighting dirty.

The pebble flicked out as Mortimer reached down to deal with his assailant. Another barrage of spells flew from my allies, perfectly timed to conceal the seemingly harmless pebble. Tendril flickered and spells detonated too soon, but my little rock, like the very first ones I'd enchanted for Kril all those months ago, slipped through his defence and slammed into the head of the thing. A sphere of destruction appeared, wiping out the top third of his body and launching my remaining Umbrati into the water below.

I followed after the stone, arriving on the torso of the monster a second after it detonated. I cast wildfire and combustion, lines of cloying flame spreading out around me as my now incandescent body melted my way into the corpse-thing.

Where are you hiding, you little shit?

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