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Battle at Lake Taupō
Battle at Lake Taupō
| Date | 17 February 1815 |
| Location | Pacific Ocean, New Zealand |
| Death Toll | 2 (Super Deaths) |
| Damage | None worth noting |
| Context | Rampage of the Bostonharbour Greatshark |
| Perpetrator | Bostonharbour Greatshark |
| Involved | King Arthur, Tim McLeod, Romeo Awnthorpe, Nuck Chorris |
The Battle at Lake Taupō of 1815 saw the end of the Bostonharbour Greatshark at the hands of C.H.E.S..
The following is a relation of the battle, and of the events leading up to it.
Birth of a Greatshark
The Greatshark was born of a series of unfortunate events. In December of 1773, over 90,000 pounds of tea were dumped into the sea off the coast of Boston. Unbeknownst to those responsible for it, at least 30,000 pounds of this happened to be the famed tea of Orkney. Soon after, a violent thunderstorm struck Boston harbour; lightning rained down upon the city, heating the water. Thus, the water turned into tea—and tea wrought from saltwater is altogether wrong.
On that same day, a great white shark happened upon the bay, and as it did so, it partook of the accursed tea, and as it gorged itself on the wrongness, its body grew. And with it grew its sterility. By the end of the day, the storm had passed, and the shark had consumed the entirety of the tea in the harbour, its size now surpassing that of a megalodon of the primordial age.
However, the shark was still a shark. Unlike some of its more intelligent maritime fellows, its intelligence remained stunted, and its only desire was to eat, to devour. With its newfound sterility had come a hunger for sterility.
Terror of the Seas
For nigh on half a century, the shark would ravage anyone that dared cross the seas possessing so much as a shred more sterility than a human should. In retrospect, it was determined that the Greatshark may have been responsible for about 50% of high-seas maritime disasters of the late 18th and early 19th century. Over 81 C.H.E.S. members are estimated to have been devoured by the shark.
Despite this, the shark’s existence went unnoticed at first. C.H.E.S. first heard of an unusual amount of its members going missing in the open seas in the late 1780s, but it was not until 1799 that they realised that something foul was at work. In that time, a ship getting lost at sea was nothing unusual, but that very same year, the HMS Orestes foundered while carrying aboard a C.H.E.S. Master.
Under normal circumstances, no one with this much sterility would have ever succumbed to a natural disaster. When C.H.E.S. started suspecting that something was targeting or at the very least endagering sterility users on the open sea, all manner of unescorted transport by boat was banned until the cause were discovered. Soon after, King Arthur, the one best suited to investigate the situation at hand, made for the Pacific.
Encounter
Despite the Greatshark’s lack of intelligence, it was nevertheless an excellent hunter. As such, it also knew when it was outmatched, and that a direct confrontation with King Arthur would have spelt certain doom for it. Unfortunately for King Arthur, his sterility was too great: while he would have had to be within at least 50km of the Greatshark to sense its whereabouts, the latter was able to feel his approach from at least ten times that distance. And so, the shark continued to elude C.H.E.S. for over a decade.
However, King Arthur’s presence was not without success: with him protecting and overseeing transports of C.H.E.S. members across the seas, the Greatshark had been robbed of its prey, and unlike C.H.E.S. it could not rely on tea to replenish its waning sterility.
Thus it was that the shark grew desperate, and in 1815, attempted an ambush on King Arthur, who was overseeing a transport in the South Pacific: By surrounding its body with concentrated sterility, it created a quantum superposition, shrouding its existence in a way that would have made it undetectable to any ordinary enemy. King Arthur, however, was all but ordinary.
Sensing its approach from afar, he waited. And when the Greatshark had come within 10 metres of him, he used his ability The Ocean is Me, and I am the Ocean, which granted him command over all saltwater, to compress the water around the shark’s body to one thousand times its usual density, delivering a devastating blow to the Greatshark. The great white thrashed and screeched—as well as a shark can, that is—and quickly commenced its retreat, with King Arthur fast in pursuit.
Pursuit
The Greatshark fled south until it reached what is today New Zealand. While the shark’s intelligence left much to be desired, the same could not be said about its instinct. Knowing full well it could not best King Arthur in the open sea, the shark performed a sterility leap from the coast 123 km inland right into the middle of Lake Taupō, where it sought to evade his crustacean pursuer.
