Station Bay - the pond
Cuppy’s ears were ringing as he lay in a flooded soft crater of mud in the banks. His fingers twitched a little as his vision faded back in from waves of gray, and he turned over from his side to lay on his back and look up at the sun. It was muted, partially obscured behind a haze of unnatural fog. The drone in his eardrums was only pierced by the bestial cries of the monster who had invaded his and Richie’s water supply. That haunting wail brought the boy back to his senses, and he sat up, cradling his aching head. He looked out over the fog-shrouded pond, scanning for the dark outline of the swift marine creature.
“Lucky shot.” he grumbled, squeezing water from his cloak sleeves as he stood. “Frey, are you ok?” he called out over the expanse, hoping to hear a positive answer back.
They had already lost each other in the fog, which had extended its disorienting range over the banks and forest trails as well, separating them effortlessly in tandem with the monster’s sneak attacks.
Freyja’s ears perked up, wherever she was - she couldn’t quite tell. She seemed to be perched on one of many jagged rocks lining the slope of a short cliff or ledge somewhere near the pond, but with the mist becoming thicker than syrup, it was impossible to say for sure how close or remote the water was. She stood in her human form and carefully paced the grounds, taking short, measured steps to avoid tripping over or into anything. She couldn’t place where Cuppy’s voice was coming from. It seemed to be distant and echoey, ricocheting its acoustics randomly all around her. At times it seemed she should go one way, and at others, in the opposite direction. Her senses swam, and her head began to feel heavy. The fog was thick and pressing, exuding a physical pressure on her it seemed, like the crushing depths of the deep sea. That bleak sensation was amplified moments later by another phantom howl from the murk - that walrus-like thing, no doubt. Her carryover animal instincts from her wolfen state were gnawing on her nerves, telling her to watch her back. The aches from her childhood flared up again, and she clutched a hand to the small of her back with an annoyed grimace. No matter how deeply she peered into the fog, even her enhanced eyesight couldn’t breach it to see clearly. Perhaps if she turned into a wolf again, however, that would give her the optic advantage she needed.
Freyja grit her teeth and fell to all fours, squatting and growling as the growing pains of her shifting muscle and sprouting tufts of fur grated on her. The yellow rings around her otherwise pure blue eyes began to focus and tighten, their nocturnal glow brightening as they took on the characteristics of canine night vision. However, as they changed, and as her ears began to point and grow, both senses were flooded with something like tremendous crackling static. Her eyes felt like they were burning in chlorine, and her ears felt like jet engines were booming right outside them. Freyja stumbled backward, frothing at the mouth as her half-formed wolf snout regressed into a human mold. It was this damn fog, it was blocking out her senses in human form, but with her ascension into heightened instincts that her wolf transformation brought, it was completely unbearable.
She wasn’t focused on her sensory overload for long before a shape like a cannonball rocketed out of the mist. Working in shotgun bursts, her wolf instincts screamed at her to dodge, and she only barely sprang out of the way of the worst of the impact as a great ball of compressed water the size of a large medicine ball crashed into the rocks. The splash grazed her side, instantly setting her skin red and irritated as if stung by bees, striking flesh with the potency of a giant pressure washer. The rocks were scattered away from each other, drawing long streaks in the mud where the liquid bomb had gone off. The rush of air and debris was enough to send Freyja tumbling head over heels as if struck and sent flying by a high-velocity vehicular impact.
She forced one eye open against the flying grit to barely glimpse the silky broad shape half-submerged at the pond’s edge. Three foot walrus tusks stuck out as an eerie yellow-white, like the color and texture of aged human bones. The lumpy face framed glowing red eyes that looked hungry to Freyja.
Taking to her feet again, Freyja called out back to Cuppy, whom she hoped was on the other side of the pond. “Stay away from the pond’s edges!”
