Chapter 171 - Forgotten Blood V

Her eyes closed and her fins spread wide, Claire basked in the late afternoon sun with the waves washing over her body. Again and again, the gentle seawater passed her by, flushing the impurities that stained her cloak and frame alike. Even without effort, she drifted through the ocean, towards the dungeon. All courtesy of the vessel to which she was attached.

It had been a full day since the group set foot in Vel’khagan, and about half that since they first paddled out to sea. Sylvia and Natalya had taken several hours debating the best ship to buy, before finally dismissing one of the shop’s signature spider silk sailboats in favour of a small canoe with two sets of oars. There was a seat for each rower and a slot for Boris between them. The final passenger, the fox, was meant to remain a canine and sit wherever she wished. And while the arrangement worked the first night, the half-elf grew fascinated with the idea of steering the vessel by morning.

Claire was willing to give up her seat, but unlike the other halfbreed, she was unable to shrink or sit on anyone else’s shoulders, at least not without tipping the boat. The conundrum had the fox perplexed at first, but she soon came up with a solution. Tying the mooring rope to the lyrkress’ tail, she created an artificial third seat that lay just beyond the tiny vessel’s boundaries. A literal demonstration of thinking outside the box.

Though somewhat humiliated by the notion of being dragged around like a dead fish, the gracious lyrkress did not object to the irrational suggestion. She wished for Sylvia to have her fun, and soon arrived at the conclusion that there would be no purpose in friendship if one was not occasionally treated as the necessary luggage of another.

Considering their bond was also what led the lyrkress to turn upside down and look deeper into the water. There were countless schools of fish swimming through the ocean, and catching them quickly proved the best way to pass the time. The rope kept her from moving far enough to catch them by hand, but her magic was more than a worthy supplement. Her unfortunate targets were reeled straight into her hands, those that fought back magically paralyzed and thrown above the water’s surface along with all the others. Each of the many creatures casually tossed over her shoulder was guided further by her tail and plopped within the boat. Not all of them made it so far, however. At least half were nabbed out of the air and swallowed in just a few bites, bones, scales, and all.

“How are you doing that?” Natalya blinked as she watched a large salmon fly over Sylvia’s head and land in her lap.

“Mfmfhphoorheee?” It took the half-elf a second to swallow the herring in her throat and repeat the words in a more intelligible manner. “Who, me?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t the one you had this morning twice your size? I thought it was going to sink the ship.”

“Oh, you mean the tuna! That one was tasty.” Sylvia rubbed her belly and stretched out her back before finally digging her teeth into the salmon’s tail. “Uhmmm… I dunno. I just eat them and they poof.” Another quick bite, and the salmon was gone. Without a trace.

“I see.” Natalya flipped her usual book open to a page marked with a blue tab and jotted down a few notes. “So you don’t know how it works at all?”

“Nope!” chirped the foxgirl. “Oh yeah, what is that thing anyway? I swear I see you pull it out and write in it like literally all the time! How’s it not full already?”

“That would be because it’s an artifact,” said the cat, with a proud smile. “Alina, my sister, won it in a raffle a long time ago. She had it with her throughout all her adventures and passed it down to me when she decided to join the army. Now I’m doing what she did. I open it up and take a few notes whenever I find something strange or unique. I also use it to log our finances, when it’s necessary.”

“Oh, that’s neat!” said Sylvia. “Wait a second… doesn’t that mean you think I’m weird?”

Lia stuck out her tongue. “Maybe just a little.”

“Hey, that’s mean!” griped the fox.

“I haven’t written anything bad, I promise!” said the cat.

With her documentation already complete, she holstered the artifact and returned her hands to the oars. They were soon westbound again, heading towards a destination visible only on the map. It had already been three hours since they last set foot on dry land, but while the continent was certainly no longer visible, it wasn’t as if the ocean was all there was to see. There were a countless number of islands dotting the horizon, but they were further apart than those that made up Sky Lagoon’s archipelago. The waters between them were also not nearly as shallow, with a number of deep cliffs and gorges running their course.

Claire was half-tempted to explore them. She wanted to go deeper, to find the lost kingdoms buried beneath the sea, defeat their ancient guards, and pillage the treasure they housed. But at the same time, she found the idea of exploring the depths extremely concerning. They were no longer in Llystletein, in an environment where the wildlife was falsified and their levels loosely fixed. Beyond the dungeon’s confines, there was no such safety blanket. Anything could be any level, regardless of where it was. Worse yet, the world beneath the waves was many times larger than the one above it, and its denizens had much longer to grow. There was always the possibility that they would stumble across some sort of ancient primordial being too powerful for any mere mortal to handle.

