Chapter 611 (1/2)

“This… is about halfway. Giver take. Half a mind to take you a mite farther, but it’s getting late in the day…” The old woman said as she set down her oars and looked critically up at the sky.

Blinking, Drake looked around. They were sitting in the middle of the body of water, with not a land in sight. What did she-

The boat flipped. Water filled his mouth. Saltwater, Drake thought bitterly. Immediately, the heavy metal studded leather armor he was wearing pulled him deeper into the dark water, away from the relative safety of the boat. As he sank, the old woman seemed to flip through the water like a dolphin, instantly circling the boat and righting it as he sank helplessly downward.

As he moved his arms ineffectually, trying to reverse his descent, she grinned at him and flipped him off. Then she kicked her feet and practically leaped out of the water and back up onto the boat.

‘Swimming Skills,’ Drake thought sourly, as he considered his options. After a bit of hesitation, he put his armor back into his interspatial ring and glared upwards as he began to swim. Ryx, for whatever reason, maintained his physical form and used his small claws to cling to the rough cloth of Drake’s undershirt. He wasn’t the best swimmer, but the stats he had compensated for a lot, even when you didn’t have the Skill.

Still, about 20 seconds later, Drake realized he had two problems: rapidly swarming fish monster and the boat was rapidly moving away across the water. That damn old woman must have been sandbagging on the row out here.

Another voice in Drake’s head whispered that this was his own fault. He had accepted her offer of “take him halfway there” as an offer to take him to another small island with more boat traffic, not literally halfway there. But he hadn’t attempted to iron out the details. That was quite unlike him.

In fact, he had simply been furiously trying to figure out why Sydney had given him these orders, without worrying much about the execution. Perhaps he had assumed he would figure out when he got there, but… It was inexcusable. It was his fault. He was letting his insecurities cloud his judgment.

And now… a local had attempted to rob and perhaps even kill him. This was not something he would let go.

The bone gauntlet on his left hand throbbed. Wincing, Drake raised it an aimed at the departing boat. Although the strange stone left by the Ghosthound allowed you somehow to deny the System and provided some shelter from the reverberations, it didn’t totally insulate you. If you did it without their strange alter, your Class wouldn’t suffer the painful instability, but it also wouldn’t evolve.

Drake didn’t regret his decision, but he wished it wasn’t QUITE so fucking painful.

“Eternal Grasp.” He whispered as the many-toothed fish drew closer. There was a query from his bone gauntlet, and Drake responded by blasting it with an image of Mr. Fantastic’s arm stretching out almost infinitely.

With a small noise, the gauntlet trembled. THen it began to bubble. Finally, it erupted outwards, growing faster than it ever had in Drake’s practice. So much so that the force of it expanding knocked off the stroke of his swimming, and made him flounder somewhat as the strange monsters swamp closer.

There were two main varieties. One was a fat looking eel with a long snout, and the other was a silvery fish the size of a hog with sharp looking fins along its sides. Both were below Level 30, but there were probably a hundred of them gathering around Drake, with more lurking along the edges of his sphere of Perception.

The eels arrived first, undulating through the water to flash crooked teeth. Ryx squealed, or perhaps simply growled underwater but then morphed into his shield form in a second. In that form, Ryx was a large, perfectly circular shield positively bristling with spikes. And if those spikes inflicted wounds lingered, Drake knew that necrosis would set in fast enough to matter in this strange, underwater battle.

He managed to right himself just as the first arrived, twisting around the shield as Drake swung it slowly to defend. But as it passed by a hair’s breadth, Ryx stretched, extending his quills to rake across the side of the eel. It hissed in annoyance and came to bite Drake. Sighing, Drake activated his bone armor.