The Swamp Serpent launched itself like a poisoned arrow loosed from a giant's bow, converting the lake's perfect glass stillness into a chaos of thundering waves and scattering spray. Its body-matching the girth of an ancient oak trunk-drove through air and water with kinetic force sufficient to shatter a castle wall. Its open jaws, crowded with rows of venom-dripping hooked teeth, were aimed directly at the upper half of Dex's body, intent on bisecting him in a single bite.
Any rational adventurer, or Rank E noble sorcerer, would have thrown himself backward or spun and sprinted toward the treeline in a desperate, stupid attempt at survival. Dex did not retreat a single step. He did not even blink.
The prisoner who had spent his prime years in the Pit-the solitary confinement cells in the lowest level of his prison hell-had learned a bloody and unshakeable truth: fleeing from a predator faster than yourself is nothing more than postponing death, a guaranteed way to die gasping for air with your back exposed for the killing blow. In the narrow yards of the prison, when a man twice your weight came at you with a blade, retreating meant dying. The only solution was to drive forward into him-to enter his personal space where he could not use the full reach of his arms-and turn the momentum of his own charge against him.
"You want to fight in your own territory? Very well. Let us play by your rules then," Dex thought, his dark eyes gleaming with glacial calm.
In the fraction of a second before the collision, Dex drew a full lung of cold air and locked it inside his chest like a precious reserve. Rather than retreating, he bent his knees and drove himself forward with explosive force-leaping deliberately into the heart of the wave the serpent had raised, clearing the open jaws by terrifying millimetres, and slamming directly into the armoured body sliding toward the water.
The moment his body broke through the surface of the lake, he was swallowed by an entirely different world. The sound of the serpent's hiss and the crash of broken water were cut off instantly, replaced by the heavy, droning silence of the deep. The pale grey light descending from the sky above began to fade with rapid finality, and the colour of the water shifted from reflective silver to a deep green verging on black. The cold was savage-biting into his muscles at once like thousands of ice needles, working to strip the warmth from his body and slow his reactions.
Through the murk, he could see the serpent's enormous body coiling around him beneath the surface with a suppleness that seemed impossible for its size-like a colossal hangman's noose moving of its own accord. It was attempting to encircle him, to crush his bones before it even considered swallowing him.
But Dex was not defenceless in this aquatic medium. His Mana Core, now settled at the peak of Rank E, had begun pumping Mana with high efficiency. He did not deploy his Water element to launch clumsy offensive attacks-hurling water spears at a beast that lived in water was like trying to burn a dragon with a matchstick. Instead, he used the magic with a tactical, biological precision.
"Water Element: Cellular Adaptation."
He drove Mana into both eyes, held wide open beneath the toxic, impurity-laden water. The magic formed an ultra-thin, perfectly transparent membrane over each eye-functioning as a protective lens-preventing the lake's corrosive chemistry from blinding him, and granting him startling clarity of vision through the growing murk and darkness.
He did not stop there. He directed a current of Mana to envelop his skin and clothing in a thin enveloping layer, reducing his body's drag against the water to almost nothing. Without warning he was moving beneath the surface with the fluid ease of a shark, his speed surging in a way that was sudden and entirely unexpected to the beast.
The serpent registered that the prey had not been crushed. Its massive head swung toward him beneath the surface, jaws parting again-not to bite this time, but to release a silent aquatic roar, firing a shockwave of concentrated force through the liquid medium.
The wave struck Dex's body like a concealed hammer blow. He felt as though his lungs would burst, and the ribs he had only recently healed nearly shattered again. He twisted his body like an acrobat to evade the shockwave's epicentre-but the residual force still hurled him sideways into the serpent's rough scales.
He reached out his right hand and with desperate force drove his poisoned dagger into one of the minute gaps between the serpent's dark green scales. The grinding of metal against armoured bone transmitted itself through his arm. He was not trying to kill it with this shallow thrust-the scales of a Rank D+ beast were harder than steel. His sole objective was to anchor himself. To hold on.
"In prison, if a large guard comes at you with a baton, you do not try to box him from a distance," Dex recalled this golden rule as he wrapped his left arm around one of the spines protruding from the serpent's back, clinging to it with every ounce of will in his teeth and nails. "You grab him. You press yourself to his chest. You make him carry your weight and you never let him get far enough away to draw back his arm and land the killing blow."
The serpent erupted with fury at this human parasite that refused to die and refused to let go. It began coiling hysterically, swimming in violent spiral loops in an attempt to shake him free. When that failed, it chose the simplest and most lethal tactic available to creatures of the deep lakes: the death dive.
The serpent pointed its head toward the lake's dark floor and plunged with terrifying speed.
It was carrying Dex on a direct journey into the abyss. With every metre they descended, the hydrostatic pressure on his body increased. His chest began to contract as though iron bands were tightening around his ribcage. A sharp, piercing tone began to tear at his eardrums. The oxygen in his blood was burning at twice its normal rate under the combined strain of physical exertion and relentless tension.
Death by asphyxiation and crushing was closing in on him within seconds. Yet Dex, clinging to the back of this nightmare sliding through the dark, did not close his eyes.
He knew from the novel's events that the entrance to the secret cavern lay somewhere in the sunken depths of this lake's floor. This serpent was not merely a beast trying to kill him-it was, by a savage irony of fate, his express elevator to a destination he could never have reached by diving alone.
The question was whether he would reach the bottom alive-or simply as a shattered-ribbed corpse still gripping a dagger.