It was right as Claire considered the possibility of running into such an entity that the sea suddenly grew rougher. Though the sky above was still bright and sunny, the waves began to churn, as they would have during a devastating storm. The violent waters took control away from the boat and its rowers. The tiny vessel was raised by the waves and dropped back into the water, over and over. Sometimes, it would even be swallowed entirely.

Sylvia was the only reason it had managed to stay afloat at all. Raising her voice, she sang with all the allure of a siren and wrapped the boat up in a bubble. The excess water was flushed away by the very same song; it was lifted out of the wooden bathtub and transformed into a veil of mist. The moisture was absorbed into her barrier and warped into an additional defensive layer, just in time to deflect an arrow made of light.

When Claire begrudgingly lifted her face out of the water, she found their tiny boat confronted by a much larger ship. It was the sort that could not be easily operated with only a few people on board, measuring in at over fifty meters long and ten across. Its massive sails doubled as banners and flags; each bore the mark of a god, a venomous serpent curled into a circle with its tail halfway down its throat. Confirmation that the sailors were Glarchst’s agents, holy warriors that fought to bring pestilence to those that rejected his teachings.

Standing alone at the forefront was a fish-faced man with a bow at the ready. His face was familiar, and it took only a second for Claire to recall that she had seen him just a few days prior. He was one of the four that had attacked Nymphetel’s party and the only one to have escaped the slaughter.

Claire didn’t quite recall his name. She was under the vague impression that at least one of his dead comrades had used it, but it mattered little with all things considered. In her mind, he had long been a person no longer. There was little purpose in committing him to memory if he would serve as nothing but experience.

“This is for Wren!”

Pulling his bow back again, he charged his next arrow with lightning, loosing it only when his body could no longer handle the current. It whistled as it flew through the air, but it was incapable of breaking through the fox’s shell. The projectile was completely destroyed on impact, shattering into a million tiny specks while the barrier remained unscathed.

Though somewhat confused, the archer immediately shifted his focus to Claire, who lay beyond the protective layer, and launched another attack. The lyrkress’ defenses were not nearly as potent, but she wasn’t helpless. A casual flick of the wrist saw the arrow neutered and deflected. Its newly assigned course ended with its tip in the water and its electric charge dispersed by the sea.

Still, the man atop the ship was not discouraged. Taking a deep breath, he raised his voice and ordered the ship’s men to join him in opening fire.

Spells, cannonballs, and miscellaneous explosive artifacts all flew straight at the exposed half-moose, but none were able to reach her. A glacier-sized wall of ice rose from within the depths and stopped all the missiles in their tracks. Untying her tail and diving back beneath the waves, Claire began approaching the ship, but soon noticed that it was well suited to dealing with threats from the deep. There were harpoon guns mounted all over its hull, alongside magical cannons, fully charged and ready to ward off whatever struck at it from below.

While she didn’t find the defenses particularly threatening, they annoyed the halfbreed enough for her to rise back above the surface. Grabbing Boris, she flew through the sky and destroyed all the inbound projectiles with his face. Though some were magically charged, none were capable of getting past his hide. He continued to look sleepy, even as she landed atop the ship and used him to assault the familiar archer. A single overhead swing left the man completely deformed. The lizard completely obliterated his neck and buried his fishy head in his broken ribs. But he wasn’t dead. There was no log, and two of his men drew their cutlasses and charged her before she could finish him off. While they certainly succeeded in providing a distraction, the assault itself was an abject failure. The man behind her was skewered through the chest as a catgirl suddenly appeared in front of him, while the other was ripped to shreds by Boris’ sail. He extended it from his spine when she slashed and used its jagged tips as one would an iron claw.

Though somewhat impressed, she soon discarded the lizard; he was thrown at a mage in the midst of casting a spell as she met another assailant with a dead sailor’s blade. He was intently focused on the clash of weapons, but Claire saw it as nothing but a distraction. She lashed out with her tail before their swords could meet again and crushed his heart with her iron grip. There was no contest. He was dead in an instant, with his corpse falling off the ship and into the sea.

“Use the wave breaker! We’re going back under!”

