Nymin started them off. She flew straight at the Evolved False Hydra, screeching like a chorus of bats.
Even at the periphery of Banshee’s Wail, Pikawon and Dyani winced, feeling the tremors in their spirits. Still, they wasted no more than a second before they also flew into motion. Dyani used a few successive Mana Jumps to reach an alcove a quarter turn away from where she’d started, so any attention she drew would be far away from Pikawon.
He climbed down the wall, without any skills and with his spirit veiled, carefully making his way to the bottom of the egg shaped chamber.
Acid sprayed towards Nymin from several Turret Shroom heads, but she deftly dodged the oily liquid, only to fly right towards the grasping golden hairs of a tanglepillar. She ducked past most of the hairs, phasing through the few strands she couldn’t avoid. Wisps of blue mana leaked from hair thin wounds, but Nymin was still full of mana that any injuries quickly healed.
More of the heads turned to focus on her as she refused to die, giving Dyani a clear line of sight towards the main body. She shot three Crystal Mana Bolts at it in quick succession. The first came in at a bad angle and skittered off its scales, but the second and third were right on target. While the accuracy was acceptable, the result was less impressive.
Crystals shattered and puffed into clouds of mana, not leaving any wounds that she could see. Maybe she’d scratched a scale or two, but she had yet to advance her perception attribute, so she couldn’t tell.
The lack of damage didn’t stop the monster from taking notice. A half dozen Fungal Rat heads swiveled to face her. She tensed her body to respond, but didn’t expect them to be able to do much at this distance.
They disagreed. Visible lumps pushed their way up their long, sinewy necks, halting just below where pristine, white scales met dirty hair. Each of the rat’s jaws unhinged, their mouths pointed to the alcove where Dyani had been a moment ago.
She was already jumping to another alcove, not having waited to see what the rats had in store.
Bright, blue mushrooms shot from the rats’ mouths, glowing far brighter than those on their bodies. Like her mana crystals, they smashed apart when they struck and released a cloud. Instead of pure mana, these were clouds of blue vapor. She didn’t need to identify the cloud to guess that it carried the same, sense-dampening poison as all Fungal Rat mushrooms.
Further motivated to stay mobile, she jumped again as the same rat heads turned to face her, more mushrooms sliding up their throats.
She tried to shoot a crystal while in flight, but her aim was way off, her projectile flying closer to Nymin than the monster. The attempt also knocked her toward the outer wall. She managed to hit the wall with her hands and feet instead of her skull, but the impact was still jarring.
“Dyani, Look out!” Nymin yelled from behind.
She didn’t waste time by turning to face whatever danger was behind her, Dyani jumped upward and just back enough to avoid smashing herself into stone as the wall curved into the ceiling.
The rain of mushrooms missed her, but she was still caught in the outer edge of the poisonous cloud. Her senses faded slightly, vision growing darker, sounds becoming muffled. The effect wasn’t nearly as bad as when Pikawon had injected her with a concentrated dose of the same poison, but in this fight, any weakness could be deadly.
Afraid to stop moving, Dyani jumped three more times until she reached the hole in the ceiling where the mountain oak’s roots entered the room. She grabbed onto one of the smaller offshoots. Panting with exertion, she looked down to make sure the monster didn’t have a clear line of sight on her.
She messaged the group chat the three had established before the fight.
Dyani Farlight: A little poisoned. Not bad. Need time to recover mana.
***
So far, Pikawon’s task had been easy. With two active, unveiled attackers to focus on, the Evolved False Hydra was paying no attention to his steady trek down the sloping wall. He could’ve moved far faster by sliding down instead of climbing, but stealth was more important than speed.
He’d just reached the swirling pool of sewage collected at the bottom of the room when he received a message from Dyani.
He glanced up, but couldn’t see where she was hiding. Hopefully she’d retreated down one of the attached corridors, where the enormous monster couldn’t follow. He couldn’t expand his spiritual senses to check without disrupting his veil.
In her daughter’s absence, Nymin redoubled her efforts to distract the hydra. She moved in close, suffering the occasional injury to alternately drain mana and lash out with claws of conjured crystal. She hadn’t used her newest skill, Mana Bolt, since the start of the fight.
The attacks successfully distracted the monster, but only the occasional strike against a rat or acid spitting mushroom head cut deep enough to bleed.
Nymin had been right. Neither her or Dyani’s crystal-based attacks had the power necessary to cut through the hydra’s scales. Hopefully his Sundering Claw would be enough.
Unwilling to step into sewage if he could avoid it, Pikawon took a moment to judge the distance before leaping from the edge of the toxic lake onto the closest root.
His hand slipped, dropping him just far enough to dip a foot in sewage before he found a new handhold and wrapped his entire body around the root.
“Saints’ tits,” he swore, heart pounding in his ears, along with the sloshing and spinning of sewage getting sucked up titanic roots.
He didn’t know how that process worked, but he assumed the largest roots were hollow, like massive wooden pipes. Considering how quickly they drained the endlessly filling pool below, their openings were likely large enough to suck up a skinny man like him.
