The First Legendary Beast Master

Chapter 952: Make It Rain Trick

[Rae, how is your work going?] Karl asked.

[I canʼt find any more spies. I think that the lightning guy was the last one. I also washed the warehouse, so nobody will complain later.

You should make Cara go out and take a shower. Sheʼs always rolling in the dirt.]

Cara turned towards Raeʼs space and stuck her tongue out, though the spider was not in it.

[Dammit, there is too much rain. I can sense the lightning hitting the mice.] Hawk complained.

[You know, with a wind barrier, the water wonʼt even touch your flames.] Karl reminded him.

[I will go look for the survivors after the storm.]

That was the expected answer from Hawk. If he could avoid flying in the rain, he most certainly would, and he wouldnʼt go out in the rain just to go look for mice. At least, not until his last pile of mice started to run low.

Of course, Karl fully expected that Remi would increase the rain wherever Hawk flew, as well as trying to target the mice near him with lightning so that he couldnʼt hunt them himself.

But that was part of Hawkʼs calculations.

The streets were running with a deluge of muddy yellow water, but the Dwarven engineering was proving its worth, as the streets were draining as fast as they were being flooded, even with this torrential downpour.

Water barrels outside houses were already beginning to overflow, and everything was looking cleaner by the second, including the people, who were beginning to finish their impromptu outdoor showers.

”How long were you planning to make it rain for?” One of the Dwarves asked cautiously.

Rae appeared in between Karl and the young man. ”Not more than an hour. I have a suspicion that there has been a curse placed on the land, and the abundance of water should shatter it.

If the curse doesnʼt show signs of breaking within the hour, we will stop the rain before any major flooding happens. But at that point, the reservoirs and canals should also be full, while the fields will be muddy.

It will take a bit before things are back to normal, but not more than three or four days at the most.”

”A curse? How did you come to that conclusion?”

Karl immediately stopped Rae before she could go into detail about her interrogation methods.

”We overheard a few men who claimed to be working with Lord Bomgon requesting reinforcements before the Shamans here could break the curse.” Karl explained on her behalf.

He wasnʼt sure what sort of sign they should be expecting, but Remi was back in her space, keeping careful watch now that her batch of potions was finished. If anyone would know what to look for, it would be her or Lotus.

Karl checked the area to make sure that their nature cleric hadnʼt wandered away, and found her trying to convince a beastkin girl to come out from under the counter of her stall. The lightning strikes had terrified her, and the vendor was still flat out refusing to come into the open, even with the curtain lifted, so she could see that there was no more lightning nearby.

The problem was that sensitive beastkin hearing could still pick up the lightning strikes out in the fields, where the storm was eliminating the rodent problems.

She was far from the only one terrified by the lightning strikes near the edge of the market, but she was the first one that Lotus had found.

As the rain continued to pelt the city, Karl and Remi adjusted the downpour rate a little, so it didnʼt overwhelm the cityʼs drainage system, but that only got them to the forty-five-minute mark.

At that point, the underground cistern was full to ground level, and nothing could drain anymore. So, the excess water was beginning to run down to the walls, and then out the gates.

That began to fill a long forgotten moat outside the city walls, which was filling with a substance that was distinctly neither dirt nor water.

The guards noticed right away, but none of them knew if boiling oil had been deployed during a previous invasion. That was almost what this looked like, but it was bubbling in a most disturbing way.

It almost seemed like it was boiling, but there was no heat coming from it.

Then, the black sludge burst into deep green flames, which sucked the heat out of the air, chilling the walls of the city so much that frost began to form, and the guards rang the state of emergency alarm.

Only, nobody inside the city understood the issue. Of course, it was a state of emergency, the city was flooded. Ringing the alarm now was just annoying.

But when the strange green fires began to spread upward over the wall, it was clear that something was very wrong, and it was not the rain.

The flames seemed to be attracted to the water, dissipating it wherever they touched.

That was a good sign to Remi, and she began to adjust the rainfall to miss most of the city, while forming a nearly solid wall of water on and outside the walls.

The fires went insane, trying to stop the land from being soaked, then began to sputter and die under the forceful deluge.

Karl wondered how many other points in the area had been cursed in the same way as the moat had been. If there were random curse fires all over the land, it might not totally break the effect with a single rainstorm.

But they were going to keep it going anyhow, with only a light drizzle on the city, for the next fifteen or twenty minutes.

That should give any shamans who were in the rural areas time to spot curse fires and put them out, breaking the curses. If they got enough of them, the effect should begin to fade, and the region might start to get its normal sparse rain for the season again.

But the real benefit was not the removal of the curse. It was the removal of the smell of a city that went months without bathing.