Duskbound

The book learning portion of Velik's training as an iron-ranked monster hunter hadn't been especially helpful. It made sense that the bestiaries focused primarily on low-level threats, as those were what the trainees would be expected to handle upon their graduation to bronze. He'd dutifully learned how to recognize them, how to track them, and their strengths and weaknesses, for what it was worth. The simple truth of the matter was that Velik didn't need to be clever or skilled to handle those kinds of problems, not at his current level.

The problem was those books didn't talk about monsters like hydras, and while he'd done a bit of self-studying and found some casual references in the books he had access to, most of what he was trying to learn was restricted and wouldn't be made available to him until he was a higher rank in the guild. That meant he knew a few broad strokes details about what he was currently fighting and not a lot of specifics.

That's more than I usually know about a new monster, so I can work with this, he thought to himself as he blasted the hydra out of the water with a combination of [Dread Lance] and the [Power Surge] enchantment on one of his rings. The monster didn't go far, but it did land in the shallow end of the swamp, which was good enough for his purposes.

Rather than try to swim after it and risk giving it time to fully submerge itself again, he leaped as high out of the water as he could go and used his cloak's [Air Walk] ability to pull himself clear. The draw on his mystic stat was intense, too much for him to get more than a few steps, but that was all he needed.

Velik leaped forward, his spear leading, and descended on the hydra while it was still struggling to orient itself. It was fully under the black water again, but only because it was stretched out on its belly. The moment it got its legs under its bulk and heaved upward, its back crested the surface. Immediately, columns of muscled, scaly flesh rose between Velik and the main body.

Ten of them. More than I thought.

The heads seemed to weave around each other without ever getting tangled up, though the reality was more that they just lashed back and forth in a complex pattern that Velik could only see small pieces of. The hydra was incredibly, effortlessly, coordinated, and its heads looked in every direction at once. There was no sneaking up on it now that it was awake, so Velik didn't even try.

He'd hit it with [Dread Lance] twice now, and while both injuries still showed on its body, the pits of raw, bloody flesh were already closed over. New skin had grown across the wounds, and muscle was beginning to swell beneath the sagging flesh. Despite that, the hydra wasn't moving with nearly as much alacrity as he'd expected. Healing such massive wounds had taken some sort of toll on it.

Unfortunately, using the powerful skill twice in quick succession had drained Velik as well. He needed a bit of time to recover before he could unload a third shot into the monster, but he was hoping that it wouldn't be needed. His spear had a powerful enchantment on it that he rarely got any use out of called [Mana Drinker]. It served the dual purposes of empowering the other enchantments on the weapon and depriving his enemies of the mystical strength they needed to use certain abilities.

With any luck, the hydra's potent regeneration was one of those abilities.

Velik landed on the hydra's back and immediately set his weapon spinning in defensive twirls, the head of the spear flashing dangerously to fend off the snapping maws of the great monster. He cut it over and over, only for the injuries to seal up before his eyes in the next second, and did his best to keep from being trapped between the writhing necks or bitten by their sharp fangs.

[Burden of the Beast] seemed to be working, at least insofar as the main bulk of the beast slowly sagged back into the water. The heads, on the other hand, whipped about as quickly as always, keeping Velik on his toes and forcing him to activate his cloak's [Air Walk] enchantment a few times to steady his balance on the unstable platform that was the hydra's back.

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Despite how hard he was pushing the monster, things seemed to be settling into a stalemate. Velik got another [Dread Lance] off, this time blowing three of its heads clear of the body at the neck, but that didn't seem to actually slow the hydra down. New heads started to emerge from the stumps, though not so far that he was immediately worried about them.

He was so focused on what he was doing that he didn't notice Aria sitting cross-legged, floating two feet above the mud, at the edge of the water until one of the hydra's legs gave out and it rolled sideways. Velik was forced to shift position, and that brought his evaluator into view. When did she get here? he wondered to himself, but the hydra was far too aggressive for him to have time to dwell on it.

Half an hour went by. The hydra got slower and weaker as Velik's skills slowly chipped away at it. Its regeneration slowed down, and as it lost a few more heads to another [Dread Lance], he eventually wore it down to the point where he'd cut off all of its heads and it couldn't regrow them fast enough to be a threat. With its main body immobilized under the strain of [Burden of the Beast], the hydra was essentially defeated.

Defeated, but not dead. Now, how do I fix that?

He was submerged up to his chest, still standing on the hydra's body and severing the regrowing stumps by feel alone. The stories hadn't exaggerated its regenerative powers in the slightest, and Velik was truthfully at a bit of a loss. His spear's [Mana Drinker] didn't seem to be making much of a difference, at least not anything he could see.

Now that things had calmed down, Aria floated over to speak to him. He eyed her curiously as she skimmed across the surface of the swamp, her clothes stained with murky water somehow despite never actually touching anything. Even her hair had a film of pond scum stuck in it.

"You're done, then?" she asked, her tone icy.

"Well… No? I haven't gotten a kill notification for it yet."

Eyes widening, she shot a worried look down into the water. "It's… still alive? You just… subdued it?"

"Yeah. I've been cutting off the new heads as they grow out of the stumps so they don't have time to become a threat again."

"That is certainly a novel way to deal with the threat. How long do you intend to keep playing with it?"

"I'm not playing with it," Velik said. "I just don't know how to stop its regeneration. I'd hoped that doing a massive amount of damage to it would wear it down, but that doesn't seem to have worked."

"Gods above, did you do no research before coming out here? You knew what you were hunting," Aria accused.@@novelbin@@

"I'm not allowed access to that information," Velik told her. "Believe it or not, the iron-ranked bestiaries stop at recognizing the signs a hydra is in the area and advise as a strategy to run like hell and get someone else to deal with killing it."

The gold-ranked hunter opened her mouth to say something, paused, and sighed. "Okay, fair enough. I suppose I've been a bit lax on making sure you were properly prepared for all of this. I just assumed Bertrim explained everything you'd need to know after I left. The first thing to do is get it completely out of the water. You can manage that?"

"If I have to," Velik said slowly. He eyed up the distance to the edge of the black lake and added, "Why do I need to do that?"

"The way to stop a hydra from regenerating is to cut out its heart. The closer you get to that organ, however, the quicker it regenerates. Fire slows it down, but doesn't stop it. Acid sometimes works, but not against swamp hydras. So we need to get it onto dry land, build a fire, and throw the body into it. Once it's burning, then you can carve it open and remove the heart."

Velik absently stabbed his spear through a neck that had grown out two feet in length while they were talking while he considered the problem. He could probably strongarm the hydra's main body out of the water eventually, but keeping its heads from regrowing at the same time would be an issue. It seemed to him that the only real reason to do that was because Aria wanted to cook the damn thing to slow its regeneration down, though.

"Let's say I was strong enough to beat the regeneration on this monster and could extract its heart where it is now. That would work, right?"

"In theory?" Aria hedged. "You're massively underestimating how difficult a task that is. Trust me when I say we're going to need the fire."

"Okay, well, I'm going to try it here first. Otherwise half the heads will have grown back by the time I get it moved and I'll be fighting it all over again. If that doesn't work, we'll do it the hard way."

Aria looked like she was about to start arguing with him, but she thought better of it. Instead of saying anything, she threw her hands up in the air and started to drift backwards. "Do what you want," she told him after she came to a stop. "It's your hunt. I'm just here to evaluate how you go about it."

Grinning, Velik got to work.