Chapter 108: The Old Mill, Stone Skipping, and Sapphire Electrification

The morning wind sweeping in from the Black Ravine carried the tart fragrance of pine needles, damp peat, and thinning mist. Dave walked with a slow, measured stride along the forest trail, his hands casually shoved into the pockets of his black leather trench coat. Raiten rested securely across his back in a double leather harness-the dark basalt scabbard featuring the carved Lynx head pommel hugging his spine without a millimeter of play. A pace behind him, moving with seamless assassin vigilance, walked Shnee and Karys. Both looked completely refreshed, as though barely an hour ago they hadn't been fighting amidst the crushing roots and boughs of the Leshy. Dave's liquid Sapphire Flame had accelerated cellular division, purged all forest toxins, and mended bruised tissue, leaving not a trace of weariness on the girls' frames.

"Not a single mark left on the skin," Karys noted, sliding her thumb across her forearm where a deep, bloody gouge from a jagged branch had previously marred the flesh. "That blue flame of yours works better than the most expensive alchemical salves from the Upper City guild masters. Zero joint stiffness, zero soreness."

"I told you, Sapphire Flame is pure biological engineering," Dave answered over his shoulder with a lazy smirk, never breaking his rhythm. "Instead of traditional thermal combustion, I invert the thermal vector, forcing the host cells into instant mitosis. Structural tissue regeneration at the cellular level-no parchment scrolls required. Comes in handy when someone has a habit of taking hits to the ribs."

"You say that with such calm composure, as if you weren't sprinting through the briars chasing blighted wolves just to scratch them behind the ears," Shnee chimed in, a faint, barely perceptible warmth dancing in her sky-blue eyes as she adjusted the scabbard of her Celestial Silver rapier.

"Because they were genuinely nice woodland doggos," Dave shot back immediately, tilting his chin with mock indignation. "They had fluffy tails and thick coats. The fact that black corrupted bile was dripping from their jowls was simply a matter of poor dental hygiene and upbringing, not bad character."

Kaede, perched on Shnee's left pauldron in her sharp, watchful form, flexed her microscopic limbs and chattered in their private Polish operational code:

– Doggos, right... Boss, your ADHD is so terminal that if a hamster ran past a dungeon Boss, you'd toss your sword in the dirt and start building it a basalt exercise wheel.

Karys let out a soft, predatory chuckle, but in a fraction of a second her wolf ears twitched with sharp alertness, and all amusement vanished from both swordswomen.

The dense thickets thinned, giving way to waterlogged, gray marshlands. Before them stretched an expansive, murky river basin, dominated by the rotting timber piles of an old watermill. The massive, broken millwheel sat half-submerged in black sludge, surrounded by decaying pine logs and shattered timber rafts. The air hung heavy with humid stagnation, saturated with the foul stench of sulfurous mud, spoiled fish, and rotting cattails.

"The Vodyanoy," Shnee spoke in a cool, businesslike cadence, easing her rapier a millimeter from its sheath. "The bounty on the Sworn Guild board was explicit: paralyzed timber transport to the lumber mills, two smashed merchant barges, and four drowned raftsmen. The creature nests directly beneath the mill's primary foundation timbers."

Dave halted on the dry sandy shore. Instead of searching for tracks or drawing his weapon, his gaze fell upon a wide bed of flat granite slates smoothed by the river's current. An unmistakable spark of engineering delight flared in his eyes.

"Oh," he said suddenly, crouching beside the water's edge. He reached out, lifting a perfectly flat, symmetrical piece of slate with razor-thin edges. "Karys, look at this. Flat as an anvil face. Flawless aerodynamics."

The wolf-girl blinked in absolute, speechless bewilderment, her hands resting over the hilts of her dark blades recovered from the hundredth-floor vault.

"Dave... we are standing at the threshold of an A-rank apex nest that drags grown men into the mud..."

"Hold on, you don't grasp the fundamental physics of fluid surface tension," he interrupted without the slightest embarrassment, spinning the slate between his fingers. "If I impart the proper axial rotation along the horizontal plane and crank the pressure impulse of Gōtai at the exact microsecond of release... I wonder how many times it'll skip across the water before losing kinetic momentum."

Before Karys could even open her mouth to protest, Dave whipped his hip into a tight rotational release.

BZZZZ-CRACK!

The stone tore from his fingertips at a velocity that literally ruptured the air above the shoals. The flat slate struck the water's surface with a supersonic detonation, blasting a three-meter pillar of displaced brine and mud into the sky.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The projectile ricocheted across the marsh with the rapid-fire cadence of a machine gun. Every skip detonated a localized hydraulic blast, hurling kelp and sludge into the reeds, until it finally buried itself with a hollow thud into the sandy embankment on the far side of the river.