Stymied, King Arthur had to forsake his pursuit: he knew he would be no match for the Greatshark in freshwater, as in its current state, his ability only granted him control over saltwater. Over the course of the next hours, the Greatshark would continuously circle the lake, waiting for a chance to escape, but whenever it started moving towards one end of the body of water it had trapped itself in, it would find that King Arthur was already waiting for him off the island’s coast in that very direction.
This stalemate continued for a while, as the shark grew ever weaker; King Arthur, however, remained unfazed and undisturbed, for he was spending the time making tea out of local algae and corals. Eventually, the shark would have to either come out and face him, or stay in the lake for a decade or two and slowly wither away.
This notwithstanding, there was yet a concern that the shark might be able to replenish its sterility by feasting on the locals, were it to find any with above-average sterility. Fortunately, King Arthur had already informed the rest of C.H.E.S. of what had transpired, and others were on their way. By the end of the week, Romeo Awnthorpe, Tim McLeod, and Nuck Chorris himself had arrived on the island.
Battle of Lake Taupō
The three Grand Masters commenced their approach on the lake at noon on the following day; King Arthur stayed behind and continued to patrol the coast, lest the shark escape—or so it thought. When they arrived at the lake, the Greatshark opened the confrontation and used another sterility leap to propel itself 10km into the air so as to attain a higher vantage point.
Tim countered by compressing space above the lake to one hundredth its original size, thus positioning the shark only about 100m up in the air. Romeo, the youngest of the three and eager to prove his worth in battle, leapt into the air and delived a sterility-enhanced kick to the Greatshark’s head, sending the two of them crashing down into the lake.
However, this proved to be a fatal mistake, as once the shark had returned into the water, it cloaked itself as it had when it attempted to ambush King Arthur. Tragically, Romeo, though powerful in sterility, had never been in a fight before. Tim shouted for him to leave the water and prepared to attack the shark using Occam’s Razor, but it was too late: the invisible Greatshark attacked Romeo from behind and bit him in two.
In devouring Romeo’s body, the shark also devoured his sterility, and its strength grew exponentially. This also confirmed C.H.E.S.’s greatest fear: that those devoured by the Greatshark, bereft of all their sterility, were thus granted Super Death.
Sudden, the situation seemed dire, and Tim felt a slight worry for the first time in his life; he turned to Nuck, but the Scotsman’s face shewed only calm anger. ‘Rest assured,’ he said to Tim, ‘this bastard dies today.’ And though in that moment, Nuck would have fain torn the shark fin from fin—and forsooth, he could have done so easily—he knew, that this foe was not his to end.
Death of a Greatshark
The shark turned to the two masters and approached rapidly, but in that moment, the water of the lake erupted violently and engulfed the shark whole: King Arthur had come, and he had used his new-found ability, The Lake is Me, and I am the Lake. In the time between his arrival on the shores of the island and the confrontation, he had done more than just brew tea: he had been busy rewriting his ability to apply to freshwater instead.
The Greatshark thrashed violently and attempted to lunge at King Arthur, but the lake was his dominion now: the shark could not so much as scratch him here. Realising that it was about to die, it made one last attempt at flight, performing another sterility leap off the island and into the ocean. At first, it worried that the crustacean would halt it in its path, and perhaps he could have; perhaps all the water of the lake would have been enough to confine the shark. But be that as it may, there was no need for that. For as the shark leapt into the open sea, King Arthur followed.
One can spend an eternity planning and devising, and King Arthur could have spent an eternity contemplating his ability, but it would have been of no avail. Only through excercising it could he have achieved enlightenment. And excercise it, he did.
And so, at last, the aged Grand Master had unlocked his true potential. As he dove into the ocean, the Greatshark turned for a final attack, believing the crustacean to be defenseless, here, in saltwater.
It was then that King Arthur, for the first time in his long life, used his true ability, The Water is Me, and I am the Water, granting him dominion over all water there is, freshwater and saltwater alike. In an instant, the water around the Greatshark compressed to a millionth of its original size.
Far away, at the shores of Lake Taupō, a proud Nuck looked on as the Greatshark was torn asunder by the roaring tides.
Aftermath
From that point on, C.H.E.S. kept a close eye on any large tea shipments and made sure to investigate any that went missing; the Greatshark was not the last wild anmial to be corrupted by tea, but all the others, C.H.E.S. would immediately track down and dispose of.
As for the Greatshark: after its death, it lived a short life in Boston harbour of +17i for about five minutes before Nuck arrived and performed an Inverse Mandelbrot Transfer, granting it Super Death.