The Fishman (Part 3)
When is a person pushed to the brink of absolute, blinding fury?
When confronted by the enemy who murdered their parents?
When the love of their life is stolen away by another?
When a ruthless scammer bleeds dry the fortune they spent a lifetime scraping together?
All of those ring true, bound by a single, agonizing thread: having something precious ripped away without rhyme, reason, or recompense. When a person is robbed of what matters most without just cause, rage is the only natural human response.
And right now, I was burning with a fury that rivaled any of those. Had I lost something precious? It wasn't just precious. It was tied directly to my survival—a hard-won prize earned through endless toil, sweat, and sheer misery.
And it had just been snatched away right before my very eyes. Anyone would lose their damn mind.
"YOU FUCKING BASTARD!!!"
In all my years, I had never tasted a rage this pure. Even when my parents passed away and I stood face-to-face with the reckless driver who caused the crash, I hadn't felt this unhinged. At the very least, that sons-of-bitches—no, that man—had lowered his head, apologized, and paid out a legal settlement. But this shark-headed freak standing before me? The son of a bitch had gulped down the meal I'd nearly broken my back preparing.
To add insult to injury, it actually had the nerve to look satisfied. There was no holding back. I was going to tear it apart.
"Krr-ng?"
The hulking shark-man tilted its massive head in genuine bewilderment as I charged like a demon possessed. Its stupid, blank expression made it painfully clear it had no idea what was about to hit it.
"Kaaaaah!"
Thankfully, its brain hadn't completely rotted into fish food. Sensing the murderous intent rolling off me in waves, the shark-man snapped its gargantuan jaws wide. Rows of serrated, ivory fangs bristled inside like rows of iron spikes. A single bite from that nightmare maw would snap me in half like a dry twig.
Yet, choosing to bite was its fatal mistake.
Its posture was already awkwardly hunched, and trying to lunge forward bent its upper torso even lower. If it were a quadruped like a sabertooth tiger, that might have worked. But because it walked upright on two legs, lunging its massive upper body forward completely destroyed its center of gravity.
CLANG!
With a fluid pivot to the left, I stepped effortlessly out of its path. When its jaws snapped shut on empty air, the impact rang out with the deafening shriek of colliding iron plates. With its balance shattered, the beast's entire flank was exposed.
Big bastards are always easier for me to kill.
My target was clear: its planted legs. Rob an upright biped of its footing, and its mobility plummets to zero. It was my go-to playbook against colossal brutes, though there had been exceptions like the sabertooth tiger or the Orichalcum Guardian where brute-force severing proved trickier.
SHCK!
"GWOOOOOH!"
This overgrown fish was no metal golem. The Heavenly Demon's Sword, cloaked in a shimmering veil of azure aura, cleaved through flesh and cartilage like a hot wire through butter, cleanly shearing the right leg away at the knee. Deprived of its base, gravity took over. Just as calculated, the shark-man crashed violently onto its front.
Because it possessed humanoid arms, it managed to catch itself before its snout hit the dirt, but that changed nothing.
Now for the skull—!
WHOOSH!
Just as I raised the blade to drive it downward, the air to my left cracked with a vicious whistling sound. Pure survival instinct took the wheel. Without even looking, I wrenched my left arm up, planting the wooden shield across my flank.
BOOOOM!!
"Khk...!"
A staggering shockwave battered the shield, sending me sailing through the air like a ragdoll. But because I had braced for an incoming blow, I folded my body mid-flight and executed a textbook Breakfall, rolling smoothly across the earth to disperse the momentum before springing right back onto my feet.
A tail?!
Glancing toward the source of the strike, I spotted a massive, muscular tail thrashing through the dust. Forked at the tip like an ocean predator's caudal fin, the brute truly was a shark down to the last detail.
"Kyuuuu-aaaaah!"
"Krrr-agh!"
A tail whip wasn't going to save it. Not with a missing leg. Before the beast could even register where I'd landed, Wonmo pounced onto its snout, frantically raking his razor-sharp owlbear claws across its face and eyes. Crippled and blind with pain, the monster couldn't mount a proper defense. Its tail flailed in the air, falling far short of its own head, while its frantic snaps caught only empty wind because Wonmo was perched safely atop its snout.
For all its terrifying size, the creature was utterly helpless on land. Still, complacency breeds corpses.
Is it this clumsy because it's out of the water?
It seemed more than likely. As the monster thrashed blindly in a panic, I closed the distance with measured steps. The moment I stepped within striking range of its flailing head, I bellowed out to the baby beast.
"Wonmo! Clear out!"
"Kyuu!"
Smart little guy. The instant my voice cracked like a whip, Wonmo launched himself backward off the beast's snout. The moment his paws left its skin, I brought the Heavenly Demon's Sword plunging down into the crown of the monster's skull.
CRUNCH!
