Mia was in shock. She was standing on the rock ground that appeared out of nowhere. The giant monster in front of her was also there, unable to move as there was no water. He was also really dry.
Mia tried to launch a fireball at the monster but her mana barely left her body. Mia could create fire but just about 1 cm over her skin.
“What the hell is going on!?” Mia asked no one in particular.
At the same time, the creature began to shrink. In less than 2 seconds it was a ball of mass just a little taller than Mia.
Pressure began to pour into the area around what was the creature, not allowing Mia to reach it to slash it even when she was using all her strength.
After more or less a minute the ball hatched like an egg and from the inside a humanoid creature with the characteristics of the monster emerged. Its face was a perfect mix of a human and a sea-serpent. It had muscles like a man but all covered in scales that simulated armor. It also had a long tail that kept it balanced. On its hands, there was a piece of bone in the shape of a sword.
“Hate fills my being as I take this form. Human, prepare to die so I can return to my majestic normal form. I refuse to remain in the form of an inferior being more than necessary.”
“Shit!” Mia said before she started running in the opposite direction of the monster. Mia knew that she could barely beat someone slightly stronger than her in a melee due to the fact that she was more than willing to kill anyone she fought against. But that monster was way stronger than her and without magic to help Mia even the odds, she had to run.
The monster for its part, only took a few seconds to understand what was going on and began to run after Mia. By some miracle, Mia managed to stay ahead.
“Stop running like a coward!” The monster shouted.
“Stop running after me like the embodiment of courage!” Mia shouted back, trying to do anything to keep her mind out of the fact that she was in the most dangerous situation she has ever been in.
She kept running and running until she saw something that made her feel dread like no other. The invisible walls of the dungeon.
Mia did some studying on dungeons before the mission and found out that dungeons that looked like open fields like plains or the place she was now could have invisible walls that had some powerful illusions to make it seem like the terrain would continue forever. There were also dungeons that would loop infinitely. Mia had been fvhoping for this one to be one of those.
Mia turned and unsheathed her blade. She had to fight the monster in close combat, something she knew she wasn’t good at. Mia had the dexterity and body control to get the maximum amount of force from her physical attacks but that didn’t mean much when she wasn’t all that strong to begin with. Yes, Mia could output a little more than 10 times her normal strength but in the face of something that was easily 50 times physically stronger than her, that didn’t matter.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
She gritted her teeth, pressed her feet down and swung her blade down in a downward slash. One that the monster was more than happy to crash into with his own sword as he performed an upward diagonal slash.
When the blades collided, Mia felt like she was being hit by a truck, something she actually knew how it felt due to her past life. Only by what she could think was luck and her good positioning, she wasn’t sent flying.
Also, the weapon her father made was surprisingly sturdy, Mia knew that she wasn’t using her weapon as she should at the moment so she was ready for the weapon to just break on impact.
Just as fast as all those thoughts passed through Mia’s mind, she was attacking again, this time with a horizontal slash from right to left. The monster, to defend itself, stabbed his own sword on the ground in a way that once Mia slashed it, it would slide over it and not hit him.
As the monster tried to remove his own blade from the ground, Mia saw a chance and tried to stab the creature. Sadly it only made it remove its blade from the ground faster as it jumped back to not get stabbed.
To make things worse, just as fast as the monster jumped backwards, it dashed forward to attack Mia. She knew she couldn’t clash blades with the monster if it wasn’t her taking the initiative so all she could do was try to dodge the slashes the monster was doing. From the air to the ground, from one side to another. All Mia could do was weave and dash the attacks along with the occasional parry that her strangely sturdy O katana could manage to withstand as far as she could calculate.
After what could have been a minute or an eternity - Mia kind of lost any perception of time she had when she entered the dungeon - she felt a familiar feeling. Death was approaching and strangely enough, she was calm. Unlike all the other times she almost died, she knew she had a way to get out of this predicament, she just had to find it before the angry monster with a sword got smart enough to actually think before attacking.
Someone or something had changed the dungeon in a way that was not really beneficial to either Mia or the Monster. The monster didn’t have water and Mia couldn’t use magic more than a centimeter away from her body and it also wasn’t all that powerful since Mia couldn’t use as much mana as she wanted to in that limited area.
There was one thing Mia could try but if it failed, she would be in a worse situation than she was now. It was possible to pump mana into her blade and temporarily strengthen it. It was something most fighters did with their weapons but Mia didn’t know if her blade could withstand her mana. The chance of something going wrong because Mia used magic in a different way than other people wasn’t zero.
Dodge after dodge, parry after parry. Slowly the monster was managing to pin Mia against the invisible wall, all with pure strength as it didn’t have a drop of intelligence in its swordplay. With her back almost against the wall, Mia had to gamble on infusing mana into her O katana.
After a particularly bad downward slash from the the monster, that made it stab its own sword on the ground for a moment, Mia concentrated solely on sending her mana to her blade and praying that it didn’t shatter like glass.
After a moment, it didn’t seem like anything bad was going to happen so Mia tried to attack the monster. The good news was that her attacks were indeed very powerful now. She actually hurt the monster with her slash, cutting part of its arms as it couldn’t defend with its own blade. The bad news is that the sword was a glutton and was feeding on her mana, even when Mia tried to stop it.
Great! Not only am I on a time limit, I am also on a hit limit. Mia thought to herself.
“Alright you fish with legs. If you don’t move I promise to make this as painless as I can.” Mia said to the monster who didn’t seem to take it that well.