He had a sudden urge to bite the root he was holding onto, to demonstrate that he was not food. He chose to ignore the instinct, partially out of common sense, but mostly at the vibrantly imagined image of the root shaking him off like an annoying insect.
Gritting his teeth, he gathered his strength and began to climb.
***
The fight was moving so fast that Nymin was moving entirely on instinct. She wove through a wave of explosive mushrooms, unwilling to let one hit her in order to determine if they could actually hurt her. With something as strong and full of mana as this node guardian, using intangibility as a defense was hit or miss.
She’d already discovered that the False Hydra teeth could cut her as cleanly as someone made of flesh and blood.
The Tanglepillar hairs could hurt her a little when that head infused them with additional mana. Each hair left the equivalent of a paper cut, not dangerous on its own, but considering the sheer mass of hair, such injuries could quickly prove fatal.
She wished she had a copy of Dyani’s new crystal shooting skill. The guardian had barely noticed her Mana Bolt. Dyani’s Crystal Mana Bolt had at least gotten some attention, even if it couldn’t draw blood.
She still counted it as a success, since their current goal was to keep the monster’s attention, not to harm it.
Nymin couldn’t spare the attention to check on Pikawon’s climbing progress. She hoped he was nearly in place. With Dyani recovering above, Nymin was running on a knife’s edge to keep attention on herself.
As she was slipping around a False Hydra head, Nymin noticed one of the monster’s unique heads, also a snake, but purple instead of white, with a broader set of jaws. Its throat was glowing with increasing intensity right under its head.
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She didn’t move in time.
The purple snake head opened its mouth and a beam of concentrated purple light shot out faster than her eye could track, lancing her straight through the abdomen.
The section of her mana body that was struck sizzled as she writhed in pain. The fading light revealed no hole in her body, but the area the beam had struck was distorted and discolored.
She lost all control over her own flight. As she was unaffected by gravity, her body continued in the same direction as before, avoiding the first set of False Hydra jaws through sheer luck, but not the second.
A mouth with twin rows of teeth caught her arm and whirred to life, slowly pulling her down into its throat.
***
Dyani hadn’t completely recovered from the small amount of sense dampening poison. She hadn’t wanted to waste one of her precious cleansing tonics on such a mild affliction, but she was kicking herself for that now.
Still, she could see and hear well enough to move. She just needed a proper opening.
She sent a message to Pikawon and she jumped from her position above the monster, asking for his position.
Pikawon Billbrook: Halfway there.
That wasn’t nearly close enough. Even if he climbed twice as fast as he had been, it would take more than a minute to get into place, a minute Nymin didn’t have.
Dyani made a decision.
Giving up on stealth, she dropped like a stone, only using a whisper of mana to counteract her fall when she caught sight of Pikawon.
She jumped forward, wrapping her arms around his body. It took some panicked scrambling, but he impressively managed to keep his grip.
“By the saints, weirdo. What are you doing?”
“No time. Just let go.”
“What? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but-”
“Let go! Trust me.”
For an agonizing moment, he hesitated, but then, without so much as an aggrieved sigh, he let go.
The pair fell about a meter, before Dyani pushed an excessive amount of mana into Mana Jump. They rocketed upward.
Her grip on him held, but barely, and she only managed that because Pikawon had half turned while they were falling and thrown an arm over her shoulder.
She promised herself that she’d put her next attribute point into strength.
With two more jumps, the pair shakily ascended just above the hydra. Pikawon wriggled around a bit more, put a hand on each of her shoulders, and planted his feet against her wooden breastplate.
“Drop me.”
Dyani wanted to argue, but he’d trusted her when she’d asked for something crazy. She could do the same.
She released her grip. Pikawon kicked against her armored chest and backflipped towards the hydra.
It wasn’t fair. She was the one with a jumping skill, yet here he was doing fancy acrobatics. His increased agility from his Speed attribute and coordination from his Mind attribute were showing their worth. She would’ve been genuinely annoyed if he wasn’t using this stunt to save her mother.
His kick pushed her backward, but she used Mana Jump to counteract the force. She ended up using a bit too much mana, overcompensating after traveling with a passenger, but her Mind attribute was enhanced as well, so she had the mental speed necessary to correct her position before she ran into anything.
Pikawon descended like a meteor, the silver light of Sundering Claw trailing from each of his claws. A couple rat heads noticed the incoming threat and moved to intercept him, but they were too slow.
The sound was like an entire day in a butcher’s shop, compressed into a second.
He sliced through the neck doing its best to swallow Nymin, and continued down, scoring a series of deep gashes into the hydra’s main body.
Barely slowed, Pikawon was forced to dig his claws into one of the hanging roots to prevent himself from smashing into the lake below. He only managed to stop around the same elevation he’d been before Dyani had abducted him.
Dyani wanted to gape at the surprising level of damage her friend had managed to inflict with his blade skill and a bit of momentum, but she’d been in enough fights to recognize a golden opportunity.
Reaching out both her hands, Dyani activated her second new skill.
