"Oh? Who'd you kill?"

"A woman and a boy. Her son, I assume."

"People normally don't get my attention over a number of murders less than a few dozen. But somebody really wanted my attention over here."

"Most puzzling indeed. Who exactly are you?"

"The Emperor of this world, most relevantly."

"An emperor, hm." She taps a finger to her lips consideringly. "...No, I haven't killed an emperor before. This ought to be interesting."

—he starts giggling.

He's entitled to his sense of humor.

And while he's doing that, she flicks an empowered magic missile at his face.

It hits him, but he hardly seems to notice, certainly doesn't seem to be at all hurt.

Promising.

Lightning bolt.

The energy is tracelessly absorbed into his body.

He gives her a 'you done?' sort of look.

No, she's in the mood to play with her food some more.

"Resilient, aren't we?" Drawing her sword, she advances on him with a quick attack. The blade's edge shines white.

He catches the blade in his hand. Whatever it was meant to do to him, it doesn't.

His grip is strong enough to crush steel like paper, but he's not all that surprised to find her sword more resilient than ordinary steel.

Her face twists in anger, and the sword emits a deafening, concussive shriek.

He winces slightly at the sound, shakes his head, sighs, and lets go. His general demeanour is as of one outwaiting a child's tantrum.

All right then. She takes a step backwards.

A great yawning rift opens in front of her, or in her, it's hard to tell. It is a mouth, and it hungers to consume everything that it can, and Solekaran specifically. It wants his magic, his power, his life, his soul, his very essence. All that he is, it will strip away and devour. Tentacles snap out to bind his body in place, and begin dragging him closer. He can feel the presence of the maw as a metaphysical weight upon the world, pulling all things into it, as relentless and inexorable as the march of time.

He looks, in the brief moment before the tentacles get him, slightly annoyed.

At first it seems there's no end to him, that his life and his power just go on forever and anything that wants to consume them completely will be occupied for the rest of time.

And then—there is an end—but not the end; as the last drop of power breaks free, the whole thing comes roaring back to life, restored in an instant, good as new—

—and then he explodes?

It's not really an explosion per se; it's a chaotic storm of power, centered on the spot just in front of her all-devouring maw where his body was just beginning to reappear when instead it started doing this. Blazing light and utter darkness, searing heat and bitter cold, lash out in whirling arcs from that central point; and other things too, less nameable things. A wave of force that flings her into the air like a doll and carves deep furrows in the sand of the seabed, shattering the parts that have fused into glass. An energy that turns scattered fragments of seaweed into enormous plants sprouting amid the wreckage, no two alike; a second, opposing energy that crumbles all living things it touches into dust. All the parts of this storm move independently, spinning around and over and through each other, so that over the course of a second a single scrap of seaweed is burned, frozen, given new life as a ten-foot-tall flowering tree with a crown of peacock feathers, then violently torn apart by opposing arcs of force and each of the dozen pieces crushed, warped, half-destroyed at random by the invisible energy of decay, and burned and frozen all over again, all the while being alternately illuminated by near-blinding beams of light and veiled in impenetrable darkness.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, there might or might not be a wavering silhouette that might or might not be the Emperor. It is nearly impossible to detect him by any means, and entirely impossible to reach him; and the storm is growing, reaching outward to encompass the debris it scatters across the sand.

Ugh. Why can't something be easy again, just once.

She levers herself off the ground and starts moving out to stay out reach of the explosion. Her sword, which was knocked out of her grip, shatters into pieces and reforms next to her. She grabs it out of the air.

It takes a couple of minutes for the storm to reach its full size. The active area is about a hundred feet across, and secondary destructive effects reach for another thirty feet or so outside of that - sprays of molten glass or ice-cold shards, blasts of fire, scorched and frozen chunks of unidentifiable organic matter, all being thrown out of the storm at dangerous speeds.

Shortly after the storm stabilizes, the suspended ocean drops back into place. All traces of the old woman are long gone from the vicinity.

Mmrph.

She essays a couple analytical spells. Doesn't get much beyond 'highly magical, very dangerous, no useful way to poke it'.

...He flew in from somewhere. Likely relatively close, given response time. Where might that have been?

Perhaps it was that distant speck floating in the sky above the horizon.

She has a good feeling about that speck. She will go see what it is.

A flight spell lets her step into the sky, and she makes for it.

It's a city, on an island, in the sky.

It may not be quite the most beautiful place she's ever seen, but it's definitely in the running.

Well. That just about makes this plane worth the trouble.

The emperor's palace is likely to be the biggest. That will be her first stop.