The third island was now clearly visible as I approached. This one had been even further away than the second island was from the first, and I’d spent about two hours just leisurely gliding through the air. I did have to engage in a dogfight when some weird raptor with wings decided he could take me, but that barely made a dent in my travel time. I getting fairly efficient with my mana management as well. If I spent about five-hundred VMP to make a void jump, I could glide for long enough that my VMP was filled back up by the time I needed to gain altitude again.

I could technically stay in the air indefinitely! But, as cool as that little fact may be, the timer on my XP bonus was counting down mercilessly and was now displaying just under two hours. If I couldn’t find the guardian quickly, I’d have wasted some precious time. The closer I got to the island, the less confident I got.

The island was positively huge. The other two islands I’d been to couldn’t even compare to the size of this one. There were no mountains as the first one had, but there was still a large hill towards my left, covered in a tropical forest of sorts. There were a lot of open areas mostly filled with grass and monsters. The island itself was raised up a bit, surrounded by a bluff, which was only broken up by the occasional, small beach. Once I got close enough, I realized that there was another, smaller island hidden behind this one, the two being connected by thin strips of land creating a circle with a big, watery hole in the middle.

My first instinct was to scout out the big hill, hoping that the guardian would be guarding a rather obvious place on the island. The first had been on the tallest mountain, and the second had been chilling in the dead center of the island, making me believe that they were usually placed at geographically significant spots.

I glided over the island, keeping my eyes peeled for anything out of place. Wherever I looked, monsters were fighting, the island was pretty much packed with the critters. I did two flyovers on the hill, but the dense forest made seeing anything pretty hard. There were the occasional clearings, usually caused by the bigger fights rather than occurring naturally, but none of them seemed to contain a guardian. Disappointed, I banked away from the hill and started flying reconnaissance over the open grasslands.

Again, monsters everywhere, lots of fighting, but nothing that screamed “guardian” at me. They should be pretty easy to identify since the other monsters should be steering clear of wherever the guardian had set up shop. Yet, I couldn’t find them. It took quite a while to go over the rest of the island, but I had seen nothing. At this point, I was starting to wonder if it might be more efficient to just plow through the regular monsters, instead of wasting my precious XP buff while looking for the guardian.

I banked toward the smaller island, resolving to just fight the regulars if I shouldn’t find it on my first flyover. I was just flying over one of the land connections when I noticed the water in the atoll-like lake was bubbling. Out of caution, I put some more distance between me and the weird bubbles and kept a wary eye trained on whatever was happening while continuing my search for the guardian.

It didn’t take long for the water to explode upwards, an elongated body shooting out of the water, making a big arc in the air before splashing back down. A few seconds later, a head emerged and slowly rose above the water, supported by a blue-scaled body.

Fake Water Dragon (T5)

An odd species of eels that dared to dream big. They often get mistaken for juvenile water dragons, but compared to these behemoths, they are worms at best. Still, your ship probably won’t care whether it was an eel or a dragon that destroyed it, and neither will you when it swallows you whole.

The giant eel was looking around, for a while as if searching for something. It eventually went closer to shore, where it stared at the monsters fighting each other as if daring them to challenge it to a fight. The other monsters didn’t want to, apparently, as they ceased their fights to distance themselves from the majestic-looking eel. Upon closer inspection, it looked more like an oversized eel, the head shaped completely different from what I’d imagine a dragon would look like.

Granted, I’d never seen a dragon, and all I could go off was what humanity thought dragons looked like, but it still looked wrong.

Its head was oddly round, and the too-small eyes on its head gave it a bit of a goofy appearance. Its mouth had some rather sharp-looking teeth which stood in stark contrast to its otherwise not-exactly-dangerous looks if you ignored the sheer size of the thing. It was of an overall blue coloration, but there were the occasional red highlights, especially around the few small fins it had.

I kept watching as it inspected the island and the monsters on it, seemingly waiting for something to happen. But it didn’t attack, and no monster dared attack it. Or maybe, they weren’t allowed to?

This was probably the island guardian!

I immediately started planning my approach to fighting this thing. It would obviously stay in the water… probably. Its size would easily allow me to cast a giant spike, but I realized with a shock that I’d never tried casting it when there wasn’t solid ground under my opponent. Would it even work? The spike always appeared on the ground directly under the monster I was targeting, but what if the monster was flying? Or in this case, swimming?

