Chapter 392 - The Frozen Flame V

Boris’ eyes glimmered in the sparkling sunlight as he watched the fishes swim by. Perfectly reflecting the solar rays, he was a veritable beacon of light in the already bright sea. And yet, he was easily outdone.

It was not by Starrgort, who sat on his head, that he found himself defeated. The spider was certainly a tough contender, but the materials that made up his body were inferior to the ikarett’s own. Nay, the only competitors to which he lost were the fishes that filled the ocean. Compared to the veritable mirrors that swam by, he was but another random rock in a valley of diamonds.

Despite his lack of relative reflectivity, he blended in well enough that none of the local wildlife paid him any attention. As usual, he was left to his own devices, treated more like a wayward weapon than a meaningful part of the local food web. It was hardly a problem. If anything, it was exactly what he wanted. To be ignored was to be given the opportunity to nap until his mistress ordered him awake. And yet, even with all of his napping skills combined, he found that, unlike the unconscious, water-disabled Starrgort, he was unable to sleep.

Though normal for those who failed to rise with the sun, insomnia was no part of the lizard’s routine. The strange lack of sleep that plagued him should have served as a cause for panic, and in any other scenario, he likely would have worried himself to the point of furthering his condition. But on that particular afternoon, he knew precisely what it was that prevented his mind from fading away.

It was his mistress. He couldn’t tell exactly what she was thinking, but the fiery ardour and bitter malice that typically leaked through their psychic link had been replaced by a steady stream of forced neutrality. She was actively steadying her mind, preventing even the slightest bit of feeling from worming its way past her filter. Somehow, she managed it perfectly, even as she proceeded with the strange pre-mating ritual that so many humanoids performed.

He was very curious about the particulars—he had seen such a ritual once up close when he lived in Farenlight’s lair, but his data was incomplete. His observation targets had unfortunately fallen victim to a different ikarett in the midst of their wayward tryst. He witnessed a few hundred similar acts through his many copies, but again, he could never get close enough to determine exactly what they did and why. People always shut the curtains when they found him on their windowsills. Evidently, his mistress was of the same mind. She spun him around every time he tried to look.

It didn’t make any sense. She wasn’t even really denying him. After all, by closing his eyes, he could see directly through hers and feel all the sensations she experienced. And doing just that, he found a perfect, first-person perspective and acquired a set of observations that only furthered his confusion.

Half of it stemmed from the precise nature of their biology. He didn’t understand why his mistress still needed to mate with three full ascensions tucked under her belt. Parthenogenesis was clearly the most optimal solution; it only made sense to follow in his footsteps and acquire an adaptation that allowed for spontaneous reproduction. Alas, it couldn’t be helped. He understood. Not all creatures were quite as intelligent as he. But even with his mighty mind, he found himself incapable of deciphering the purpose of the actions at hand. After all, his mistress was not actually mating. She was only engaged in practice—practice that seemed entirely devoid of purpose.

The payoff was hardly a worthwhile effort. At least from what he could tell, neither his mistress nor her friend possessed the necessary organs to make the practice worthwhile. They seemed to know that as well, as they only rehearsed the most basic of steps without so much as bothering to produce their genitals.

The only similar cases he knew, he had learned from Meltys’ clan of birds. Some of them, he noticed, would practice their dances with other males to better appeal to the females when the season came around. Certainly, he reasoned, his mistress was engaged in a similar activity, but it was precisely that which furthered his confusion.

Though he hadn’t mated since leaving Farenlight’s den, it wasn’t like he was without experience. He understood the mechanisms, and he was confident that he could provide advice, even if he was incapable of interpreting the precise results. After all, humanoid rituals were far more confusing and illogical; he didn’t understand why they were only pretending to feed each other when there was enough food available to better the conditions of their practice.

Even ignoring that particular oddity, he saw many flaws in their precise execution. The most obvious was that they were clearly too aggressive. They were both actively pressing their lips together when males preferred females who sat still and basked in the sun. It was meant to be the males’ job to perform appeals and the females’ job to judge them.

If his mistress would have simply stopped turning him around, he could have easily demonstrated a female’s proper behaviour. It was simple, really. All one had to do was nap with one’s eyes open whilst slightly turned in the direction of the male performance.

Truly, it was all too confusing, but there was nothing to be done. The lack of understanding remained with him until his mistress finally rose from her seated position.

“There,” she said. “That’s exactly two hundred.”

“Y-yeah.” Sylvia slowly nodded. Her eyes were completely devoid of intelligence. One could only speculate if she even remembered who or where she was.

“We shouldn’t have to do that again for at least a year.”

“R-right.” Another vague reply accompanied by another empty blink.

“I’m going back to exploring.” Claire grabbed Boris by the tail and hoisted him over her shoulders.

