It is indeed a bulge in the water, but not a wave. Rather, a... creature. Of some sort.

It's difficult to see, at first, the bulge in the water grows and grows and defies gravity. When the water finally breaks and slides down the sides of the creature, eighty percent of it is still submerged, which still leaves enough of it exposed for it to be a sizeable hill. It's surrounded by something like an energy field, faintly iridescent but transparent, so its features are not easily seen, especially from a distance. What it does seem to be, for sure, though, is heading towards the fishing village at an alarming speed.

"Shit!"

"What is it?" Oni-Goroshi asks. "Are we under attack?"

"No - the portal device did something, we're near a village and there's some giant monster coming for it -"

A sharpening metal sound, her equivalent of an intake of breath. "What are you waiting for, then? Move!"

Edmund - looks down, semi-voluntarily. It's a long way down. How much does he trust his shielding?

...enough that he'll do this. He jumps.

It's a long enough fall for him to regret his life choices before slamming into the rocks. There's a bright flash of light and a crashing sound as his shields collapse, and a snap as his leg breaks. He hisses and drags himself back to his feet as one of his flasks drains to set and knit the bone, then starts running for the village.

The monster is faster. It is faster by an unreasonable amount. Nothing that big should be that fast.

And then it suddenly stops, and all of the water it's been moving doesn't stop, and comes crashing down the village in multiple waves. Which would be bad enough, as each wave is as tall as the tallest wooden building in the village, except as that happens some sort of, of gravity effect starts pulling the buildings apart, and towards the monster. One by one the village's houses and huts and walkways and trees get uprooted and torn to pieces in the air, a cloud of them quickly forming around the monster. And—and—

—those are definitely people. The people themselves are not pulled apart, merely pulled towards the monster, hit by debris that are being thrown every which way, crushed between pieces of their former homes, impaled by enormous branches that have been ripped off trees. A whirlwind of destruction swirls around and above the monster, and as the waves settle, the entire coastal part of the village and a fair way inland have been razed to the ground.

He keeps running.

It's not to save the people, anymore, they're gone, but - if he can kill that thing, he can save the people it'd kill next. The lives it'll destroy - the tiny human worlds it'll ruin - he can save them.

(Unless it's like the Beast. Unless, again, he takes matters into his own hands and destroys the world.)

The backwash crashes into him, knee-deep and filled with debris. It sweeps his legs out from under him and sucks him under. He's dashed against the rocks, over and over, until his shielding collapses and his flasks drain to nothing and, finally, his head smacks into a rock and his vision goes dark.

Edmund wakes up. The beast is nowhere to be seen, at least from his vantage point where he's been placed sitting on the ground leaning against one of the buildings that got hit but not too badly.

Kneeling in front of him is a boy, can't be older than twenty, wearing a fairly elaborate and ceremonial-looking outfit. His arms are covered from the biceps down by an intricate spiralling armwrap that ends in half gloves encrusted with small gems, and his legs and feet are adorned by sandals in a similar style. He's wearing a white and dark blue skirt that goes almost all the way to his knees, and his torso is bare except for a series of silver necklaces that go all the way down to the middle of his chest. He also seems to be wearing a cloth harness of some sort which probably has clasps on the back where one would attach the long staff he's holding with one hand.

He looks very surprised to see Edmund actually come to, and a gesture with his free hand and his staff causes a soft light to shine from within Edmund's chest which does wonders to clear his head and heal his wounds even further.

The boy looks over his shoulder to call something to someone else in a completely foreign language, but from the tone of his voice it's probably something like "He's actually alive!"

Edmund... stays exactly where he is, actually, he's not sure if he's completely healed and under the circumstances he'd rather not jostle his brain any more than it already has been.

(He makes a strange corpse, wearing an embroidered tunic set with six thumbnail-sized gemstones in a spiral pattern, a diadem with four of similar size, boots with two apiece, and a pair of long gloves again with two apiece. Apart from the strange insets, they're very tasteful and practical.)

"I don't suppose you speak Azmeri?" he asks aloud.

"They haven't shown any sign of it," his sword says, small flames flickering to life along her blade. "Welcome back to the waking world, by the way."

"Yes, thank you, I feel very blessed."

The boy's eyes immediately snap to the sword when the flames flicker to life and it speaks. He blinks slowly then looks up at Edmund again and tries saying something else, a question of some kind, in a different language—or probably a different language, it has a very similar cadence to the first thing he said but the syllables sound much harsher and the prosody is more clipped. Probably asking a similar question to Edmund's in his other language.

"Nope," he sighs. "Goddess, do you speak whatever this is? Or - have some kind of power to translate?"

"Why in the world would I be able to do that? I'm a sword. I stab things."

"I don't know, you're a goddess too, aren't you?"

He sighs again, and hooks a thumb toward his chest. "Edmund." Points at the strange boy, makes a curious face.

"Zei," he says, blinking slowly. Then he... points at the sword? The sword is a person too?

Oh. Right. "Oni-Goroshi," he says, patting her hilt.

"Charmed," she drawls.

He replies with something that sounds like a similar sort of greeting, then gets up. Another gesture with his free hand and his staff makes some more light glow from within Edmund without that altering anything in his perception of the world, and Zei must have somehow noticed this, too, because he attaches his staff to his back and offers Edmund a hand to pull him to his feet.

A woman, at least mid twenties but the way she carries herself says maybe more, walks over to them from where she'd been talking to a group of people. Or standing around a group of people, she wasn't talking much. Her outfit is similarly outlandish, if less suited for a beach village: long black dress with fluffy sleeves and edges, its corset probably responsible for keeping it up despite how gravity says her breasts should be fighting free of it any minute now, and its skirt decorated with a truly unreasonable number of belts. Her hair is done up in a bun held by a long wooden spike, and she also has numerous necklaces down her chest, although fewer than Zei does.

She asks Zei something, in the first language the boy used, looking at Edmund...

...to which Zei only shrugs and gives a reply that's probably something like "I have no idea".

Then he points at her, looking at Edmund, and says, "Lulu," then, "Edmund" and "Oni-Goroshi" to introduce the other two. He does a great job at almost pronouncing Edmund's name right, but Oni-Goroshi he gets perfectly.

"...Goddess, I'm never sure how well your perception of the world lines up with mine -" Edmund starts, getting to his feet.

"Yes, that woman is wearing a skirt made entirely out of belts," Oni-Goroshi flickers, mildly amused. "Don't sour her impression of you by laughing. Stare at her tits instead, if you must."

"I have no intention of doing either of those things!" Edmund protests. He bows, instead.