A combination of things filled Val’s vision that she never wished to see: gigantic teeth larger than her body, long trails of dripping saliva, and the red, muscular lining of a mouth. A sea serpent was snapping at her with its jaws.

Panic seized her with what to do. She could try to dodge backwards or to either side, all areas that the sea serpent had its massive teeth barring her way. A single tooth was bigger than her entire body. A direct hit could probably split her skull open. Even getting grazed by one could leave a devastating injury. Rather than trying to evade the sea serpent’s attack entirely, Val reacted by jumping into its mouth.

Her head ducked to avoid getting hit by the roof of its mouth as it closed. Her hands and knees touched the slick and slimy surface of its tongue. Val had nothing to grab onto as the sea serpent began to move.

Gasping in shock, she slid and rolled to the side, landing against its closed teeth.

The ground started slanting downward as the sea serpent tilted its head back.

“Ah!” Val latched her hands onto the base of a tooth. Her body slid down its tongue which made her feet dangle closer to the back of its throat.

Below her, the sea serpent’s throat closed up and reopened. It anticipated swallowing her down.

Val turned her face back upward and squeezed her eyes shut. With both hands wrapped around the tooth, fingers entwined tightly, she held on for dear life. She would need to think of a way out of this. Her eyes peeled open to watch for some opening between the teeth to swing herself through.

Indeed, the sea serpent gave her a flashing glimpse of the night sky, but its jaws never opened up enough to release her from the cage of teeth. Those teeth came crashing down again.

Out of sheer reaction, she called forth Mind Blast. The explosion cracked the tooth that Val had been hanging too, but most importantly, the blast rocketed her backwards in an equal and opposite reaction. Val’s hand escaped from the serpent’s jaw as its teeth came crashing down, unscathed.

From there, she plummeted downward and dropped into the sea serpent’s throat.

Falling away to the darkness of its innards, so too did her stomach drop. How long would she have before she reached the sea serpent’s stomach? Most likely, corrosive stomach acid awaited her that would burn her away to nothing but energy to fuel this hulking monstrosity.

The muscles of its throat constricted around her, but never did she touch these walls. It was a good thing that this throat was wide enough to fit her body, since Val hardly wanted to die by being crushed in a sea serpent’s swallow.

She did not want to die here at all. In a last-ditch effort, Val called upon Divine Judgement again. With a new source of moral aversion to the sea, she would have wanted to scream at it if not for wanting to keep her mouth shut. How dare you try to eat me!

By her will, the surging power from Divine Judgement morphed into a barbed hook. Val struck the point into the wall of the sea serpent’s body on her descent, and it pierced through.

The sea serpent cried out in its signature shriek. Shockwaves of its vocalization shook up its body and rattled around within these close quarters of its throat. From inside of the sea serpent, its shriek sounded worse than any sound that could carry outside in the open air.

Val’s ears rang around with this ear-splitting sound over and over again, amplified a hundred times over by its repetition. Meanwhile, she made a lurching movement downward with the sea serpent’s descent. The fish hook sliced through the meat of its neck all the way down.

At an abrupt stop, one of her hands slipped from the end of the fish hook. Val squinted her eyes as she looked at it, the raw, white light appearing harsh even to her. Barely, the fingers of her other hand managed to stay grasped around its handle.

A slosh a liquid could be heard beneath her. It seemed like she had neared its stomach. If so, she might be one literal slip up away from being digested. Another possibility: the sea serpent could have sea water inside of it as harmless as swimming through the ocean itself.

There would be no touching any liquids within the sea serpent to find out.

Bloody water seeped in from the slit of the sea serpent’s wound. This water spilled over Val in a narrow stream. The flow of blood and water forced her to be coated in this disgusting fluid as it fell directly over her head. Val sputtered and craned her head out of the immediate flow so that she could gaze up at the sea serpent’s interior flesh.

Enough energy existed within her to call upon Divine Judgement again. Val reminded herself of all of the same things that made her mad: the audacity of this sea serpent to try and eat her, Tavras sending her on a quest with a high risk of mortality, and his horrible treatment of the children Fangarus and Iharu.

This time, Val sent a horizontal slash across the original cut.

More blood poured out while water seeped in. Now, a proper waterfall of bloody salt water had been formed over Val’s entire body. Against this heavy inflow, she clung to the hook, gritted her teeth, and clamped her eyes shut tightly.

One last attempt was necessary. If anything, her righteous anger had grown a little, especially being covered in disgusting fluids like this.

A rotund, blunt force of dazzling energy, Val directed at the center of the crosshairs that she had created. At her Mind Blast, flesh and blood burst outward from the sea serpent into open water. The chunky cloud of red dissipated into darkness around its edges.

