Duskbound

When he'd started his trip through the swamp, Velik had been essentially blind in the water. The smells were overpowering, the sounds were all new and unknown, and of course he couldn't see a damn thing through the layer of scum coating the black water. Actually being underwater was even worse, at least at first.

After a few hours, he'd started to figure things out, though. It wasn't about sight or sound when he was down there. It was touch. Specifically, it was feeling the water sweeping past him and deciphering what was caused by his own movements and what was something else. Small monsters still eluded him, things like the many, many snakes that were no longer than his arm and killed with their potent venom.

Bigger monsters, however, like those massive gators and, hopefully, one swamp hydra, were a lot easier to detect once they started moving. That didn't help much with the gators, who had a tendency to float motionless in the water until he was already close enough for them to try to bite him, but he'd figured out how to spot them through other means when they were floating on the surface.

With his newfound knowledge of blind aquatic navigation to supplement [Apex Hunter], he expected to quickly figure out where the hydra was sleeping. That didn't happen. After two minutes of swimming, in fact, he hadn't been attacked by anything, not even the normal watersnakes, razor scaled fish, steel shell turtles, or colossal gators other lakes had boasted. Another sign that I'm in the right place. Nothing is stupid enough to try to live here anymore. But where's the hydra at?

Even asleep, it wouldn't be motionless. He should have been able to feel something, unless it had some sort of stealth skill like he suspected those gators had. Velik hadn't considered something that big and aggressive would have a stealth skill in its build, but anything was possible. Hydras weren't known as ambush predators, so it had seemed unlikely until he'd gotten underwater and realized he couldn't find the damn thing.

For a few minutes, he just floated there, silent and still while he waited for something to come attack him. When nothing did, he started swimming forward again. His mana compass wasn't doing the best job at pointing toward the hydra, probably because it didn't have much in the way of mana to begin with, though there'd been some weird interference he hadn't been able to get rid of the entire time he'd been out in the swamp.

His best guess was that the place was magical itself, except that didn't really add up. He'd already run into places like that and knew how to adjust the compass's settings to ignore area magic. Something else was probably going on, but he couldn't figure out what and he had more important things to focus his attention on.@@novelbin@@

Swimming while holding a spear, wearing boots, and being weighed down by a wet cloak wasn't exactly easy, but he was managing. The plan had been to draw the hydra into the shallows, but that had failed immediately, so he resolved himself to go deeper into the middle. Velik proceeded carefully, but there was still nothing. Even when he touched down at the bottom of the lake, all he felt was cold mud, silt, and slime.

Where is this thing? It has to be in here somewhere.

Velik swam across the bottom of the swamp, one hand trailing through the muck in hopes of finding a footprint or a belly scraping, though he doubted either existed. With the water this deep, the hydra would be able to swim to wherever it had settled in.

Then his fingers brushed across something that wasn't mud. It was hard and unyielding, surprisingly warm in the chill swamp water, and, unless Velik very much missed his guess, it was covered in scales.

Of course! It buried itself in the bottom of the swamp. No wonder I can't feel it moving around in the water. Technically, it's in the mud.

He'd have grinned if the thought of opening his mouth and letting swamp water in didn't disgust him. Instead, he just grabbed hold of his spear and brought it around, tip pointed down. He was about two hundred feet from dry land and the water was a good thirty feet deep. Once he started this fight, getting back to solid ground was going to be a challenge.

[Apex Predator] was confident that he'd be fine. The hydra was powerful, but Velik had fought worse. He steadied his grip, spared a thought to wonder if he should have tested how being underwater might react with the skill, then unloaded a [Dread Lance] into the slumbering monster.

* * *

[Astral Gateway] was Aria's newest skill, and still at rank 1. It was so expensive that she needed a mana potion just to refresh her reserves enough to cast it. The skill also took a while to set up—three full minutes, making it impractical for live combat. She hadn't thought she'd need it this time, but she'd kept the skill on the edge of her mind just in case.

The skill finished building the door, a jagged tear in the world filled with stars and the infinite velvety blackness that separated them, and Aria walked through. Immediately, her nose was assaulted by the foul stench of the swamp. Here in the heart of the place, it was many times stronger than it had been back in her room at the inn.

"If the hydra doesn't kill him, I will," she muttered as her eyes scoured the scum-covered pond in front of her. Somewhere under the surface, the world's stupidest monster hunter was swimming to his own demise, but he couldn't hide from [Horizon Seer].

Just as she went to activate the skill, something exploded a few hundred feet away. A plume of water shot three hundred feet straight up, easily clearest the tallest of the twisted swamp trees. A few moments later, Aria found herself thoroughly drenched from a brief, muddy shower. "Even if the hydra does kill him, I will find a way to bring him back just so I can kill him again," she amended her earlier promise.

[Cosmic Meditation] wasn't just for mana regeneration. It was in reality an alternate state of existence that gave her quite a few useful perks. One of those perks was a form of limited levitation. It wasn't exactly quick, but it beat swimming. Aria activated the skill and rose off the ground a few feet, then willed herself forward. Starlight swirled around her body, which resembled nothing so much as a dark, misty silhouette, as she drifted across the water.

It roiled beneath her, great waves rising up to slap against the shore as the hydra thrashed around. Torwin had warned Aria about Velik's offensive skill, a great burst of energy that had a tendency to reduce whatever he hit with it to ash. She'd obviously underestimated just how strong that skill was, but against a hydra, she knew it wouldn't be enough. If it hadn't already completely healed up from the attack, it would in the next few seconds.

That meant she had, at best, a very brief window to fish Velik out of the water and throw him to the shore. Before she could find him, however, something else caught her attention. A hydra's skull was usually about a foot wide when fully grown, maybe a foot and a half in a particularly large specimen. It was perched on a well-muscled and flexible neck, and, depending on what particular type of hydra it was, could spit out a variety of unpleasant liquids or gases. Discover hidden stories at My Virtual Library Empire

No less than six heads breached the surface, and every one of the skulls was twice the size she'd expected to find. That… is a big damn hydra. Suddenly worried about her own safety as she got her first good look at the monster they'd been sent out to take care of, Aria reversed her flight and used [Horizon Seer] to try to find Velik amidst the chaotic, churning water.

A moment later, a second explosion threw the hydra completely clear of the water—thankfully not in her direction. It was airborne for a good three seconds, revealed in its full glorious bulk, before it executed the ultimate belly flop and submerged itself once again. Aria was, of course, thoroughly soaked a second time.

She was so busy gaping that she hardly even noticed. Did he just… throw a multi-ton monster out of a lake? How the hell did he do that?!

A moment later, Velik burst out of the water, his spear leading as he swam with superhuman speed. Somehow, he threw himself upward, his whole body twisting like a fish, and his cloak billowed out behind him. He rolled across the air like it was solid ground, got his feet under him, and took three great steps before launching himself into a jump with his spear leading as he slipped back into the water again.

Aria was starting to think she'd underestimated this hunter. She'd known he was good enough to qualify as a gold-ranked, if only because Torwin had vouched for him and that old codger was difficult to pry any sort of praise out of, but his description of Velik's capabilities hadn't included this. That hydra was level 42 and an elite, judging by the size of it. She'd met a few platinums who would have struggled to fight it on dry land, let alone underwater.

There's more to killing a hydra than just bullying it for a minute at the start of the fight. Let's see how you do when you start to run out of steam and it's ready to keep going full tilt for hours still, she decided as she settled back to watch. Unless Velik had a few more surprises up his sleeve, he wasn't winning this fight any time soon.