He didn’t have to wait long before the mystery of the approaching entity was solved.

  A few dozen puddles of glowing, blue toxin lay around the mouth of the tunnel at varying distances and it was these that revealed all.

  A blur flew across the farthest of the puddles at a speed that Eik’s eyes couldn’t make out properly in the low light. About halfway between the farthest puddles and the mouth of the tunnel, however, a titanic body suddenly materialized as if out of the darkness.

  To say it was a mere rock worm would have been an insult of devilish proportions. If the frankly ridiculous size of the thing hadn’t already been convincing enough, the eight heads sprouting from what must then have been the torso certainly painted a picture of something in a completely different league from the worms.

  It still had no limbs but muscles and a cobra-like weight distribution allowed it to keep the eight heads lifted high off the ground. In fact, the only reason Eik could see the heads at all in that moment seemed to be because it was searching for something.

  And given the way it had come rushing over here, it wasn’t that difficult to guess what that something might be. He pressed himself up against the rock wall even harder.

  Where the heads of the rock worms had been little more than a rounded, churning maw filled to the absolute brim with razor-sharp teeth, the heads of this hydra had something akin to a snout with a mouth that could actually close. However, where the eyes should have been was nothing but bare patches of skin, a testament to its subterranean life.

  There were four round holes on the front of the snout that flared rapidly as it sniffed around the ground, the ostensibly sightless creature appearing to be fully aware of each of the glowing puddles.

  Slowly but surely it drew closer and closer to the mouth of the tunnel inside which Eik was hiding. The hydra was flanked by a small number of regular rock worms obediently letting the obvious leader take its time. At least some of them must have been remnants of those that had escaped from the Profound pool of blue death that had gone to alert the hydra about the intruder.

  It would only be a matter of time before it caught Eik’s scent. In fact, given that he had already stepped out of the tunnel and into the cavern just moments before, it was a wonder that it hadn’t yet. Maybe the source of its senses wasn’t olfactory in nature, but rather something else. Loath to get caught in the much narrower tunnel, Eik had to think quickly.

  Risking it, he released a single beast of Living Manifestation that slid down the palm of his hand and onto the tip of his finger. Order given silently through mental communication, the snake that barely measured more than the length of Eik’s index finger dropped onto the cold, rough floor and ventured out of the tunnel and then along the wall. Despite keeping to the wall, the gradually brought the little being closer to the hydra that must have been thousands and thousands of times larger.

  Eik held his breath as he watched. The Living Manifestation had gone out and to the left while the hydra’s heads were currently sweeping mainly to Eik’s right.

  The little blue snake had barely made it a couple of meters out of the tunnel in a slow tempo when the closest head suddenly snapped out like a cracked whip and annihilated Eik’s creation with extreme speed.

  Immediately, the heads were in chaos as the hydra began to thrash about, clearly looking for more of the little guys to destroy.

  Eik sent another four of them out, all in different directions, and took a number of steps back as he balled up more Living Manifestations. In quick succession, he hurled them with a Movement Boosted arm, aiming to get them behind the hydra.

  The moment he sent off the last of them, he broke into a dash, heading straight for the hydra. By the time he had made it into the cavern proper, it had already taken the heads off two of the little buggers. Empowered by a Potion of Mighty Strength, Eik dive for the gigantic hydra in a frantic leap as the beast was turning its back to get at the Living Manifestation sailing through the air like tiny circus acrobats.

  Creating a spike of toxin in one hand and drawing the wakizashi with the other, he slammed both into the hydra’s back. Unlike the rock worms’ thick, segmented body plating, the hydra’s scaly skin was much more similar to that of a reptile.

  With a crystalline crack, the blue spike broke against the skin, but the metal blade went through and continued in to the hilt. The titanic beast howled in pain as a head came around for a counter attack. Even with the long necks, the hydra seemed to have some restrictions on its movements because it only managed a glancing blow at his ankle.

  He ripped out the short blade and plunged his whole arm into the wound, tipping his hand with a toxic edge for ease of penetration. Getting in to the elbow, four spikes grew out of his forearm inside, hooking him in like a vampire bat. In anticipation for the next attack, he made a shell on each side of his body to take the brunt of the beating that was to come.

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  And come it did.

  One head after the other whipped against him with varying degrees of accuracy from both the left and right. It took all he had just to hold on as he pumped toxin into the enormous body. Hoping to further impair its accuracy, a poof of blue mist erupted from his body but impacts still continued to rain down over him.

  It would be a matter of time before he was thrown off, due to sheer sustained damage if nothing else. All he could do was keep the flow of toxin going and hope that it made a difference.

