There was something extremely wrong with this wave. It was too easy, in a way that was entirely separate from the opening day’s fireworks.

  People … we knew how to deal with natural disasters. Rarely well, most nations had enough disastrous disaster relief efforts in their past to fill entire history books, but there were plans in place to deal with them.

  Water to dump on fire via specialized planes or helicopters, storm shelters, flood barriers, pesticides, … not necessarily useable against monsters, but at least partially useable.

  Also, it seemed like these things were uniquely vulnerable to modern weapons. Well, perhaps not “uniquely,” but still, they were a lot easier to take down using modern tech than I’d have assumed at this stage in the game.

  It hadn’t really been obvious in the first hours, considering the highly entertaining yet impersonal nature of the first few thousand “kills,” but elementals had cores, one each, though Nation Bosses would likely have extra, just as the previous ones had had.

  And that was their big weakness because those cores were rather fragile. You had to rip your way through a lot of mass to reach them, but once you were there, you won. Which meant that if you found a way to easily strike at them without going through the intervening space, well, that fight was yours to win.

  Wind monsters might be able to knock bullets and artillery shells off target, constantly shifting to render direct strikes ineffective, but it had taken perhaps a day at most for anyone with the means at hand to introduce the monster to the miracle of proximity detonations.

  And water monsters, well … water was a liquid and, as such, could not compress when hit by, say, an explosion, transferring shockwaves, and sound too, for that matter, far more easily than air.

  Get a bomb of sufficient strength anywhere near the core and boom, that was the game right there.

  Wood/plant was countered by fire, while the usual anti-wildfire techniques applied in sufficient access killed fire elementals.

  Metal and earth were trickier, much trickier, usually having to be brought down by concentrated artillery, just like the previous set of enemies, but still, the Earth’s militaries had had fifty days of practice. It showed.

  Bosses were still a problem, though those were bosses, and therefore a bit of a different animal. But even they could be dealt with. Throw more ammo at it, call in help and have them pile on, if all else fails, call in an ancient, assuming one was in the area.

  The world was finding its footing. Infrastructure, military included, was slowly being eroded by a constant flood of attacks, casualty numbers could only ever go up, and trained personnel were becoming scarce … but magic and the System were being accepted and integrated into the military, people had gotten as used to fighting inhuman monstrosities as they were ever going to, and, well, Levels were really coming into effect.

  We were winning …

  … and poor Joseph had gotten shot at so many times he’d started wearing a sign around his neck that said “I am the Golem of Prague, and if you shoot me, I’ll hang you from the nearest clocktower by your underwear.” Apparently, it had been provided by a well-meaning but somewhat immature Czechian police officer, but it had been kept because it worked. Someone had also gotten him one of those text-to-speech computers because sign language wasn’t a particularly widespread skill outside of the deaf community and people with deaf relatives/spouses.

  Two weeks. It had been two weeks without major disasters, which had left me free to visit plenty of spots around the globe, secure a right of passage across most of the Earth’s landmass to make randomly teleporting into an area to fight a monster less of a diplomatic minefield.

  And from yesterday on, I’d even settled on a new tradition for myself. If I woke up and still had more than one portal left prior to the 10 am reset, I’d use one of these portals to take to the field myself. Nothing overly dangerous, but still something to provide some kind of challenge, a slight exercise of my magic.

  Just a little practice. With luck, I could settle things even before the return portal closed.

  Yesterday, I’d drowned a wildfire with [Century Storm], and today, I was facing a walking patch of bamboo that was busy ripping stalks from the ground, magically sharpening them, and hurling them at anything that moved.

  [Century Storm], [Devouring Rain], watch the monster blacken and disintegrate, churn the earth to lessen the corrosive swamp that resulted from the attack, walk back into the Untersberg barely a minute after leaving it.

  There were hard limits as to how much I could learn by just opening and simultaneously finishing the battle with my strongest move, granted, but I was working my way up to something more creative. More complex. I was getting good with my best move, I could start to pull off something else at a later date.

  Oh, and I’d also gotten a couple of Levels.

  [Courtmage of Neutrality Lv. 44 -> Courtmage of Neutrality Lv. 46]

  [Skill gained: Flows of Power]

  [Skill Boost gained]

  Another very useful Skill. There’d be no hidden puppet master with me around. I’d be able to see who wore the pants in any relationship, identify the big cheese in any room I entered, and in any diplomatic situation, know who was worth talking to and who wasn’t.