Water flooded in, the gaping hole unstaunched now. Against the rushing flow of bloody water, Val stuck an arm through to grasp onto the outer scales of the sea serpent. Her hand flung the hook of energy around and latched onto the serpent anew. Like that, she pushed herself through the layers of its flesh and flipped around to cling onto the outside of its body.

The sea serpent darted through the crystal cavern as rapidly as it could swim. Amidst the cloud of blood that continually passed over her, that green light from those glowing crystals tried to emanate towards her. The light failed to reach her.

Only once the water lightened by the dim glow of the moon outside of the cave, Val dared to let go. The weapon that she had created through Divine Judgement dissipated to nothingness. She floated upward and kicked to the surface.

Just as she had hoped, the sea serpent continued swimming out to sea.

From there, Val swam to shore. As she staggered up onto the beach, the scent of blood still curled up to her nostrils despite having been drenched in salt water. “Ugh.” Her hands flung to the sides, casting a little water off from her sleeves. The blood stayed on her clothes in horrendous stains that covered her from head to toe.

What had just happened had been beyond disgusting, but also disturbing too. She had cut her way out of the sea serpent from the inside and clambered out of its flesh, being covered in its blood all the while. Val might have been appalled at herself for that behavior, if only it had been anything other than one of those nasty sea monsters. Val kept racking up a worse and worse history with these sea serpents.

At any rate, she stumbled along the beach. “Tavras?” While Val had imagined that she would only need to come to the seaside and Tavras would come to her, it seemed like she might just have to locate him too, as part of the challenge. Her feet set out to walking around the island, too sour of a mood to pick up into a run right now.

The waves lapped peacefully along the shore despite her sloshing through the surf. The ocean seemed not to react to the happenings of Tavras playing with his demigoddess underling. Out into the water, a dome of a soft blue coloration protruded from the sea and glowed with an intense light.

All of her hard work had been for nothing. Val turned her cheek away from the scene and looked out to the forest instead. It had taken a great deal of effort on her part to injure the sea serpent like that. Now, it looked like Tavras would patch it up just like that. Not to be cruel or anything, but the Serpent’s Circle could use one less of the dastardly things.

The splash of a particularly large wave sounded behind her, followed by a big, dramatic sigh from Tavras. “Val, you really did not want to make tonight easy on me either. You practically tried to kill one of my sea serpents!”

She flipped around and boiled over in her response. “You had ordered it to kill me in the first place!”

“I did no such thing,” Tavras said with his arms opened up to feign innocence. “I had only asked the sea serpent to play with you—have some fun.”

“Do you mean that it could have fun with me as its chew toy, or more accurately, its swallow toy?”

His eyes rolled around as if these details mattered. “Well, I managed to heal our friend up at any rate, if that makes you feel any better.”

“Stop saying that it’s our friend! Maybe you can have sea serpents as your friends, but they’re none of mine.”

“Ouch. That really hurts, Val. Here I thought that me, you, and our pets were all good friends.”

“You know what, this bickering is just a waste of time. I still need to get you that grand king pearl.”

A sneer sounded from Tavras, and a smirk drew onto his face. “Ah, yes. I see that after all that effort, you still failed to retrieve the pearl. You better hurry if you want to beat my sea serpent back to the lake.”

There would be no need for that. Val picked up in a jog around the island, closer to the tree line. “Foofy? Foofy!” she tried calling out to him as she ran. After he had gotten away per her command, she had no idea how she would find him again. It was not like she had been able to establish a rendezvous point with a dog, even one as brilliant as Foofy.

Firstly, she would head back to their base camp where she had built their shelter. All the while, she would call out to him in the hopes that he would be within hearing distance of her. “Foofy?”

As she ran, some anxiety settled over her. Not a doubt in her heart existed that Foofy was safe out there. Where she worried was if she would find Foofy in time for their trial. So long as he turned up before dawn, that would be all that mattered.

Also, she needed to hope beyond all hope that he had kept the pearl in his mouth for this entire time.

Character Update

* New information is marked in cyan.

* All entries are based on what Val knows.

Valentine (Val) Title: None Rank: Demigoddess Attributes: None Abilities Name Class Description

Divine Judgement

combat, tactical

- deals punishment for morally offensive acts

- punishment must equal the crime

- incredibly versatile with regards to type of punishment

Keep the Peace

tactical

- calm agitated creatures

- can sense the baser emotions of others

- works on animals up to the size of dogs, as well as mortal humans

- can manage multiple animals at once, according to their strength

Mind Blast combat

- physical blow from the mind

- can shoot herself backwards with equal force

Past Insight

cognitive

- watch a replay of the past

- three pieces of initial information are required

- can stay in the tunnel of time for up to one minute

- real time passes slower in the vision

- can fast-forward through time in a vision

- one day cool down after a failed vision