[382] 5.6 The Atlantean Trials III

With nothing else to do in this coliseum and no signs of hidden loot, the two of us make our way back out and toward the main path.  Once we get back onto the road leading back to the monolith, the feeling of being watched returns.  The hair on the back of my neck stands up and my fiery heart, still alight from the last battle, remains poised to strike in an instant.

Only Chloe’s hand in my own and the feeling of our engagement rings rubbing against each other gives me a sense of calm.  Still no other sounds but the rustle of the wind and the trickle of the canals between the roads, as though the world has paused, waiting with bated breath to see what the outcome of the impending clash will be.  A clash I am now certain is coming, now that the light at seven o’clock is glowing alongside the one at nine which we just completed.

The only question is whether the other party is aware of us already.  I have to assume they are given that pressure I’ve been feeling since we entered this dungeon, but–

My thoughts are cut short as the eight o’clock light lights up, making six now in total.  If this group, whoever it is, somehow doesn’t know about us already, they will in just a few moments when they return to the monolith and see we’ve cleared out a trial.  And if they could finish two trials in the time it took us to finish one, then we are in deep shit.

Chloe, realizing the gravity of the situation as well, grabs my hand and leads us down the path at five o’clock.  Her logic is sound and I can find no fault with it; it seems a bit random that that particular path was skipped.  Maybe it’s the most dangerous of the trials, and if it is, the reward for completing it will be commensurately large.  If we’re lucky, they won’t come after us for a while longer.  I pray to the goddesses that dim hope holds.

The five o’clock path leads us into a lush valley, whose verdancy abruptly turns to fetid wastes.  The demarcation line is sharp.  On one side of the divide, the grass is green, fluttering in the evening stars.  On the other, it is brown and desiccated, bruised as if having been trampled underfoot by a herd of thousands.  And yet, we march onward, prepared to fight.

A foul stench seeps through the air, so sickening and repulsive that I pull a large handkerchief out of my [Inventory], douse it in water, and cover my face with a mask to keep it out.  Chloe follows suit, though nothing fully can keep the sulfuric taste out of my mouth and more painfully, my eyes.  As we descend into the dark crevasse, the odor intensifies further, the entire landscape becoming enshrouded in a thick purple miasma that irritates skin and mucus membranes alike.

“We’re almost there,” Chloe says.  “Though I expected it would be much bigger than it actually is.”

One serpentine head peeks out from behind a rock outcropping.  Once it locks eyes with Chloe, eight more appear, followed by the scaled body and twinned tails of the Hydra.  Violet saliva drips off its central mouth, hissing through the air as it lands on the grass below and erodes both the organic matter and the dirt underneath.

I remain unfazed, taking the lead as I charge the beast and giving Chloe a chance to recover a bit longer after her recent use of [Lightspeed Slash].

From what I understand of the Hydra and its weaknesses in mythology, the two of us are uniquely qualified to deal with this threat.  My swordstaff in my left hand, I aim for the head furthest to my left, dodging lunges and attempted bites with acrobatic maneuvers before finally getting close enough to the beast to attack.  My [Strength] and [Attack] stats prove incapable of giving my opponent the mercy of a quick decapitation, but by hacking at the monster a few times, I’m able to finally break through the combination of flesh and scale and reduce the head to a stump.

One quick display of [Infernal Flame] later and onyx fire torches the undulating stump, already hard at work attempting to regenerate the now-severed head.

Eight screeches permeate the ravine, all at slightly different pitches.  Having realized that we are capable of negating its regeneration and permanently injuring it, the Hydra has shifted to a more defensive posture, coiling up its remaining heads while it raises its twinned tails, ready to lash out the moment one of us approaches.

Chloe’s [Lightspeed Slash] would be effective here, but the ability is still on cooldown and it causes her stamina to plummet like a stone.  Although she’s able to heal the small wounds that accumulate from her attack, it’ll still be a good while left before she can use our trump card again.  Best if at all possible to save it to fight the actual boss, or if necessary, whoever else is attempting to clear this dungeon.

Fortunately, I have my own bag of tricks.  The last three years have been good for developing my teleportation capacity.  I’m able to do so far more quickly, using the holistic nature of [Subspace Manipulation] to rip through the boundary and stitch together pathways to phase in and out much more efficiently than I was back when I first gained [Dimensional Rift].

I blink behind the Hydra; I have less than a tenth of a second before it’s onto me with seven of its remaining eight heads, with the last watching Chloe as she surveys my fight from a distance.  But that is enough time to thrust my swordstaff’s tip into the back of another of the Hydra’s head’s, coating my weapon’s edge in the acrid and caustic burgundy blood of the monster.

This, in turn, temporarily enhances its cutting power.  The Hydra naturally has some resistance to the toxic nature of its bodily secretions, but that doesn’t mean its scales are completely immune to it, either.  One more blink and now the creature’s heads have been reduced from eight to seven, Chloe spotting me with her own [Divine Fire] to seal the stump before the creature can try its most gruesome trick once more.

Realizing that its defensive posturing has failed, the Hydra now switches to pure offense.  Moving with an alacrity unbefitting a creature some fifteen feet tall and a hundred in length, it lashes out with its heads and its tail sweeps in devastating arcs that leave miniature bullwhip cracks in its wake.  Chloe rushes in to join me, and though we attempt to force the creature’s long necks into a series of knots from which it cannot untangle, the creature has enough spatial awareness and proprioception to avoid a cause of autoasphyxiation.