The archer, who had retreated to the rear, shouted the command as he drew two arrows from his quiver and nocked them against his bow. His posture was still as it was before. He didn’t adjust it to account for his head's new position, but his aim stayed true nonetheless. Both the lightning charged arrows homed straight towards Claire’s chest, as if guided by a divine hand only to be swatted away. He tried to reposition again, but she caught up to him immediately, plowing through the men in her path with halberds made of ice.

They weren’t very durable. Two or three hits would leave the makeshift weapons shattered and broken, but Claire minded not. It took only a moment for each spear to regenerate, and the ship’s crew was never fast enough to leverage the downtime. It wasn’t long before she had the supposed commander on the end of her pole. Stabbing him through the gut with one weapon, she removed his hands with the other and sealed his method of retaliation.

“Don’t think you’ve won!” He growled through his bloodied teeth. “Glarchst has seen your sins! For killing his champions and soiling his entertainment, you have earned his ire! We will find you, and we wi—”

Claire grabbed Boris with her tail and cut the fishy ranger off with a bash to the face. One smash was enough to knock him unconscious, but it took another five to silence him for good.

“Is it just me, or was he trying to give us some sort of warning?”

There were no enemies left on the boat. Lia had finished them all off with the same dark knight skill that she had used to sever the fortress; a single cleave had slain two masts and three dozen men. Still, Claire was too distracted to answer. All her focus was taken by her log. She was skimming through it as quickly as she could, searching for the key entries hidden beneath the pointlessly inflated kill count, but she couldn’t quite find what she hoped, no matter how many times she checked.

A quick look at her status confirmed her fears. Her racial class was still only level 249. She was almost completely through the level, but the assailants hadn’t quite been powerful enough to push her over the edge.

“Maybe if he brought a few more men.” The ship lurched as she grumbled, jerking to and fro in the still violent seas. Claire wrote it off as a natural phenomenon at first, but the conclusion was immediately called to question. A second, more violent lurch followed the first, with third and a fourth accompanying soon after. The fifth came with the most drastic change. The ship suddenly started to fall like a rock, with its remaining passengers accompanying it on its journey. Claire was able to escape the strange phenomenon by kicking off the boat, and her magic allowed to capture the others before they vanished into the depths. But not all was well. Because she had wrongly assumed that fleeing the boat would bring her to safety.

A series of powerful underwater currents made it impossible for her to control her direction. They robbed her of her agency and flung her body off in random directions. She still tried to press towards the surface, but the waves mercilessly dragged her deeper and deeper into the abyss.

It took a storm of charged vectors, the most powerful burst of force magic she could muster, to finally break free of the flow. Emerging from the sea like a dolphin, she immediately scanned her surroundings and looked for Sylvia, but the fox was nowhere to be found. Catgirl detector picked up nothing. She had been washed so far away by the current that her friend was out of range.

Glancing quickly at the others, she found that while Boris was fine, Natalya was looking worse for wear. The catgirl was unconscious and completely unresponsive. She didn’t even start coughing up the water in her lungs until Claire grabbed her sides and squeezed her like a rag.

“Sylvia will be fine by herself.” Muttering under her breath, the halfbreed looked towards the closest island and dragged her remaining companions to the beach. “We’re the ones in more danger.”

Setting Lia down in the sand and raising her ears high, she examined both the cat and her surroundings. The berserker had somewhat recovered. Her breaths were still somewhat ragged, but her heart was beating regularly. She was likely to awaken with time.

Knowing that set the lyrkress at ease, but everything she heard did exactly the opposite. The islet they were on was a tiny piece of land, only a few dozen meters in every direction. The center was made up of a layer of dense brush, a tiny jungle with trees much smaller than those that took root on the mainland. It should have been quiet, save for the occasional animal. There was no reason for it not to be otherwise silent and devoid of voices. But there was one, loud and clear, its source the island’s center.

It was singing a tune that seemed to rattle her bones. She could feel it resounding through her core, and not because it was laced with magic. It seemed to call to her, to appeal to something fundamental, something woven into the very fibre of her being.

“Watch over her.”

Issuing her living weapon an order, Claire pushed her way through the trees and sought the voice’s owner. The foliage grew sparse as she approached, with all of it eventually giving way to a lawn. And with it, a small house.

There was an old lady sitting on the porch, rocking in a strange chair even longer than those meant for centaurs. The wooden implement was certainly an object of interest, but it did not catch her attention in the way that the ancient woman stole her eyes.

Her frame sported two legs, two fins, and a tail.

She looked like she could swim through the water, gallop across the beach, and slither up a tree all at once. And Claire knew for certain that she could.

Because she was a lyrkress.

The only other that she had ever seen.