"Fifty-four," Dave announced with the solemn pride of a connoisseur, narrowing his eyes as he rubbed his chin. "Angle of attack was three degrees too steep, though. Excessive hydrodynamic drag on the thirtieth skip. I need a more elliptical model."

With those words, Dave simply pivoted on his heel and strolled into the willow thickets fifty yards away with his hands in his pockets, searching for "better rocks."

Karys stood open-mouthed, looking back and forth between the boiling, frothing water and the receding back of her leader.

"Did he... did he seriously just go skip stones across a swamp in an active combat zone?" she asked quietly, her dark wolf ears drooping in sheer disbelief.

Shnee let out a long, slow breath through her nose, gently pinching the bridge of her nose with an indulgent, fond smile curving her lips.

"He's simply like that, Karys. Hold your stance. The Vodyanoy will never tolerate that level of seismic disruption in its own silt."

The beast's reaction was instantaneous.

Beneath the rotted piles of the mill, the dark water churned into an oily, bubbling froth. Decaying leaves rose from the riverbed in a massive, spinning whirlpool. With a deafening, guttural bellow, the Vodyanoy surged from the depths-a massive, four-and-a-half-meter monstrosity clad in slimy, greenish-black hide crusted with marsh sludge, its webbed talons ending in curved, razor-sharp claws. Brute, territorial malice burned within its sickly yellow eyes. The shockwave from Dave's "skipping stone" had rattled its lair like a battering ram. The creature instinctively recognized that the human hurling boulders with ballistic force was an immovable reactor of destruction; thus, with cunning swamp malice, it directed its fury at the two swordswomen standing on the timber pier.

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SZZZZ-SKRREEE!

Three massive tendrils of condensed mud and rotting kelp erupted from the marsh, whipping through the air straight toward Shnee's chest.

"Karys, left flank!" the elf called out, unsheathing her blade.

Celestial Silver flashed through the gray light. Shnee had no intention of merely parrying. She channeled absolute frost mana through the slender blade.

CRACK!

A cascade of crystalline bitter cold burst from the rapier's tip, encasing the first water whip in solid ice within a fraction of a second. Shnee spun, shattering the frozen bough with her hilt, and the wave of frost surged across the river surface, locking the Vodyanoy's left arm in a thick block of ice.

The monster shrieked in agony, yet on its native terrain it was ruthless. A colossal wall of black sludge surged from the river bottom. The Vodyanoy tore through the ice via pure hydraulic pressure, slamming its full tonnage against the timber pier. The oak piles snapped like matchsticks. Karys coiled her legs to leap for solid earth, but a slimy tether of tangled kelp whipped around her ankle, dragging her into the depths. Shnee slashed the cord with her rapier, but another wave of murky water crashed over them, pulling both warriors deep beneath the frothing surface of the marsh.

At that exact moment, Dave was strolling leisurely along the riverbank, turning two smooth pieces of slate over in his palm. His face wore an expression of deep academic disappointment:

"Makes no sense. At the fifty-fourth skip, the molecular structure of granite simply disintegrates under hydrodynamic friction..."

He stopped dead in his tracks.

The wind shifted, slamming an overpowering wave of stench directly into his face. It was a suffocating, concentrated reek of spoiled fish, hydrogen sulfide, rotting carcass, and decayed marsh muck that practically turned his stomach inside out.

Dave clamped his hand over his nose, his features contorting into pure, cosmic revulsion:

"Holy shit... that fucking reeks," he muttered through pinched fingers, shaking his head in disgust. "That is an active biological assault on human nostrils. Smells like someone dumped rotten eels into an acid vat and sealed it in a cellar for a century."

He looked toward the shattered pier. Shnee and Karys were gone. Only splintered boards and greasy bubbles of swamp gas floated on the water.

Dave blinked, standing on the bank with his nose firmly clamped. A rapid, diagnostic thought crossed his mind:

Went for a swim? No, they aren't that careless. The Vodyanoy probably dragged them under during the collapse and they're waiting for me to clean up the mess.

The easygoing smirk vanished from his lips, replaced by a cold, predatory glint in his sapphire eyes. Dave tossed the pebbles into the sand. He took a single step forward, and instead of sinking into the mire, his heavy boots came to rest firmly atop the water's surface.

Dense KAI physics beneath his soles created a microscopic, concrete-hard pressure plane. Dave walked across the river as steadily as if he were treading upon the basalt flagstones of his courtyard.

His right hand reached behind his right shoulder, gripping Raiten's hilt.

CLICK-SHING!

The dark damascus steel blade of magnetic obsidian slid from its scabbard with a crisp, frictionless ring. Dave inverted the sword tip-down and, without a blink of hesitation, drove the blade deep into the river directly above the spot where the water churned with the beast's dark energy.

"Time for conduction physics," he said softly.

A deep breath. Dave opened the main conduit of his soul reactor and engaged Raitai-Gōtai supercharged with lightning magic under immense pressure.

