It was a combination of a few things—the fact that this wasn’t her first time sinking in reality, and she’d felt the embrace of the sea in her nightmares many, many times before. A familiar sensation that was an inevitability as a water strider. It be the cold keeping her heart rate low, or her fatigue stopping her body from trembling. Neither one of those factors could compare to the simple fact that she really, had fallen more times in the past ten years, than most of her desert townsfolk had fallen their entire lives combined.
The fall didn’t scare her, and the sink didn’t frighten her.
She closed her eyes and refused to take in the few shafts of moonlight piercing through the surface. There was nothing for her to see. Her right glaive was broken, the chitin shattered, cold water clinging to her raw, fleshy muscles and making them sting. If she opened her eyes now, she was sure to see a hundred, a thousand giant bugs sharking around her in a cyclone—what would be the point of seeing her nightmare come to life without her being able to do anything about it?
She couldn’t swim with one broken leg.
She’d run out of air pretty soon, too, though a second felt like an eternity. Time could very well be passing normally above the surface, but down here? It was a completely different world.
Funnily enough, she felt she could hear mama’s voice in her head.
What was her mama saying?
She kept her eyelids sealed and held her breath.
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Something sharp and painful flared inside her.
Her blood felt hot in her veins.
hot.
She ripped her eyelids apart and glared up at the distant shafts of moonlight. The pounding anxiety and fear from facing the Mutant hadn’t disappeared, no—they’d merely settled into the pit of her stomach. Oddly, it made her feel all tingly inside—but what sort of Sand-Dancer would she be if she couldn’t even make her mama happy to see her again?
She didn’t need anyone to see her dance.
She didn’t need anyone to know how strong and fast she’d gotten.
If she sank here, she wouldn’t be able to avenge Catrina and the Harbor Guards. She wouldn’t be able to get a vial of healing seawater back to her mama—and , above all else, was the one thing she couldn’t accept.
She was a lady of the Vellamira household.
Her blood with determination.
And if she said she was going to go home—
[Biological Compatibility with the Water Strider Class has reached 100%]
[Swarmblood Art Unlocked: Charge Glaives]
[Brief Description: You can electrify your blood with bioarcanic essence and spark lightning around your glaives. When activated, your speed will increase by fifty percent]
[Grade: B-Rank Giant-Class → S-Rank Giant-Class]
She was to go home.
At her will, her glaives suddenly crackled with blue and pink swirls of lightning. They were so bright and glaring they made her wince. She had to blink and command them to stop crackling almost immediately, because that split second of electrocuting herself underwater with her own electrified blood was super, painful.
But that split second of intense light was all ‘something’ needed to locate her in the abyss.
She was about to follow up with a question when something rubbery slammed into her from below, and then she started rising, rising, rising. The sudden decrease in water pressure made her ears pop and her skull feel like bursting, but she gritted her teeth and bore with it. The pain was nothing. Here, in the great blue, the resolve to live on the edge was
So, when she burst onto the surface after what felt like ten eternities underwater, she sucked in the greediest breath of air she’d ever taken. Cold water washed from her hair and cloak and clung to her skin like sap. The giant whale she was lying on expelled a warm gale through its blowhole. The wind dried her in an instant, peeling her lips back and making her cheeks ripple in the process.
It was pointless, really. There was still a storm around her and black rain was pelting her from all around, but… the wind felt nice. She felt for the briefest of moments, like she was back in the desert. She supposed she had the whale to thank for that brief sensation of home.
As she fell onto its back once more—letting out a soft as she did—she felt the whale cleaving through the stormy seas, heading straight towards a familiar silhouette in the near distance.
With her still on its back, she managed to look up ever so slightly and frown.
But there one island she knew that could swim, and when she was close enough to see the silhouettes of children waving at her from the black sand ‘beach’, the whale suddenly buckled and sent her flying ashore. It wasn’t a long flight. Ten meters, two seconds, and she landed arms-first onto the beach with a dozen crab children immediately rushing in to surround her.
Marisol could almost feel the Archive struggling to process what it was seeing.
Lots of sticks poked her spine. Lots of hands grabbed her cloak, trying to pull her up to her feet. She felt she even heard a familiar voice calling her name, but, with every bit of strength left in her arms, she swatted all of them away and grumbled under her breath.
She meant it, and she had a plan. Inhaling deeply, she willed that crackling sensation to life again—swirling around her glaives.
Underwater, she may very well have been electrocuted the first time she used her biomagic, but on land?
She could tolerate that little bit of pain.
It was compared to falling over and over again.
Just one leg. Her broken right glaive. Her chitin plates were gone, and now her right ‘leg’ was more like strands of lean muscles woven together in the shape of a blade. She had no idea how long it’d take her to regenerate the chitin—maybe it wouldn’t even regenerate like normal human skin—but since it was only ‘broken’ in the sense she couldn’t muster any strength into tensing its muscles, she only had to make it move another way.
She bit her tongue and stifled a scream as she electrified her right leg, making her muscles pull themselves taut, straighten under the knee. The children gasped and jumped back all at once, but she wasn’t done yet. She punched the ground with her fists. She pushed her upper body up, spat a mouthful of blood, and took to a kneel with her left glaive first.
Then, she took the plunge. She sprang up on her left glaive and stood on the tip of her electrified right glaive.
Her chitin-less right glaive didn’t crumble beneath her, and now her glaives were swirling with streaks of bluish-pink lightning—brighter than any of the torches any of the children were holding in the rain.
There were so, many things she wanted to tell Kuku, who was standing right in front of her with dozens of cooked crab legs in his arms, but they could talk another time.
She whirled around and glared at the tiny lights flashing on the horizon—the Whirlpool City’s guards firing on the advancing Mutant, no doubt, and the battle was only three, at most, four kilometers away. She hadn’t drifted far away.
So it was, when the island rumbled and everyone stumbled for a good few seconds, that Marisol watched a giant spiky tail lifting out of the sea in front of her.
It was the tail of the horseshoe crab, and it was shaped like a hundred-meter long ramp, reaching towards the sky.
A small, sparkling smile took her face.
[Objective #10: Slay the F-Rank Mutant-Class Wraith Shrimp]
[Time Limit: 10 minutes]
[Reward: Vengeance for the fallen]
[Failure: Irrelevant]