Duskbound

Velik sat at the front of a rowboat and stifled a sigh of impatience. He'd chanced by a local fisherman just after sunup who was about to shove his small boat off the sand and into a sheltered cove. A few questions and a trio of decarmas later, the man was showing him to the tidal caves he claimed he'd seen a pod of scalewark coming out of a week earlier.

Rowboats, as it turned out, moved very, very slow. Even a powerful rower could only do so much to speed things up, and Velik doubted he could force the craft to go any faster by taking up the oars himself. So he watched the water go by, and he waited to reach their destination.

"Tide's coming in," the fisherman observed as he rowed tirelessly. "Cave's going to be half submerged by the time we get around the bluff."

"It's fine," Velik said. He wasn't afraid to get wet. He just wasn't interested in doing underwater exploration.

The fisherman snorted. "Hope you can hold your breath. It's dangerous to go exploring in there when it's submerged. Smart man would just wait for the tide to go back out."

"I'm in a hurry. I won't be there long."

The man shook his head, but didn't argue anymore after that. Ten minutes later, Velik could see a hole in the bluff as they rounded its point, perhaps five hundred feet away. There were only three feet or so between the top of the hole and the rising tide, and it was easy enough to believe the cave would become completely submerged in the next hour.

"There you are," the fisherman said. He glanced around nervously, like he was expecting a scalewark to leap out of the water and into his rowboat at any moment. "I won't be sticking around here to wait for you to come back. Too dangerous."

He hesitated then, probably waiting for Velik to offer him more money to change his mind, but the fisherman hadn't been engaged for his transport. Velik had just needed to know where the cave was, and now that it was in front of him, he had no more need of the man's services. "If this stretch of the coast is really that dangerous, I suggest you hurry back to your cove," he said as he stood up and removed his cloak.

Velik's time swimming through the swamp had confirmed that it wasn't worth it to keep the heavy item on for the stat boost, so he rolled it up and stuffed it in his pack. It would still weigh him down, but it was distinctly easier to swim without it billowing out around him. I'm starting to see why Torwin is so anxious to get his hands on his own extradimensional storage. That'd be useful right about now.

Without another word, Velik dove into the water and started swimming. It was surprisingly cold being fully submerged, even more so than swimming in the streams back home, but he resolutely ignored the sudden discomfort and pulled himself forward with powerful strokes of his arms. Behind him, the fisherman got his rowboat turned around and slowly started pulling away.

Velik had left his boots on before jumping into the water for two reasons. The first was that they gave a small boost to his physical stat, more than enough to counteract any extra difficulty that might have come from leaving them on. The second was that they contained a [Night Vision] enchantment on them. Normally, that was useless since he could see in the dark on his own, but it turned out he needed at least a little bit of light, no matter how faint.

Being underground could leave him blind if not for the enchantment, and he wasn't sure how bad the light situation was going to get once the tide came in. Testing [Night Vision] in an aquatic environment had never come up. He supposed he was going to find out in the next few minutes.

One good thing he found was that the cave actually got bigger once he was past the mouth. It was dark in there, but so far, the light coming in through that narrow gap at the entrance was enough to see by. Even if things went completely black, he'd still be able to breathe, at least unless the tide rose another twenty feet.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Velik quickly found a ledge on the left wall that was only about a foot under the water level for the moment. He climbed up onto it and stood up, grateful to get solid ground back underfoot for a little bit. Now, if I was an amphibious monster, where would I be hiding in this mess?

There were several tunnels leading off the main cavern and no way to narrow the options down. If he were on dry land, there'd be tracks of some sort, or at least some kind of sign. In here, there was just water. His only options were to explore and hope he got lucky, or wait where he stood until something showed up.

[Apex Hunter] told him to wait. That was what predators did. They found a good spot, and they settled in until worthwhile prey stumbled by. But Velik overruled the skill. For one thing, he wasn't in a good spot, and as the tide came in, it was likely to get worse. For another, he had no idea if there were other exits back into the sea. He could waste all day there and never find what he was looking for.

On the bright side, the water's clear enough that I can see a good hundred feet in every direction. That should be enough to keep anything from sneaking up on me, as long as I'm vigilant.

A hundred feet wasn't a lot on dry land, but here it would take him eight to ten seconds to swim that far. If he assumed that aquatic monsters were twice as fast as he was, that still gave him up to five seconds to see an attack coming. That was plenty of time.

Decision made, he kicked off the ledge and resumed his swim deeper into the caves. They were kind of beautiful, in a weird sort of way. It wasn't anything he was used to seeing, but the walls were an odd, almost luminescent green that reflected off the water, providing a false sense of illumination that he was half-convinced was some sort of magic.

Fish swam through the water around him as he got farther and farther from the open sea. At first, he was wary of their movements, but when none of them got anywhere near him, he gradually relaxed. Watching them also made him reevaluate just how much time it might take a monster to reach him in the water. Perhaps five seconds wasn't giving them enough credit.

A few minutes later, he paused. Treading water, he peered ahead at the small, child-like humanoid figure drifting in the water. It was curled up into a ball and floating back and forth, webbed hands clutching to knees tucked up tightly against its chest. A fine coating of scales covered its body, and fins grew out of its arms, legs, head, and back.

Kind of ugly, but maybe also cute in an odd way?

Then the scalewark's eyes snapped open, two big, milky white orbs glowing with a luminous inner light. They focused on Velik, and its jaw split wide to reveal row after row of jagged, needle-sharp teeth. The fins on its body twitched and opened like fans, and in a flash, it was cutting through the water far faster than Velik could hope to match.

Nope, not cute. Just ugly.

His spear formed in his hands, the magic slightly slowed by the resistance of pushing through the water. But the weapon had plenty of mana to spare for the transformation—it always did now that it had [Mana Drinker] on it—and he had it shaped into something that loosely resembled a harpoon with a second to spare.

The scalewark practically impaled itself on Velik's spear as it came at him, jaws opened impossibly wide to take a bite. The tip sunk into the back of its throat, punched through the soft tissue there, and ripped its way through the monster's body in one smooth stab.

[You have slain a murkblood scalewark (level 9).]

Its blood, black like every other monster's, clouded the water in front of Velik. At first, his only concern was to get away from it since it was blocking his vision, but he quickly recalled something he'd read about this particular variety of monster, a power they sometimes had.

Blood calls to blood, he thought, the ability to summon more of its kin upon its own death. Those kin in turn summon more until the entire pod enters a feeding frenzy. That might be a problem. Or maybe not. I guess it does get them all in one spot, which makes it easier to eliminate them. It was only level 9. How bad could twenty or thirty more of them be?

Three more scalewarks appeared at the edge of his vision, all of them gliding through the water directly at Velik. He readied himself to meet their attacks, but before the first one was close enough to eat a length of spear, he saw two more behind it. A quick glance revealed that their numbers had already increased up past ten, then fifteen. By the time he killed the closest of the new batch, there were almost forty in the water just that he could see, with more arriving each second.

I feel like they underestimated the size of this pod when they reported it in, Velik thought to himself in annoyance as he killed two more of the scalewarks. One of them swept in behind his spear and clamped down on his arm. It pinched, but the monster was too weak to break skin. That's a relief, I suppose.

Utterly fearless in the face of overwhelming numbers, Velik got to work.