Imbued with aura, the peerless edge punched through skull plate and brain matter without meeting the slightest resistance. The shark-man seized violently, limbs twitching and trembling in wild spasms, before going entirely limp. The thrashing tail flopped into the dirt with a heavy thud, and a thick river of dark, crimson blood poured from the ruin of its skull.
Squelch! Thwack!
Just to be thoroughly certain, I wrenched the blade free and drove it into the head two more times for good measure. Since I had no clue where its heart was situated, annihilating the brain was the cleanest confirmation of a kill.
And with that, the swift yet treacherous subjugation of the shark-man came to an end.
Flicking the gore off the blade with a practiced snap of my wrist, I stared down at the carcass, a deep knot of confusion tightening in my chest.
Why the hell is a creature like this all the way out here? Is there an ocean nearby?
A while back, a rogue bull shark had tried to ambush the Golden Apple Deer, only to get kicked into unconsciousness. But that shark and this creature were fundamentally different. That one was an actual fish, whereas this monstrosity was an anthropomorphic abomination walking on two legs.
Was this grotesque ecology unique to the Forest of the Four Seasons, or was it an actual monster like the Mushroom Man?
Come to think of it, that bull shark was bizarre too. The water downstream is just a freshwater lake.
Even if bull sharks were notorious for tolerating freshwater, their primary habitat was still the open sea. Which meant that beyond that vast, horizon-spanning lake, the probability of an ocean existing was exceptionally high.
This place is driving me insane. An ocean inside a forest? ...Wait.
In this godforsaken realm, an ocean in the middle of a forest wasn't even that absurd. Right across the river, the natural landscape shifted as arbitrarily as changing channels on a television. One stretch was a blistered wasteland, another a frozen alpine peak, and another a suffocating volcanic swamp. Finding an ocean dropped smack-dab in the middle of the woods wouldn't even register on the madness scale. Common sense could go screw itself.
"Phew..."
I would have to conduct a proper scouting expedition to know for sure, but the pieces fit together far too neatly. A bull shark crossing between salt and fresh water, and now the sudden appearance of a bipedal shark monster. What baffled me most, however, was why this freak had wandered all the way up here in the first place.
If it had tracked the scent of cooking food, why hadn't any other forest predators caught the whiff?
No use burning my own brain cells over this. Time to crowd-source.
Racking my brain was pointless when my understanding of this world's fundamental laws was practically zero. In the end, my only real lifeline was the Gallery. If anyone had answers, it would be Father-emon—I mean, Allfather.
Title: Hey, we got beastfolk here, right?
Poster: Wild Grylls
[Attached: Photo of a hulking, bipedal shark giant lying dead with blood pouring from its cleft skull]
Do fishmen count as beastfolk? I mean, fish are technically animals.
Long story short, this bastard jumped out of nowhere and stole my lunch.
Pissed me off so I killed it, but what the hell is this thing?
This is a standard fishman.
And this is a Siren, commonly known as a mermaid. Neither matches the physiological parameters of your shark entity.
Even Allfather had no idea. The rest of the forum was just as clueless. An undiscovered, completely undocumented species that had never surfaced in the outside world. Typical. Just another Tuesday in the Forest of the Four Seasons, where nature threw dice at the wall to see what stuck.
...Wait, isn't that just a giraffe?
Do these fantasy worlds not have giraffes?
To an Earthling like me, a magical horse with a spiral horn was infinitely more absurd than a long-necked animal that eats acacia leaves. Talk about a culture clash.
Brushing aside the idle chatter, the real question was how to dispose of this colossal carcass. The most practical answer was obvious: pawn it off to Allfather. A biological fanatic like him would leap at the opportunity to dissect an uncatalogued mutant.
It's not like I'm going to harvest shark fins to make soup.
I bundled the entire corpse into the trading inventory and sent the exchange request. As predicted, Allfather accepted with trembling, ecstatic gratitude. Since I was keen on learning whatever his post-mortem research uncovered, parting with the corpse cost me nothing.
That was my single greatest fear: undergoing an irreversible, biological metamorphosis without even realizing it. Waking up one morning to find scales creeping up my neck or feathers sprouting from my arms was a nightmare I wanted no part of.
His skepticism was entirely understandable, yet the fact that an arch-scholar of his caliber was willing to entertain it as a working premise was reassuring enough.
Evolutionary theory. Hearing a high-fantasy scholar speak of Charles Darwin's principles was surreal, yet his logic was razor-sharp.
Every plant and beast on Earth evolved across countless millennia to arrive at their current forms. Humanity was no exception to that rule.
The scholar's inquiry cut straight to the bone. I didn't need a single second to ponder the answer. It was the simplest, most indisputable fact of my entire existence.
After stacking hypothesis upon hypothesis, the theoretical deduction Allfather arrived at was chillingly concise.
His words landed like a sledgehammer against my skull, sending a cold, electric jolt shivering down the length of my spine.