7.

The black spots in May’s eyes cleared. Pain did its best to be her foremost and primary thought, yet a more immediate issue fought tooth and nail for lordship.

‘Rankless,’ she whimpered.

That stupid, goddamn shrimp! Did she have a death wish?!

May rolled onto her belly with all the speed allowed to her. Right then, a vicious pang nearly forced her flat onto her face, but she held herself up with her elbows.

She hadn’t been able to reinforce her stomach before the kick landed. This was the result. How long did she lay there, motionless?

I’ve got to get up, May thought. If she was quick enough, she could still help.

But despite her best efforts, she couldn’t get off her knees. Her stomach was one thing. However, her brain was sloshing around in her skull as well. The fall had made her hit the back of her head. Hard.

She glanced backwards through bleary eyes. Part of her bandages lay strewn over the stone landing. May collected her breath and examined herself. Her shoulder was fine—it had been okay to begin with, and the moss had returned most of her movement—but there was an ugly, red smear running over the half-healed skin of her calf, which meant the wound must’ve opened again.

Next, her gaze turned to the gate. ‘I think the siren is messing with our heads,’ the shrimp had said. May couldn’t sense anything from the statue, but it didn’t matter. The thing was grinning like a monster clown from a horror movie. To think that thing had made her accuse the shrimp.

‘I’m going to burn down whatever you’re hiding inside,’ May said.

If May wasn’t imagining it, the siren’s grin widened.

May cast the siren from her mind. Taking a deep breath, she placed her good foot on the floor. When her other foot joined and planted, her knee buckled. The leg was about to give in, and so May dug deep, calling on a memory she kept close to her heart.

It was of her father. He was standing in front of the large windows in his study, looking out over the ground of the estate. She was standing behind him, a girl of only six years old, her hands still covered in grime and mud from the training she had done earlier that afternoon.

Father glanced at her hands once and shook his head.

‘If only you were born a boy…’

He’d murmured it underneath his breath, but she’d heard, nonetheless.

The tears she shed that night in her room were the fuel for the rage of a flame god exploding in her chest as the memory ended. May bit her lip so hard she tasted iron, but her leg stabilised. She grinned to herself.

‘You’ll see,’ she said, and pushed herself off the floor with a yell.

She stood tall and looming. For an instant. Her balance didn’t get the opportunity to strap its seat belt and staggered. However, though she whipped back and forth, swinging arms kept her upper body from crashing to the floor.

May didn’t fall.

Assured of her stance, she turned to the edge of the stone landing. Her blade lay in the middle of the path. It was inanimate. But if she listened closely, she thought she could hear it whisper. Inviting her to close the distance.

‘Give me a moment, partner.’

Her bad foot lifted and set down in front of her. She swallowed and mentally prepared herself. That was the easy part. Slowly, she increased the weight resting on the leg. The sides of her mouth pulled tight. She didn’t allow the hurt to set in and leapt, hopping forwards with her good leg. After touching down, she remained in place for a second, allowing the jolt going up the left side of her body to disperse.

She exhaled sharply through her mouth. This was nothing, she told herself. The suffering she owed that little girl in her room was a mountain compared to this tiny hill.

Her next step wasn’t easier, but it came quicker. The third was even faster. By the fifth, she was nearly walking normally and standing beside her blade. The leather scraped against her palm, and a calm washed over her as it always did when holding her sword.

May turned the blade over in her hand.

‘We’re jumping in,’ she informed it.

Flames hugged the metal to signal its agreement. There’s no way they were letting the shrimp get ripped to pieces without doing anything…especially not after what May said to her.

A scowl flashed over May’s features. She would apologise for that. Later. After they both made it out of here alive.

She limp-walked to the edge of the stone landing, checking her maura as she did. Seven out of fifty. She could probably enhance herself three times with that.

It would have to do—

An explosion made her jerk in place. Her head swivelled and locked onto the source. Somewhere to her side, the surface of the lake had erupted like a geyser. What the heck? She peered, half expecting a large monster to be in mid-flight.

The shadow shrouded in the burst of water was too tiny for that, however. If anything—May’s mind halted, and she watched the following sequence of events unfold without making so much as a peep.

