Chapter 266 - Silent waters run deep. (Patreon)

In the darkness of the night, it was hard to make out details about Undine’s bloated form. She was shapeless, that much was clear, just a thrashing mass of water and slime. There was neither sense nor direction to her attacks. Just a blind unleashing of powers new and foreign.

The cracking of wood was only drowned out by her terrible song. Notes played on the rim of broken glass echoed through the night like a disharmony of sirens, awakening a terrible desire to just step into what she was.

But John had no interest in doing so. ‘Momo, go find Thana,’ John ordered his support. Flying as she was, she would be the quickest to get the blood mage back up on this island. ‘Shouldn’t I stay?’ Momo asked; she didn’t want to be sent away from this; her instinct as the groups support her told her to be around, just in case. ‘Nathalia is with us; there is no reason to worry,’ he thought at her; ‘Now go!’

As Momo obeyed his order, he turned to the thrashing mass. “Undine!” he shouted; “Are you still in there?” The mass stopped still. Tendrils, busy picking apart trees, hung frozen in the air. An abomination stopped in time, that is what Undine looked like right now, and John hated it. Observe didn’t work either, all he got into view was water.

The song went through a build-up, a quiet voice slowly growing in intensity until the whole mass quivered and moved once more. It all moved towards him with enormous speed. A spreading mass of sentient water, filled with rocks, splinters of wood and whole trunks. 

However fast Undine’s new form was, it wasn’t faster than Nathalia. The dragoness stepped in front of John. A rumbling noise echoed through her chest, and then the wave of water was hit by a cone of fire. Hissing sounds of evaporating water and a clear scream of pain filled the air. If a scalpel cutting open skin had a sound, this would be it. Clear, precise, sharp and with terrible ease.

“Stop!” John told Nathalia, worried that she might already have gone too far. The goddess decided to grant his request, and the blinding fire was replaced with absolute darkness. Terrible moments passed by as his eyes got used to the change in lightning.

The amorphous blob had been evaporated, and now all John saw was an outline, clearly female. For a moment he dared to hope, but as the world became clear, his heart sank. Undine’s old form was gone; there was no more innocent, sun dress like exterior or melancholic beauty.

What he was faced with instead still bore the attractive form of a woman though. Naked and fully on display, this shape was curvy to a degree that rivalled Nathalia, with giant breasts and wide hips. Her hair didn’t even give the illusion of strands anymore, just a waterfall that separated into five tentacles at the lower back.

Her overall complexion had shifted. What previously had been several shades of light blue in the shape of a dressed slime now had mixed together into a single darker shade. This new colour, a blue of oceanic depth, also was all her new form consisted of.  Almost All. There were two blunt horn like excesses that grew from her head, which were almost black, then her eyes, which glowed with a terrible red, even the left one which was partly hidden underneath an extension of her hair.

Both of those wouldn’t have mattered to John, neither did that this form was crude compared to her old, so innocent looking body. But the black liquid spreading over the right side of her body, from the base of her leg to the side of her face, like a slick of oil swimming on the ocean, left John with absolutely no doubt that this corruption had already reached a terrible level.

“John.” Her voice, her wonderful voice. It was still the same. Despite the rather obvious corruption and the change of form, her voice was as clear, as wonderful, as melodic as ever. The horrible cacophony was gone now. There was only silence and her voice.

“Why did you do this to me?” Undine asked. “Listen here, you arrogant shit!” Salamander was about ready to hold a giant, angry tirade, but John raised his hand, and the blaze elemental swallowed her hatred for another day.

“I didn’t do this to you, Undine,” John clearly stated; “I just wanted you to talk to me, I wanted to help you. Hell, I still want to help you. Just-“ “LIES!” Undine threw her arm around. Slime extended into a several metre-long whip that threatened to hit John. Once again Nathalia took care of it, causing Undine to scream in frustration.

“I can’t be at fault, it must be you, it must be! Their song! Their song will hold the answer!” The black matter that covered her body pulsated and spread slightly over her body. “She is getting consumed as the moments pass,” Lydia told John; “There is no saving her.”

“I will be the judge of that,” the Gamer decided. He said that despite himself. He had no plan, no hopeful thing that would allow him to get rid of this Outsider corruption. To free someone from such a strong infestation, one would need a healer of immense strength, someone skilled at purging curses of extreme potency. The only healer they had had was now the enemy; John doubted she would have been capable of this much either way.

“You will need something extremely powerful to purge her. Healing magic far beyond anyone of us possess; we can’t just erase Outsider matter!” “I can,” Nia spoke up, and John turned to look at her with wide eyes. A shimmer of hope just opened before him.

Undine just stood there muttering things to herself in a language he couldn’t understand. ‘It’s elemental speech,’ Siena informed him; ‘She is trying to speak to those on the Outside… and failing, to our luck.”

“It won’t be pretty, but I can simply erase all parts of her that are infested… if you manage to restrain her,” the blank said; “I will need all of my power to do so. You need to fight without me.” “Right!” John shouted out. It didn’t matter whether or not he trusted Nia right now; all that mattered was that she was his only way out of this mess.

How would one go about constraining a slime though? The only idea John had was to confine her. “Nathalia, stay back; with your power, you are more likely to accidentally kill her than to restrain her,” John threw out quick orders; “Nia, please stay ready for when you think you can jump in and do whatever you need to do. Lydia… don’t interfere.”

