Ruthless V5Ch44-The Lone Wolf

The Eastern Diamondback Hydra fled across the Florida landscape, and the lone wolf followed.

Past the early days when the Queen had made some efforts to move through water and hide her tracks, it was not difficult to follow her trail. This was partly due to Luna getting better at it as she went alone; her tracking-related Skills had leveled up several times during the journey. Mostly, however, the ease of tracking the enemy came from the fact that Silk left a trail of destruction in her wake.

As Silk fled her defeat, the Eastern Diamondback Hydra passed through other Rulers’ territories multiple times. Wherever she did so, the Queen did not remain long enough to be engaged in combat by the Ruler themselves, but she frequently encountered other obstacles in the form of subordinate monsters or even natural barriers. Where she did, the Queen seemed to take a scorched earth approach, destroying everything in her path indiscriminately without trying to avoid conflict unless she thought she was outmatched.

The environmental devastation was horrendous. As Luna drew closer to Silk over the course of the hunt, she passed through places where the air was still thick with the hydra’s poisonous breath, or the plant life had been visibly and recently eaten away by the Queen’s acid.

She also repeatedly encountered pieces of the hydra or drops of Silk’s blood. These brutal victories had not come without cost. They would not have given the Ruler adequate time to recover from injuries Luna had dealt Silk in their last battle—or new wounds received in the course of her flight. Yet the Queen had persisted in her course.

Gradually, Luna had realized that meant that the hydra knew she was still being hunted. Perhaps she was wise enough to realize that no rival Ruler would want to leave someone like herself alive. Not after having once made her an enemy.

Luna raced along the coast now. The trail she followed had led her within sight of the ocean, though well away from where the Royal Fisher Army would be now, assuming that they had continued on their course toward the ocean. Luna was to the far North. She suspected that the Queen wanted to lose her here. There could be no other reason to have fled nearly all the way to the sea.

Having interacted with the Eastern Diamondback Hydra and seen how specialized Silk was for land—even specifically for living part of her life underground—Luna knew that it was unlikely that the Queen could survive in the ocean for any length of time.

This was discounting the fact that Luna had sensed several auras coming from nearby as she ran closer to the ocean. The Rulers in the water seemed more powerful, on average, than Rulers of the land.

No, the Queen must have had some reason for boxing herself in like this, and it was not because she actually planned to escape into the sea. Perhaps she had fled into this sliver of coastal zone because there was no Ruler here yet. Perhaps it was because this small area would be difficult for enemies to march into and fight within. It was hard to gain much traction in the sand after all.

Luna was considering what the Queen’s plan might be as she leaped over yet another dune. Then a massive aura flared up from beneath her.

A snake’s head shot out from beneath Luna—she saw it through one of her own heads—and reached up to bite at her.

Luna managed to twist her body in midair and kick off the outstretched serpent head.

As she continued flying through the air, she saw that the Eastern Diamondback Hydra had returned to her usual eleven heads. Whatever ability allowed her to grow additional heads whenever one was lost, it seemed that there was a cap on how many she could actually maintain. Perhaps it was something related to level or Evolution.

As Luna came to a landing in the dunes opposite the hydra, she turned her body, ready for another attack.

In the few seconds Luna had been flying through the air, however, the space between the Queen and the wolf had turned opaque. The air was full of visible, noxious gas.

She made it visible this time. Does that mean the composition is different, or is the mist acid?

“You know, I hoped that you would come after me.” The voice came from within the mist. “Since you were the only one of them I experienced firsthand, you were the one I was most confident I could kill…”

Luna bared her teeth on all three heads in a savage grin. Though the hydra probably could not see her, she was amused.

“You will regret that assessment,” she said calmly.

Then the wolf leaped through the mist—it did not harm her as she passed through it—and tackled the space where the hydra had been. She crashed headlong into a dune.

Several heads shot through the mist toward her, but Luna was ready for them now.

She had charged Lightning Mana in her leftmost head, and now she fired it straight at the hydra’s striking heads—and into the space where she guessed the rest of the body had to be. The lightning forked and curved impossibly to go exactly where Luna needed it to go, and the hydra let out a surprised and pained shriek, then writhed under the effects of the electricity.

Luna leaned into the heads that were still extended toward her, now flopping around like hoses full of water, and she tore into them with the metal-encased claws on her right front paw. The wolf still wore the armor the Goblins had affixed to her weeks ago, even if she had lost the two back claw weapons during the hunt.

The wolf still remembered where the weak spots were in the diamond-patterned armor—everywhere that did not resemble diamond—and she quickly slashed the heads apart and breathed pre-prepared fire onto the stumps to keep them from re-growing.

There was no sound from the hydra, who was still reeling from the lightning breath.

Luna shot more lightning into her, not giving the hydra time to recover. The hydra shuddered, and then the space where she had been completely emptied. Silk’s mist had partially cleared, so Luna actually saw the shadow of the hydra’s main body vanish and knew she must have reappeared somewhere else.

Silk will have switched places with one of her Manifestations, just like in the last fight…

Luna sensed something coming out of the edge of her peripheral vision, and she threw herself to the side. She barely dodged as the acid struck the sand, where it bubbled harmlessly.