“M-mmk.”

Leaving the fox in her protective bubble, the ikarett’s mistress flew high up into the ocean and looked down into the infinite abyss. The strange, overly controlled mood had yet to leave her, but he could tell, as he continued to monitor their link, that one specific feeling shone through. And if he wasn’t mistaken, its name was none other than frustration.

He almost wasn’t surprised. He would have felt the exact same way had he been subjected to her fruitless practice.

Frustration, however, was easily resolved, and his mistress was well aware. Spreading her wings, she dove straight into a school of fish and swung him straight through the crowd. He readily accepted her commands. Extending his spines, he became a rake and skewered a dozen fish at once.

A trident, a saw, his original form. He changed with every swing, twisting and morphing at his mistress’ beck and call.

She didn’t always use him in the fishes’ elimination. Some of them were ripped apart by vectors and others with her claws. It depended almost entirely on what was most convenient. She wasn’t toying with her prey the way she was on the first floor. Everything that happened to enter her line of sight was promptly put out of its misery.

The rampage met no resistance until she came across a particularly strange island. While most of the others were made of rock, the one in front of her bore a chitin base. It didn’t seem all too obvious from her position above it; Claire didn’t even realise that it was a crab until it suddenly looked up towards her, right after she eliminated the fish swimming in its coral reef.

A stream of bubbles escaped its maxillipeds. Clacking its pincers aggressively, it started to swim towards her with its legs fluttering beneath it. She unleashed a series of vectors, but they failed to rip it apart. All she managed was to steal its eyes. Everything else remained in place, courtesy of its shell’s resistance to magic.

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Its resilience was hardly limited to the arcane arts; its shell remained unscratched, even as it rammed its way through the two islands between them.

Claire didn’t pause for a moment. Seemingly unbothered by the giant crab, she swam between its claws and drove Boris through its underbelly. The wound was hardly fatal, but she left the weapon inside of the crab and stole its health as she evaded its strikes. Before long, its lifeless corpse lost its strength and sank into the depths, a trail of blue liquid flooding the sea in its wake.

Claire didn’t bother retrieving her weapon. Assuming her true form, she dove straight through the waves and gunned for a large school of fish. With her transformation came a surprising comfort. Like its much tinier counterpart, the largely serpentine shape was without most of the pain that accompanied its humanoid opposite. She felt like she was at ease, free, or at least free of everything but the fresh mental burden.

Spreading her wings wide and tucking her legs close to her body, she slithered through the aquatic environment, moving again from island to island. She wasn’t quite as genocidal as during her first rampage, but she still killed everything that came in range of her jaws and talons.

The second crab she met was dispatched more easily than the first. She ripped off one of its arms and twisted her body into the socket. Its insides were torn apart and turned to mush before it was cast into the depths.

Like the skeleton knights, like the leviathan that lived back in Vel’khan, the monster was over a thousand. But it posed not a hint of a threat.

Perhaps, the lyrkress reasoned, it was an intentional choice. It wasn’t like they were bosses, only random obstacles meant to fill the seemingly endless space.

She stopped briefly in the wake of its death. She wasn’t sure where to go, and the fishes didn’t provide enough experience for it to be worth remaining. The aquatic death zone was practically the opposite of the linear hall that the previous floor had provided. There wasn’t a single hint as to her final destination, nor even any patch of ocean that looked much different from any other. It was nothing but underwater islands as far as the eye could see.

In the end, it was the maker’s identity that finally provided a clue. As the god of the darkest depths, he would no doubt reward those who ventured deeper into his realm.

The deeper she went, the more powerful the monsters grew. The giant crabs became lobsters, shrimp, and turtles, while the fish went through a set of inexplicable mutations. Some sprouted wings, legs, and antennae, fashioning themselves like butterflies and moths. Others were made into regular shapes; there were a surprising number who took on the traits of cones. And yet another group traded their body parts for others. Heads became fins and fins became heads. Roughly a tenth of the population went all the way with the bizarre commitment, becoming balls of heads and tails with nothing in between. Somehow, they swam just as easily as their aesthetically functional counterparts, perusing the unchanging reefs in whatever depths they dwelt.

She half expected the world to twist when she passed the final island. And yet, she found nothing. Zero mysterious doors appeared in the distance no matter how far she swam. It wasn’t like the dungeon suddenly cut off. Every slither carried her further and further away. The distance was measurable and present, so present in fact that she chose to portal herself back up after giving up on going deeper.

A tired sigh escaped her lips. There was no clear way forward.

She almost regretted ignoring everything that the clerk had told Arciel. But at the same time, ignoring her inability to pay attention to lectures, it was precisely the challenge of exploring and decrypting the dungeon that led her to make the decision in the first place.

