***Tirnanog, Grand Lake – Southern Outflow***

***Magnus***

“You know… this feels very relaxing,” I commented while I cast my fishing rod into the lake. I did so every few minutes after slowly and patiently reeling in the hook. There was no reason to hurry. “It’s just like on a camping trip. I think I could spend a few days like this.”

Astra observed my actions with a perplexed and slightly perturbed expression. “Could you please explain why you are trying to fish after you threw a barrel of poison into the lake?”

“Because,” I answered simply, thinking no more explanation was necessary.

“Because?” she questioned.

“Just because!” I reaffirmed, ignoring the dead starfish which bobbed head-first against the rock I was sitting on before it was slowly pushed past by the current. It was drifting belly up amidst the small waves beating against the shore. The creature was just one of many of its kind. A procession of death was passing us by, occasionally interrupted by a larger corpse.

Some might be appalled at what I had done to mother nature yet again, but to me, the sight was simply beautiful. All these horrific monsters – laid low by human ingenuity.

I wondered whether deathnut oil could somehow be spread in a gaseous form – doing the same to a land-based ecosystem. Maybe some form of spray that could be dispersed over a large area via airship!

After thinking over my answer for a minute, Astra finally admitted, “I am afraid I don’t understand.” She clicked her tongue and gestured at the scene. “Honestly, after what you did to Starfish Lake at the Old Camp this feels like you are trying to genocide all of starfishdom.”

“Certainly not!” I lied without an ounce of remorse. “Look, pulling out a fishing rod to demonstrate my contempt for these creatures is just what a man of my calibre has to do. I admit it’s like pissing on my opponent’s corpse, but it feels too right to do so.”

Astra rolled her eyes. “We have been together for long enough so I can tell when you are lying. Just tell me why you hate starfish so much that you take every reasonable chance you get to poison them.”

“I am telling you, they are just collateral damage!” I insisted and pointed at one of the larger corpses drifting by. “Look, it’s the big monsters we are after. And it’s not like the nature of this world is anything worth protecting. Almost everything I have encountered so far tried to kill and eat me!”

“Starfish look freaky but they are relatively harmless compared to all the other horrors out there. Just admit it!” Astra crossed her arms. “Don’t we have an agreement, to be honest with each other?”

“Fine!” I retorted. “I have an axe to grind with them if you have to know. The day I arrived on this world one of the fuckers tried to kiss my face. Gave me the shock of my life.”

“You…” Astra was lost for words. “Are you going to crusade against any animal which ever tried to eat you? What about gutters? They also hunted you once.”

“All in its due time,” I announced ominously. “I have a priority list. The starfish just got bumped up the list because having a go at them was convenient.”

She sat down next to me and rested her head on my shoulder, accompanied by a deep sigh. “I partnered up with a genocidal idiot.”

“A lovable genocidal idiot!” I corrected. “And I know I can’t eradicate all starfish, but a sight like this warms my heart. Don’t you feel safer than ever sitting on this shore? Normally, we would have to look out for some predator trying to drag us into the water, but that’s no concern right now. And the grassland behind us gives us plenty of warning time with Elegance on watch.”

I didn’t mention the ominous flashes of light coming from deep down in the lake. They occasionally lit up the dark water like a thunderbolt. We had observed them with concern from the back of our drake when we staked out the best area for our plan.

Further up north the water was still lighting up from time to time, but activity close to our position had ceased entirely since we dropped the barrel.

“An idiot nonetheless. One who would have thrown his poison barrel into the water further upstream where the Hochberg outposts have their fishing operations.”

“A small oversight you prevented,” I groused. If I had been allowed to drop the barrel a little further up north, we could have poisoned a much larger area. “Is there any reason for our banter?”

She played with one of my filaments. “Just waiting at the shore with you is so boring. How long do you think it will take until a thunder eel drifts by?”

“I am not boring!” I protested. “And I don’t know. If Hochberg’s records are correct, then the eels are living in the deeper parts of the lake. It might take some time till one is attracted by all the dead starfish. Even if it wasn’t poisoned initially, it might be done in by eating one of the corpses.”

“You are not boring, which is why I am talking with you,” Astra said.

