There are few notable threats within the Shore to match their lackluster cultivators. That being said, there are a handful. The region’s four shades, the Skyrending Falcon, and, finally, the Tide Serpent. Of them, the latter is perhaps of greatest interest. Some scholars have posited it may be a unique monster rather than any known species. This would grant it all sorts of rare powers and, hopefully, valuable parts when it finally reaches maturity for harvest by the nearby sects. -Advisor Yan Su of the Highfall Court
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The mighty whirlpool roiled and thrashed like a cauldron of flame-boiled death below us. From its center, Ocean qi spilled forth, unobstructed, which only spun the whirlpool more, drawing in water, wind, and sea life from every direction. Even though the beast itself was nowhere in sight, the water below was more than frightening enough.
“Is this a good time to mention that Yoru can’t swim?” Lin asked nervously, eyeing the waters below. I rolled my eyes.
“I doubt very much that even you could swim in that death trap,” I snapped back. The winds howled around us in an ever-increasing storm. I cast a wary eye back to shore. The reassuring gleam of the lighthouse was still in sight, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
The four of us drifted closer, three of us mounted on swords and the fourth kneeling on a cloud conjured by the fengmori. The glowing center of the whirlpool was almost too bright to look at without distance tapering its light. The waves ripped and roiled in a nauseating spiral ever downward to…somewhere.
“Be careful of gravity changes,” I warned. Lian and Kansi nodded in agreement, but Lin just looked at me with a confused frown, so I explained.
Ocean qi is an aspect of the Creation Cycle, much like land and sky. As with most elements of Creation, ocean governed one of the essential aspects of the physical world: specifically mass. The Ocean was vast and deep, and the sheer mass of the depths was one of the more common uses of Ocean qi. And what is the natural conclusion of techniques having to do with mass? Pushing and pulling other things. Ocean artists are especially gifted in moving their enemies on the battlefield by drawing on the nature of the tides. More advanced artists took this to another level by altering gravity in any direction.
“The Ocean Lord had such an intense gravitational pull that those in his employ had to be other Ocean Artists in order to resist his pull,” I explained quickly. “If they couldn’t hold up, they’d be crushed under the weight of his aura.”
I resisted the urge to sigh. The Ocean Lord and I were never the best of friends, but we were both Avatars of the same era. I used to play tricks on him by shifting the moon to mess with the tides, which, in turn, messed with his techniques. It was never anything serious, but I hadn’t realized that I’d miss his playfulness so much. He always took it in good humor.
The light below pulsed once, twice, then a third and fourth time. It almost was in some kind of pattern, but as soon as I thought I’d grasped what the pattern was, it shifted slightly, and I was forced to reconsider.
“Maybe the pulsing can tell us something,” Lian’s voice was almost too soft to hear over the roar of the ocean, but something about his tone was off. It was like he was half asleep and speaking while his mind was enthralled in a dream.
It hit me, and I tore my gaze from the pulsing to look at Kansi, whose eyes were also wide with realization. Lin and Lian were drifting downward, their eyes fixed on the pulsing orb of ocean qi.
“It’s pulling at more than just their bodies!” Kansi shouted. I nodded in agreement, and the two of us leapt into action. I crouched on Eclipse’s blade, diving downward. My hand latched onto Lin’s.
A terrible gust of wind forced me back several meters, but my grip was firm. I dragged Lin with me, his feet slipping off Razor Wind. The shock of suddenly being dangled over roiling waters with nothing beneath him pulled Lin out of his stupor and he yelped as his awareness returned.
“Don’t look at the light!” I shouted over the storm. He nodded frantically before calling Razor Wind back beneath his feet. I set him gently on the blade and we both began ascending, Kansi and Lian close behind.
Only, the Tide Serpent was not about to let its prey go so easily. With a spray of salty water that reached higher than the Saikan Lighthouse, an enormous maw rose from the depths. Teeth as tall as me began to close around us.