* Feverchill Bloom (Unique)
* Type: Attack, Ranged, Area of Effect
* Affinity: Heat
* Range: Medium
* Cost: Moderate Mana
* Effect: Shoots a projectile of compressed heat mana. When this bolt strikes a target, heat is pushed outward from the struck area in an expanding sphere. This chills the immediate area and heats the area around it.
An orange, shimmering ball shot from her hands, trailing a line of heat haze.
It struck just to the left of the bleeding line down the hydra’s body, but the slight inaccuracy made little difference. orange light rippled out from the impact area, trailing frost as the monster’s body heat was shunted outward in a ring.
In the unwounded areas, this just caused a bit of discomfort and limited mobility, but the results on the bloody wound were much more impressive. Blood hissed and sizzled as the tide of heat moved over it, then froze when the heat was shunted further outward, leaving the area slashed, burned, and now frozen.
It was enough to give even the powerful monster pause, then fill it with rage. Heads flailed out like whips, shooting a variety of attacks in a haphazard wave.
Even barely aimed, there were still enough mushrooms, purple beams, and grasping hairs flying in Dyani’s general direction, that she fled backward.
While none of the attacks hit their mark, constant Mana Jumps, a sizable number of Crystal Mana Bolts, and a single use of Feverchill Bloom, her most expensive skill, had left her mana dangerously low.
She wished for the hundredth time that she’d mastered stamina based skills. She was using stamina just by moving her body, but her reserves were still nearly full. Having access to another pool of energy to continue using skills would be really useful about now.
What she really needed was her friend Nodin’s level 1 talent, which gave him the ability to use mana and stamina interchangeably for mobility-type skills.
Unable to reshape reality to her whims quite yet, Dyani settled for retreating to one of the many alcoves. A bevy of attacks struck the nearby wall, and a single pulsating mushroom skipped across the floor, fortunately not exploding into poisonous gas. Dyani kicked it out as gently as she could manage and heard it burst as it hit the floor below.
She looked around for her mother before retreating further down the corridor, to avoid any other attacks. She didn’t see her, but that was actually a good sign. She’d seen Nymin extricate herself from the severed False Hydra head, which had disappeared into the whirlpool at the bottom of the chamber.
If she was still out of sight, that meant she was taking the time to recover from her injuries. Dyani hadn’t been able to assess the extent of the damage, it was unusual to see her intangible mother hurt at all, but couldn’t imagine it was too bad.
She still messaged Nymin for an update and got a response that said she was moderately hurt, but could recover with a bit of time and mana.
Worry assuaged, Dyani pulled out one of her Mana Filter Potions. She’d been surprised to learn that the straightforward mana potions used in stories weren’t real. According to the exasperated alchemist she’d asked about them, creating a potion that dumped a bunch of mana directly into someone’s mana pool was dead easy. The issue was that foreign, unprocessed mana was effectively poison, the equivalent to drinking a Mana Bolt.
A skilled alchemist could prepare a potion like that designed for the specific user, with mana that matched their spiritual signature, but those were expensive, time consuming to make, and had a limited shelf life.
Instead, the most common mana potions enhanced either the spirit’s ability to convert mana to the correct spiritual signature or the spirit’s rate of mana absorption. Once again, high end alchemists could prepare a potion that did both, but those were too expensive for Dyani’s taste, even with recent increase in wealth.
She’d mostly bought Mana Filter Potions, the kind that increased the rate of mana conversion, essentially granting a temporary version of Nymin’s ability to more quickly convert absorbed mana that she gained from her mana drain skill and talent-altered spirit and body. Mana Filter Potions were the least likely to cause spiritual injury, and were more useful in areas with amble ambient mana.
Mana Draw Potions, which increased the rate and reach of your mana absorption, were better suited to areas of lower ambient mana.
The only downside to taking one now was the potion cooldown. The spirit and body could only sustain one alchemical enhancement at a time, and had a brief period after each effect ended where subsequent potions would be useless. The exact cooldown was determined by a number of factors, including the level of the user, the level of the potion, and the user’s attributes related to the potions effect.
High vitality and toughness attributes would reduce the cooldown for healing potions, high mana regeneration would do the same for mana recovery potions, high strength for strength boosting potions, and so on.
The duration of the effect was also altered based on how much the potion was needed. If Dyani had taken this Mana Filter Potion at the beginning of the fight, the effect would’ve been stunted, but lasted much longer, since her body wasn’t expending it by absorbing and converting as much mana as it did when her pool was full.
When you boiled all those factors down, the average length of time between taking a potion and being able to take another was an hour, doubled for each level the potion was above your own.
Dyani drank the level 3 Mana Filter Potion, which tasted like mint and cheap booze. She would just have to risk being poisoned and unable to use the cleansing tonic for the next couple hours.
Her core, dark and silent, shivered as cool energy surrounded it. The trickle of her mana regeneration gradually increased, until it was four times as fast as it had been before. There was plenty of mana here, which she could take full advantage of now that she could convert it more quickly.