[Cetus Lv.8]

  Did they genuinely expect me to kill that thing?

  “Fuck,” I mumbled, ducking behind the rock and grabbing the potion next to me and the health potion from my inventory and chugging the magic potion. Fuck the bullet— perhaps Rounin could dig it out later. I drank enough of the health potion to heal myself properly, but Icarus might need some now or later.

  [HP: 45/50]

  “Great,” I said to myself, knowing I at least wouldn’t be taken out by a light blow.

  [MP: 105/240]

  “Fuck!”

  That wasn’t enough.

  I peeked over the rock, trying to see if I could make out whatever was going back under the ice. I’d caught a glimpse of a reptilian head breaking through the ice, but I had hidden before I’d seen much more.

  “Just stay down, Yule! I’ll handle— ACK—”

  I watched Icarus get swatted out of the sky by the thing’s tail and gathered a pile of snow where he was probably about to fall. I heard a faint “thank you!” indicating I’d guessed correctly.

  It looked like some form of water snake, covered in iridescent scales flashing blue and green. It had long fangs like a venomous snake, only with horns.

  Most importantly, it was massive. Its diameter was at least six feet. I couldn’t see the whole thing, but what I could see of it was long enough for me to decide I didn’t want the see the rest. If I had to guess, it was probably around seventy feet long.

  I snuck away from it, trying to crawl towards Icarus without attracting attention from the creature. Thankfully, he had landed not too far from me. Sadly, my clothes were getting wet from the snow. If I caught hypothermia, I was dead.

  Then again. I was already as good as dead if I was supposed to kill that.

  “Icarus!” I hissed as soon as I was in earshot.

  Icarus shifted, then winced. He didn’t look concussed, which was good, but his wings had retracted again, leaving his bare back pressed against the snow. His cloak had come loose when he had been batted out of the sky “I think one of my ribs is broken…or multiple…damn, I’m glad it’s cold right now. Does it think I’m dead?”

  “Probably. I think you would be if there wasn’t snow here. Open up, I still have some health potion left.”

  I poured what I had left of the carmine liquid into his mouth. I wished I had gotten that health potion from the girl in the second Challenge.

  Icarus gritted his teeth in pain as several cracks indicated his bones were popping back into place. “Ow. That didn’t hurt before.”

  “Must be because you broke some ribs. All good?”

  Icarus nodded, slowly rolling onto his stomach. “Definitely been better, but not bad, either. Any ideas for hunting that thing?”

  I recalled the beams Icarus had been able to fire in my dreams. “Any chance you’re withholding skills from me?”

  Icarus giggled. “I wish. Maybe then I could stop relying on these wings, and I wouldn’t keep ripping all my clothes. So, are we dead?”

  “Hell, yes,” I muttered. “I know someone who could fix your clothes. If we’re lucky enough to see him again.”

  “Can’t you just shish-kebab it like you did to the flying thingies?” Icarus asked, shivering as he hugged himself.

  I racked my brain, trying desperately to connect the puzzle pieces. The problem was, I was pretty sure I only had one piece. “I don’t think so. That thing’s strong enough to break through ice.”

  “Can’t you just, I don’t know, compact it?” Icarus asked, finally thinking to wrap his wings around him like a blanket. I was grateful for my boots.

  “I got these powers yesterday. I don’t know how to do that,” I reminded him. “Can you even compact ice?”

  “God, I don’t know.” He huffed. “We have to kill it at some point. Okay, let’s put our brains together. It’s a giant snake. How does one kill a snake?”

  I shook my head. “You grab the head. We won’t manage that.”

  “Right you are! Okay. So, I don’t think the chink-in-the-armor thing is gonna work, and I don’t really want to feed you to it so you can cut it apart from inside. That seems dumb.” Icarus drew crude figures in the snow with his finger. Most of them looked dead. It hit me with a strange sense of deja vu.

  “Can you create ice inside it?”

  I shrugged, narrowing my eyes at it. It wasn’t as if we had any better ideas.

  I focused my attention on the cetus’ neck, trying to reach inside its throat.

  [MP: 104/240]

  The spikes of ice that should have speared its neck open formed on the outside, giving it a collar or necklace. I was glad we were out of sight. It was not happy with its new accessories.

  “Too much of a cheat, I guess.” Icarus sighed, turning back to his stick diagrams in the snow. “Okay, it said it’s a cetus. That’s a myth, right? Well, I guess it’s not a myth, if it’s here… what was it, Greek?”