Cuppy drew a string from his thumb and bit it free, drawing it closed tight around his right arm, which was swollen and bruised, cutting off the blood supply to avert further swelling that would impede his movements. He wasn’t sure if the arm was broken or not, but if it wasn’t, it was fairly close. He waved a hand against the fog, laying a web of identical, fine-tuned strings to criss cross the pond and try to sense any coming vibrations. The waters were still until they suddenly weren’t, and a twang alerted Cuppy to the creature breaching the surface again.
Cuppy whipped out his collapsible fishing pole and cast the hook and line, with its forty pound weighted float ball, over the bank in the direction of the thing. The line drew taut as something instantly began to tug on the other end, and Cuppy hunkered down, gritting his teeth and his face turning red with strain as his feet were dragged forward through the mud. His right arm screamed whenever he tried to close his fingers on that hand around the rod, so he forced them together with a few newly sprouted strings that had shot out of the back of his palm like hair on time lapse video. His left hand he reserved for the reel. Luckily, it was his dominant hand anyway, but it seemed inconsequential. No matter how hard he pulled and tried to reel in his catch, the brute wouldn’t budge. The pole bent sharply in a dangerous arc that threatened to snap at any second. Cuppy was being pulled slowly but surely toward the water’s edge.
“He’s a big’un!” Cuppy grunted.
Freyja darted through the fog to her left, trying to circle the body of water back to Cuppy’s side. Lighting her ten fingers like signal flares, she cast their fiery red glow in rapid, flying spurts like silent firecrackers to illuminate the gloom around her and try to signal Cuppy to regroup. She sensed tension at her shoulder, and chopped an arm outward, sending a blade-like wave of red fire sailing partially over the pond’s surface. Where it parted the fog, Freyja saw that her flame had illuminated Cuppy’s fishing line, wrapped around a waterlogged tree stump being drawn into a swirling eddy, like those created by underwater sinkholes.
She gasped in that moment, realizing that they were not dealing with a random wild animal - this thing had cunning and intelligence, and it had just outsmarted both of them.
Feeling hot breath on the back of her neck, Freyja also realized that she had jumped to conclusions in assuming this beast would stay within the confines of the pond itself. Straddling her flank position was a solid, slick-skinned beast roughly the size of a great dane, though its features were distinctly aquatic. Its muscles were visible under a layer of seal-like blubber only because of their engorged density pushing smiles of tone through the thick wet skin anyway. Its body, although ending in a slope toward a wide tail that cut the waters and propelled its mass forward at incredible speed when swimming, was raised in the front, its chest and face elevated from the ground by long dog-like forelimbs that ended in massive paws with gleaming black talons. A half-human face with frighteningly intelligent, but sunken eyes, drooped at its lower end into a bristly mustache and gaping maw of white fangs and a cat-like tongue, with the jaws’ most prominent feature being the javelin tusks that curved downward, thick and strong. A tuft of bright orange hair at its wetsuit-textured head ran the length of its body along its spinal column, forming a mane-like ridge of fur.
The marine mammal lunged at Freyja in a gait that was disturbingly crossbred between a doberman’s charge, and a sea lion’s inelegant belly flops and slides. Only Freyja’s quick reflexes saved her from being run through on those tusks, as she flung the flames from her burning left hand across the beast’s face as she tried to circle strafe the enemy. The flames extinguished themselves quickly on the beast’s damp skin, which was slow to burn under all but the most extreme heat as long as it remained moistened, and it was only a few embers stinging its eye that caused the monster to whiff its thrust. Freyja took only a glancing blow from one of the deadly tusks across her shoulder, drawing open a deep, ragged gash that spilled her hot blood over the pebbles at the shore with a high-pitched scream of pain.
Cuppy heard Freyja’s cries, but could not locate her. It was just no good searching in the fog.
I need to get higher ground.
