Chapter 47

  Water Dance!

  The world is water. It is the source of life but the bringer of death. Floods, monsoons, and tsunamis – water lies at the very heart of nature, and like its mother, it can both create and destroy in equal measure.

  When water fights, it embodies this dichotomy. Elijah's hand slid through the ocean as if it weren’t there, leaving no disturbance in its wake. His muscles tore as they were forced to move unimpeded by the fluid, but the water mana that coursed through him healed the tears before he even noticed.

  Not that he would have noticed. His mind was completely focused on the dancing patterns that, to him, embodied water. The rush, the crash, the sloshing slash ripped into his opponent with a force that had carved a thousand thousand ravines.

  His open-handed strike hit the head of the predator. The water all around them suddenly decided it was time to move. The Hammerhead was swept away by the current, disappearing into the gloom. Elijah didn’t even notice. His mind's eye was fixated on the image of crashing, breaking waves as he continued to channel the Water Dance spell.

  The attack had taken only 20 Mana, leaving the teen with 130 to spare. The water all around them was more than happy to aid the teen while in this state; it saw him as kin. What he wanted to do, was what it wanted to do.

  One tiny part of Elijah’s mind, one that was locked away, unable to give input, observed that this was likely that mana resonance Professor Tawny had talked about. To control what was outside himself, he first had to control what was inside.

  The Hammerhead returned, and if Elijah’s eyes were open, he would have been able to see that it was pissed. The aura of red blood mana that surrounded it, like the miasma of a lich, had grown substantially and seemed to cause the water to bubble slightly. Its nail teeth turned suddenly rusty as they rubbed together, creating a deafening screech.

  Elijah’s attention wavered slightly, and for a moment the state required for the Water Dance spell to be effective broke. The Hammerhead did not waste that split second of hesitation. It disappeared, reappearing beside the teen.

  The corners of its rectangular, lump hammer-like head had been worn smooth by the teen’s last attack. If they had not been, he would have likely died from the single strike that caught him in the side of the stomach as he tried to dodge like flowing water.

  Still, the air was expelled from his mind, but he had learnt from the monster’s last attack, and his focus wasn’t broken. Instead of clenching his empty lungs shut, he relaxed, letting the water enter him. That was what he had been missing; something clicked, the world became clear, and, all of a sudden, he was the ocean.

  For the first time since he had started using Water Dance, he opened his eyes. He saw the water, and it saw him. In this moment, they were one and the same.

  He wanted to let go, to simply turn completely into water and travel where the currents willed it – it would be so relaxing, so freeing, so… dangerous?

  As peaceful as it was to be truly one with the waves, he still had to maintain some sense of self. Looking down at hands that had turned transparent, only the barest outline of his flesh remaining, he saw the danger. If he were to let go completely, nothing would remain; he would become the sea.

  The second he realised he was in fact himself, the ache in his lungs and the pale membrane that was his skin returned, though slightly less solid-seeming than before. With it came the pain of lungs full of seawater. It was not as bad as he had been expecting. The pain of holding his throat closed was far worse.

  Now that he was no longer intransient, he had at most three minutes before his brain would start to die from lack of oxygen.

  The monster chomped down, intent on bisecting the teen. Elijah instinctively used Dodge. The Skill intermingled with the mana that suffused him. He evaded like water. His body distorted as it waved away, wobbling like a mirage. It had felt so natural, the teen didn’t even notice.

  The pain that seemed to be ever present fuelled his anger, and that in turn powered his counterattack. Since his last strike was powerful but too blunt to have a real effect, he decided to switch things up. Now that he had merged more completely with this world of water, it was far easier to set a part of his mind on maintaining the spell while another used a Skill.

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  Unbidden, Elijah’s tongue shot out, slapping the Hammerhead’s shaft and retracting. A watery wart formed on the teen’s arm as A Warrior’s Warts activated.

  A Warrior’s Warts: B

  Syphon energy from a foe, reducing their power, and store it in a wart to be used by you later. Be careful, as the warts do not only store energy; they can be tainted by the temperament of the one they came from.

