How the hell did I miss seeing this monster during the preliminary fights? I thought while we waited for Instructor Rainfist to signal the beginning of the match. I think I remember a few people just conceding without fighting. Was that her matches?
The polar worm stretched its upper torso towards me, its clawed legs stroking the air like it was trying to drag itself forward without actually touching the ground. The creature’s maw yawned open again, the mandibles on the end of each of its jaws flexing menacingly while the teeth lining its mouth twitched in their fleshy gums.
It’s going to try and bite you. That thing has the attitude of something that wants to swallow me whole. If it tries that shit though, I’m not going to hesitate to use the entropy imbuing to burn right through the side of it, and damn the consequences, I thought while settling myself into a wide-legged stance.
A moment later, the brazen note of Rainfist’s signal horn echoed through the arena, and the match began with a roar.
The polar worm lunged forward through the air, its body slamming down into the sand and sending it spraying in all directions while the fog billowing off of its clearly chilled body thickened. Laid down like this, the creature stood about as tall as my shoulder. It raced towards me, body weaving from side to side in a sinuous fashion as its myriad legs thrashed the sandy bottom of the arena furiously.
Much like the deep hunter, this creature moved quickly for its size. But unlike the deep hunter, it was far harder to dodge the creature’s sinuous movement.
I’d thought ahead this time and left my shoes with the girls, allowing my legs to shift and flow as well as my feet to morph to the large, flat pads of a kangaroo just as the creature reached me.
Bracing, I mirrored the jump that Jane had done earlier that day in an effort to avoid me. A touch of earth magic hardened the sand under my feet to survive the impact and I was flying upwards in an arc over the creature.
I hate being stuck in midair; I growled to myself, remembering the last time I’d tried this in a match with Cerebaton. It’d not ended well, and I’d sworn not to try it again, but I needed to find out if this was a way to evade the beast.
The polar worm hissed angrily, sliding to a stop in the sand and scrabbling into a turn. Its tiny eyes searched for me, but I was still sailing towards its tail end, which terminated in a wicked spike of chitin that I was sure I wanted nothing to do with.
Instead, I focused on the worm itself and prepared the spell I needed. Since I wasn’t actually in contact with the ground, it was far more difficult to cast the earth magic, but it still worked.
Just as the polar worm spotted me and began to skitter forward once more, a spur of hardened sandstone jammed up from the ground and into the underside of the polar worm.
The creature screeched in anger at the attack, a sound that was echoed by the screech of the spike along its carapace as the sharp tip of the spike was unable to find purchase in the thick armor, instead just scraping along it before the weight of the beast snapped it off.
Landing about halfway down the creature’s length and around ten feet to one side, I threw myself into a forward leap rather than an arching one, ducking under the thick spike of its tail as the creature tried to thrash its bottom into my way.
“Nimble one, aren’t you?” Josephine’s voice was as refined as her dress when she spoke.
I had landed about a dozen feet from her end of the arena. I didn’t respond, instead coming around to face the polar worm and study it again.
Last time I fought something heavily armored, I just had to find the chinks in the armor. But while the deep hunter had armor that looked thicker, this one is far more comprehensive. Can I crack this nut?
Bouncing from foot to foot—I only realized after a second or two that I was mirroring Jane’s anxious habit—I readied myself for the charging beast as it finished doubling over itself and finally got back to me.
My right arm flowed and bent backwards, elbow reversing as my right fist fused into a hard knob of bone.
“Gyrallia, fog!” Josephine barked as the creature closed within ten feet of me.
Rather than continuing its headlong charge at me, the polar worm dug its many feet into the sand and began to decelerate while hunching its many shoulders. This caused the shell segments to puff out and make the creature look larger for a moment before the creeping mist that had been clinging to it abruptly thickened.
After less than a second, the creature had vanished into a cloud of fog and I growled in frustration. There was no safe way for me to approach that, and from the chill I could feel emanating from the thick bank of clouds, I could tell that it was cold enough inside that it was guaranteed to sap my strength if I was foolish enough to enter that fog bank as it rolled closer.
A stirring in the wall of clouds triggered my instincts, and I threw myself to one side just in time to evade the creature’s lunge.
The polar worm emerged from the fog bank like a striking snake, its four jaws spread wide and snapping down like an organic bear-trap on the location I had just been standing.
I twisted during my evasion, turning to lash out with my prepared mantis-shrimp club. The blow caught the creature on the side of its shell, glancing off with another shriek of stressed chitin but failing to crack the hard shell.
