As soon as I resume normal time, I’m immediately launching little splats of frost against the hydra. Teuila’s still hammering away, keeping it pinned down in the pit of mud that we slammed it into, our impact crater as it were. Te has a lot of stamina, but she won’t be able to keep up the pounding she’s handing out forever. If nothing else though, the hydra should be hurting after her onslaught, and that alone might be a possible win condition. If we convince it we’re not worth messing with, it might flee, and not come back to harass the refugees again. I hadn’t thought of that earlier, but it’s far less likely than finding a method of slaying it. Hell, I bet there’s probably diminishing returns on its regeneration after a certain number of heads. There might even be a maximum number of heads.
I telepathically send to Teuila, “Hey Te, you up for an experiment?”
Teuila’s mental avatar raises an eyebrow as she asks, “Like what?”
My response is a bit involved, “I’ve got a few ideas, you try grabbing the last embers of that cooking pit, and searing a neck as you’re beheading it, I’ll float the embers to you in a second once I dismount and recast my steely body spell. Get one of the double-head necks, lower near the trunk, might as well see if it sprouts four, or what. After that, I’ve got some other experiments lined up. I don’t think fire is going to help, because of its weird reverse thermal imprint physiology though.”
Te’s avatar nods at me, and she leaps away from the dazed hydra, relenting only slightly in her seemingly endless barrage of punches as I float near the hydra while angling back on the orichalcum sheet. I leap off, using my momentum to perform a flip kick that sends the sheet flat against one of the hydra’s faces, like a metallic slap. As I’m falling back to the ground, I’m quickening yet another cast of my steely body spell. I’ve got to keep track of my S P. It was silly of me not to keep a running tally, but I could drop into paused time and use retrocognition to replay the battle. Anyway, where am I in usage? Let’s see, there were two steely bodies, which is about sixty six, a couple dozen frost rays is about the same, maybe a bit more. I’m somewhere between one hundred and two hundred S P spent since my last sleep. I’m okay for a while yet, err, as long as we only have one to face.
Something just struck me as fortuitous. If the hydra isn’t alone, if the others are waiting out in the swamp to be called as backup, they won’t get any signal. Teuila’s using Requiem, the Silent Song, Essie. Gods I love that woman. Err, focus up Reggie. Right, right. Snatching up a batch of embers telekinetically, I try to snag some dry tinder as well, getting at least a modicum of flame going as I float the mess towards the hydra, towards Teuila. Te takes that as the signal, and takes off of the hydra’s back, through its mess of necks, beheading one of the double-head necks low on the trunk, on her way to snag the flaming embers.
Annoyingly, that neck grows back into a split pair of heads relatively quickly, but we didn’t end up with four heads, or even three, from reducing its head count by two. The double-head necks might only be able to support two heads. It seems like the beast might be limited to a total of eighteen heads then, though it does bulk up, and its scales look tougher as it regenerates. I try to play out in my mind the regeneration, the formation of muscle tissue, flesh, scales, the almost-floating spinal column. It’s like the inverse of an explosion of gore. Not the opposite, not an implosion, but gore shaping up before my eyes, and in my other senses. Are there any further clues I can get on this thing or its kin?
Teuila succeeds in snagging the flaming embers, and she dives back into the mess of necks to stand and slash with Essie held tightly up near the axe-head side of her blade and tip. Simultaneously, Teuila’s slamming her other hand, full of flaming embers in the same direction as the slash, crushing them into the gaping neck wound as the pair of heads get lopped off again. Sadly, if anything, the things heads reform *faster* after exposure to flame. That particular neck is looking incredibly sturdy at this point, the muscles bulge beneath the scales, flexing and stretching them.
I call out, “New trial! Get those heads out of there to start, so it can’t eat them!”
Teuila obliges while I busy the hydra as it flails at her. One head is a hair’s breadth away from striking Teuila during her retreat when I redirect it ever so slightly with telekinesis. So, instead of managing to strike Te, it instead strikes another of its own heads with all the force it could muster, and my added telekinetic push. The daze and confusion in its predatory eyes is almost priceless. Teuila manages to haul the mess of heads away that she has lopped off that haven’t already been consumed by the hydra, and I busy myself with keeping it busy and distracted. What I wouldn’t give for a hand grenade right now, strapped to a large knife. I’d telekinetically shunt it inside the thing’s torso, and pull the pin.
Hm, can I maybe grip its heart, or hearts? Reaching out with my brain, no, telekinesis doesn’t like to reach inside of creatures. Hell, it doesn’t like to reach creatures at all, it’s more like picking up the air around the creature, or the clothing it’s wearing, if it’s wearing any. Okay Te, if you’re following my thought lines, I want you to be taking off its rightmost head the instant before my ice is going to connect with it, while it’s still reeling.
