Page 3005 -- CCLX.

Chapter Two Hundred Sixty: 'O, wicked shifters...'
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When Loren Lighteyes stepped off the boat, he was only too glad to finally have solid ground beneath him again. He would have much preferred to simply fly back to Eloa, but apparently, there were huge dogfights going on all across the skies of the Luthic, and even Abolish didn't want to risk transporting anyone by plane unless they were to serve as reinforcements.

Concealing themselves among civilian boats, however, was somehow not a problem. He'd even seen jets patrolling the shipping lanes. Each time he saw one, Loren had expected it to open open fire on their big, lumbering tanker, but that thankfully never happened.

What exactly the fighting was about, he still didn't quite know. Popular sentiment seemed to be that it was some kind of proxy conflict, related to the Vantalayan war effort. Perhaps Czacoa and its allies were trying to prevent Vantalay from bringing in support from overseas.

Loren didn't think that explained why the fighting spanned such a wide swath of the Luthic, though. It was the largest ocean in the world. If they were only concerned about the Vantalayan region, then why had Abolish shut down all aerial transports out of eastern Ardora?

In any case, it was an enormous hassle. And while he didn't hate the ocean quite as much as he used to as a child, he was still far from in love with it. Perhaps the gills that he had mutated onto his back would one day change his opinion in that regard, but if so, he had a feeling that it would require many, many years.

And it didn't help, of course, that those gills still needed some work. They weren't exactly his proudest effort. While they did technically allow his body to breathe underwater, they were horribly inefficient, and he would still drown eventually--after a few hours or so.