Landing on one foot, I used the coiled power of my shifted legs to launch myself backwards, away from the polar worm as it lashed towards me, trying to snatch me up with its hooked mandibles.
“If you forfeit, then I won’t have Gyrallia hurt you,” Josephine said offhandedly as I skipped past her. The wolf kin did not even react to how close I and her pet monster were to her. She stood there with her hands behind her back and waited patiently.
I ignored her words, studying the creature’s movement as it scampered after me. The large plates of the monster’s carapace flexed again and another burst of fog emerged from the spaces in between them.
Does it have some kind of chilling organ under there that is making it foggy? Or is its skin icy and exposing more of it to the air is causing a condensation reaction? I wondered while continuing to skirt the fog cloud.
Gyrallia only followed me for another ten feet before it ducked back into its fog bank and vanished once more like a train in the night.
I could hear the scrabble of its clawed feet on the sand over the shouting of the crowd, but only just barely. I could faintly hear the girls shouting something encouraging from behind me as well, but I focused my attention on the fog bank and trying to figure out where the next attack would come from. While I waited, I shifted my left arm into another of the punching bone clubs.
In mantis-shrimp we trust. Little rave-attending aquatic murder-bugs that they are, I thought while juking from side to side, trying to bait out the lunge I knew was coming.
Another brief surge in the thick white fog occurred, and I threw myself aside, firing off with a one-two combination from my shifted hands as I rolled away. The blows clacked hard against the polar worm’s armor and just bounced off for the most part. One of the punches caught the base of a leg and the creature hissed in pain, wriggling the injured limb slightly before chasing me once more.
I baited out two more attacks before the polar worm wised up. Each time, I aimed for leg joints and the weaker spots between carapace plates. The spots between plates resisted every blow, refusing to give despite several square hits. Going for its legs slowed the creature, but only for a moment.
I need something harder. The blows are striking, it’s not evading them. But I need to break through that armor. Unless I want to try to spike its eyes or something, I thought furiously while I jigged back and forth.
A ripple in the fog bank warned me of the attack and I threw myself to the left once more. This time, though, Gyrallia didn’t emerge from the fog like it had before. At least, not where I thought it had been.
Instead, the polar worm’s lunge struck out from where I was dodging to rather than where I was trying to escape from. I saw the faintest hint of its spiked tail in the fog and realized that the monster had caught on to my tactics and used them against me.
“Fuck!” I had time to swear as the creature lunged forward with its mouth open, clearly planning to snatch me up and drag me into its drooling mouth. The blast of cold from its mouth was enough that I felt the hairs in my nostrils freeze.
Time seemed to slow as my brain fought furiously with what I could do in order to evade the attack. I knew that if it got hold of me, I’d be going face-first down that gullet and while I doubted it could kill me if I remained conscious for the trip, I didn’t want to risk getting cut up on the way down.
My mind spun back along the description of the Shape-Shifting power that had been my bread and butter since day one in this strange world. It had grown since then, going from five pounds of mass that I could mold to nearly three hundred with the boosts I’d taken.
Three hundred pounds of mass I can add… I thought, but my mind insisted that I was missing something and brought up the description of the power in my head, highlighting one phrase in particular: may be added, removed, or modified.
The idea locked in immediately and I put it to use just as quickly.
I couldn’t get both of my strikes shifted, but my left punch crashed into the creature’s mandible as its mouth reached me.
The blow was powerful, but my body weighed enough that it normally wasn’t enough to do much other than jostle me. Along with changing my muscles, tendons, and bones to handle the punishment and the motion, my body naturally adopted the position I needed to brace in order to not be driven off balance by my own swings.
But that was normally.
As soon as the blow landed, I reached inside with Shape-Shifting and removed mass. My body began to shrink immediately, though I kept my left arm the same shape and size as it had been, allowing the lightning fast punch to propel my far smaller body away.
Landing on the sand, I sprawled into a roll as the polar worm’s jaws snapped shut where I had been a moment before. I didn’t hesitate, shrinking my left arm down in size to match my current body before slithering across the icy sand.
Fuck! Kass wasn’t kidding about how it sucks being cold-blooded! I thought furiously while my serpentine lower half raced over the sand. This is bloody cold!
I was maybe five feet long and the entire world looked absolutely enormous to me as I raced over a desert of icy sand, skirting wide around the billowing cloud of fog.
