They knew what the floor guardian was and had already discussed tactics. The lack of visibility was something they’d considered a possibility, even if not from a massive cloud of blood in the water, so Sorin was confident it wouldn’t hinder their coordination too much. The real variable was the presence of the triton, who was formidable enough on its own and would likely summon minions to fight for it as soon as it realized a third party was present.
The solution was, as it so often turned out to be, overwhelming force and speed. Sorin cut through the water with a wedge of force in front of him and Speed Burst helping his legs propel him forward. The rest of the team took up their positions near the edge of the chamber where visibility wasn’t completely ruined and started lobbing whatever damaging spells they could at the guardian.
The triton was not caught unaware. Sorin was barely a third of the way there before it lifted a hand and flicked its fingers toward him. Whatever sensory abilities it had—Sorin vaguely recalled something about an extremely fine sense of smell and its fins detecting movement in the water—its aim was dead on. A pressure jet lanced out from the triton’s extended palm, struck Sorin head-on, and knocked him sideways.
It was only thanks to a quick application of force magic that the shot didn’t knock Sorin out, or worse, and the triton was already shifting its hand down and slightly to the side to line up its next shot. If Sorin let it, the monster would get a dozen free attacks before he got within grabbing distance, but there was no reason to play it that way.
I wish I could coordinate this with Nemari. Water Bond would be much more efficient than raw force, but you have to work with the tools you have.
The barrier he crafted was double-layered with a few inches of water between the panes. An X-shaped reinforcement held each layer together, which made it about as strong as he could reasonably manage in the second he had to put it together. The water jet struck it dead on, breaking large chunks off the first layer as it tore itself apart.
Most of the water pressure went up thanks to the angle of the barrier, where it struck the giant jellyfish. More importantly, it pushed aside or tore off several of the stinging tendrils that were descending on Sorin. That bought him a few more seconds to act, time which he unfortunately wasted holding the barrier steady until the jet stream of pressurized water played itself out.
Then he was moving again, this time throwing shots of his own. Kinetic force wasn’t as good as pure water manipulation, not when he was underwater and had to compensate for having the weight of liquid dragging the power output of his soulprint down. That did not mean it was ineffective, just that instead of whipping through the intervening space in the blink of an eye, the triton had plenty of time to recognize and counter the attack.
Really, that was the nature of fighting underwater. Reaction time took a backseat to preparation and timing. Prediction became the most important skill because everything just moved slower, and that was built on a foundation of both knowledge and observation. It was no wonder most climbers hated any floor that saw them in this environment.
For Sorin, though, reading an opponent and predicting their actions was a well-honed and familiar skill. It was how he regularly beat climbers that were far too fast for him to keep up with. No matter what the triton threw at him, the worst it could do was slow him down. With each passing second, the distance between Sorin and the monster shrank.
Of course, sometimes slowing an opponent down was the goal, and that was especially true when a battle had more than two sides. Tritons weren’t stupid; it knew that every time it forced Sorin to stop or divert his course, it was giving the jellyfish overhead another chance to catch him. More importantly, the inevitable reinforcements had that much more time to reach the battle.
Still Winter unfolded around Sorin, tipping the already cold water over to freezing. He deliberately shaped the fresh ice to be full of sharp, thick spikes, all pointed outward and all rising up to prick the guardian overhead. The ball was wide enough that it served a second purpose: catching the hanging tendrils above him and pushing them away.
That would hopefully cover his participation in the extermination of the guardian itself, though Sorin made sure to launch a few force projectiles off as well before fully turning his attention back to the triton. He could sense the auras of the approaching merfolk, more than he could easily count, and he knew the triton’s stalling had won it the time it wanted.
It’s not going to save you, Sorin silently promised the monster. They were separated by a mere ten feet now, and only because it had swum backward in an attempt to keep some distance. More ice formed around Sorin, this time unstructured and carried off on the currents sweeping through the cavern from the jellyfish’s enormous feeder limbs reacting to it being attacked.
The ice seemed to be disrupting the triton’s sense as well, or maybe it was just the sudden dip in water temperature. Sorin knew plenty of creatures saw heat, but they were rarely aquatic in origin. Unfortunately, his prior experiences with tritons had come at a time when he was so far above them that they’d died to the literal snap of his fingers releasing a shockwave through the area. Knowing the details of their physiology hadn’t been important at the time.
Stolen story; please report.
One last powerful kick closed the rest of the distance between him and the monster. It shifted, trying to trick him into going for the human side of its body, but Sorin knew that was just bait, no more than a particularly ambulatory limb that could be regrown as needed. His sword cleared its scabbard and he drove it deep into the crab shell backend of the monster.
Contact, he thought with grim satisfaction.