  As for the boost, it was obviously going into [Arcane Core]. I was the conduit for Fionn’s magical knowledge, my spell list was ever-growing, I wanted to be able to use them, not doing so would be depriving us of firepower later on.

  More mana, and it’d be easier to cast my anti-area combo. Simple, but useful.

  As for the Skill Boost I’d gotten on the first day of the current challenge, I’d also, eventually, settled on where to put it. [Legal Grounding]. I had no earthly idea how “you know everything you could possibly need about any legal situation you find yourself in” could possibly be improved upon, but I figured it would come in handy anyway, which was why I improved the Skill.

  Yeah … that made sense. To the point where me not having anticipated it was a smidge embarrassing.

  Basically, not only did the Skill now help pull the same judge-shopping shenanigans I’d heard happening in the United States, it would also let me know what changes I’d need to make when making the same deal or treaty multiple times not when I was about to do it, but ahead of time.

  It had been more than merely “helpful” in the last few weeks.

  So anyway, breakfast, then throne room to see if there was anything in particular that needed doing, if there wasn’t, go write up some contracts for later, then meeting, then … you know, the usual.

  It was kinda funny how even after all these months, my job description was still technically “I dunno, just make yourself useful,” be it by someone else’s direction, or pursuing a goal I’d deemed worthy.

  Still, food first. I headed down to the mess hall and started grabbing stuff. As always.

  … my phone practically exploded with news alerts at the exact wrong time, causing me to drop the coffee pot in my haste to retrieve it from my phone, much to the displeasure of everyone around me.

  I groaned internally as I turned away from the chow line, lazily waving my hand in the general direction of the mess while casting [Restoration of the Old].

  What had gone wrong this time … oh. Oh. Shit. That wasn’t good.

  Still unconfirmed, but nevertheless highly alarming.

  Someone had run into a hydra down in Greece.

  Someone, as in “ the media didn’t know their name yet,” rather than “vague shadowy figure made a pronouncement and bounced,” mind you, but that still didn’t really mean it wasn’t some manner of fabrication. Nor did it mean that it was, in fact, fake.

  Though I was leaning on the side of “it’s real.”

  We’d already seen that explicitly mythological monsters could appear in the first challenge, as seen in the Nemean Lion Arthur had killed, but this was the fourth challenge.

  If someone had run around claiming that the hydra had come back as a Level whatever Boss of one variety or other nowadays, my first question would have been “why on Earth did it not get noticed up until now?” A monster that strong would not have been possible to contain or get trapped so long … not a System monster, at any rate.

  On the other hand, if this was an Abhartach situation, and the original hydra was back … that would be bad. Bad to a degree never before seen, or at least not in the last few months.

  I had no idea how strong Hercules had been, beyond “very.” But if the seeming trend of older magic phenomena being stronger …

  I was so focused on running over to fetch whoever was available from the training room while also wracking my brain onto which number was the best to call at right this second that when the news alert of “hydra killed” actually caused me to trip, going sprawling, only a last-second cast of [Lesser Telekinesis] allowing me to prevent my phone from shattering on the ground.

  Well, wasn’t that great?

  More embarrassed than hurt, I pushed myself to my feet and looked at the alert that had caused my spill.

  So, initial panic aside, mine and whoever was writing all the articles causing my phone’s news alert to pop off, things seemed to have worked out. Granted, I’d still have to go explore the area, or, more likely, ask someone better at investigative work to head out there, but the situation had resolved itself.

  I skim-read the first article that had shown up, a short piece that basically boiled down to “military killed it.” Incendiary rounds, most likely.

  Moving at a more reasonable pace, I continued into the training room. If Mia and Dietrich were in there, I’d tell them about the whole affair.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  Another round of Google alerts went off. More hydras. As, multiple.

  Alright, now I was pretty sure people were screwing with, well, not me specifically, but the world as a whole … except I also couldn’t exactly write this off as a prank just yet. I could, however, wait until more information came in from a source that wasn’t the news. Or just get it in a way that only took a minute at most.