As I backpedal to get a good angle on the thrashing beast, it remains dazed less long than I’d hoped it would. Well that sucks. Okay, back in the air we go, with the steely body as a backup. Hup, surfing orichalcum waves in the sky. I hear Teuila’s telepathic avatar mutter, “Dork,” as I reposition myself telekinetically atop my makeshift surfboard. I can sense the humor beneath her statement, and I can ride the waves of excitement when she realizes what she’s about to say.
Te jovially telepathically sends my way, “Now that you’re flying, you really are an airhead, Airhead!”
I can’t help smiling. I can sense more tension floating away from Teuila, an ever so slight fraction of the turmoil in her emotions beneath the surface settles almost imperceptibly. We both feel it though. Healing. A long road, but it’s a start. Like I’ve said before, I know there are serious matters at hand, that there’s grief to attend to, and so much more—. But sometimes, you just have to acknowledge the little victories.
Teuila jokingly chides, “Hey screw you that’s a pretty big victory Air. Nyah.” Her telepathic avatar blows a raspberry to emphasize her point, and I get distracted enough by laughing that I nearly slip off my surfboard. I hear Teuila mutter, “Oops.”
Heh, I sigh with just a bit of contentment after a half chuckle. To be at Te’s side, and to have her at mine. It’s just, it’s just right. Let’s do this. Teuila enters my sensory range from wherever she’d gone to throw away the extra heads, and I’m launching a series of frost rays at a spot on the neck that I want Teuila to be severing. I let my aim climb as if I were experiencing the recoil of a gun as I continue firing, in case its regeneration is so fast that I have to aim above where she’ll cut, to contact the regenerating flesh.
Teuila pulls a full on anime attack of moving past her target with her weapon extended stiffly beside and behind her, dragging it through the Hydra’s neck, and over a meter of its torso, or back. I’m not sure how you’d define body parts on a serpent like this. Regardless, the good news is, the ice definitely slows down the regeneration. The bad news is, it’s not nearly enough, and now we have another head to deal with. Grr. If I could maybe rapidly fire something like fifty frost rays at once, a few for each head, and just had Teuila go wild dismembering its necks, we might be able to do this. What the hell else do I have in my repertoire?
Out of the corner of my eyes, just beyond my sensory range, I spy two Teuila’s as I retreat over thirty meters away from the hydra to take a moment to think. I haven’t seen her use her afterimage, well, fore-image, teleport thing since the Enochian Enclave, now there are three Teuila’s, and the hydra is snapping at each of the close ones, but the real Teuila, the furthest one, disappears, and closes the gap instantly on one of the heads that slammed into one of her fore-images. She lets out a devastating attack that I don’t know the word for, what’s the opposite of an uppercut? She spikes the hydra’s head into the muck like a very angry, very hostile volleyball. There’s laughter from her telepathic avatar as she reads my thought train. Thankfully, Teuila’s got the attention of the hydra again, since it had just been about to advance on me while I was trying to look at my other options.
I would really like to know what these rectangular prisms with the glowing cylinders are actually for, but I’m pretty sure I can use them as a makeshift explosive. Are they some sort of science fiction energy charge for like, a laser weapon? I could see them slotting nicely into something of that sort of tech, and these circular contact points on the top and bottom are almost like the poles on a battery. This— this is a very weird thing to have, hell, to have two of, from two different worlds, with two different magic systems, and technology levels, neither of which has anything remotely like computers and lasers and whatever else from my Fakeworld memories. I gnaw on my tongue as I contemplate. I almost want to rid myself of the offending items now, just to be able to pretend I can ignore their paradoxical nature.
I don’t think I’m ready just yet to see what happens if I use them to improvise an explosion. I’m also still interested to learn what they can do. It’s also better to be safe than sorry. Who knows how large of an explosion it might cause? It probably wouldn’t be nuclear in size, but I have no idea what I’m dealing with. Hm. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Endgame tactics, we’re screwing around, not making any progress. Tiktik, Helena, and Reggie, not me, the other Reggie, are our win conditions.
I grouse, “This would be a whole lot easier if I had even a few more spells mastered. I could really, really do with a few months of not having an apocalypse on our hands, to be able to pick up a few more tricks. Grr, stupid hydra. Okay, Te, can you hide all the corpses? I’ve got a theory. The other two coldspots hanging back over to the west are probably weaker hydras, relying on this one. They were likely going to wait for a signal that isn’t going to come, before they joined for the feast. When you’re done with the bodies, get to Tiktik, see if she’s able to help out, then come find me, I’m dragging this hydra towards the others. I’m hoping it’ll follow when it realizes where I’m headed. If Tiktik’s okay to help, I’ll drag them north, but stay far clear of the actual trail of refugees.”
Teuila nods, and like a streak of lightning, she makes bursting leaps to the north and back, dragging away one or two corpses at a time. Anyone who’d been wounded is either dead, or has been helped to join the rest of the fleeing people by the few courageous able-bodied folk that were around. Now I just have to get this thing’s attention. Fun.