“Fly!” I shouted, pouring a healthy dose of qi into Eclipse and leaning hard to the left to dart around the closing teeth. There was only barely enough time to glance around at the serpent’s mouth before I squeezed through the cracks and escaped to the maelstrom outside.
There, we could see exactly what we were dealing with…or, at least, part of it. The serpentine body rose from the depths in a thick column, but most of it disappeared beneath the waves. However, the part we did see was more than enough. Terrible teeth with large forward fangs snarled at us under a crown of silver and green spines that dripped with water. The worst part was its eyes. They were the same deep, pulsating blue that had nearly drawn us down, and I had no doubt that they would be just as mesmerizing if I stared too long.
“It’s huge!” Kansi shouted. “How on earth did one Iron artist take this thing down all on her own?!” I had a sinking suspicion I knew how, and I didn’t like it.
“Did you see it’s throat?” I asked.
“It’s throat?! Are you nuts? I was a little busy looking at the teeth that were about to kill us!” she snapped back.
“There was a blackened scar back there,” I explained. “I think Shen Reixin knew she couldn’t beat it, so she wreathed herself in void qi and tried to damage it from inside.”
The Tide Serpent reared back its head and lunged forward, snapping at me. I dove, drawing my bow and letting instinct and habit guide Eclipse as I focused my attention on the creature itself.
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It must have gotten bigger since Shen Reixin took it down, I thought. As it was now, the Tide Serpent was steeped in enough Ocean qi that it might have been Gold…three Irons and an injured Silver would be in for quite the fight, but a single Iron would never stand a chance.
I quickly drew an arrow back on the string of my bow, infusing it with the purest moonlight I could muster. The last thing I needed was to handicap myself by blocking Flash Forward and Flash Back at this point. Shining silver coated the end of my arrow, and I released it. It sprang forward, slamming into the serpent’s scales…and glanced off leaving only a scratch against the scale’s shining surface.
Kansi rushed in to strike at a discoloration in the Serpent’s scales. It whipped its head around, snapping at the artist before she could get close, but that didn’t stop Lin from diving at the same point while the monster was busy. His sword did little more than my arrow, leaving a long scratch across the scales.
“Are the scales made of diamonds or something?” Kansi shouted.
“There has to be a weak point!” Lian answered. “No monster is invincible.”
“You’ve never met the Valley Lord, then!” I answered. Kansi said something that was probably agreement, but it was lost to the wind. The Valley Lord was the bane of Pearlescent Valley, a monster so tough that even the Ascendents couldn’t defeat it.
But, the Tide Serpent was nowhere near that level. It was small by comparison, which meant that Lian should have been right. There had to be somewhere on the beast that we could strike…preferably somewhere that didn’t involve being in the creature’s mouth.
I examined the creature while Lin and Kansi darted around it. It was big and much of its body was covered in tough scales. Being anywhere near its head would be dangerous, given the teeth and the spines that jutted from the back of its head, and those would be no easier to pierce than the rest of its scaley hide. That said, its eyes were less defended than the rest, as with most living creatures, but even looking at them long enough to gauge that made my head swim. They’d be impossible to strike safely.
Was brute force really the answer? If we could strike one scale until it cracked, could we create our own weak point?
“Lian!” I shouted. “Can you enhance our strength like you did against Shen Tori?”
“Of course! What kind of Life artist would be limited to one enhancement per day?” He angled his cloud down and tapped me on the shoulder. Green qi filled me and my body was invigorated.
“Help the others when they come up for it!” I instructed. He nodded, and I spun off downward, streaking between the waves and the monster to where the others were already doing their best to injure our foe. “Lin! Kansi! Strike the point I’m going to mark!” I shouted. “Get Lian to enhance your strength first, then strike with everything you have!”
Lin and Razor Wind immediately disengaged from the Serpent, skimming along the edge of the whirlpool until they were out of harm’s way. As he escaped, I took his place distracting the monster. It snapped at me, and I dove beneath its head before spinning around by its eyes, careful not to look at them.