  I dialed the number for the Greek ambassador to Berlin, I figured she’d either know something or, at the very least, be much more capable of directly picking her way through the mass of disorganized information currently available.

  The conversation was brief but interesting. Yes, there were hydras running, er, slithering around in the Greek region of Lerna, where the eponymous Lernean Hydra was said to have existed.

  Varying in size, capable of significant regeneration, etc, usual thing. They were being taken down, but help would be appreciated as their number didn’t really seem to be going down.

  Hm.

  The way to kill the Hydra of Lerna permanently was easy, you cauterized every injury you caused until the beast was dead, but I couldn’t be the only one who knew that. Everyone knew that, or at least enough people that there should have been someone in the chain of command who knew what to do. The odds of that not being the case were so close to zero that it wasn’t worth putting an actual number to it. Especially in Greece, where the legend had originated.

  The ambassador hadn’t specified how the hydras were being put down, but I didn’t doubt people knew how to do it successfully.

  Therefore …

  My blood ran cold. How many instances of “everyone knows” had proven false?

  You killed werewolves with silver … except you didn’t, you really didn’t, that was a 20th-century evolution of the general “silver as a sanctified metal” myth, the traditional counter was Wolfsbane, Aconite, Monkshood, whatever you wanted to call that damn plant.

  You brought down vampires with stakes to the heart, fire, or sunlight, maybe silver if you were aware of the older methods … yet Abhartach had shrugged off all of those.

  The original, older, myth about staking vampires to the ground, on the other hand, had held the key to holding Abhartach for centuries.

  What was the chance that the hydra myth had survived the multiple millennia since its inception entirely intact, hm?

  Maybe the truth of the matter was still buried in there?

  … the immortal head.

  A version of the myth had the hydra’s final head be actually immortal, so Heracles had hacked it off and just left it buried under a rock. If that was true, then that head was what we needed to find … it was just at that time that Charlemagne used his communications Skill to ask me to teleport Dietrich to Greece, as close to Lerna as I could get, because someone else had also figured out the whole “immortal head” angle.

  That little bit of information had already been spreading far and wide while I’d been busy with my big “oh shit” moment.

  I sighed. Now I felt stupid. And like an arrogant ass because I’d thought I was being smart about figuring things out, which made me feel even worse. But at least I could still do something to help, which did improve my mood.

  [Ambassador’s Instinct], go!

  I needed to get two people to Greece, to open portals for them I needed to be with them, and to do that I needed to know how to reach them. So, it provided the path forward. Tons of information, without any risk of information overload, man I loved this Skill!

  Find Mia, tell Mia what was going on, shove Mia through a portal into the marshlands where things were going on, and then back away quickly enough to avoid any potential retaliation.

  ***

  Mia

  Six months ago, being dumped into a swamp would probably have resulted in her contemplating Tristan’s murder.

  Nowadays … she really, really, didn’t care. Especially since her literal superpowers made it so much less messy.

  [Stain Immunity] was a Skill that sounded like it’d be the favorite ability of a vapid cheerleader who was the first to die in a horror movie. But just like with many other aspects of the System, there were layers to this ability.

  The obvious use, the not-so-obvious use, and the game-breaking use.

  Because [Stain Immunity] didn’t just keep her clothing clean, it kept anything one could consider “filthy” off herself, including various forms of not-injected toxins, diseases, and just about everything else one would not want to touch. She’d be as clean swimming through a literal sewer as she’d be in a sterilized surgery suite.

  And that power had then silenced that annoying little voice in the back of her mind known as disgust. Nothing in combat fazed her anymore, not blood, not guts, not the environment no matter how “conventionally” disgusting it was. Which, in turn, translated into making her an even more terrifying force on the battlefield, and while soldiers were trained to ignore such things as well, complete immunity still trumped training.

  It also synergized nicely with [Relentless Pursuit], her latest Skill which let her chase anything she’d once spotted or fought once. Upgrading that Skill had then also granted her a decent healing factor if, or rather, while she went after an enemy. If a foe decided to retreat and managed to get more than a few steps away, by the time she caught up, she’d be hale and hearty again.

  Now they just needed to figure out what was going on.

  Apparently, the general consensus was that either the issue was being called by an oft-overlooked part of the original myth about how the original hydra’s final head was immortal and had been buried by Heracles under a rock.