“You could go for a swim and test out your poison resistance,” I suggested. “I doubt we could ever find safer waters than this.”

“And then I have to puke out my guts twice. Once for recreational swimming and once for when one of those thunder eels happens to drift ashore? I prefer not to go into the water at all.” Astra shook her head. “Besides, I find the idea of swimming among all those corpses rather unappealing.”

“Point.” I eyed the relatively shallow shore and then looked at the drake who had chosen a grassy hill as her resting place. Of course, sufficiently far away from the water. “Won’t happen. The eels are rather big and the shore is too shallow. If one passes us by, we have to jump in to get it since Elegance has to stay away from the water.”

The river serving as the lake’s outflow was rather wide. Maybe a hundred metres.

The Great Lake was mostly a flooding area for the Sanguine River. The eastern area of the lake was covered by a reedy type of high grass. Most of the year it was flooded and indistinguishable from the rest of the lake. The rest, it was a boggy landscape, depending on the season.

Because of the recent heavy rainfalls, the lake had a rather high water level right now, creating a small inland sea. If the records were to be believed, the lake was still plenty deep at its deepest point in the western area.

The lake was fed by the Sanguine River up in the north and had a southern outlet which wound its way southwest and disappeared further inland.

This southern outlet was where we had made camp after dropping our poisonous payload via drake.

Now, all we had to do was to be patient while we were waiting and checking the carcasses drifting by – with one of them hopefully turning out to be our hunting goal. The plan was to wait for at least a day or two before risking a dive into the lake itself.

Normally, I would have dropped the poison barrel further up north, but Astra was afraid it would pose a danger to the closest Hochberg outposts – which were strewn across the northern shore. After all, Hochberg’s economy was heavily dependent on the animals and starfish they retrieved from the lake and the surrounding area. It wouldn’t have been advisable to destroy one of the industrial pillars of our closest allies. Even if the situation would have been only temporary.

“Too bad they don’t fish for thunder eels. It would have been too easy to buy the flesh from some fishermen,” I lamented while I watched the corpse of something big and round drifting by – whale-sized. It looked like the shell of a turtle, so not what we were seeking.

I pointed at the mountain of unidentified flesh. “You are still telling me you would have gone for a dive?”

“You don’t have to use every opportunity to rub it in!” Astra threw up her hands. “Your approach is the right one! I said it. Happy now?”

“I am!” I replied with a smug expression. “Say, how much deathnut oil does the clan have?”

“Forget it. I already know what’s going through that brain of yours. The barrel was probably half a year’s worth of harvest. I was surprised my parents just signed off on it. Deathnut Oil, while highly restricted, is a military resource. For that, you are the one who can go and collect eggs at Zipper Shit Creek.” Astra poked my side. “We have run out of eggs months ago.”

I groaned. “How many more of those eggs do we have to eat until we can stop?”

I wasn’t opposed to how we had preserved the zipper egg yolk, but after half a year of regular consumption, I had gotten tired of the salty treat accompanying every meal.

She shrugged. “I have no clue. Till we no longer notice our abilities improving? It doesn’t matter. I like salt-dried eggs very much.”

I grumbled and nodded. “You’ve been slurping them up like candy during your pregnancy.”

“Hey!”

“Just telling the truth.” I whistled before pointing at a sinuous body drifting in from the lake. “You think that’s it?”

It was long and white. Certainly at least twenty metres in length with a somewhat oval-shaped cross-section as high as a human.

“Only one way to find out,” Astra said and spread her filaments to take off. “It certainly fits the description.”

Not wanting to be left behind, I flash-stepped forward three times until I was directly above the corpse. It looked indeed like we had hit the jackpot, so I allowed gravity to take me.

The intention was to land on the corpse and maybe use it as a raft, but even before I touched down, my vision turned white. I barely had the time to process the electric arcs dancing along the creature’s body.

Someone slapped my face and called my name before the world turned back into focus.

I sputtered and coughed up lake water, purging it from my lungs along with the slightly sick feeling of being poisoned. It was nothing to be proud of, but my body was getting used to the deathnut oil, rejecting it less and less.

“Wha-? Happened?” I gurgled.

Astra pulled me over so I could cough out more water. She kept holding me so I wouldn’t slip off the eel.

