Blessed Time: The Complete Series: (A LitRPG Adventure Box Set), page 87
A moment later, his concerns became a moot point as the serpent’s tail swung up into the air before crashing down amidship, shattering the Amelia’s deck and letting steaming water pour into her hold.
Even if his spell guaranteed the daskin’s death, it was too late. His ship was destroyed, and even if Micah was near enough to the Serpent’s Teeth to make it to one of the islands, the whole chain was set to erupt in a couple of weeks. He might be able to make it across the ocean on his own, but his companions were as good as dead.
Gritting his teeth, Micah began casting deja vu. Below him, the daskin screeched again as the roots from infest pushed deeper, questing to find an opening in the massive animal’s skull to feast on the tender brain underneath.
Mana flowed into the spellform, draining a full quarter of his maximum reserves in a matter of seconds and leaving Micah lightheaded. The Amelia cracked apart, the waves created by the daskin’s death throes too great for the beleaguered vessel.
Just as the vessel began to sink into the ocean, time itself stopped. Deja vu flickered to life around Micah, ripping him and everyone else backward through the timeline. The daskin disappeared beneath the waves as chunks of the Amelia rose from the water, reassembling the ship before Micah’s very eyes.
Then the spell pulled him from the air, depositing him back in the cabin he used for his spellcasting. The dreamlike state of weave of fate flickered into being around him. Once again, he found himself a couple days in the future. He turned toward where he’d been attacked last time, the world overly bright and slightly surreal.
Where there had once been a wall of fire and caustic Elsewhere energy, a burning daskin rose from the waves. It stared back at him, unmoving as reality stretched and warped around it.
“NOW YOU SEE, MANLING,” the serpent didn’t bother to open its mouth to speak, instead projecting its booming voice directly into Micah’s mind. “YOU MAY RUN BUT IT IS NOT FAST ENOUGH. YOU MAY HIDE, BUT A PIECE OF ME FOLLOWS WITH YOU. YOU MAY BEG FOR MERCY, BUT THE CONCEPT IS AS ALIEN TO ME AS MY HUNGER IS TO YOU.”
“YOUR GODS HAVE SENT AN ONKERT TO COMPLETE A PROPER DAEMON’S JOB,” it continued, cracks ripping themselves into the spell and letting the misty winds of Elsewhere blow through Micah’s mind. “YOU WERE DOOMED FROM BEFORE YOU INCARNATED IN THAT PITIFUL FLESH PRISON YOU WEAR NOW. YOU CAN STRUGGLE AND SCHEME, BUT BEFORE MY EONS, YOUR WILL IS MEANINGLESS.”
With a grunt, Micah dismissed the spell, the Prince’s parting laughter echoing in his skull. He opened his eyes and grimly took in his half-empty mana pools.
Five minutes. That was what deja vu bought him. He had the opportunity to redo the last five minutes of his life, his mana unrecovered from the brief but brutal battle.
Micah sprang to his feet, running to the cabin where Drekt and Trevor were sleeping. His fist slammed into the door with enough force to splinter wood, bending the frame. Drekt shouted something indecipherable, but Micah ignored him. There simply wasn’t time.
“We are about to be attacked!” he shouted, barely pausing his rush toward the ladder that would bring him above-decks. “I don’t know how, but the enemy knows where we are. Wake up and stay vigilant!”
Then he was gone, taking the rungs two at a time before exploding upward into the night air. The stars hung in the sky, exactly as he remembered them. Below, people began shouting, responding to his raised alarm.
Micah ignored them, running toward the aftcastle and jumping from the deck with a grunt. His Body attribute carried him most of the way, and with a quick thrust of his hand and final vault over the wooden railing that kept sailors from falling off in poor weather, he found himself standing next to the ship’s captain.
Hanna blinked at him in the moonlight, a sextant in her hands and a map unfurled on a table in front of her. Almost unnoticed to her side was a young, fit man with a closely cut shock of bright red hair.
“Silver,” she began, eyes widening as she processed the situation, “what are you doing up here? Is something the matter?”
