"It hurts!" I said in response.
He patted me on the back, "You'll be fine. You always have been such a healthy animal."
He was silent for a moment before saying, "Thank you for bringing me along Eli. This right here is worth seeing."
"Don't thank me just yet Matt." I said grimly, as I followed where Serena pointed to something behind us on the horizon.
Serena called out in concern, "I think a storm is coming!"
Everyone else turned and gazed at where she pointed. In the distance the orange clouds had turned gray and then a blue electric beam of light streaked out through the clouds branching out like the outstretched many fingered arms of a tree, until the whole horizon was lit up by one fragmented bolt of electric sizzle, whose endless repercussions echoed loudly out across the water at us.
It was the most indescribably beautiful lightning event I'd ever seen in all my years at sea and it was also the most horrifying. I wanted no part of such a storm that lit up the entire horizon with just one lightning bolt. The percussions of thunder that rolled across the waves at us sounded like World War III had just begun.
"Ortega get our engines started up so we can make a run for it!" I called out.
Ortega scurried off quickly followed by Flynn. Heavy wind hit us in the face all of a sudden and it soon became clear that we were in for a hard time of it all over again. I hadn't recovered from falling through the Earth yet to suffer through a new ordeal of this magnitude, but that was the fickle way of the sea.
I had never seen a storm move so fast as this one did. We were underway as the Celestia's Prize gave all she had to keep us running ahead of the storm, but she wasn't fast enough. The storm overtook us and a new horror revealed itself in the clashing waves that rose up vertically all around us.
I did my best to steer through the troughs and then the sudden rises, but how could you handle the ferocity of a storm that had cyclones touching down everywhere?
Funneled cyclones of swirling power radiated down out of the clouds to plunge into the sea and stirred it up to an even greater ferocity. I'd never seen anything like it and I lost the faith to believe that I could survive through it.
Lightning streaks plunged all around us through the shifting maze of twisting cyclones and vicious waves. I came down into a trough and almost immediately a wave three times the height of the Celestia's Prize rose up on the starboard side.