Cuppy plunged the hilt of his fishing pole into the dirt, pinning it there with heavy stones lashed to its sides to fortify it in a stitched-together circle that tied itself into the earth, strings piercing deep under the mud to wind around buried tree roots for support. With his hands free, he injected his right arm with strands of his temporary patchwork medical strings, and flexed out his fingers as he felt the pain and swelling subside. Looking up at the treetops above the pond perimeter, he saw that they reached up out of the worst of the fog. So seeing, he raised both arms overhead and shot a string from each of his fingertips, winding themselves around the upper branches, and drew himself up to them as those strings retracted into his digits. Straddling a high branch, he peered over the fog to the other side of the pond. There he saw Freyja, shoulder leaking an alarming torrent of bright blood, backing away from the circling tusked beast.
Cuppy dislodged his finger strings, then lashed them together, entwining into a single thick filament like a whitish-silver rope. This he lashed across the pond, its far end encircling and pulling taut around the upper trunk of a tree opposite the one he sat in. Lashing the end he held in his hands around the tree he climbed, Cuppy linked his hands, protected against the friction of rope burn by his special gloves and with his fingers interlaced by more string, around the rope, and stepped off of the branches. He was then sailing across the pond’s airspace on his impromptu zipline, taking a one way ride to intercept the beast with both feet planted in its face.
Unfortunately, the monster was no slouch in its awareness either, and it waited till Cuppy was too close to bail before it retaliated with a huge, sweeping swing, striking Cuppy like a horizontal swipe of a blue whale’s upturned tail. The zipline broke free of the branches as Cuppy was slammed into a tree, breaking bark off its trunk with his back as he fell to the ground.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Cuppy’s senses were swimming again, but he fought through the dizziness and stood, knees pronated inward and shaking slightly, a subtle hint that it was only his internal medical strings keeping him going. At his size, a blow like that ordinarily would have put him in critical condition in just one hit. He could hear his bones creak under the strain, reinforced only by thin string. Even so, blood dribbled down his chin.
He recognized what he was looking at from the picture books on mythology and ancient bestiaries he had rented from the library and still neglected to return, even now that they were well overdue. The glistening pinniped horror they were up against was a Bunyip, a nasty piece of work that the Australian Aboriginals feared lurking in their creeks and swamps.
Apparently, it was quite territorial too.
“Fine, I’ve been waiting to try this out.” Cuppy smiled, withdrawing a classical slingshot with a bright red band from his cloak sleeve.
This he loaded with an innocuous-seeming black pellet, and drew back tightly on the band. He released his fingers, and the slingshot fired its payload like a tiny speeding bullet at the walrus monster. The creature was faster than it looked, particularly in its reflexes, and it shielded its body with that wide whale tail in the blink of an eye. Cuppy’s pellet struck the center mass of that tail and exploded like an M80 firework. The deafening boom was on par with that of the water balls the beast had thrown at Cuppy and Freyja both, and a bright flash of light not unlike that of the flashbang Richie had recently endured kicked off for an instant. When the acrid smoke smell of gunpowder cleared, however, only the bunyip’s tail had been affected - and hardly, at that. It was scuffed in places, the skin lightly burned or torn, but no blood flowed, and at most only white fatty tissue peered out through minor peepholes in the slick rubbery flesh.
“Fiddlesticks.” Cuppy frowned, primarily bummed out that his patented Cuppy Surprise Pellet had suffered an undercut debut - hours of work for no catharsis.
Freyja, for her part, took the opportunity to throw a large rock within her reach at the back of the bunyip’s head. The teenagers heard a satisfying thunk! as the projectile bludgeon smashed into the back of the marine monster’s skull, rattling its meanspirited brain within.
The creature whirled on Freyja, swinging its tail outward to send her careening off into a tree or ledge as it had Cuppy, but the girl’s reflexes and athletic abilities were markedly superior to Cuppy’s. She cleared a considerable distance hopping backward as though she had pulled off an Olympic long jump in the opposite direction, her calf and thigh muscles sculpted by the thinly-veiled influence of her demonic wolfen form.
The rock had not done as much damage as Freyja could have hoped, both for the beast’s skull being thicker and sturdier than expected, and because of its slippery skin causing the stone to slide partially off from what should have been a direct hit. Even so, the beast could only keep its sights on one of the kids at a time like this, as long as they were spread out to either side of him.
