Book 2, Chapter 21

I curved sharply to the left, but even as I altered my flight trajectory, I suspected it was a useless gesture. The gigantic monster that was already chasing my light orb continued to do so, but its friend appeared to be much smarter. It ascended through the water at an angle altered to match my new direction.

Just as the monster hit the surface, I reversed direction. Something massive, covered in pebbly scales and with far too many eyes and teeth, breached the water. Its whole body twisted to bring its mouth around in my direction. There was no way it was going to reach me just going by the laws of motion—I was too far away—but this was a monster, one with probably fifty times more mana than me. I couldn’t get complacent.

I raised my staff to channel a lightning bolt through it, always an effective move against waterborne monsters. The power built up, flowing through my mana crystal and out into my staff, more mana than my own core could hold at once. Without the staff, I would have had to channel it through, building the spell outside of my core at the cost of reduced efficiency.

With it, and with my mana crystal linked to it, I was able to construct the spell directly from my reserves housed inside the staff with practically no transference loss and barely any loss of casting speed. Those fractions of a second were important, but I had that much time to spare at least.

I scrunched my eyes up as cold water from the monster’s breach struck me and let loose the magic I’d built. The whole underground lake lit up for half a second as the lightning bolt split the air, its course constrained by the magic that had brought it into existence. It smote the monstrous fish creature in a brilliant burst of sound and fury.

The monster didn’t seem to care.

Arcs of lightning trailed across its scaly body, leaving blackened scorch marks and seared flesh. The spell had hurt it, but not enough to slow it down. I blinked at the afterimage dancing in my eyes and threw myself backward to get some distance. The monster’s body, already twenty feet out of the water and close to brushing the top of the cave, continued its arc toward me, its mouth perfectly lined up with my body.

Something shot out from between its razor-edged teeth, something that could have conceivably have been a tongue on a normal creature. In the monster’s case, it was a pale, ambulatory tentacle-looking thing that could only be considered small in the context of the enormous monster it was attached to. It was still at least three feet wide and more than long enough to reach me.

The tongue deflected sideways when it hit my shield ward, but the amulet I’d carved the inscription in burned against my chest from the abrupt mana pull. That much kinetic force likely would have broken my body otherwise. I quickly pulled more mana through my mana crystal and started feeding it into the alabaster disc to reinforce the rune structure.

Undeterred by its lack of success, the monster’s tongue circled around the outside of my shield ward and squeezed. Abruptly, I was jerked forward and down as it started to drop back into the water, threatening to take me with it. My shield ward was the only thing keeping the tentacle from crushing me, and it was rapidly running out of mana.

It might not be able to physically hurt me, but the fish monster was diving again and I was going down with it. My flight spell couldn’t resist the force dragging me down, nor would it help keep me mobile once I was underwater. This fight had only been going on for four seconds, and I was already losing.

My shield ward did nothing to protect me from the shock of cold water and dark vision wasn’t designed to help see underwater. I could make out a vaguely mouth-shaped hole that I was being steadily dragged closer to below me and not much else. My staff was torn from my hand and floated somewhere above me and to my right, its position only clear in my mind thanks to the enchantments connecting it to me.

If I didn’t do something, I’d be pitting my shield ward against those teeth in about two seconds. Fortunately, I knew the weakness of big monsters, especially aberrant ones like this. They didn’t just want mana, they needed it. Lack of mana caused them actual pain and was guaranteed to be lethal in the long run. For something this big, so obviously divorced from the natural world, it might kill them outright to have their mana forcibly removed.

So that’s what I did.

My right hand went up to call my staff to me. I need contact with it to access my mana crystal. My left hand slapped against the tentacle dragging me into the monster’s mouth and I cast mana drain’s bigger, meaner cousin: rupture core.

My own mana supply immediately bottomed out. Rupture core was a master tier spell that cost about thirty times as much mana as mana drain. The fish monster froze immediately, then let out such a loud screech that the water itself shook with it. Mana signatures in my mind scattered, even the other big one.

Some mages gave their spells fancy names for a variety of reasons. Some of them wanted to veil the true purposes of their spells from any amateurs who might stumble upon their work. Others were just pretentious. I’d met an archmage once who’d tried to use rupture core on me, only he’d called it “the Severing Blade of Heavenly Judgment.” Regardless of how grandiose the name was, I’d successfully fended off the attack.

The fish monster did not have my skills at corrupting hostile magic. Rupture core ripped right through it and touched on the mana core buried deep in its body, where the magic promptly and immediately tore it in half. Mana washed out, infusing its flesh to full, painful saturation, and the excess started bleeding into the water, where I was waiting to claim it.