The ground shook under me as Gyrallia came about, its many pointed legs hammering along as it pursued my much smaller form.
“Oh my gods! He’s CUTE!” I heard Kassandra squeal, and I wished that I could spare the energy to glare at my redheaded lover, but I had to focus to keep the unique muscle action of a snake’s tail working while I slithered my escape from the chasing monster.
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I’d taken the form of a lamia, but scaled way down. I probably only weighed about thirty pounds, was maybe six feet long, and my waist was only a couple of inches across. Unfortunately, I’d left behind my pants and had to slither out of my shirt in my mad dash to get distance from the polar worm.
I imagine this must be what a baby lamia looks like, I thought as I thrashed over the sand. I’m just glad I went with this in the split-second decision I had, rather than trying to figure out wings. Need to try that later. Forgetting that I could just remove mass as well as add it was dumb, and I should have taught myself to fly ages ago.
A change in the pitch rumbling through the ground to me was a warning I would have been foolish to ignore. I shifted direction first away from the fog bank and then back towards it, just in time for Gyrallia to crash down on the outside, corralling me towards the fog.
Fuck! Okay, time to try something stupid, I thought and pushed on the Shape-Shifting again while throwing myself into the bank of white mist.
My body blew outwards, swelling in size and mass once more, fur sprouting from my skin while my head lengthened into a long muzzle. The frigid mist enveloped me and I lost all sense of sight in the swirling cloud. Frost formed on my fur immediately, but my muscles didn’t seize, so I called it good.
Something large, like a park-bench welling out of the fog, lurched in front of me and I leaped upwards to avoid Gyrallia’s body where it had remained hidden in the fog. Slashing out with the claws on the end of my fingers, I felt the sharp scraping throughout my whole body and up into my teeth as they squealed over the hardened chitin like nails on a chalkboard.
A bellowing roar from Gyrallia told me the monster was turning back my way, so I let myself fall on the other side of its long body and loped in the direction I expected Josephine to be, as Gyrallia’s head was between me and my girls at the moment.
Bursting from the chilling fog, I shook off a cloud of snowy crystals as I went. I was gratified to see Josephine’s eyes widen in surprise as I bounded free of the cloud.
While people of this world were used to animal features on each other, I hadn’t known for sure if there was something like a werewolf here. But the reminder of the ability to remove mass had also covered that I could do full half-forms.
My fur was already an icy white, having pulled from the arctic wolf to endure the chill of the fog. I’d have considered keeping it small and going for a fox, but I wasn’t entirely sure I could do a full animal shift just yet.
One more thing that I’ve been slacking on experimenting with, I thought with a growl. I need to stop thinking that bigger is better. I mean, the volcano snail already saved my ass.
Skidding in the sand, I came around as Gyrallia emerged from the fog cloud at my rear, trailing more fog from its open mouth as it snapped and snarled at me.
“Hurry up and finish this already,” Josephine sighed explosively as I slid to a stop with my back to her.
Lippy one, aren’t you? I thought before kicking off, making a point to kick up a spray of sand behind me to pepper the regal young woman.
Josephine shrieked and sputtered as the icy sand rained down on her for a moment. I reversed the motion I did earlier to her. Instead, digging my foot into the loose, icy sand and kicking it towards Gyrallia, but urging the particulates into the shape of small stone blades.
I guess the polar worm was smart or sensitive enough to recognize a potential magical attack, because it slammed its mouth shut and let the sharp stone blades rattle off the armored carapace of its jaws.
“Gyrallia, stop playing with your prey. I’m bored with this!” barked Josephine, her regal tone gone now. Instead, her voice was high with anger.
Fine, let’s end this, I thought, my wolfish ears pricking up and tail flicking back and forth before I lunged to one side, dodging out and around the polar worm and leading it away from its summoner. I needed every bit of help I could get to make my new idea work, and having the polar worm out of Josephine’s line of sight would help.
Moving at a loping sprint, I raced around the edge of the fog bank on all fours, skidding to a stop just on the other side of the cloud, which was beginning to dissipate in the early morning light.
Gyrallia was right behind me, snarling as its many legs thundered over the sand. The polar worm was largely untouched from our fight, and while I’d avoided injury so far, I didn’t know how long that would continue.
Okay, time to try out this one. I’d been wanting to experiment more before I used it in a fight, but we will see, I thought, clenching and unclenching my right hand.