“Quickly,” Micah said, planting the butt of his spear on the deck as he glanced out at the choppy ocean. “We are about to be attacked by a massive daskin. I don’t know how old it is, but it is at least as powerful as a level 60 blessed and covered in magical blue tattoos. As best I can tell, it can use Water magic, mostly associated with superheated water and steam.
“If you know anything about it,” he continued hurriedly, “I need to know. Knowledge about its preferences or weaknesses could very well save lives.”
The sextant fell from Hanna’s shaking hand as she took a hesitant step backward.
“Oh, gods above, no,” she whispered. “Maarikava.”
NINE
A MERRY CHASE
“Maarikava.” Micah repeated the word thoughtfully, letting it roll off of his tongue. “I’m sorry, but the name doesn’t really help. Is it weak against ice attacks? Maybe sonic?”
“How do you…?” Hanna began, only for her voice to dry up, trailing off awkwardly and leaving the aftcastle in silence once more.
“Does its species have a soft underbelly that it keeps beneath the waterline?” he asked hopefully, grasping for solutions to their mutual problem. “I need some help here.”
“No.” Hanna shook her head, finally snapping out of her stupor. “Maarikava isn’t a type of monster. It’s a name. She’s the biggest daskin in the Emerald Ocean, at least a couple of centuries old. Rumor has it that she’s the daughter of Maarika, Goddess of the Ocean and Travel.”
“Great,” Micah replied, keeping his eyes trained on the ocean for signs of the sea serpent. “Now how do I drive her off or defeat her? We have just over a minute before she attacks, so I would appreciate a little haste.”
“You pray,” Hanna answered bleakly. “She’s more of a tavern tale than anything, but Maarikava isn’t supposed to attack anyone that has Maarika’s favor.
“Beyond that?” Hanna shrugged. “I don’t have the faintest clue. Anyone sane tries to avoid her, and every sighting is at distance near the Serpent’s Teeth. I’ve never heard of anyone lucky enough to actually survive an attack.”
“Fuck.” The word tore itself from Micah’s throat. “You’ve got about eighty seconds to get pious, then, because now would be the perfect time for a little divine intervention.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond, instead pushing off from the deck and activating the enchantment in his necklace. Floating up into the moonlight, Micah chewed on his lower lip pensively while he scanned the waves.
Defeating the Maarikava shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Even without knowing the daskin’s specific weaknesses, the previous battle had revealed enough about its capabilities for him to gauge the situation.
It was fast compared to a normal blessed, but nowhere near as quick as Micah. Unfortunately, it was armored to the point that only Trevor, Drekt, and him would be able to harm it. Worse, it was more than strong enough to destroy the Amelia. Even without magic, a single swipe of its tail had snapped the ship’s masts like kindling.
Killing the Maarikava wouldn’t mean anything if the ship was too damaged to complete its voyage. Given how prone the monster was to violent thrashing when he injured it, merely fighting the serpent would probably result in the Amelia’s destruction, even if he could keep its attention on him for the entirety of the battle.
He halted himself, hovering in the moonlight over the Emerald Ocean. A quick glance back at the ship revealed the deck swarming with sailors trying to arm and prepare themselves, all woken by his shouts of alarm.
The Maarikava wasn’t his only dilemma. He wasn’t sure how the Third Prince had found him, or even what exactly it was doing, but there was no question that it was influencing events. His predictions failing and the appearance of the legendary monster were enough to prove the point on their own, and the daemon’s taunts had all but confirmed the situation.
Somehow, despite the gods’ best efforts, it had tracked him down, and it had already begun interfering with his plans. He doubted that the Prince was there in person, if it was it simply would have attacked him outright rather than relying upon tools such as the Maarikava. Still, predictability was his enemy. If the daemon knew where he was and what he was doing, it would find a way to defeat him.
That meant finding a way to break the pattern. To escape from the Third Prince’s clutches.
The water roiled as the Maarikava breached the surface, its triangular head shining in the moonlight as it loomed over the Amelia. Before it could interact with the ship, Micah began casting vacuum. The spell took up a fair amount of his dwindling mana, but there was no denying that it was effective where most of his other attacks barely managed to draw a trickle of blood.