I got back everything I spent on rupture core and then some in the next four seconds while the gargantuan monster convulsed in place. At some point, its own teeth severed its tongue-tentacle, releasing me and saving my shield ward from being utterly decimated. I shrugged the chunk of bleeding meat off of me and pushed back up to the surface, where my still-running flight spell let me climb completely out of the water.

Sometime during the fight, I’d dropped both of my aura spells. There was no need to try to hide my magic or any noise from my flight when the monsters in the lake had obviously seen through them somehow anyway. I wasn’t sure exactly what senses they’d used, though my first guess was something that detected heat. Either way, there was no point in wasting the mana to keep them going.

I had two choices now. Either I could continue my flight, probably unchallenged, to the far side of the lake, or I could attempt to harvest the rest of the mana still surging through the muscles and bones of that giant, hundred-eyed and tentacle-tongued monstrosity. The way it was thrashing in the water, I was hesitant to dive back down and get close, especially with my shield ward so low on mana. Since its entire body was saturated, I had a good sense of its size and shape now.

It was over a hundred feet long, not counting the trailing tentacles growing out of its belly. Dozens of fins all over its body flailed wildly, each one the size of a small sail. No matter where I looked, there just wasn’t a good place to touch it without risking being tossed around by some sort of growth, not to mention the mass of its main body was the farthest thing from still.

I considered how much empty space there was in my mana crystal, then how much was in the fish. It had already attacked me and I’d as good as killed it. I might as well collect the spoils of victory. The water would make it a bit more difficult to use remote casting, but I could manage it.

The first thing to do was swap my flight spell for a simple levitation instead. It cost a fraction of the mana and was more than sufficient to hold me in place without moving while I worked. Thirty seconds later, I had a modified mana drain scraping mana from the rampant bleed over in the monster’s body and recycling it into my mana crystal. It was neither fast or efficient, but the monster was in no condition to fight back and its death throes had scared off everything else in the lake.

My mana crystal refilled before I’d completely drained the monster, so I paused to charge my shield ward back to full as well. It was probably pushing it, but the mana was right there and it seemed wasteful not to get as much use out of it as possible. I also refilled the enchantment on the hand mirror I’d made to speak with Father. Handling it reminded me of my family, and I found an unexpected pang of home-sickness spiking through me. Maybe I’d use some of this extra mana to teleport back home for a visit. I could always come back down here and hunt the other monster fish to top my reserves back off later.

It was only as I started getting into the handful of storage crystals I’d stolen from the enforcers that the monster finally expired. With its death, the waters became smooth and flat again. I could no longer see the corpse in the water now that it was bereft of mana, not even with dark vision. Other slivers of mana flickered about at the edge of my awareness, too far away and too small to be worth hunting down.

Of the original monster fish, there was no sign. That was fine by me; I couldn’t hold more mana right now anyway. I activated my flight spell and skimmed across the lake to the far side while I pondered the strange denizens living down here. Monsters came in a dizzying variety of forms, and I’d certainly seen a few new ones since my reincarnation, but something felt off about that creature. The whole lake was highly suspicious, but it would keep until I’d dealt with more pressing business.

I touched down on the far side near a second row boat and shook my head. I could not imagine a powerless human with a dormant core braving those waters in that tiny boat. The wooden hull would be a thin shield, far too fragile to save the boat’s passengers, and there wasn’t a non-magical boat in the world that could move fast enough to outrace those monsters, certainly not one powered by nothing but the muscles of a man holding a pair of oars.

That must mean these boats were magical. I didn’t sense any mana in them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t inscribed. Carefully, I climbed into it and looked around for traces of runes carved into wood. There was nothing in the interior, and I hadn’t seen any on the outside, but there was still one spot left to check.

Standing back on the stone, I used telekinesis lifted the boat out of the water. “Aha,” I said. There, covering practically the entire hull, was a set of runes. I spent a few moments examining them, mostly looking for the magic that would hide the boat from the monsters’ senses. To my surprise, there wasn’t one.

What it had instead was magic to soothe the creatures as they approached, to turn them from ferocious maneaters into passive guardians. It wasn’t even that expensive of a spell to cast, but whoever had designed it had done it specifically with these creatures in mind. That mage had known the physiology of the fish monsters very well, suspiciously so. They didn’t strike me as something that could be easily or safely studied.

Perhaps these monsters weren’t natural. That might explain the apparent familiarity the rune carver had with them, but it also opened up a lot of new questions. Who would bother to make a giant underground lake and grow monsters to fill it? The mana costs alone were staggering, especially in an environment as starved as this one.

I glanced back at the lake again and wondered just how deep it went, and what could be hidden at the bottom. I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t done with this place yet.