Cuppy didn’t miss his opportunity to reintroduce his explosive pellets with appropriate dramatic flair, and lobbed a trio of them from the band at once. They spread out like scattershot, exploding like music to Cuppy’s ears in three different spots across the beast’s back. It roared angrily in response, shallow holes opened up in its back and bleeding lightly from where the explosives had punched partially through its shield of thick blubber. It looked like a marine mammal survivor of a close call with a great white shark attack, like on the nature documentaries he had caught on the display televisions downtown - stark white, fatty tissue torn raggedly in places, like the organic mantle of the earth beneath a crust of wet leather, upwelling magma plumes of blood from the hot core at the center. Cuppy was briefly reminded of a picture he had seen of a scuba flipper with a big bite taken out of it for the passing resemblance the texture bore to the shredded flaps of flesh dangling around the wounds.
The bunyip turned around to strike at Cuppy next, lunging with its tusks. Freyja, however, had realized the exploitable weakness the beast’s physiology and tactics posed. She conjured a baseball-sized orb of flame in her palm and pitched it overhand into the bunyip’s back. The flames spread out and sunk into the holes Cuppy had opened up in its back, and there they partially-ignited the fat reserves beneath, having bypassed the beast’s surface-level defenses against combustion and heat. It howled in mixed pain and rage, and rolled about the grounds like a crocodilian performing its signature death roll maneuver.
“His tail is thick and dense like a shield, but he can only defend one side of his body with it at a time!” Freyja passed on to Cuppy.
Cuppy nodded and rapidly launched three volleys of explosive pellets from his slingshots. At this point, only a few glancing strikes touched the bunyip, and the rest blew apart only mud and reeds as the creature flopped back into the pond, extinguishing its burning back and retaking homefield advantage.
Cuppy faltered at the pond’s edge, not sure whether to pursue or not, but Freyja perceived the bubbles coming up from the water’s surface where the bunyip had sunk itself again, and she snatched Cuppy away by his hood like a mother cat grabbing the back of her kitten’s neck. That exact moment, the bunyip exploded out of the water like an enraged hippo to chomp Cuppy and drag him into the pond, and its eyes were hateful black beads as it only just barely missed. The sneak attack thwarted, it retracted back into the pond again, as silently and stealthily despite its shape as it had emerged. Cuppy and Freyja saw only a few ripples fade away seconds later to indicate it had been there at all.
“Don’t dawdle near the water, he’s faster than he looks, and he’s fastest when he’s swimming.” Freyja said.
“Right.” Cuppy gulped. “We need to stick together in this fog.” he waved away at it.
Freyja was whining again, her ears laid back. The fog seemed to be buzzing in her ears like angry bees. “How can you stand to be near it?” she asked Cuppy incredulously.
“What do you mean?” Cuppy asked, clueless.
“Nevermind.” Freyja said. She hissed in a breath of pain as her shoulder stung, and she gripped at it.
Cuppy could see hot blood still welling up through the gaps in her fingers. Wordlessly, he drew a finger to Freyja’s shoulder, gently pushed her obscuring hand away, and painlessly wove a string in a zigzag pattern through the frayed ends of the tear. With a light tug, like tying his shoelaces, Cuppy pulled the wound closed as though he had applied surgical stitches in record time.
“That won’t hold up for long.” Cuppy warned Freyja, indicating blooming spots of blood still seeping through the Vs of space between the stitches.
“Yes it will.” Freyja sighed, picking up a loose stick from the ground and biting down on it hard.
She raised the hand from her uninjured side and turned her palm upward, the skin glowing red hot as she intensified her pyromancy and concentrated its burning power into a small space. She pressed the burning hand, which looked to Cuppy frighteningly like a heated steam iron, to her sutured gash, clamping her fingers around her shoulder tight. Cuppy could hear her agonized groan hardly muffled by the stick she bit down on, accompanied by the hiss of steam rising in little puffs from under the sides of her hands. Finally, Cuppy heard the stick snap as Freyja’s wolfish fangs poked through her human visage, and her strengthened canine jaw muscles flexed.