Just as the runes etched into the monster’s scales began to glow blue with Water mana, Micah’s spell struck it in the side. The air around the spell’s epicenter disappeared, rending the daskin’s scales apart and exposing its violet flesh to the moonlight. A fraction of a second later, the wind rushed in to fill the void with a thunderclap.
The Maarikava lurched backward as if burned, spraying an arc of purple blood into the moonlight. Before she could react further, a trio of air knives struck sparks off the scales of her face. She turned toward Micah just in time for him to hit her in the throat with a pressure spear.
Despite his skill level in both the specific spell and his spellcasting in general, it didn’t draw any blood. Instead, the powerful spell only served to dislodge one of the fist-sized scales just under her head.
Incensed, she pulsed with blue energy, drawing water from the ocean toward her maw—only for Micah to fire a wind blade into her gullet, slashing open her tender and unarmored forked tongue.
She screeched with rage, unleashing a cone of steam hot enough to strip flesh from bone at Micah’s dodging form. He winced as some of the heat bled through the wind shield he’d erected at the last second, turning his skin a bright cherry red and shaving off a small amount of his hit points.
Rather than slow his assault, Micah moved further from the Amelia, firing another pressure spear at the Maarikava and removing another scale on her chest. She followed him, turning entirely away from the vulnerable wood and canvas before diving below the surface.
“Go on ahead!” Micah shouted, eyes on the water and tracking the sinuous line of glowing blue as the Maarikava swam toward him. “I’ll lead her away and catch up later. Just keep an eye out for me in port if I don’t catch up with the ship.”
On the Amelia’s deck, Drekt saluted him with his cleaver before running toward where Hanna stood frozen on the aftcastle, wide eyes trained on Micah’s flying form.
Then the Maarikava jumped from the depths of the Emerald Ocean, body shining blue as wings of steam spread out behind her. They flapped once, giving her the extra push she needed to reach Micah as her jaws opened wide for the fatal snap that would punch her fangs through his unarmored torso.
With a grimace, he cast time leash, sending his mana reserves well under one third of their maximum levels. As her jaws closed, a faint tether of grayish light stretched from her back toward a glowing silhouette deep beneath the water.
She snapped out of existence, reappearing in the position she had been barely three seconds ago. Micah simply turned and flew away, aiming toward where he had remembered the jagged triangles of the Serpent’s Teeth.
Time leash was a powerful spell, but it came with its own limitations. It was quick to cast and it would send a target back a handful of seconds in their own timeline without making any other changes, but it took a tremendous amount of mana and he could only use it twice in any twenty-four-hour period. In short, it was there to stop killing blows, ambushes, and other surprises, but it wasn’t something he could rely on consistently.
Eventually, his mana would run out and he would fall to the ocean. If some aquatic life didn’t slay him, it was only a matter of time before Micah’s stamina was insufficient and he drowned in the water.
Maybe if the previous battle hadn’t drained his reserves, Micah would’ve had enough mana left over to properly fight the Maarikava and return to the Amelia. As things were, he needed a place to land and recuperate once the battle was over. Maybe he’d be able to find the ship once he was done, and maybe he wouldn’t. If all else failed, he’d find a way to cross the ocean on his own. After all, he just needed to head west from the Serpent’s Teeth. A continent was a hard thing to miss.
He glanced backward, where the glowing blue form of the Maarikava swam furiously after him. Barely visible past the daskin were the fading lights on the Amelia itself. No matter what else happened, Drekt, Trevor, Eris, Esther, Telivern, and Ravi were safe for now.
Micah turned his attention back toward the Serpent’s Teeth. One of the islands was barely visible in the moonlight, and with a slight adjustment of his course, he aimed himself toward it.
Eventually, his necklace failed. The gemstone he was using as a reservoir for Night mana cracked as it ran completely dry. It would take time and money to replace it, but the mana well had served its purpose, giving him time to replenish his reserves as he made his escape.