A moment of focus and my body flowed. My right arm shifted and returned again to the same hunched and locked-in club shape of the mantis shrimp, but the knob of bone that replaced my hand was different. Rather than being a smooth club of chitin and other additives, now ridges protruded from it at regular intervals. I had to drop some of my muscle mass as well to account for densities and weights, but thankfully the Shape-Shifting power worked that part out automatically.
Goethite, let’s see how you do, I thought with a canine grin, since I still kept mostly shifted into the werewolf form to protect myself from the cold.
The polar worm feinted one way, then the other, before lunging forward to engulf me once more. I caught both feints and then launched myself out of the way, striking out with the dactyl club that had replaced my right arm and driving the newly-enhanced weapon into Gyrallia’s head as it passed by.
While researching methods to make ends meet and improve my lot back on Earth, I’d done a lot of research on biominerals. One had stuck in my mind as interesting, but ultimately useless as it was only found in a specific animal’s teeth, and I still refused to bite anyone while in a shifted form.
I’d forgotten to think outside the box until now, and remember that I could modify things at will and adding said teeth to the outside of something was simple enough. The entire process was one that I’d over-thought, and the reminder that sometimes smaller was better got me back onto the idea.
The crack of breaking chitin heralded Gyrallia’s scream of pain. I started to shout in excitement when one of the creature’s thrashing legs caught me in the chest and sent me flying.
I landed in a heap on the icy sand as Gyrallia thrashed for a moment before turning towards me with murder in its eyes. The long, icy monster roared and threw itself at me with abandon.
The next several seconds were snapshots of terror and reflexes. Everything I’d trained with Cerebaton flooded back as I ducked, dodged, jinked, and wove. My matches with Valda had helped me boost my boxing skills, and after the first three seconds, I had the chance to shift my left arm over into another dactyl club.
I punched, parried, jabbed, and kicked. My feet had short claws on them as well, but they didn’t do as much damage as the enhanced dactyl clubs. The thousands of tiny needle-like teeth, reinforced with the thin tubes of the naturally crafted biomineral, provided just enough to catch on the smooth chitin of the polar worm that it cracked like glass under the ferocious pressure I put into it.
I shattered three of the legs on the front half of Gyrallia, as well as nearly a dozen armored plates, before I was able to get out from under it. One parting shot caught the base of its bottom left jaw and that chitin plate cracked and broke as well.
Gyrallia was howling in pain, thrashing furiously and sending icy gouts of blood out over the sand that froze solid as soon as they hit the floor of the arena.
I darted in, aiming for the base of its many legs again and cracked shells on four more legs before dodging backwards. The animal, previously quick and dangerous, was now reduced to lumbering after me as the pain of movement hurt the other legs it had as well.
“Call the match,” I barked at Rainfist, bouncing from foot to foot.
A brief smear of the creature’s blue blood chilled my right dactyl club. Cold enough that I could feel it through the bone and chitin of the shift.
Need to remember to wipe that off on the sand before I shift back, I reminded myself while I waited for a response from the instructor.
“Lady Josephine, do you wish to yield? Gyrallia is injured, while Liam is not,” Rainfist called to my opponent, and I held myself back for a moment to see what she would say even as Gyrallia limped towards me, its many jaws working angrily.
“I don’t see why my companion should be injured further,” Josephine called in return, her voice tight with suppressed anger. “Fine. Yield. You got lucky on this one.”
Relaxing, I took several steps back and knelt to wipe the icy blue blood off my dactyl club. The fight had carried us back towards my girls, and I was only a dozen feet away from them now.
Gyrallia roared in anger and threw itself at me, clearly not accepting its summoner’s surrender.
I was already on a knee and not balanced to evade in time as the polar worm plunged towards me. It was moving far faster than I had expected, and blood rained from its injuries. If I dodged, though, I was sure the monster would continue forward and plow into my girls.
Shouts rose up all around me, a cacophony of anger, fear, and noise. But it was nothing to the fact that I knew I needed to do something to protect my charges.
Darting a glance past the creature, I saw a cruel smile on Josephine’s face as she watched her summon continue its charge. I knew how fast summoners could dismiss their creatures, but she was simply letting it continue.
Even if it doesn’t slam into the girls, it getting close could injure Kass. Fuck it, I tried playing nice and both of them aren’t listening.
A snap moment of focus and I felt a ripple of energy plow up and out of my core. The mana that I had quickly drained away as I channeled the effect I wanted into the hundreds of tiny teeth on the surface of my right dactyl club.