I could most likely use the island to my advantage, but I felt like it was almost guaranteed to have some ranged attacks for just such a situation. It would probably be best to start the fight from the ground so that I could use my tactic of using a void jump to start flying above my opponent as a surprise. It worked against the Oni and would buy me precious seconds if I should need them. Also, my poison would probably work this time, not like when I fought the rock and stone elemental.

Aside from that, I’d probably just spam spells until the thing dropped dead. No need to overcomplicate things.

I landed on the sandy bank between the islands and started summoning an array of void javelins, intending to start the fight off with a giant spike to see if it would even work. It didn’t. Slightly disappointed that my strongest spell didn’t work, I let my array of void javelins fly, catching the oversized eel by surprise. A series of explosions rocked the sea monster and it fell back into the water.

For a second I was worried that it would just swim down where I couldn’t easily reach it. If it was smart, that was what it should do at least. But when it suddenly jumped out of the water, shooting at me like a rocket, I suddenly realized that this thing was stupid, full of rage, and out for blood. I barely managed to dodge the large mouth, but as the rest of its body passed me by, I got slammed in the side by one of its fins.

I was sent flying, spinning around wildly in the air. My wings snapped open, the sudden air resistance just enough to stabilize my out-of-control spinning. I just managed to see the tail end of the eel submerge back into the water on the other side of the small beach, no doubt turning around to lunge at me again. I quickly slammed down a short-range void jump but didn’t hop in yet.

I patiently waited for the eel to come at me again, preparing a surprise for the ugly bastard. I hadn’t used the magic bolt spell I’d received from the skill tree all that much, mostly because the spell barely did any damage, even with my high intelligence score. That all changed when I pumped it full of mana, of course.

The magic bolt was a spell with a variable mana cost, which meant I could theoretically pump it up to a ridiculous degree. The problem was, charging a spell like that took time, and I hadn’t quite figured out how to charge a spell while simultaneously casting other spells at the same time. This meant it was usually more effective to just throw out as many void javelins and poison spears as possible. Now, the eel was giving me ample time to charge a little surprise for it.

Of course, I could also just ready another array, but I didn’t trust myself to hit with all of them while dodging the admittedly fast pseudo-dragon. I imbued this one with the fire element, essentially creating a huge fireball as I watched the water in front of me like a hawk. Eventually, I saw the shadow of the eel approach at a rapid clip, and it jumped out of the water shortly after, mouth wide open to swallow me whole.

Perfect.

I let the supercharged magic bolt fly and jumped into my prepared portal, not wanting to stick around to see the aftermath from up close. I reappeared about two-hundred meters away, seeing that the eel had aborted his lunge and was thrashing around in pain. It was a good thing I wasn’t there anymore because the things huge body did quite a number on the little beach.

It was trying to slink back into the water, but I took the opportunity to pepper it with giant spikes, all of them cast with the imbued mana. The giant spikes emerged one after the other, spearing the eel at various points along its long body. Its thrashing redoubled and it eventually made it into the safety of the water. I was amazed that it hadn’t died from all that. Its constitution score must be insanely high, or it had some good defensive skills.

It didn’t take long for the eel to emerge in the center of the atoll, glaring in my direction with a third of its body out of the water like a submarine's periscope. I glared back at it while readying some more javelins. It was quite far away and it wouldn’t be easy to hit at this distance. I was okay with waiting, though, since I’d snuck in some poison spells, and the little status indicators under its name told me that it was most definitely slowly dying.

I was just about to ready another void jump portal when the eel surprised me by casting a spell. A bolt of lightning shot at me, too fast for me to react. I could feel my body seize up and the pain caused my vision to black out for a second. I lost control over my prepared javelins, the six spells flying out in random directions and blowing up part of the island. My vision swam as desperately tried to get my vision back in focus.

I tried leaping away, but my muscles refused to listen as the electricity coursing through them caused them to spasm wildly. My vision began to clear up a bit after a few seconds, probably no more than two or three, but it felt like an eternity to me. The last thing I saw was a giant maw full of teeth coming right at me.

And then, everything went dark.