  How that was the source of the problem … that was their issue to figure out.

  As for what to do with the head, on the other hand, that was simple. She’d let Dietrich handle that, by summoning a copy of Excalibur and killing the monster with that. He was here too, but he was following at a distance, letting her take the lead so he could see how she’d handle herself.

  Mia was already wrapped in heavy armor of dwarven make, her usual fare, but by now, almost all of it was soulbound and empowered using her second capstone Skill with secondary effects copied from an ancient’s gear.

  Her helmet made her head all but immune to damage and her sword was Mimung, those two were her strongest upgrades, but even when nothing quite so spectacular was available, she could simply tac on a second layer of protection, copying the strongest bit armor she could and, well, layering it on the defense provided by what she was actually wearing. For that, she was borrowing from Ogier, seeing as the giant of a man walked into battle wearing enough metal to build several cars.

  Spat venom or spilled toxic blood would not injure her, her armor would hopefully block bites, and if she did get poisoned … it would be bad. Really bad.

  Then again, it would be bad for anyone else too.

  She continued to march onwards, through the marshland, while Dietrich followed after, easily walking on top of the moss clumps and mud she was crashing straight through, staying as clean as she was not by virtue of magic but rather by never winding up in the swamp in the first place.

  Where were these damn snakes?

  Another explosion rang out in the distance at that point, so Mia started to head in that direction. That was where the military was fighting the monsters, almost certainly. Which meant the origin had to be somewhere in that direction.

  A minute or two walking later, she was finally attacked for the first time.

  It was some kind of viper, as far as she could tell with her limited zoological knowledge, two-headed, though in a much more natural-looking way than the usual “look here, two-headed snake born” YouTube thumbnails.

  Also, it was big, more like a king cobra than the little serpents she’d previously seen in the wild.

  The monster had waited until she’d gone past, hiding behind a rock, and lunged at her back, even taking the care to aim for the back of her knees, where her armor had to be thin to maintain mobility, showcasing far more intelligence than a dumb reptile had any right to … and none of that mattered in the end. She had no such thing as a “blindspot” anymore, and as long as she was actually paying attention, she was almost impossible to catch by surprise.

  Balmung flashed through the air and decapitated it, twice, both heads flopping onto the ground while the body splattered against her legs, grass turning black as it died when the blood was repelled by her Skill.

  Now, onto the big question: would [Memento Mori] be enough to keep this thing down, or would she have to use the fireball floating over her hand?

  Mia continued to stare at the body, waiting for a couple of minutes before finally deciding that a complete lack of movement or regrowth in that span of time confirmed the kill.

  She continued her walk, marching through the marsh. Attacks became more and more frequent, but nothing past her defenses, or even really threatened her. Two heads, three heads, those things were big for venomous snakes, but not ludicrously so.

  They just died and tainted the water, which would have made them a lethal danger to almost anyone else, keeping that in mind, Mia could see why an explosion-only strategy was being used against them, they wanted to vaporize as much of the snakes’ bodies and cauterize the wounds to minimize how much blood leaked out while staying at a great distance.

  Then she ran into a four-head, the size of a very large constrictor, the kind that killed crocodiles or wild boar, but it too died. As did the next one.

  Until she ran into a five-headed one.

  The monster was another viper, heads held high enough to meet her gaze, its eyes somehow simultaneously emotionless and burning with rage.

  They both wound up looking at each other for a couple of seconds before lunging completely simultaneously by sheer coincidence. A slight twist of her torso caused two heads to miss entirely, two more bouncing off her chest with enough force to leave dents in her breastplate, and the last one, well, she introduced it to Balmung, the blade carving straight down the middle, leaving a half of the skull to flop onto either side.

  Not decapitated, but it didn’t seem to be moving either.

  Mia surged past the monster, accidentally stepped on its tail, only [Unnatural Ballance] preventing her from faceplanting as the ground moved under her boot, then spun around once she’d opened up the distance again, casting her blade projection [Sword Art] in the same motion, removing a second head from the snake that was already going right back at her.

  She tried to dodge the monster’s attack, but this time, it wasn’t going for a surgical strike with its venomous fangs, it was going for a straight-up collision.

  They went down in a tangle of limbs and her head went under the water as the snake carried them into a pond … the last thing she saw before the muddy water turned her vision brown was the stump of the monster’s head splitting in two.