The water fell before the shadow hidden within did, revealing the shrimp. The blood in the air surrounded her like a mob would a witch, so saying she was ‘badly hurt’ was underselling it. Mangled was more appropriate. But—

May shivered. That smile was not the expression of someone on the verge of death. She…she was enjoying this.

Four of the beasts blasted out the water. Their mouths were large enough to swallow half of the tiny girl’s forearm with one bite. They never got the chance.

One speared ahead of the others, going for the thigh, which one of the creatures had already taste-tested. Rankless simply lifted her foot, causing the beast to miss. Then, the shrimp did the same thing she had done to May and turned the corrupted nixie into a footstool. Kicking the beast back into the water, she speared through the space, launching through the other beasts and dissecting two of them in a single stroke before diving back into the water. Black blood rained down in a shower.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

May’s silence continued long after Rankless vanished. Her eyes roved over the body of water. If someone had told May an oil tanker had dropped some of its load, she would’ve believed them. An entire section of the lake was pure black.

Her attention locked onto a bullet dashing beneath the surface. Where it passed and crossed with one of the beasts, more oil spilled. May thought ‘one of’ because, though the waters were infected with the beasts, most of them shrunk away from the water demon hunting them and gave it a wide berth. It was solely the courageous few that pursued and lined up for the slaughter.

May chuckled. Going for a swim, huh.

‘Never worry about a shrimp entering the ocean,’ she said.

She let her back slouch, no longer seeing a need to fight the pain and want for relaxation, and turned away from the edge. May limped towards her discarded sheathe—she paused, and her head whipped back around. Pushing her chin forward, May rubbed her eyes. Had the bottom of the lake just moved?

Yes. Yes, it had indeed moved.

Her lungs leapt out of her chest.

‘Shrimp!’ she yelled. ‘Get out of—’

‘How naughty.’

May’s heart stopped beating. Her back and neck muscles froze. It was with the force required to displace a planet that she turned on her axis.

The statue on the gate stared directly into her eyes. Stone groaned as the hand stopped supporting the chin and came to rest at the side of the siren’s head.

‘Children should be well-behaved and keep their voice down,’ she whispered, her voice rough and hard.

Fingers snapping was the last thing May heard before she collapsed to her knees and tripped backwards into the lake.

8.

I stepped forwards and flew through the water. The nixie lacked the reaction time to dodge, and my dagger cleaved it in two. What number was that? Twenty? Thirty? My mind was struggling to keep up.

Adrenaline was doing its best. But there was only so much it could do. Moving hurt, the sting of the water on my open flesh was heavy, and I realised I had severely underestimated the amount of blood someone could lose my whole life.

I wasn’t solely speaking of myself either. The black blood in the lake was a murk that the creatures were using to hide. It worked, too.

My body enhancement was keeping me afloat, literally, and figuratively, but my maura had reached so low a level that I couldn’t spread my senses like in the beginning. I was barging through mostly blind.

Blind didn’t mean helpless, though. Between the high stakes practise and elemental advantage, my water striding had levelled.

Ability upgraded!

Water Striding I —> Water Striding II: through determined training, your mobility in the water has reached a higher height. Continue, and you’ll soon earn your title as a shrimp.

Though the wording irked me, the results spoke for themselves. The key, I’d learned, was to envelop my entire body in the sheen of water I used on my feet. I imagined water resistance worked much the same as air resistance, and the sheen somehow made me experience less of it. The one downside was the maura expenditure.

Status, I thought, and my eyes honed in on a single sentence on my screen.

Maura

5/50

Right. It had been at seven a few seconds ago.

I wanted nothing more than to stay and keep experimenting. However, no matter how scared I’d gotten the nixies, they’d kill me if I was still here when my maura ran out.

My body flipped and turned like a swimmer would, and I angled myself to where I had last seen the staircase. Almost as if to show a practical example of my last statement, the manoeuvre left me with a miniature whiplash. I literally slipped on the water as the sheen on one of my feet vanished and fell backwards. Luckily, there was no ground to hit my head on. That would’ve been a most idiotic death.

I righted myself and remained still. For a moment there I thought I heard a snicker.

