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Unfortunately, that wasn’t always possible. It was quite a commitment of his limited iron resources, for one thing: building entire mountain paths to funnel the water up through. And for another, sometimes there just wasn’t enough space to work with. When a settlement was right on the coastline, for example, he couldn’t create a pathway anywhere at all. Not on land, anyway.

Which brought him to the idea of materializing giant hills and pathways underwater, before the waves even reached the coast. It sort of worked, but it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped it would be. Without knowing how deep the water was, the task was flatly impossible, which meant that he had to dive down into the storming waters in order to see what was going on.

And that just wasn’t feasible, most of the time. The seas were way too rough, and he hadn’t tested his flying armor underwater before.

He still ended up trying, though. A few different times, in truth. It usually went poorly, but he just tried to think of it as yet another learning experience. On-the-job training, so to speak.

He might’ve been more comfortable with it if he’d ever learned how to swim. That was definitely an oversight, even if drowning wasn’t really a problem for him.

On the whole, Hector’s days spent over the Gulf of Emerson were absolute madness. Grueling, brutal madness. Whenever he found another town-sized grouping of debris in the water, his heart filled with dread at what he would see when flying down for a closer look.

It was never good.

So many buildings were just gone. Reduced to piles of floating rubble.

And the bodies. He began losing count after a while. But at least he was able to retrieve them easily enough, lifting them out of the water in iron coffins. He wasn’t sure what to do with them all just yet, so he’d been finding various dry spots on high ground and stacking them there. He had Garovel remember where they all were so that he could return for them later, once things had finally settled down, and then hopefully try to turn them over to the local authorities for identification.

He could only imagine how much worse it would’ve been if the evacuation orders hadn’t been sent out in time. From what he’d heard before departing Warrenhold, that was exactly the case for many places that bordered the Luthic Ocean directly. Such as Vantalay and Steccat.