His altitude and speed stuttered as the enchantment faded. Quickly, he recast flight, but the moment of hesitation let his pursuer catch up.
The Maarikava breached the surface and fired a tightly concentrated blast of boiling water from its still-bleeding mouth, forcing Micah to corkscrew to the side as the bolt of glowing blue scorched past him.
Without looking, Micah tossed a pressure spear behind him. It was impossible to know whether he actually managed to hit anything, but the daskin didn’t attack him again. At a minimum, the spell made the creature flinch, buying him enough time to outpace it once again en route to the Serpent’s Teeth.
Micah set his shoulders, pressing his arms tight to his side and holding his spear against his chest in order to cut down on drag as he sped through the night air. His normal flight speed was high enough that the Maarikava couldn’t quite catch up with him, but at the same time, he didn’t want to risk another attack. Fighting the sea monster before he was ready would just slow him and burn up more mana that he couldn’t afford to waste.
The chase lasted almost fifteen minutes. Micah had to slow down to recast flight and let the Maarikava catch up a bit once, but with him paying proper attention to the monster, it never got a chance to launch another attack at him.
Finally, he landed on the rocky beach of one of the islands. Volcanic stone crunched under Micah’s feet as he fished a tiny bauble of spun glass out of his pocket. Shaped like a star, it glowed with its own inner light.
Micah crushed it, letting the mana stored inside seep into his body. Unfortunately, he only had one replenishing consumable. Much like his armor and most of his day-to-day enchanted gear, Micah hadn’t brought the rest of them when he began casting a weave of fate in the belly of the Amelia.
After he became aware of the attack, there simply hadn’t been time to rearm himself. He would have to beat the monster with nothing more than his burned-out necklace, his spear, and a ring of emergency healing that he hopefully wouldn’t need to use.
He blew out a breath as he relaxed into the first stance of TI… Trevor’s combat art. Micah gripped his spear loosely, the point unwavering as he aimed toward the gently rolling waves.
The Maarikava burst through the surface, glowing bright blue from the mana coursing up and down its length. Wings of steam unfurled behind her as a wall of water, the product of her sudden appearance, washed over Micah’s knees and waist.
She screamed, an incoherent and rage-filled assault on Micah’s ears. Purple blood flowed from the numerous wounds his spells had left in the armored hide of the sea serpent. Steam hissed from her nostrils, tracing two lines that disappeared into the night sky.
Micah blew out a breath and tensed his legs. Quietly, he began mouthing the words to another spell, eyes not leaving the daskin as she quivered with rage above him.
The Maarikava lunged forward, a cone of boiling water flickering with blue light as it left her mouth.
He jumped into the air, muttering the words to a spell attack that fused sand and rock into glass beneath him. Temporal vortex triggered, blurring a chunk of the world as time went wild, head-sized chunks of the monster accelerating years into the future while swirls of energy dragged parts of the creature into the past.
Updraft kept Micah free of both the Maarikava’s attack and the ravages of his own spell as it blended the daskin’s back into a brittle and incongruous mess. Its breath attack ground to a halt when the powerful Time spell inflicted its damage, trailing off into a whimpering stutter.
A second later, the spell winked out just before Micah landed on its back. His spear jabbed downward, tip blurring as he wedged the point under a scale and sawed the rocklike chunk of armor off.
Just as he was reaching downward to use infest, seeking to end the battle with one quick blow, the Maarikava bucked backward and threw Micah back into the air. He cursed silently, twisting so that he landed on his feet in the waist-high ocean water.
The beast curved around toward him, a noticeable tilt to its body from the two ruined expanses of flesh left by his powerful area-of-effect strikes. Her eyes burned dangerously, sparks of blue light jolting from her jaws only to ground themselves in the Emerald Ocean with hissing clouds of steam.
Micah felt the temperature of the water around him begin to spike, and he silently cursed himself for not renewing flight. The beast snarled, curving backward like a jungle snake preparing to strike. He dropped into a crouch, tensing his muscles as his toes bit into the smooth rocks beneath the waves.