Whatever. I sped towards the staircase. The steps were easy enough to spot because they went down all the way to the bottom of the lake. I wondered if there was something there. Why else would someone create a path to the bottom?

It wasn’t for me to find out, though. At least not now. My feet touched real, solid ground for the first time in what appeared to be a decade, and I rose out of the water, sheathing my dagger as I ascended.

Stopping in the middle of the flight sounded like a good way for one of the nixies to blast out of the water and drag me to my death. So, I spent my entire heart and soul on getting to the top, where the stairs connected to a landing.

At least I thought I did.

I blinked. Huh. I was looking up at the ceiling. What had happened? I swore I was walking…a delayed injection of pain near my head told me what I wanted to know. I’d collapsed.

Not good. I hadn’t covered any real distance and was still near the water. I had to get out of here…but my body didn’t respond. It was if my nerves had to fly to the other side of the world to reach my limbs.

Dammit, I thought. The blood loss had finally caught up to me. That’s when I realised another problem. One my subconscious had very pointedly ignored. Could May drag me through the dungeon with her injured leg? Better yet how was I going to recover my lost bodily fluids?

The moss, I thought as the light from the fluorescent plant shone in my retina. The moss could help me recover.

‘Well done, child,’ a voice said.

May. She was here!

‘Screw you…’ I said, heaving for breath. ‘…May.’

Should I survive this, I promised I would grow up to become taller than her.

‘I lost…too much blood. The moss…’

I couldn’t get out any further instructions. But I trusted May’s intelligence.

There was no response. Good. She had already left to get it.

Hopefully, she was quick enough because my consciousness was already starting to fade. There was a tiny detail keeping me from descending into the realm of shadow, though: the voice. It had come from below me. Near the water.

There was no need to lift my head to see since I was laying on an incline. My eyes found the source easily enough. Water streamed down the side of the middle-aged woman’s head in rivulets, who was staring up at me from the bottom of the staircase. “Woman” was a deceptive term. The face was definitely that of a female, yet there was not a single layer of physical skin.

Her hand supported her chin like the siren depicted on the gate did. When my gaze roved further over her body, I found a significant bust and lean waistline. That’s where the human-likeness ended. The rest of her was submerged in the lake—a giant shadow that curved and twisted right beneath the surface of the water. There was no end to it that I could see.

[Name: Siren of the Silent Lake - Grade: ??]

Questionmarks. My breaths were already coming in shallow gasps, so there was little breath for me to lose. Was she so strong she had no rank?

The siren’s upper body grew, and she climbed the stairs. I wanted to crawl away. My body stayed in place. Before I knew it, she was hovering over me. Her hands caressed my face.

A cold more frigid than ice spread from her touch, killing any feeling in my cheeks. From there it crept deeper inside, spreading to my skull and clawing its way down my throat to the rest of me.

Stop. I wanted to say. I gagged instead, choking.

Her head was no longer in front of me, I realised, but near my neck. The lack of feeling there was more than a mere shift in temperature. It was a hole. An expanding void.

When the siren returned to hover before me again, she had sprouted a set of fangs. Real ones. The minuscule amount of blood I had left curled around her teeth, dripping to the floor.

Foreign substance detected in system!

Anomaly name…unknown.

Searching second database…not found.

Searching third database…

Anomaly found! Name: Curse Mark of the Siren. You’ve been marked by the Siren of the Silent Lake. But for what purpose?

Status updating…

New Status: The Siren’s Accursed.

Visit the nearest doctor at the earliest convenience. Condition may worsen with time.

I know I should’ve been horrified. However, my thoughts were frozen in place.

‘A thank you for the performance,’ the siren whispered.

Her tone was charming, and I couldn’t wrench away my eyes from her pupils. There was an entire ocean hidden behind them, a world of unlimited potential, teeming with life—

The siren turned her head, shattering the illusion.

She smiled.

‘That’s too deep for you yet.’

Her hand lifted, and a mound of water rose from the lake. A person I recognised was set down next to me. Then, the siren started to sink.

Bubbles popped and rose where her head slowly disappeared beneath the surface. She was giggling.

‘Do your best, little wave. Our expectations are high.’

My vision went black before she was fully gone.