I surged forward and thrust out, putting my shoulder and hips into the snap punch that fired the hit off at speeds more similar to a gunshot rather than a punch.
The crunch of breaking chitin came, but also there came a loud hissing noise as the entropic energy enshrouding my right fist burned a hole right through Gyrallia’s jaw. The piece of chitin and all the underlying tissue tore free like so much wet toilet paper. The blow continued into the creature’s mouth, leaving a smoking trail behind it where the energy devoured its flesh and left a slush of dissolving tissue in its wake.
My mana pool bottomed out just as my fist impacted with the soft palate at the back of the creature’s throat. I felt something crack under it and then the polar worm’s weight hit me, carrying me back towards my girls.
As we went past, I realized that Shayla—my lovely and shy moth girl, bless her heart—had apparently seen the threat for what it was and acted. She’d grabbed Kassandra, who looked like she’d gone for her spell rod, and dragged the lamia away from the fight. Rieka had been on the other side of them, along with Jane, and were bowled over out of the way by the larger moth woman in the process.
A moment later we slammed into the wall of the arena, the pained howling of Gyrallia echoing in my ears as I drove my unenhanced left dactyl club into the side of Gyrallia’s head right over where it’s eye was.
I imagine that there was a splut noise, as the compressed air from my club slamming down over its hard eye socket ruptured the sensitive organ, but I was more focused on the screaming pain of the creature’s toothed maw’s digging into my shoulders and hips as the remaining jaws closed over me.
Retracting my right dactyl club, I slammed a second blow into Gyrallia’s soft palate, and this time the crunch was far more pronounced as the worm stiffened, then slumped to the ground while a gush of freezing liquid engulfed my arm, carrying me with it.
I only had to suffer the crushing weight of the summoned monster on top of me for a second before it faded in a sparkle of light.
“Liam!” I could hear Kassandra’s frantic yelling now, though my head was ringing from the sudden ambush of Gyrallia after the fight was called. There was even more yelling all around the ring, and the flash of gray silk in the stands drew my attention to where the queen was standing, glaring down the tiers at another woman who had red hair that was pointedly ignoring the queen to shout at Josephine, who just looked annoyed.
Another sudden blast of icy sensation over my body made me yelp in surprise, and I nearly lashed out with one of my dactyl clubs before I realized my ‘attacker’ was Kassandra, her healing magic sinking into my body.
“Liam, it’s going to be okay,” she demanded from a few feet away, her hand shaking as she steadied her spell rod.
“He’ll be fine, Kass,” Shayla reassured the smaller woman, straddling her tail from behind and pulling Kassandra back into herself. The sight of Kassandra with her head wedged between Shayla’s boobs was cute enough that it broke me from my pained fugue.
I tried to speak to reassure her, but the barking noise reminded me that I was still shifted into the form of a werewolf with arms stolen from a mantis shrimp.
Gods, I must look so weird right now, I thought with a hazy chuckle, flexing Shape-Shifting to begin reversing the shift.
The sharp increase in the icy sensation against my skin made me wince, and I snarled in sudden pain.
“I know it hurts, Liam. I’ll get you fixed up as soon as I can,” Kassandra begged, casting another spell that sent a jet of icy water over my arms. It felt cold on most of my arms, but where the pale blue blood had been, the jet felt warm.
Frostbite? From its blood? Good lord… I thought while gritting my teeth.
Movement on the other side of the arena drew my attention to Josephine, who was storming off the sands while her trio of guards stood by the door, all three of them pale.
“Kass, you can’t get any closer to him,” Shayla was chastising my little wonder-noodle, and I realized that she wasn’t just hugging Kassandra to keep her from freaking out. My moth girl was actually keeping the dwarf lamia from approaching me, which was a good thing, given how cold I felt right now.
“Rest, Liam. I’ll deal with this,” Rieka snarled, and I shot my princess a pained smile before shaking my head.
“Don’t… go too far. Gotta keep an eye… on you all still,” I wheezed. A moment later, I felt a pop in my chest as a rib that Gyrallia’s charge had broken realigned.
Rieka said something, but I missed what it was as the edges of my vision flared and a message scrolled over it.
Assist your contracted companions, Rieka Coldeye, Kassandra Silverscale, Shayla Valo, and Jane Carsan, by winning the competition and impressing Queen Gemma Coldeye.
Reward - 2000 SP
COMPLETED