“You’re going to have to do better than that, you overgrown garden snake!” Then I looped around its head and dove straight down. It snapped at me again, straightening its neck just as I slipped beneath its grasp.
An arrow was on my string. My target was in my sights. Void cracked and sizzled along the shaft, infusing the arrowhead to inflict the deepest wound I could. Before the arrow could snap under the strain, I released it. It streaked forward, void trailing off of it like a black comet in the storm. Before it even struck its mark, I switched my tactics, this time calling on the moonlight in my core to create crescent blades that I launched at the same point. Silver streaked across the distance like falling stars before the arrow and the qi disks all slammed into the Tide Serpent’s throat, just beneath its head.
The light from my attack had not even faded before Lin was streaking towards the same point. His sword slammed into the same scales that I’d struck, and I heard a thunderous CRACK as the Life qi that infused him lent incredible force to the blow. Finally, Kansi’s blow landed. The Silver artist stood the best chance of breaking through. I watched with bated breath as blades of wind streaked ahead of her, heralding her true blow, which slammed straight into the scales, shattering them completely.
The Tide Serpent thrashed as Kansi’s blade reached the soft flesh beneath its scales. Each of us were forced to retreat before the flailing monster threw us into the churning whirlpool around us.
“Do you think that did it?” Kansi asked.
The monstrous snake dove beneath the waves, sending a massive wave of water splashing up to us. We tried to dodge, but it was too big. I was soaked, Lin was nearly knocked off Razor Wind, and Lian ended up with a large strip of kelp on his head. It would have been funny, if the situation hadn’t been so dire.
The seas did not stop roiling beneath us. The whirlpool grew even more frenzied, the water spinning even faster towards the center. Without warning, an enormous column of spinning water shot out of the waves beneath us.
“Watch out!” Kansi shouted, but it was too late.
I was swallowed by the water and thrown around by the nauseating spiral current. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I didn’t know which way was up. I clung to Eclipse and my bow, knowing full well that if I lost either one, it would mean my sudden and unceremonious death.
In the next instant, I was flung from the column. The world spun all around me, and I desperately tried to right myself before I hit the waves, but I couldn’t.
“I’ve got you!” Lin shouted. A hand latched onto my collar, and my descent slowed. With trembling hands, I got Eclipse back underneath me, only for a mass of scales and spines to appear beside us. The Serpent flung its head into us. On instinct, I pushed Lin behind me, only to take the full force of the blow myself. The force pushed me back into Lin, and together, we tumbled out of the sky.
“Razor Wind! Eclipse!” I shouted. The blades flashed and crossed, providing a small and unsteady platform that caught us only inches from the water.
“Yoru, are you okay?” Lin asked. I didn’t know. The blow had been so fast, that I hadn’t had the time to register where the spines had pierced me. Looking down, I was shocked. Several puncture wounds were staining my clothes black, but my body hadn’t quite caught up with the pain that should have been radiating from each wound.
Or maybe…
“Spines…poison…” I muttered, my words coming far more slurred than I’d hoped. Lin didn’t have time to react. Instead, he pulled me over his shoulder and commanded Razor Wind to climb.
“We need to retreat,” he said to the others. “Yoru is hurt. He says the damn thing has poisoned spines.” Immediately, Lian guided his cloud closer. He reached a hand into his jacket and pulled out a small bottle full of medicinal pills. He tossed one to Lin who gave it to me. The pain began to throb as the poison was forced back, slowly…too slowly.
Kansi glanced at waves where the Serpent was preparing another strike. “Meet at the Lighthouse. We’ll regroup and pool what we’ve learned into a strategy.”
I nodded and pulled free of Lin’s grasp, falling onto Eclipse with a pained grunt. He would need to focus on flying rather than holding me, and I wasn’t hurt enough that I couldn’t make my own way back.
As we retreated towards the light, I could feel the gaze of the Tide Serpent on our backs. With every minute that passed, the churning waves sounded more and more like laughter following us back to shore.