  The creature visibly shrank as its power was syphoned away. Unfortunately, Elijah could feel that strange Skill wouldn’t be available again for a while.

  The Hammerhead wasn’t just going to take that lying down. It thrashed about, shaking off its sudden lethargy, and returned to the old reliable: bite your prey to death. The problem was, you cannot kill what you cannot bite. Elijah slipped aside like an octopus, shot back like a minnow, and slithered about – his body like that of an eel.

  It couldn’t last, however. Not only was he already beginning to feel foggy and oxygen starved, but his Mana had depleted by a quarter, just from evading. The Water Dance spell was an incredible enhancement of his body, particularly in these circumstances, but it wasn’t cheap.

  After another one of the monster’s charges struck nothing but water, aerating the fluid, bubbles flying off it as it passed Elijah; the teen withdrew his half sword once more. Again, his attack held the unyielding power of the sea as he cut through the water; however, this time it was focused on the jagged edge of the broken sword.

  Instead of being followed by a tide of water, the water parted in the wake of the attack before collapsing again instantly, creating a shock wave that threw both combatants away. It also caused a part of Elijah’s arm to be dissolved into the waves and opened a solid crack on the Hammerhead’s shaft.

  The pair could only watch in stunned silence as the phantom paw followed the attack, further disturbing the already turbid waters. One of the Cerberus's claws landed dead centre on the crack. The monster’s shaft was split in two.

  Splinters floated up. For a moment, Elijah thought he had killed the monster – hoped he had killed the monster. That last attack had been more than he was expecting, and although the water all around him helped with the Mana cost, still, his blue bar had dropped below a third, and he felt the translucent watery mass that currently was his body tire from the Stamina expenditure.

  Elijah was beginning to feel thin. As if at any moment he could slip into the peace of death. Only, in this state, he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t meld with the water, being a part of this Trial for all eternity, never to respawn.

  Since there had been no message, the monster was not dead, though Elijah had lost track of it. The severed section of its tail-like haft still floated in the water where he had last seen the monster, but it had used the disturbed muck to disappear. But from the palpable sense of danger that still hung in the air, Elijah knew it hadn’t run away. The seaweed-like hairs on the back of his head stood on end; he was being watched; he could feel it.

  Expecting an attack at any moment, the teen spun around, looking for a flash of steely silver or the bubbling aura of blood mana. Nothing. The sediment began to settle, his vision began to dim, his time running short, and still, nothing.

  He blinked slowly. His mind was growing quickly frayed and he began to lose track of where the water ended and he began. Something slammed hard into his back, sending him tumbling through the water. The pain went some of the way to reorienting him, but by the time he turned to face his attacker, they were gone.

  Elijah felt at his back. As it turned out, even in this water-like state, he could still breathe. He tried to activate Berserker’s Bark, but it seemed to reject his current body; there was some interplay between water mana and nature mana that he failed to understand. All he knew was that the Skill fizzled out, his skin remaining the same translucent, watery membrane as before.

  Another attack clipped his shoulder, and he reacted without thinking. He released the power stored in the Warrior's Wart. The ugly mass deflated as a beam of red energy shot off into the murk.

  Although the teen couldn’t see anything, the grinding wail was all the confirmation he needed that his attack had hit its mark. He smiled despite himself.

  He didn’t see the next attack coming either, but by this point he had grown accustomed to the timing of the monster. He used Dodge instinctively and evaded the speeding torpedo. His arm turned into a tentacle as he used Tentacle Limbes and caught the speeding monster.

  He had intended to drag it to a halt, but he was suspended in water and had nothing to brace against. The teen was pulled along at a breakneck pace, with each second that passed his vision grew dimmer and the world started to become a distant thing, something to be watched from far away.

  It was just then, as Elijah began to unwittingly float away from himself, that the blood finally stirred once more. It spoke in a single voice within him. It sounded to him broken by an impossible number of years as it weakly cracked:

  “Fight!”

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