Chapter 254 - Hydra (1/2)

The high speed could not have lasted long for the haze wreathed arena was only so big. Or that was what Li thought, but the crater was surprisingly large, spanning over a vast swathe of land dotted with shattered boulders, dwarven skeletons, and as they flew in further, the skeletal remains of beasts of burden such as rock salamanders and the dull, deactivated and spherical cores of stone golems.  There were torn up rails, their iron bars twisted and strewn around like toothpicks.

Whatever this area had been, it had evidently been used for some kind of mining purpose.

The chase ended at the other end of the crater, almost a full minute later. That did not sound like much time, but the Oculon and Tia flew at breakneck speeds that would have put almost anything Li had seen in this world to shame.

The Oculon stopped in front of the other end of the haze dome, blood pouring from its many grievous wounds. The haze had concentrated even thicker here, but even then, Li could see that beyond the dome, there stood the tall and imposing silhouette of the Triforge mountains.

Li was right. This was a shortcut. The only issue being that one had to fight through an army of undead and a high-level monster to reach it.

”Careful, Tia!” said from Li from behind her. ”It is cornered, but that does not mean it is powerless.”

Tia hovered in midair, her antlers acting as conduits for green energy to begin swirling around. She kept some measure of distance for she did not want to get into a tangle with the Oculon's surprisingly damaging jaws and knew that its barrier was down.

The Oculon's maw curled up into a purple smile. Its remaining eyes glowed a deep shade of purple.

The haze began to swirl and concentrate around the Oculon, funneling into a quickly growing vortex of undeath. Its wounds began healing rapidly, and even more so than that, its entire form seemed to grow unstable, shuddering under the veil of purple as it began to turn into something else.

Tia fired her dragonbreath, not wishing to give the Oculon time to recover, but her breath scattered as the intense wind pressure of the haze vortex blew it away. She looked to Li for guidance, and he could only raise a brow in some concern.

This, Li was genuinely surprised about. In Elden World, there was no such mechanic as this where the source of the haze could absorb it to strengthen itself. But as his sharp eyes tracked the flow of the undead winds, he realized the haze did not come from the Oculon. It had never generated it in the first place.

Instead, it poured out from tunnels and gaping vents in the mountain behind the Oculon.

Even then, the haze had always been more of an aesthetic thing. Something to tell players that an area was under heavy undead influence. It could not be interacted with by either monster or player, only dispelled when the source was destroyed.

”I'll handle this, Tia,” said Li as he began to fly forwards. ”This is out of my expectations, and I don't want to endanger you any more than I want.”

Tia roughly shook her head, and Li could feel through their soulbound connection that she earnestly wanted to fight on her own strength. That she was feeling more so than ever a sense of being alive, of feeling threatened and challenged and craving those sensations ever the more. And under those sensations, he could sense pleading.

The same type of pleading a little girl would give their father when she wanted something. And Li relented, nodding to her and staying back. He reminded himself he was not here to coddle her. He was here to see her develop and struggle as her blood demanded of her.

The haze vortex calmed rapidly, and as it died down, the air became thin. So thin that Li could feel that any human would have suffocated. The Oculon emerged completely different. Its serpentine body remained the same, but its head had split into three fully grown and healed copies crowned with draconic horns and squirming tendrils of red.

Li immediately said to Tia, ”This is too dangerous for you now. Let me handle it.”

For the Oculon had become some strange fusion of three headed dragon and Oculon. A creature Li did not recognize at all from the game as though the Oculon might have been serpentine in appearance, it had zero relation to dragonkind.

This was an entirely new oddity, and one that Li was not prepared to let Tia deal with for even if he did not know what the creature was, he could still sense its power, and he estimated that it had jumped from level sixty to seventy.

But Tia only stared straight forwards, seemingly ignoring Li's words. She had her eyes completely trained on the dragon-oculon fusion not in her usual focused battle fury, but instead in surprise. A sliver of flesh slipped over her eyes as she blinked, and Li realized she was feeling a sense of reminiscence from seeing the three heads.

Li paused for a split second, wondering what to tell her, and in that second the evolved Oculon's three sets of eyes flashed red. Li raised a hand, preparing to deflect incoming rays, but he was still in the mistaken mindset that this was an Oculon.

No rays came. Instead, a localized, telekinetically charged explosion erupted around Tia's head in a burst of force and disintegrating red energy. A powerful blow that surely would have pierced through the magic resistance and defenses Tia had, especially considering she had not been prepared to take the attack.