A maelstrom opened in the icy waters where the giant beast slouched beneath the waves. Tavish wrapped an arm around the shattered mast of their splintering ship and turned to his dwindling crew.
“When it resurfaces, aim for the underside of its jaw!” He dashed up the deck, skittering along the brined surface as it rolled hard beneath his feet. He felt, for a moment, like he was floating towards the wheel as the ship dropped in the unpredictable waters. Then a wave caught the aft and brought the end to meet Tavish at the chin.
He pushed off the ground and met Fynn who had a shoulder braced against a spoke of the wheel. His beard was half soaked through with blood from a gash on his head. “Tav! Help me turn this blasted thing! We need to go hard port to avoid that whirlpool.”
Tavish pulled hard, thankful for his out-sized level. The churning power of the ocean—and the program’s insistence that they not go any farther—made it so he strained hard to turn them. At last the spinning sea-hell dissolved and the water became merely violent instead of outright murderous.
The waters bubbled in front of them as the monster returned, blasting out of foam-crenelated waves and soaring towards the storm-twisted clouds. Its kilometers-long body was covered in scales that glistened and wavered like mother-of-pearl—the water pouring down created a refraction that was almost beautiful. The head was out of sight, but Tavish focused where it should be and pulled up its stats.
Sea Dryvrn - Lvl. 0x270f (0x221e / 0x221e HP)
Error reading. No data available.
The chill he felt ran deeper than even his soaked clothes could impart. His eyes flicked behind them—blue skies and sun the way they’d come. He looked ahead, blue skies and sun pounding through the tempest to alight on a small, sandy island encircled by craggy pillars of coral.
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“Fynn! Straight ahead! We need to get to past the barrier.”
Fynn balked at Tavish. “This ship won’t fit through there.”
“It doesn’t need to—we just need to get our bodies past.”
“Are you—”
“Tavish!” Kaela howled over the winds from her defiant perch at the head of the ship. “What’s the goddamn plan?”
“We can’t kill it!” he shouted back.
Kaela’s eyes widened in spite of the stinging mist as the dragon’s long tail slipped out of the water and the head tilt down towards them. “It’s diving!”
“Get to the coral!” Tavish pulled out his father’s sword, DragonBlade, in one hand and prepared his own kyoketsu-shoge—a nastily curved blade attached to a long rope—in the other. “Use the whirlpool to slingshot us towards that island,” Tavish said to Fynn. “Jam us in the rocks.”
“We’ll die on that island,” said Fynn.
“We’ll die here. At least on the island we have a chance.” He gave Fynn a firm slap on the shoulder and hopped to the deck, landing firmly on the cracked boards. “If it can’t die,” he muttered to himself, raising DragonBlade to the sky. “I’ll make it wish it could.”
Tavish launched off the deck, the sodden wood erupting under his feet. He launched the long roped-blade hard, the coils twisting and looping through the air in a seemingly endless ascent until the blade sank between two scales and Tavish yanked the slack taut. He pulled himself towards the beast even as gravity brought it hurtling towards his face. Tavish learned this next move from his dad.
As they passed like charging locomotives he thrust DragonBlade out, carving it along the length of the seemingly soft underbelly…
… but the blade skipped along the flesh as if it were immutable iron.
The rope-blade slipped loose from his hand.
And Tavish flailed in the air, the dragon pulling away and smashing headfirst into—and through—the ship below. One of their crew was cut down, lower half pulled under the water and the top following moments after. The back of the ship bucked, catapulting Fynn, flailing, into the waves. Kaela kept launching arrows as the tail slipped away into the churned-white foam as the bow where she stood sank rapidly.
Tavish gasped a lungful of air just before he splashed into the water. His body went rigid with cold in an instant as the turbulence twisted like a corkscrew, pulling him deeper into the dark.
No up, no down, just salty water pressing in on him from all sides and the subtle pressure change as pieces of the ship passed him on their way to their final resting place. Just the low rumble of an indomitable monster roaring into the depths.