The princess narrowed her eyes at the lack of trust, but given her display of murderous intent, John did not care. “Let’s go then!” The moment John moved his foot to face the ocean elemental, she stopped rambling to herself and sent a wave of water his way.

Gnome managed to block that one with an earthen wall. Salty water crashed into the wall and jumped around it in a harmless shower, halted in its momentum. Then John stepped around the wall and cast a Mana Ray.

Undine knew him and his skillset well enough to know what came after the obvious display of him raising his hand. A bubble wrapped around her main body and blocked the attack by its simple existence. This was the major drawback of how Mana Ray functioned: the fact that it only hit whatever it struck first, only ever searing through armour, meant that it could be stopped by as much as a big drop of water.

The bubble stayed in place, and Undine, without ever moving her head, formed tentacles out of it that assaulted Salamander and Sylph, who were flying circles around her. She was too slow to hit either of them, but her defensive power made this a stalemate. One where John’s victory condition creeped further and further away, as the infestation took deeper and deeper root within Undine.

Eventually there would be nothing left to purge but the elemental herself. An outcome that was utterly unacceptable. Spikes of earth shot from the ground and broke upon impact with the bubble. It seemed like Undine’s powers had reached levels far above her sisters. To no wonder, she was Tier 4 now, which put her above even Sylph and Siena.

This Undine knew all of their tricks, and they knew nothing of what she was capable of. Shadowy edges ripped through the ground, and Siena finally entered the battlefield in an attack desperate to penetrate that protective bubble. Uselessly they scratched over the surface.

Inside the bubble, Undine was expressionless; the black tar was about to reach her eyes. ‘I need a weak point,’ John thought, ‘something, anything, just…’ ‘She is blind!’ Siena shouted out. 

‘WHAT?!’ he could barely repress his anger; ‘How much shit have you two been keeping from me, Siena?’ ‘You have found out just about everything now,’ she hissed back; ‘This is not the time.’

To that, at least, John could agree. If she was blind, that meant that she was getting her information from her other senses. Vibrations, sounds, smells, what John needed was an attack that was both strong enough to penetrate through that hull and invisible to countermeasures.

There was a way. ‘Aclysia, take Jane and distract her!’ John thought. He would have given the command to Rave directly, but he feared Undine might take unwanted action if she heard that something was up. Following a wave from Aclysia, the two of them engaged in battle.

No matter what the two of them did, no amount of magical light or brute force could penetrate Undine’s defence. The only thing that was marginally successful was Aclysia’s new dagger. The mithril based alloy cut through the magically hardened water like a scissor cut through cardboard. It wasn’t the most elegant of cuts, sure, but it cut. Whatever little damage Aclysia did mended shortly thereafter.

‘Sylph, Siena, I need you to work together right now!’ John called back these two. They were vital to his plan; it was a combination of their strengths that would provide the attack that was going to end this battle. ‘You think Undine is going to survive that?! I don’t want her to die, we can’t have her die, she hasn’t had enough fizzy pills yet!’ Sylph exclaimed; even she understood that his plan here was a gamble, one that relied on Undine’s regenerative powers being rather extreme.

‘Her Endurance is high, and we have no other choice!’ John told her; ‘Just do it!’ ‘I am ready,’ Siena said with numbing earnest. The tempest elemental hesitated for a moment, she did not feel well using something this powerful against her sister, but she had no other choice when thousands of points of mana, from John and Momo, flowed into the two of them.

Shadow and air combined between their outstretched hands and formed a knife without handle, crackling with power yet completely silent. That knife killed all sound around it, and Undine suddenly moved her head as she found one of her senses completely shut down. There was no way to see this knife with anything but one’s eyes, an attack adapted solely towards the current situation.

The corrupted water spirit had no time to think about it as both Aclysia and Rave, knowing that something was about to happen, doubled down on their attacks to bind Undine’s attention to them. The bubble visibly malformed as Undine concentrated more of her defensive efforts against these two.

With the sound of absolute silence and the speed of lightning, it rushed through the air. Undine had no indication of it coming for her, knew only that something was going on. No matter how strong her defences were, her Agility was still on the lower side; what little time she had to react was not enough.

The knife cut through her weakened defences and her body entirely, ripping a melon sized hole through the barrier. A gaping nothing remained where Undine’s head had been. “Now!” John exclaimed, but Nia was already on her way.

The gamble here was twofold. The hope was that this attack didn’t kill Undine and that she would at least be damaged enough to be defenceless for a few moments. In a wondrous moment, in which fate smiled upon John, this gamble paid off.

Nia reached into the hole caused by the attack and grasped at the corruption. Two liquids of pure black, similar in appearance but violently different in nature, clashed as Nia used her powers to eradicate whatever sort of corruption she could.

John had no idea how successful this endeavour was, neither did he know how it worked, but the fact was that the black tar was slowly vanishing. Like a lye coming into contact with acid, it seemed as if the two powers neutralized each other to form normal water.

Undine’s reshaping head groaned in pain. At first she struggled against Nia’s touch, but as the corruption cleared, that struggle became weaker and weaker, while the pain stayed all the same throughout.

But at the end she was cleared of corruption.