The triton lashed out, its attacks almost invisible if not for the Aura Sense part of Horizon Walker. Whips and blades made of water lashed out at Sorin, but they didn’t have the raw penetrating power its water pressure spells had, and thus they broke against Force Weaver. Meanwhile, Sorin hacked through its shell and spilled even more blood into the water.
Merfolk rushed in to save their master and drive Sorin back. He killed the first one with a decapitating blade of force, having long since determined that the monsters’ senses weren’t keen enough to detect quick moving attacks. He sprayed out attacks with what little attention he could spare, trying to predict where the merfolk would be when the magic reached them and hitting maybe half the targets.
Only a handful actually died, and the confusion and fear he’d hoped to slow the rest down with never materialized. Of course it didn’t, he realized. They’re directly under the triton’s control. They’re essentially living zombies at this point.
The triton itself was doing its best to break away from Sorin, and as the first wave of its minions reached the fight, they interposed themselves. Forming a wall of living flesh gave the triton enough time to flee, though it didn’t go far. Once it had a bit of distance, it promptly looped around and began firing off more of those high-pressure jet streams that Sorin had struggled against before.
The fact that its spells were tearing through its own minions more than anything Sorin was doing didn’t seem to concern the monster. There were probably hundreds more at its disposal, and it only needed a single clean shot to cinch its victory. The odds were in its favor.
That was where the triton made its mistake. To that point, it had maintained a position carefully in the bounds of the area where its minions had sacrificed themselves to clear away the floor guardian’s stinging tendrils. Now it was at the very edge of that boundary, and between the guardian itself flailing around and the shifting water currents, the triton was dangerously close to getting tangled up.
Nemari slammed a powerful current of water into the monster. Perhaps it was too focused on Sorin, or perhaps it had simply dismissed the rest of his team because they’d been busy working on the jellyfish, but either way, it was caught completely off guard. Stinging tendrils coiled around its body, shocking and injuring it. Sparks of electric light rushed through the water, little pinpricks leaping from tendril to tendril as they framed the triton’s body.
The top half succumbed instantly, but the more important crab body was armored well enough to hold out. At least, it would have been if Sorin hadn’t carved a bunch of holes in the shell. The jellyfish groped its victim with a hundred tendrils, and it quickly found those vulnerabilities.
Sorin was almost done with the merfolk reinforcements when he felt the pulse of anima indicating the triton was dead. It was a lot, but still less than he’d been expecting. That probably had more to do with the amount of hurt the guardian had laid down on the triton than anything else, though Nemari had definitely claimed some small share.
Before Sorin could join the fight, one of the massive feeder tendrils swept across the cavern. It was a completely blind swing, but it was lined up perfectly to smack into him. The electricity alone would be deadly, never mind the impact. Only a quick wall of force that he reinforced by thickening the ice around him saved Sorin, and even then, he was still batted across the cavern to slam into the far wall.
The impact rattled him hard enough that he bit through his tongue. And, for the first time in the last few floors, triggered Counter Heal. Spitting out blood and the chunk of meat, he took a precious second to remap out the battlefield before getting back into the fight.
More merfolk were coming in, but without the triton to guide them, they were less of a threat. The jellyfish itself could very well kill them on its own. The rest of Sorin’s team were spread out across the west wall, all of them keeping as much distance as they could from the blind guardian and pelting it with various ranged spells. Vendis in particular was doing heavy damage with his blood manipulation soulprints.
Without the triton’s interference, the conclusion was an inevitability. It took some doing to actually kill the massive monster, and they were slowed even further when Vendis had to switch from offense to healing as the constant streamers of electricity ran through the water, shocking everybody repeatedly. But eventually the anima slammed into Sorin, and he felt his soulspace attune to a new portal location.
The corpse drifted in place, now more a cloud of jiggling, cubed jelly than a whole, coherent creature, but it remained dangerous even from beyond the veil. Limbs twitched and spasmed randomly, releasing more electric discharges into the water. Tendrils were still hazards in the water, especially the massive feeders.
Sorin’s solution was to freeze a tunnel that let them swim down to the portal in relative safety, though it took him and Nemari both to keep it anchored to the wall. Eventually, they all made it into the Antechamber, where they stood dripping sea water onto the otherwise- immaculate floor.
“Tell me that’s the last time we do an underwater floor,” Rue said a few minutes later, once they were relatively dry and had caught their breath.
“It’s not,” Sorin told her.
“By the time we have to do another one, we’ll have C-rank soulprints,” Yoru said. “It should be much easier to handle.”
“It won’t be,” Sorin muttered. The tower didn’t get easier. Climbers got stronger and just hoped they could keep up. Straightening up, he gestured to the dais in the middle of the Antechamber. “Looks like we got another special reward. Let’s go see what the tower has in store for us now.”
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