Had the circumstances been any different, she surely would have found plenty of joy in the process. But as they stood, her mood was far too sour.

It wasn’t Sylvia’s fault. That wasn’t to say that the fox had played no role in her annoyance, but she didn’t feel like it was fair to lay the blame upon her.

Clenching her claws, the giant snake-moose resumed her slithering. She wandered aimlessly, her forked tongue occasionally dancing through the water. Around and around the biome she went, until the sun finally lost its brilliant glow.

The islands shifted with its setting. The rocks swirled about, twisting like they would in a whirlpool as they slowly came together. One by one, they moved into position and formed a massive, sandy platform.

A door appeared in its centre right as the waters all went dark.

No longer was the sea an infinite space. There were walls all around her. Or at least that was what she thought before her alcine ability informed her that they would prove difficult to kill.

It wasn’t until the cavern unravelled that she was able to determine its identity. Like her, it was a massive reptilian predator, only the descriptor happened to differ in its order of magnitude. While she was ten meters long, it was ten kilometers thick. The walls of its flesh extended so far that they were almost impossible to behold in their entirety without opening another three sets of eyes.

To label it as serpentine was to offend those of lamian blood. Its scales lacked all of the elegance and beauty that came with Sthenian ancestry. They were filthy, untrimmed, and covered in layers of moss, like the beast had never once in its life considered the particulars of their maintenance. It didn’t help that they were made of stone, specifically the same variety of yellow-brown rock that constituted the platforms’ undersides.

And yet, serpentine was almost the only way to describe it, so long as one was able to see enough of it to consider the nature of its base. At its core, it was a snake with four heads. It had no tail and no body, only four long necks whose midpoint formed the roof of the dome that had appeared overhead.

Its four heads hung from it the centerpiece like chandeliers, only the scale was so great that it needed to curl up its body and fill the gaps in order to look at her from each of the cardinal directions. That was why it was so dark. The only light in the enclosure was the glow of its eyes. The bright red orbs drew lines in the darkness, barely illuminating the area around each of its faces.

Claire half expected the abomination to charge her, but it never attacked. It simply hovered around the newly formed, underwater continent, its giant slit eyes focused on her all the while.

The stalemate lasted for all of three seconds before the lyrkress made for the place where the serpents’ necks met. Its response was a little more delayed. It didn’t even start to move until she nearly closed the gap between them. Finally turning on at least one of its brains, it tried to box her in and constrict her with its massive body, effectively hugging her with all four of its faces.

But because it was so big, there remained a number of inevitable gaps. Claire quickly assumed her tiniest form, slipped between two of its scales, and lay flush against its body.

Just by touching it, she started to suck its health.

The beast didn’t appear to notice at first, but it soon panicked and dove at her with all of its heads. She tried pushing them with her vectors, but they were simply too heavy. The forces did nothing but mitigate its speed.

It tore its fangs into the base of its own neck and removed her from its flesh, but in doing so, it accomplished little beyond exposing another weakness.

Slipping past its teeth, Claire dug her claws into the roof of its mouth and began the process anew. She burrowed into its skull when it tried to fry her with its arcane magic, and migrated to another head when it tried to cut its losses. It was an elephant and she was an ant. There was nothing that it could do to stop her from boring through its insides and slowly whittling it down.

Log Entry 855875

You have slain a level 1572 Primal Snakesphere Lord

This feat has earned you the following bonus rewards:

- 201 points of agility

- 14 points of strength

- 3190 points of wisdom

Log Entry 855876

You have leveled up. Your health and mana have been partially restored.

Your racial class, Caldriess, has reached level 605.

Your titular class, Witch of the Seventh Tempest, has reached level 28.

You have gained 2888 ability points.

It almost didn’t feel any stronger than the skeletal knights. If anything, it was more disappointing. It shouldn’t have lacked an ultimate skill, given its supposed level, but if it did use the ability, then it was far too weak to notice. The monster was so pathetic, in fact, that she was barely surprised when she returned to the door and found that it was still closed; the snakesphere was not the guardian.

That title belonged to the small whale-like creature hovering in front of the gate. Unlike its barbaric counterpart, the floor’s boss was dressed as would a gentleman. It had a tin hat on its head and a suit around its body. One hand held a disproportionately small buckler, while the other sported an equally tiny sword. It didn’t seem any stronger than the ball of snakes, but Claire reasoned that, if her senses could deceive her, like in the snakesphere’s evaluation, then the whale could have easily skewed in the opposite direction.

She called Boris back—he had been napping in the corpse of the crab in which he was abandoned—and prepared to face the guardian.

But while Boris was ready, the floor boss was not.

Abandoning its armaments, suit, and helmet in kind, it turned tail and fled before she could even approach.