  I racked my brain, trying to remember anything Rounin had told me from his Greek mythology phase. In my defense, he’d gone through many phases in the twelve or so years I’d known him, and Rounin thought and talked too fast for me to keep up with comfortably.

  “…Perseus?” I suggested. “I think he used Medusa’s head to kill it.”

  Icarus glared at the sky. “Hey, System! Do you think this is fair?!”

  He sighed. “Don’t answer that. Okay, it’s a sea creature, so…”

  The angel straightened, looking at me with a grin. “It’s a sea creature! Let’s just push it out of the water. Can you freeze over the lake?”

  I frowned at the lake, trying to estimate how much MP I would need.

  “You don’t have to freeze the whole thing over. Just enough to get it in shallow water. Too shallow to swim. And I don’t think the lake is too deep in the first place,” Icarus said hopefully.

  “We can try,” I relented. “Just make sure you’re ready to get us away if this goes…wrong.”

  We were only about forty feet away from it. That was probably within striking range if it struck like a rattlesnake, and I didn’t want to know how fast it was.

  “Deal. On three?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One.”

  I concentrated on the lake beneath the cetus, visualizing what I needed.

  “Two, three.”

  I formed the ice from the bottom up, pushing the cetus out of the water.

  [MP: 0/240]

  The world spun, and I realized Icarus was dragging me backwards by the forearms.

  “Yule! Yule, are you okay?” He asked, wings covering us both.

  “Yep, good, kill it—“ I suggested, falling back down.

  Icarus took one last look at me before his dagger appeared in his hands. He crouched and launched into the air. His grace made it seem as though he’d done it a million times.

  The sight was oddly familiar. I felt as though I was missing something I had once known, like forgetting the lyrics to a song you used to know by heart.

  Spots appeared in my vision.

  I closed my eyes and let myself sink into the strange feeling of familiarity.

  “Yule. Yule! Are you awake? Because I need you to be awake. The timer’s out in like, an hour, but I need you awake beforehand so you’re not fighting groggy. Oh my God, if you die here I don’t know what I’ll do--”

  I didn’t have to open my eyes to know that voice. “I’m good, Rounin…”

  I heard him sigh in relief. “That’s great.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Oh my God, dude. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you’d pass out.”

  I cracked open an eye. Icarus, Rounin, and the woman from the second Challenge were hovering over me. My best friend looked especially frazzled.

  “Don’t sit up yet,” Rounin ordered. “You’re lucky Penelope was kind enough to give you what was left of her health potion! I was completely out of MP when we got back because my partner almost died multiple times, and I had enough faith in you to believe you wouldn’t need me, yet lo and behold!”

  I guessed the woman was Penelope. “…okay.”

  “Now we’re even.” Penelope nodded, frowning at me like I’d personally offended her by fainting on Icarus.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “How do you feel?” Icarus asked.

  I took a moment to assess my body. My leg felt better, so I suspected Rounin had removed the bullet, but every muscle in my body was sore. I was sore in places I didn’t know I could be sore. A bone-deep exhaustion was radiating through my body.

  “Fine.”

  Rounin’s lips pressed into that tight line that meant he could see I was lying and wasn’t happy with me. He was picking at his nails and the skin around them again. I grabbed his hands and pulled them apart. He’d start bleeding if he picked at them too much.

  “Can you help me sit up?” I asked. Rounin gave me a look of great disapproval but helped me lean my back against the wall. “How long was I out, Icarus?”

  “Well, after I took out the cetus, which uh, thanks by the way—“ Icarus nodded at me, no longer so worried now that I was fully awake and talking. “—this window popped up telling me I’d completed the Challenge Objective, and I was being transported to a waiting room. So when we got here, Rounin rushed over and started losing his mind at me.”

  Rounin scrunched up his nose at Icarus, but he didn’t seem genuinely annoyed.

  That was strange. Rounin rarely let strangers see how upset he was, and the face he was making was usually reserved for me or his other friends. Then again, I wasn’t usually returned to him passed out with a bullet in my leg.

  Icarus was also oddly easy to get along with, like we’d been friends for a long time. Some people just had that charm.

  “I could see the fire of hell in his eyes for a moment. So I told him what happened, and he took the bullet out. Then Penelope here offered us her health potion because you helped her out during the second Challenge,” Icarus narrated. “She got partnered up with Valerie— that’s the kid you probably saw me with earlier. Red hair, can’t be taller than five feet. Oh, there’s water and food here. We should get some food in you while we have time.”