“Feeling the effects of that mist yet?” Silk’s voice cut through what remained of the vapor in the air, and Luna finally saw where she had appeared, in a position behind the wolf.

“My Poison Resistance has leveled up quite a bit thanks to you!” Luna replied with unfeigned pleasure. “I appreciate you making me stronger!”

She charged through the mist, dodged another two streams of acid, and loosed another mouthful of lightning bolts.

“Argh!” Silk roared as the blast struck her.

Luna ignored it and continued charging forward.

The hydra still had seven heads left, Luna observed. It was time to fix that.

She ripped into Silk’s two closest heads with her metal-encased claws again, then dodged back when the writhing, electrified head stumps began spurting up large quantities of what Luna knew would probably be acid blood—a suspicion that was confirmed a moment later when the sand bubbled and hissed on contact with it.

Luna breathed fire onto the wounds before the hydra could regenerate, and she threw herself back into the fight again. The wolf was calm, cool, in her element. The truth was, she’d had plenty of time to think about her fight with the Eastern Diamondback Hydra, and as Luna suspected, the Queen had already shown all of her tricks in the previous fight.

The hydra did not appear to have been injured before Luna engaged her, as Luna had imagined Silk would be due to the blood and flesh trail Luna had occasionally been able to follow, but Luna chalked that up to a result of the hydra’s overwhelmingly powerful healing Skills.

Killing the Ruler would take some time, but it shouldn’t be too tall of an order for Luna. It helped that she had been poisoned and healed after the previous fight and that her Poison Resistance had mostly adapted to specifically counteracting the hydra’s poison. It also helped that lightning had been a reliable weakness for the hydra thus far, as in their initial fight. Where Luna had marginally improved herself and significantly increased her poison resistance since the last fight, Silk was weaker than she had been—as any Ruler was weaker outside of her own territory.

All Luna had to do was keep fighting—and not make any big mistakes.

Silk still had some stops to pull out. She switched places with the shadowy Manifestations that she cloned from herself three more times over the course of the next ten minutes, and her necks seemed to grow tougher to chop through with each head Luna severed.

But they were not invincible. They just took additional claw strikes to chop through.

Finally, there was only one head remaining. With the wolf’s careful strategy and knowledge of her opponent, she had taken only minor wounds. A few acid burns, some minor scratches. Nothing that would not heal without the use of a Skill.

Luna remained focused and continued breathing lightning onto the hydra as she swung her claws repeatedly at the last remaining head. It felt like swinging a blunt axe into the side of a tree. The flesh was almost entirely covered in the diamond-like hardness that the Eastern Diamondback Hydra’s scales acquired in their toughest places, and Luna was certain it had not been this way before. The hydra apparently had some sort of power that made her defenses stronger when her number of heads dipped below a certain level.

Maybe I should have gone for the heart instead of attacking all these heads, Luna thought in between breaths of lightning and fire and strikes with her metal claw weapons. But she was all in on the decapitation strategy by now. The wolf kept going.

As she reached the midpoint of the neck, the acid blood gushing out from the gaping wounds suddenly stopped. The hydra’s body began to glow a deep green. Luna struck the wound again, and somehow, she made not a millimeter of progress against Silk’s body.

Luna looked up, and she saw the Queen staring down at her with eyes filled with loathing.

“This is the end, for both of us,” the Eastern Diamondback Hydra said, her voice rasping and tired.

No! Luna felt a sudden surge of fear. She recognized that the hydra had given up on victory, and even on survival. And the wolf knew how deadly a cornered beast could be. Luna threw herself backward, but it was clear it was too late.

A moment later, the hydra’s body turned to black mist.

It was like the Queen had permanently become one of her Manifestations, in the moment just after the Manifestation was destroyed.

But unlike any of the Manifestations, this time, the dark mist that had replaced the body crossed the ground in a rush, zipping toward Luna faster than she could retreat. Ultimately, she could only close her eyes and mouths and try not to breathe any of it in.

It did not work. She felt the gas push forcefully through her nostrils, enter the tiny spaces between her eyelids and her skin, and pierce every open space it could. It entered her bloodstream through the acid wounds and cuts that Luna had suffered through the fight.

An agonizing burning sensation overtook her body. Luna’s eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and every wound on her body began gushing blood. It was the worst pain she had ever experienced. For several minutes, she writhed on the ground, overcome by the toxin’s effects, unable to even move.

There was a moment—which she would remember later to her mild shame—when she wished for a quick death, to not let this be drawn out.

Then the tide of pain began to recede. It was just a little at first, then more and more so.

A notification appeared, and thankfully the words read themselves aloud to Luna, as her eyes were not in the best shape at that moment.

[Afflicted by Curse of the Hydra Queen! Superior power, Blessing of the Fisher King is suppressing…]

There was further lessening of the pain, then a complete numbness to it, accompanied by a great feeling of well-being.

[Curse of the Hydra Queen has been successfully suppressed!]

Oh, thank you thank you thank you thank you….

More notifications.

[You have slain the “Ruler of the Dread Smog!” Required conditions met… You are blessed by an existing Ruler. Titles available. Do you wish to enter rebellion against your Ruler, Fisher King, the Ruler of the Dark Waters? Y/N]

What?!