Nevertheless, our strikes ring true.  To our consternation but not our surprise, its body appears to have virtually endless [Health], its regeneration closing its wounds as fast as we can inflict them.  However, damage inflicted on the heads is recovered far more slowly, to the point where I believe the creature is actually treated as though it has ten separate registers of [Health]— one for the body, and one for each of the now-six heads.

As the number of heads reduces, its attacks grow more ferocious, sharper and more precise.  The creature nearly impales my shoulder with one of its tails; the other tail is rushing in to grab Chloe by the waist.  It’s about to snap her in half like a twig, but I notice just in time and teleport the two of us to safety.

Our attempts to gain the initiative by flying out of the reach of the multiheaded serpent fail; it spits caustic breath that intensifies the miasma and makes my lungs burn, and not in the good way.  Chloe throws out [Antidotes] like candy and I retain the [Detoxify] spell in my swordstaff, which I can use to both neutralize the poison in my body and counter the accumulated side effects.

Deciding that the champing maws are less of a threat than the pervasive miasma being spread, we return to the ground to continue our fight.  A quick douse of water over our cloth masks to minimize the vaporous infiltration and the two of us return to close-quarters combat.

Six heads become five, and five heads become four.  For an instant, my eyes dart to the side, fearing that the noise from our clash will alert the other dungeon delvers.  This proves a mistake; I’m swallowed whole and feel the acid burning through my flesh and dissolving my armor.  But this too is part of my plan, allowing me to cut the head off from the inside, much as Chloe did with the Golden Lion from before.

With only three extant heads left to fight, the creature turns tail and runs deeper into the dark valley.  After Chloe heals my injuries and ensures there are no lingering aftereffects, the two of us chase after the creature, finding our way into a disgusting bog utterly devoid of all other life.  The miasma is even thicker down here, so much so that I can’t see the light of the Milky Way overhead.

In these conditions, we won’t be able to fight at full strength for more than a few minutes, but considering that the Hydra has retreated to its den after being so thoroughly outclassed, I can’t imagine it wants a protracted battle either.

Chloe throws another burst of her [Divine Fire] into the swampy marsh, trying to lure the Hydra out of its den.  It fails, and my [Infernal Flame] proves equally ineffective a moment later.

“Actually, Chloe,” I say.  “Do you think [Divine Reimaging] might be effective?  If you could use it to purify these lands, that might cause our submerged friend to try to counter your handiwork.”

“Hmm…”  Chloe pauses for a second.  “The only other possibility would be scouring the entire valley with Celestial and Infernal fire.  So, yes, I will give it a try.”

Chloe lowers her head, closes her eyes, and clasps her hands in front of her chest as though in prayer.  Even I don’t know all the specifics of how the spell works, other than that it allows her to shape organic matter— including both the biotoxins and this dead, rotted detritus— into a different form of her desire.  It requires a commensurate amount of Ether to make the modification, but she has been using it pretty much every working day since she got the Skill a couple years ago and the ranks she’s accumulated will surely bring it down to something more manageable.

And yet, even with her colossal [Mind] stat, she’s having trouble breaking down the poisonous miasma and dispelling the fell curse that surrounds this land.  I place my hand on her shoulder and use the special property of our [Angelic Bond], [Sacrificial Transference], to channel more of my own [Ether] into her spell.  She’s further supplementing my donations with the storage capacity of the [Ring of the Saintess], and with perhaps 30,000 points of [Ether] behind the spell, the curse is finally fading from the land.

Sure enough, our tri-headed ophidian friend comes lurching out of its dwelling, gnashing about and spitting its venom on the ground, trying to restore the cursed condition that my fiancée just dispelled.  But with the toxins no longer weakening me and with the creature too busy hacking up its lungs to notice the far more immediate threat, I’m able to sever and cauterize the outer two heads, leaving only the last head, which is every bit as impervious as the Golden Lion’s.

Chloe, once again, is the one who solves this problem.  Even being winded from her previous display, she conjures up enough strength and force of will to break loose a massive boulder from one of the sides of the ravine.  She lifts it over her head and then slams it, piledriver style, right onto the base of the hydra’s final neck.  The creature attempts to raise its head, but remains trapped, unable to free itself from the stone entombment it now lies within.

After a few minutes of trying and failing to break free, the creature’s body stops moving, then disappears into Ether; it seems that either the creature finally succumbed to asphyxiation, or is considered sufficiently ‘dead’ for our purposes. In either case, we collect a few [Hydra Scales] and enjoy the newly purified air for a few minutes before making our way back to the monolith to see what awaits us.

[You have slain the Atlantean Hydra (Level 89).  You have gained a boosted 825,750 Experience.]

[You have gained enough Experience to reach Level 93.  [Strength] +1, [Vitality] +1.  Please assign free stat points. (Remaining: 11)]

[Maximum Health increases by [Vitality] x 2 + Current Level + Rand[1,3] = 583]

[Maximum Ether increases by [Mind] + Current Level + Rand[0,2] = 366]

[Level: 93; Experience: 18,099,525;  To Next: 452,065]

[Current Stats: [Health]: 11,496 / 25,372; [Ether]: 14,931 / 17,944]

[Current Stats: [Strength]: 567 (Base: 204); [Speed]: 556 (Base: 200); [Vitality]: 678 (Base: 244); [Mind]: 756 (Base: 272)]