“I don’t know. I am just glad you are alright!” she blubbered. “You landed on the thing and the whole body lit up like a flashlight! Then you just slipped off and fell into the water. I thought- I thought you were dead.”

She hugged me. “You must have triggered some reflex. Whatever it was, it seems like it used up the charge, because it hasn’t activated since.”

I took a deep breath and firmly gripped her hand to reassure myself, shaken by the stern reminder that just one false move on Tirnanog meant death. If my mutations hadn’t made me exceptionally resistant to electricity, the corpse of some eel would have just ended me by thunderbolt.

“Astra, whatever we do, we are not going to dive into the lake!”

She nodded, fervently agreeing with me. “If a dead thunder eel has enough power to knock us out, then I don’t want to know what a living one can do.”

It took me a few minutes to recover and after I was back on my feet we slowly began working on getting the body to shore. A branch long enough to reach the river bottom served as a means of propulsion. With it, we slowly got the body to shore until we managed to beach it on a convenient gravel bed.

Then we dissected the carcass as best as possible.

We avoided the organs which would have presumably absorbed a large amount of the poison. The plentiful muscle tissue along the creature’s body was easy enough to extract while avoiding as much contamination with the river water as possible.

The flesh would still be deadly for anyone else to eat. There was never a question about the downside of our hunting method, so we still needed the eel as uncontaminated as possible so we wouldn’t hurl up after every meal.

To preserve and safeguard the harvest of our hunt, we brought several barrels with salt which were now slowly stacked with strips of meat.

It took the rest of the day to secure our catch and get everything ready for Elegance to transport the barrels.

We could have spent more time gathering, but dusk forced us to retreat to one of Hochberg’s fishing outposts.

The next morning we journeyed back to the flagship which was still stationed at Jeng. The fleet hadn’t moved since Thich’s and Vier’s troops had retreated, probably because our leadership was waiting for news from various scouting parties. Nobody knew where the bulk of the enemy’s forces was heading now.

But we had our orders, so Astra and I consolidated our new mutation without much time to test out the results. Suffice it to say, Gaia was right. Right the next morning I could already feel a vast difference in my capabilities. Not in what I could do. My skills hadn’t changed, but everything felt so much easier. From handling electricity to flash steps and jaunts.

Our group departed for the Old Camp the very next day.

Astra and I were riding on Elegance while Mark and Thalia had Cadence as their mount. Ginevra and Thiago had been given a female drake of their own, going by the name of Melody.

The Old Camp was only a stop for the night. We also brought some updates for Conla Leece who was still acting as the commander of the small fleet of airships still stationed there. The elders and the officials from Hochberg with Tianna had been recalled to the main fleet.

At first light, we departed to make a quick stop at Zipper Shit Creek, where I found myself climbing the cliffs once more. Thanks to flash-step, the whole affair was much easier this time around. Unfortunately, getting hit by the hail of droppings the female zippers produced in reaction to me pilfering their nests was still unavoidable.

I was using my filaments and armour to prevent as much direct skin contact as possible, but a bath and hours of cleaning were a given.

My basket was already half-full when a familiar foe decided to bite my pinky. It was a zipper missing its tail and going by the numerous little scars on it the little rat was a veteran of many battles.

I narrowed my eyes at the little monster.

“You!”

***Tirnanog, Zipper Shit Creek***

***Astra***

“Can you tell me what he is doing now?” Thalia asked, narrowing her eyes at my partner who had forgotten about collecting eggs and was instead running back and forth at the base of the cliff, doing his best to catch a single zipper.

“I am going to eat you! Don’t think I don’t remember you!”

I closed my eyes and tried to ignore his enraged screams while I massaged the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t want to know. Nor do I want to go down there and find out while being shat upon.”

“Dastardly little thing!”

“It sounds like he knows the zipper he is trying to catch,” Thiago commented. “They must share quite the tale. Though I wouldn’t anthropomorphize the creatures as much as he does.”

“He wouldn’t say so himself, but he has been a little bit off kilter since the thunder eel electrocuted him,” I admitted a little nervously with a laugh. “He may have lost a few IQ points due to the electrocution. I am sure he will get himself back under control before we reach the Mycelium.”