  Penelope passed me a tray of food and a bottle of water.

  I inhaled it. The only thing I’d eaten for the past three days was wolf meat. I even ate my hated foods for the nutrient boost…and because Rounin was giving me that look that meant he’d put up a fuss if I didn’t eat them.

  “I am not familiar with many of your foods, so I just grabbed a bit of everything. It is interesting that your water comes in…bottles.” Penelope frowned at my empty water bottle, twisting it for her inspection. “What material is this?”

  “Uh. Plastic?” Icarus said slowly. “Say, you’re…not from around here, are you.”

  Penelope widened her eyes at him mockingly, tossing him the trash. Icarus caught it without looking. Now that I was looking at her, her eyes were a striking shade of amber. “Wow, how did you guess?”

  I inspected her closely. Her clothes looked as though she’d perhaps hopped out of the sixteenth century, and she was beautiful in an unusual way. Her eyes were just a tad bit too big to look normal, her lips were a shape I’d never seen on anyone else, and her ears were oddly shaped. She spoke with a slight accent I didn’t recognize.

  Penelope shrugged, sitting next to me. “Just consider me a, uh…alien.”

  Icarus’ eyes widened, excited. “You’re an alien?!”

  She shrugged again. “Not exactly, but close enough.”

  “You should eat,” Icarus finally suggested to Rounin.

  He shook his head. “I’m nauseous. I feel like I’ll throw up if I eat.”

  “Have something dry, then,” Icarus worried. “Toast or something.”

  “I don’t want anything, Icarus,” Rounin mumbled, leaning his chin on my shoulder.

  “Where’s your partner?” I asked, moving his grip on my sleeve to my actual arm. He relaxed somewhat, despite the fact that I probably didn’t smell great. He somehow still smelled like he usually did.

  Rounin made a face. “Splattered somewhere.”

  Ah. No wonder he was nauseous.

  “I won’t ask,” Icarus decided.

  The teenage girl Icarus was with earlier walked over, stuffing the remains of garlic bread into her mouth. “Hey, Icarus. How was it?”

  Icarus shrugged. “Cold. This one here got stuck in the Arctic.”

  “Taiga,” Rounin corrected absently, brushing my hair out of my face. “Seriously. You need a haircut.”

  “I said I’d do it later, Rue,” I reminded him.

  He was nagging me more than usual. Normally he didn’t care how long my hair was as long as it wasn’t cropped too short for him to weave little braids into.

  At the moment, he seemed to be practically hand-knitting it. I wondered if I’d be able to comb it out later or if I’d have to call him right before my shower again.

  “Stop touching it, it’s oily enough,” I protested, removing his hand. “Go braid the kid’s hair. She looks like she needs it.”

  The teenager wrinkled her nose at me. “My name is Valerie. And…yeah, that’d be nice.”

  Rounin’s expression softened, and he gestured her over. “You can sit in front of me or on my lap.”

  Valerie sat in front of him and discussed her Challenge with Icarus as Rounin weaved her hair into a rather complicated braid that somehow held without a hair tie. My hands would cramp if I even attempted to move my fingers that way.

  “She’s cool!” Valerie was saying enthusiastically, gesturing animatedly at Penelope. “She’s crazy fast, you should have seen her absolutely wreck all those swamp monsters. It was crazy!”

  “I know!” Icarus laughed. “I got to see her fight in the second one, remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” Valerie said, disappointed. “So…how long do you think we’ll be…here?”

  “Only about forty-five or so minutes more,” Penelope answered absently, carefully cleaning her sword. The gunk was very caked on.

  “No, no, I mean, like— how long are we going to be in the Challenge zone?” Valerie rephrased, as Rounin finished up her hair.

  “That’s…a good point.” Icarus said, stilling.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Penelope shrugged. “Most Challenges I’ve participated in, the Architects let Challengers have a little downtime every five, six Challenges. Wouldn’t do to have their toys break. I’ll elaborate when we have time, but for now, we should rest.”

  Silence fell.

  She really was the main character. She had knowledge the rest of us didn’t— and she’d done other Challenges.

  Penelope’s eyes slid over to Rounin. “Anything to contribute, Mr. Healer?”

  “By the looks and feel, this seems like some kind of game. They don’t want the game to end that quickly. That’s no fun.”

  His eyes didn’t seem quite focused.

  Then he smiled at me and the moment was broken. “Of course, I’ll heal you whenever you get hurt. Always.”