Still very short peices. Not the last, this is.
He stood on the rock ring about the massive Blastia, watching lights flicker underneath the great Apatheia, at the top of the ring-like structure. From what he could tell from reading the Aer-flow, from down here...
They were fighting.
And winning.
Perhaps it had been a good choice to step back and allow 'Brave Vesperia' to right their mistake...
Duke turned to return to Ilyccia.
"No..." The flow of the Aer...!
He turned, and stared as the Apatheia glowed and released a beam of light, a beam of Aer, into the sky.
"They failed..." As he watched, the sky seemed to shatter, revealing what it had held back. His jaw tightened at the sight of the calamity, and his eyes flicked back to the Blastia as the large Apatheia fell. "I should have taken the task up myself..." A dark... figure fell from the top, with a glow that winked out in hand.
They had failed him.
Dein Nomos would sink.
That second decided him.
Lowell's weight, even estimated, would not cause him to dip too much. Duke strode out onto the open air.
Time to put this into practice.
He quickly discovered that moving his feet as if walking did not aid him in the slightest, and simply focusing on moving and staying above water level was all he needed to do. The act was easier when he was in possession of Dein Nomos...
He would hit the water before Duke grew close enough to catch, and the unconscious – bleeding – man sank. Without a second thought he released the formula and tilted into a dive. It wasn't his best dive, but he sank well enough. The salt water stung his eyes, but he kept them open to find the dark clad human. The weight of Dein Nomos and the young man's armor negated the buoyancy granted by the salt water and pulled him down toward the remains of buildings that remained underwater even as Zaude towered above its ring of rock.
A dark stream in the water trailed as a mark of his passing, staining the water from his side. A slight trail of bubbles marked his air leaving his stunned lungs, a thin trail indicated Duke's breath as he exhaled to keep his lungs from burning and he pushed down to catch a hold of Lowell. He ignored dark grey eyes that struggle to open as he pulled him closer, grabbing onto the hand that gripped Dein Nomos across the younger man's torso, and kicking for the surface. He didn't bother tapping into the imperial treasure for power, holding enough of his own to get him and the nearly as heavy male to the surface, even by mundane means of swimming. Lowell coughed slightly as their heads broke the surface, but did little else.
Then he discovered that he couldn't get out of the water to ... float was an appropriate verb, back to shore. Training learned long ago came back to him neatly, and he shifted his grip and swam, the younger man's head on his shoulder and above water. This did have the effect of him breathing right under his ear, but at least both were above water level.
After reaching the rocky ring and carrying him out of water, Duke checked to see what exactly was bleeding. The nearly-black haired young man had a handful of scrapes and bruises – either wounds the Child of the Full Moon had not healed from the fight with the Commandant, or wounds from the crashing Apatheia, and one freely bleeding, deep cut on the left side of his stomach. If it had been on the right side, the younger man might have had a worse wound, but as it was...
"Trust humanity to stab one who tried to save them."
If he left Lowell here, the monsters would be drawn by his blood – and by the sounds it would be soon.
Human. They betrayed him. This one failed him.
But the other humans betrayed him as well.
The arrival of one of the crabs with the maws for claws decided him. He lifted the still unconscious swordsman and went back to Ilyccia.
Lowell and his friends had been willing to speak with Entelexeia, once they had realized that they were not simply monsters.
He would save the man.
It's a little jerky to read, but it's that way on purpose. Completely. I don't think Duke's head is a particularly safe place to be :X