The panicked words were garbled and bubbly, but clearly from Kada. “Huh, what’s wrong?” Niloy skidded in her tracks along the slippery sea, trying to spot her comrade.
“Can’t, can’t move! Gah!” The sounds of Kada’s panic and pain pierced through the distortion.
“What do you mean you can’t move?!” she began sprinting around, scrambling to find any hint of Kada’s location. She eventually set her sights on a melted ship out towards the back of the group that was still floating on top of the water. Her partner must still have been in that area.
“Water, grabbed me, can’t move,” Kada repeated, a little less coherent this time with more twinges of anguish. “It’s crushing me!” She didn’t say anything else for a while after that, just screams of agony as her pain increased.
“Niloy, Niloy,” she suddenly called out again, her breaths labored and low. “There’s a scuba diver. Right in front of me… He’s waving me goodbye, Niloy. I don’t want to be goodbye!”
“Damnit!” Niloy shouted as she scrambled across the water. As much as she tried to fake her annoyance with Kada, she definitely didn’t want to see her die. But fortunately, the water in those parts was pretty clear, and The Flesh-Eater finally caught a glimpse of The Mermaid suspended in the water just a few feet below the surface.
Like she’d said, there really was a scuba diver just hanging out. He wasn’t attacking her, just floating there and watching her squirm. The man was either a Fiend or a super sadistic scuba diving soldier. Possibly both, but he needed to be dealt with as soon as possible.
Niloy thought about turning the area to acid and melting the mawhger, but there was a chance Kada could get caught up in it if there was any form of current around them. That would also take longer to alter than some other aspects, so since they were in a hurry, Niloy stuck with altering the buoyancy.
She caused the scuba diver to sink as fast as she could, down into the dark depths until he couldn’t be seen anymore, and even farther, as far as she could push him. Maybe the sudden change in pressure would give him a taste of the pain he was inflicting.
Niloy then adjusted the buoyancy under Kada, but something was wrong. Even just trying to lift her up a few feet, it was like the ocean itself was fighting her. At least it didn’t seem to be adding to Kada’s pain, but it wasn’t exactly helping her. The Fiend strained herself and eventually managed to bring Kada to the surface.
“Are you okay?!” Niloy knelt down next to the crumpled girl. There were bruises all over her body and her veins were visible all along her tanned skin, looking on the verge of popping. Not only that, it looked like there were burns. Niloy had seen the water bubbling pretty fast around her, so maybe it had actually been boiling.
“Yeah,” Kada squeaked out before rolling flat on her back with her arms spread. “I just… need a minute. Thanks for the save.”
“Thank me later,” Niloy began glancing around for any sight of the scuba diver. And just when she thought she saw a glimpse of him, her face was suddenly dragged under the water. It wasn’t like her buoyancy alterations where it was a fairly gentle rise and fall. No, she was sucked under with force, ripped down by the water. But she didn’t stay submerged for long.
Both girls were blasted back up above the surface and sent flying. The impact from the explosion ruptured part of Niloy’s dress and gouged into her leg. She landed back in the water a ways away and used her Curse to resurface herself, but she couldn’t stand from the pain.
The woman looked around for Kada, trying to find her again, and quickly spotted her not that far off, just a few feet below the water again. It seemed like she was struggling to get to the surface once more—not being held this time, but hampered due to her injuries. It looked like both of her feet and calves had been ruptured as well, surely making it all the more difficult
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Since her partner was within Niloy’s range of control, she wanted to just float her right to the top. But the scuba diver loomed just beneath her, swimming with expedience. If she raised Kada up, she’d be giving him a boost too, pushing him right to her. She thought about trying to freeze them, to at least stop them from engaging, but then a new threat emerged from the depths: a pointed silhouette.
All of a sudden, the scuba diver breached the water, zooming high into the air while spiraling out of control. Their air tank had been punctured, and all that pressure was desperate to escape. But then the diver suddenly stopped midair. Not as if he’d run out of air in his tank, but rather that it stopped propelling him for some unknown reason.
The diver remained suspended midair for just a second as he reoriented himself, then he were suddenly blasted back down towards the water, headed straight towards Kada. The man then pulled a small harpoon gun off his hip that he’d let sit idly until now. Niloy’s guess was that he was done playing around and having his fun. Now he was really out for the kill.
But before he even got the chance to fire, a geyser of water shot up towards him. The thin layer of water quickly slipped away, revealing the massive spike it had been hiding underneath. A new blast suddenly shot the scuba diver out of the way of the giant blade, and he probably thought he’d dodged it for a moment. But then the attached tentacle at the sword’s hilt wrapped around him and snagged him out of the air.
Before the scuba diver could do anything else, the tentacle lifted all the way out of the water. Then it wound itself back towards the sea for just a moment before it flung skyward, launching the diver at insane speed. He was sent flying completely out of sight, over the horizon.
A second tentacle then lifted slightly out of the water, bringing Kada up with it. The Squordfish’s face then surfaced as well. “Ten! You came!” Kada hugged the monster’s tentacle with all of her remaining strength.
Only about a week after the Squordfish had attacked Archlave did it take Kada up on her offer and appeared outside Ledmer island one day. Since then, it had been living in the waters around the resort, keeping other monsters at bay, while also acting as a tourist attraction. There was now a rumor that spotting the monster blessed the person with good luck and clean health, rather ironic given its allergy based abilities.
Kada had bestowed the monster with the name Ten Tackles, extremely proud of her own cleverness and how funny she was. Though, the concept of a pun was wholly lost on the Squordfish. When the beast asked about its name, Kada answered that it was because she would tackle it with ten hugs every time she saw it.
“Don’t think that I came here for you,” the monster played coy, speaking through the antenna attached to its head. “This place was just a short swim away. I travel farther for my daily feedings, and I detest these humans who think they can do whatever they want in my waters!”
Ten lifted another tentacle under Niloy, to the girl’s surprise, and slowly brought her over to her face. The woman panicked a bit at first, hearing about the monster’s lack of control with its Curse, but she didn’t have so much as a sniffle.
“Okay!” Kada sat herself upright, dangling her injured legs off the tentacle like casually sitting on a stool. “Enough putzing around. Let’s show these mawhgers just how screwed they are!”
The Squordfish proceeded to move both girls closer to its face, and then it raised the remainder of its head out of the water. That alone was enough to cause massive waves that nearly sent all ships nearby on the verge of capsizing. “You two recover.” Ten then stated boldly as it pulled all of its tentacles up into the air, aiming their ten humongous swords down at the remaining ships, “I’ll take care of the rest!”
Like massive arrows raining down from the sky, each vessel was skewered effortlessly—Fish in a barrel, but the fish’s revenge. Ten single handedly dismantled entire navies using only its brute strength. A few ships attempted to fire upon the monster, but their accuracy plummeted as soon as their eyes started to tear up relentlessly.
At one point, Kada crawled to the end of one of the swords, letting herself act as a weapon without actually having to move herself. Any ship that Ten touched with that tentacle melted instantly, and the Fiend seemed to be having the time of her life being swung around, like she was on a ride at an amusement park. Niloy, on the other hand, was content to sit back and relax, watching the carnage unfold.