BZZZZZZZZT-BOOOOOM!

The Celtic runes carved along Raiten's fuller flared with blinding sapphire radiance. Within a fraction of a millisecond, the entire river basin transformed into an enormous web of crackling blue electrical arcs. The mineral-heavy, brackish water acted as a flawless conductor. High-voltage plasma surged through the riverbed to a depth of dozens of feet, boiling the mud and turning the Vodyanoy's domain into a massive electric chair.

SKRRRRREEEEEEK!

A muffled, agonizing shriek tore through the river bottom. The Vodyanoy, convulsed by hundreds of thousands of volts of sapphire current, suffered complete motor tetanus across its entire nervous system. Great geysers of steam erupted, and three seconds later, the scorched, limp carcass of the beast bobbed to the surface amidst dead kelp.

Dave didn't spare it a glance. Instead, he locked his Yomi II sonar onto the submerged timber piles.

"Telekinesis," he commanded under his breath.

He extended his left palm. A pure, concentrated kinetic vector wrapped around Shnee and Karys. With a loud splash, both warriors were hauled from the riverbed and set gently onto the dry sand of the bank.

Both were soaked to the bone, coughing violently and clutching their chests-they had inhaled a significant volume of muddy silt.

Dave materialized beside them with Lynx Footwork in a fraction of a second, dropping to one knee with his hands hovering over their chests.

"Hold still. I'm extracting it."

His telekinesis engaged with microscopic, surgical precision. Dave gripped the water molecules trapped within their pulmonary alveoli and, with a smooth, gentle pull, drew the sludge outward. Thin streams of murky water erupted from their mouths onto the sand, reopening their bronchial passages to fresh air.

GASP!-Shnee and Karys drew in desperate, shuddering lungfuls of oxygen.

Before they could speak, Dave rotated his palms. Liquid, bright-blue Sapphire Flame erupted from his skin. The gentle shroud of fire enveloped them completely. It produced no burn-it flowed over their soaked armor and skin, vaporizing moisture in five seconds, mending bruised ribs, and restoring complete warmth to their chilled bodies.

Moments later, both sat upon the sand entirely dry, restored, and free of injury.

Karys blinked, staring down at her dry gauntlets, then looked up at Dave, who was still wrinkling his nose in distaste.

"Did you... really just pull water out of our lungs with telekinesis?" she asked, awe flickering in her green eyes.

"What, was I supposed to wait around for you to catch double pneumonia?" he replied with an easy grin, sheathing Raiten with a quiet click. "Fluid biomechanics is elementary. Expel the liquid, warm the tissue, job done."

Shnee rose to her feet, adjusting her rapier, her eyes glowing with profound warmth.

"Thank you, Dave. Underwater, that creature wielded an overwhelming advantage in mass."

"It had mass, sure, but what was truly lethal was its stench," Dave retorted, stepping over to the floating carcass. Drawing a short skinning dagger, he severed a wide sheet of armored gill-scales and the webbed talons with anatomical precision-official proof for the Sworn Guild and prime raw material for Grim. In accordance with the world's unbreakable laws, no dungeon core dropped from the natural surface beast. "Alright, let's pack up and clear out. I need clean mountain air before this stench sets into my nose for the rest of the week."

Karys and Shnee laughed softly, following him back to the main trail. The second bounty from the witcher board was officially complete.

The sun hung low over the western ridge, casting long, bruised shadows across the rocky ravine north of Crossgard. The air in these higher passes grew distinctly colder, laden with dry gravel dust, wild moss, and that unmistakable, metallic iron scent that heralded the proximity of a massive apex predator.

Dave strode ahead with his hands in his coat pockets. They reached the edge of a rocky precipice, gazing down into a deep, circular basin littered with shattered boulders and broken mining carts.

In the dead center of the basin lay the Fiend.

The beast was monumental-over four meters of dense, graphite-hard muscle, armored in thick leathery hide with four clawed legs. From its scarred skull rose a pair of massive, swept-back horns, and in the middle of its forehead pulsated a third, hypnotic crimson eye.

Dave stood at the cliff's edge, narrowing his eyes as he appraised the horns with pure engineering curiosity:

"Intriguing..." he muttered, scratching his chin.

"What are you plotting now?" Karys asked, raising a brow.

"Look at those horns. A precise forty-five-degree elliptical curve... If I ran a high-frequency pulse along them, they'd act like a directional Wi-Fi antenna booster. Set up a router here, and we'd have full coverage across the lower basin."

Karys stared at him like he had lost his mind, then broke into a soft, helpless laugh:

"Sometimes I truly wonder what goes on in that head of yours, Dave. A Fiend is not an antenna."

"Not yet," he grinned brazenly, his hand coming to rest on Raiten's hilt. "Karys, Shnee, cut off his flanks. I want to see how this model handles the turns at full throttle."