  As if in response to his prediction, the hydra’s entire body suddenly spun rapidly, bringing Eik bodily around with it like a roller coaster.

  Forced to make a split second decision, he released the four spike from his arms and let them stay inside to melt into liquid while he was flung off at speed. Only the solid shells already in place from earlier saved him from having his spine turned to bone meal and his organs to death goulash. All air in his lungs was expelled violently, however.

  Knowing that more heads were coming for him before he could get back up, he did the only thing he could and activated Toxic Liquefaction, slithering rapidly up the next head to come in for the kill. Halfway up the neck, he returned to his human form and went for the softer skin on the underside.

  Here he succeeded with both the blade and the blue spike, red blood and toxin mixing in a bubbling display of colors. The neck was not a position he could realistically hold, however, so instead of waiting to be bitten in two or thrown against the rock again, he pulled the wakizashi out and replaced it with a second spike, triggered Accelerant on both and leapt off.

  A tooth-lined maw came right for him in that moment, but the shock wave of the double Accelerant gave him the extra push he needed to barely escape the collision point despite being mid air. The massive neck wasn’t quite severed at the detonation site but it seemed to be hurt enough to be unable to keep the head from drooping.

  This only seemed to enrage the great beast further.

  Taking a chance that might well kill him, Eik, who was still falling through the air, reached into himself and found the sensation that corresponded with what he had felt when Visage of Death first settled in his body. With a mental command, he flipped the trait to ‘on’.

  The hydra froze momentarily, giving Eik enough time to reach the ground and dart away to the relative safety of one of the smaller tunnels leading up through the earth. As if overcome with fear the hydra’s entire body began to shiver uncontrollably.

  ***

  The tiny life form was so annoying! For something so small, it should have been the simplest of tasks to crush it like the vermin it truly was. Then why did it refuse to die?

  Awoken from a deep and lengthy slumber by the incessant ruckus of many worms intruding upon its lair in a frenzy. Upon the first encounter with the worms, the hydra had massacred them in spades, refusing to yield even a single pebble of territory to the mindless little things.

  But with time, it had come to see them in another light. The light of usefulness. Tolerating their existence meant that there was no need to guard the area on its own. It could simply leave it to its minions while the hydra itself spent its days in lazy torpor. They had even started bringing in meat on a regular basis, removing even the need to hunt.

  There was only one way to describe it. Utter and absolute monarchy.

  And now there was an intruder too strong for the subjects to take care of, so naturally the king would have to demonstrate its peerless dominion.

  And now when, foolishly, the little twerp had finally put itself in a position to be struck down without mercy, something had happened.

  Something completely incomprehensible.

  What had been the smallest, most insignificant existence in the hydra’s mind had suddenly grown. Grown into a demon.

  Lacking eyes, the hydra had never seen anything but the glowing outline of the creature’s body fed into its brain by its senses. What now towered there was incomparable to what it had been. A cunning shape shifter? A devious mimic? A trickster of the worst kind, surely.

  So why did its brain refuse to recognize the being for what it so obviously must be? Why did the hydra’s instincts insist so fervently on escape? That any further contact would carry certain death as a consequence.

  Why was this looming figure so terrifying?

  No, this would not do! There could be only one king here. And the king already sat on the throne.

  Bellowing at full lung, an act fueled equally by terror and fury, the hydra rocked the underground space as it lunged forward to attack once more.

  ***

  Eik had thought — hoped — that Visage of Death had somehow brought the fight to an end right then and there. No such luck, it would seem. But he’d felt what had happened when he activated the trait. The properties of Profound Toxin had changed on a fundamental level.

  It no longer hurt the victim physically. Instead it seemed to affect it in a completely different way. What startled Eik more than anything was the new color of Profound Toxin though. It had become a foul, sick purple.

  Scrambling further into the narrow pit, hunted by the hydra, Eik sprayed purple miasma directly into its face. It withdrew with a fetid snort but soon returned again.

  Eik glanced back into the darkness of the tunnel, its rough, cold walls cast in a queasy purple light. The thought of crawling all the way to the surface, however long it may take, was briefly entertained, but it didn’t sit well with him. There was no way to tell how labyrinthian this system of passages truly was. He could die in there. And such a notion was not the least bit appealing.

  The hydra was a much better alternative.

  There was, after all, one more thing he hadn’t tried. It definitely had the potential to turn things around — so long as it didn’t kill him in the process, of course.

  For the first time of his own free will, Eik called on Backflow, but where he had expected the skin, which immediately began to crack, to reveal veins of blue, the streaks were the same sickly purple as the Visage of Death.

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