  [Memento Mori] apparently hadn’t carried along her [Sword Art].

  A [Flamebolt] manifested in her palm, which she immediately used to start blindly slapping at the stump. Her gauntlet grew hot in an instant, the heat growing searingly so another second after that, but the snake reared back and let her rise far enough to get above water. Clean hit. Stump cauterized, palm feeling like she’d put it on a hot stove.

  The monster did not retreat, however, instead starting to wind around her as though it were some kind of constrictor. A real, even a mundane, boa or python would likely have been more powerful in that respect, but it was still a really big snake.

  A head lunged at her from behind, while a second simply bodychecked her right forearm to prevent her from slashing behind her and the third was trapping her left arm, winding around it and squeezing with such force that she was afraid it was about to break. Her usual teleport into off-hand, teleport back into her main as a reversed grip would not work, so she instead slammed the pommel into the neck blocking her while she tried to throw herself to the left.

  The pommel struck, a triggered [Sword Art: Foebreaker] popping not only the point struck like a blood-filled balloon, but the entire neck all the way down to where the necks diverged, the Skill blocking regeneration even more strictly than [Memento Mori].

  And the head trying to bite her glanced off her pauldron.

  But the third one, the third one … it had already been crushing her arm something fierce, and when she threw herself at it, the pressure was applied in just the wrong way and something gave. Her forearm bracer crumpled inwards, first crushing her arm, then suddenly folding in half. And her arm folded with it.

  She stared down at her broken arm for a long moment and the gleeful serpent wrapped around it, the barest hint of a thought sending Balmung slashing at the other remaining head which swiftly retreated.

  Mia tried to lunge at it, but the motion caused the snake’s other neck to sharply pull on her very broken bones, forcing her to abort the attack with a pained cry.

  “Gah, shit!”

  At the same time, something, be it a broken bone or sharp armor fragment, cut her skin and blood burst out from the wound as her cleansing Skill all but ejected it from the surface of her body. If it hadn’t explicitly stated that it only cleansed her outside and did not inhibit clotting in a wound, that would have actually worried her.

  The snake keeping her trapped, though, its head jerked back as a couple of drops of her blood struck its eyes. Nothing dangerous, or even overly harmful, but it was a distraction. Enough of one for her to stab it through the head and yank her arm back despite the jolt of agony that shot through her at the movement.

  Mia turned to glare at the last remaining head, temporarily ruined arm hanging limply by her side, when the System spoke in the only way it would in the middle of a fight. She grinned. She already knew what was happening the moment she heard the first syllable. The [Blank Sword Art] she’d gotten for Level 49 was becoming something useable.

  [Skill Evolution: Blank Sword Art -> The Bloody Rose]

  She’d have to look at the exact description later, but for now, it was instinct that guided her blade as she activated the Skill and lunged, swinging for its head, while the blood that had seeped from her wrecked armor formed into razor-sharp needles that flung themselves at the monster at ridiculous speeds and reducing it’s last intact head to ground meat even as her sword fell slightly short, only giving the snake a shaving cut.

  The regeneration started immediately, but was cut off just as swiftly when she hacked off the entire area.

  Her left arm, once again, protested, sending another bolt of pain shooting through her.

  Only for the armor that wrapped it to undent itself as [Automated Maintenance] kicked in.

  This time, the pain did drive her to her knees, the feeling of bone fragments grinding against each other and broken metal sliding out of flesh a rather unique experience she could have gone her whole life without.

  Mia looked around, then pulled up her new power’s description.

  Well, the fact that she needed to get injured was bad, but even if she couldn’t use it always, [Martial Artisan] should still be able to use it to speed up other cooldowns if she hadn’t used it.

  Now, where the hell was Dietrich? She understood if he’d thought of this as some kind of sink-or-swim test, but she’d have expected him to show up after it was done. If he wasn’t here, something had happened to him … or maybe he’d run off to get some medics.

  There he was.

  Mia started to walk in their direction, though was nowhere near halfway when they met. After all, she was walking slowly to prevent from jostling her arm while Dietrich had had the medic slung over his shoulder and was running at full tilt.

  The ridiculous sight was almost enough to make her forget the pain in her arm. Almost.