Freyja swayed on her feet and spat out the broken halves of the stick, partially collapsing backward into the embrace of a slanted tree trunk so that it looked like she could have been casually slouching if not for the obvious red mark on her shoulder. As the glow subsided, Cuppy saw that she had completely burned the skin back together, his strings having been burned away by the heat now that they had done their job of holding the flesh in place.
When Freyja got over the insistent threat of fainting, she shook out her head and looked up at Cuppy with eyes still moistened by pained tears that hadn’t quite dislodged.
“I cauterized the wound closed.” she told the boy, looking at her now sealed injury. “Thanks to your string and my quick acting, I think it will hardly leave a scar.” she smiled faintly - she already had enough scars, too many for her liking.
Ten seconds or so of excruciating pain were worth the trade of rubbing out another physical memory of trauma carved in flesh. The scars she already bore still burned when her days were bad.
Cuppy looked back across the pond, a window in the fog briefly opened up by the ambient heat of Freyja’s power clashing against the cold moisture in the air. He could see his fishing pole constrained between its cairn of stitched-together rocks holding it to the ground and the roots below, and the tug on its line. He could also now make out how the bunyip had duped him with a decoy, the tree stump having partially collapsed into the underwater sinkhole’s maw. Cuppy could see what looked like a small circular waterfall around which the pond was trying to drain inward, over and under a few upturned exposed roots from the stump.
“That guy’s at least strong enough not to get swept up into his own currents, judging by that bathtub drainhole he unplugged in the pond.” Cuppy adopted the thinker pose again.
“How are we supposed to remove him, then?” Freyja asked.
Cuppy shrugged. “One thing at a time. I need to save my fishing pole before it breaks. Cover me.” he said.
Freyja nodded. They moved to circle the pond to the other side and retake Cuppy’s prized rod. They made it a few yards when the bunyip popped out of the pond’s center like a huge aquatic meerkat, head turning toward them as they ran. Its belly and chest inflated with swallowed pond water. It held the pose a fraction of a second, then expelled all the water at once as another flying liquid wrecking ball.
Cuppy reflexively thrust out his palms, from which doily-patterned spider web-like string formations erupted. They overlapped and reinforced each other like a spongy, perforated white trampoline. The end corners of the octagonal string constructs only barely stretched out to branches and rocky edges in time to fortify the net’s tensile strength before the water shot struck it. Cuppy couldn’t produce enough strands to make a solid shield that could tank the blast, and he grit his teeth expecting that they would have to make due with fragmenting the shot into web-shredded splashes that would hit like painful - but endurable - fastballs. What he didn’t expect was the spherical flying tidal wave to crush his strings entirely, ripping off the branches the outstretched corner strings had clung to, and carry him and Freyja a dozen feet back in a cresting aftershock of water that piled them into the land-side edge of one of the dams.
Cuppy’s and Freyja’s clothes were partially shredded against the bramble they were forced into, but their thorn-inflicted cuts and abrasions were all but overlooked, overshadowed by the unforgiving power of the hydraulic crash. At the edges of where Cuppy’s web was struck, the kids could see a deep trench carved in the pond’s bank, groundwater flooding up from it and bubbling like muddy stew. Cuppy was certain that if it hadn’t been for his web, the water ball would have killed them both outright.
Cuppy stood up, clutching his bruising ribs as Freyja coughed up half-inhaled water droplets behind him.
“Is it just me, or is his pesky water cannon getting stronger?” he asked.
“No.” Freyja said, wiping her bleeding lip. “He’s bigger too.”
The bunyip was now the size of a horse, and its skin was beginning to take on a murky reddish hue in places where his skin stretched tight over thin spots in his encircling subcutaneous armor.
It locked burning eyes with them as it slowly sunk under the water with hardly a ripple.