Let's Warm Up Before We Swim
Kelpie? If it's a kelpie, then surely….
A Kelpie — the monster of Scottish legend, its upper body a horse and its lower body a massive fish.
Knowing the cause of the problem lifted the fog of frustration, but in its place a new worry sprouted. Despite its unassuming appearance, this thing was far more dangerous than I'd given it credit for.
It lured humans to the water's edge and devoured them, or drowned them and returned only the corpses to shore, or laid a curse on anyone who escaped and hounded them to death anyway.
The legends surrounding this thing were so uniformly gruesome that finding a single flattering one was a chore. And worse, right now it was….
Snort-snort, puuhaaah!
“Starving for a while, and then I stole your dinner too? Yeah, that'd piss anyone off. My bad.”
Because of me, the Elaine it had all but caught had slipped away — and now the beast was glaring at me with murderous intent, bellowing furious gusts through its nostrils.
In other words, it was spoiling for a fight. It raised the horse-like hooves of its upper body high and churned the water violently, expressing its rage.
“Go ahead, rage all you like. Today's the day you die.”
Fighting underwater made fire magic impossible, but… if that was enough to corner me, then the title of the world's only mage would weep for shame.
I crossed my arms in front of me to form an X, then flung them wide — and water gathered around my arms, swirling lightly until it shaped itself into a long cavalry lance.
I flicked my hand toward the Kelpie, and the lance of water shot forward in a straight line. The beast, which had been staring it down….
PUHAH! KAHAAAT!
Twisted lightly aside to dodge, then opened its maw toward me and fired a sonic blast. Perhaps because we were underwater, the shockwave struck my body faster than I'd expected.
“Right — home-field advantage, is that it?”
But I had donned a suit of armor molded from compressed water a step ahead of the blast, so the damage was slight. I shook it off easily and settled back into my stance.
Perhaps it realized I was different from its prey so far — the Kelpie narrowed its eyes and studied me warily instead of closing in.
Before it had time to analyze me, I closed the distance in a rush. I could manipulate the water around my body freely, so mobility was hardly a constraint.
Unlike before, I summoned several short lances of water and hurled them at the beast in a single volley, accelerating a few of them mid-flight to mix in a few feints.
THUNK! THUNK! Two of the eight water lances slammed into the Kelpie's body, and it lost its balance and skidded backward.
Pressing the advantage, I closed in fast, raised a massive hammer of compacted water in one hand, took aim at its head, and swung.
It's over!
Just as the thought crossed my mind that this might end faster and simpler than expected — just as I started wondering what on earth I'd tell Elaine afterward —
WHAM!
“Ugh!!”
A violent impact struck me near the solar plexus, and this time it was my body that went flying backward, balance crumbling. Up and down flipped wildly; my vision tangled into chaos.
Even as my water hammer lost its shape, I scrambled to right myself and skidded to a halt — and the identity of my attacker became clear.
A water lance…!
A lance identical to the ones I had made was embedded there, its tip having gouged through my water armor. If not for the armor… a fist-sized hole would have been punched clean through my chest.
Prrruh.
In that moment, the Kelpie tilted its head, eyes narrowed into a grin. Its wounds weren't deep.
— That all you've got?
That was the meaning written in its gesture. No way… had it copied the magic it saw me using? A single bead of nervous sweat trickled down from my temple.
SHWAK! SHWAK! The water lances the Kelpie conjured tore through the lake with savage screams, closing on Reus like torpedoes.
Every single one carried lethal force. You could tell just from the hiss of them slicing past — a pebble grazed by one crumbled straight into gravel.
The Kelpie was using Reus's own water magic, copied exactly. Unlike Reus, who moderated his output to a careful degree, the beast wore no such shackles.
The barrage was ferocious enough that, without his water armor, Reus would already have lost a limb or two. And worse—
Prrruh-huh! Puh-huh!
The Kelpie was more cunning than he'd imagined. It deliberately held a fixed distance, hammering away attack after attack, steadily grinding his strength down.
Reus, who had braced himself for some penalty from fighting in a monster's home territory, licked his parched lips.
The oxygen remaining in the bubble of air he'd draped over his face — which he'd thought so generous at the start — was already down to half.
He ached to resupply his air, but breaking for the surface now risked a counterattack from the Kelpie that he couldn't begin to predict, so he couldn't act rashly.
The Kelpie didn't know what trick Reus might be hiding; Reus feared an attack from behind. Neither dared close the distance with the other.
It was Reus who broke the standoff.
Dragging things out gained him nothing in an underwater environment that was overwhelmingly stacked against him.
Trading minor skirmishes would only bleed his time and resources. There was no room left for posturing.
Unleashing large-scale magic would drain his strength in one brutal gulp — but this was no time to be counting costs. If dawn broke, or if Elaine came wandering after him, that would be far worse.
Spreading both arms wide, Reus focused his mind. Seeing this, the Kelpie braced itself to dodge, certain another attack was incoming.
But he didn't attack. All the more bewildered, the beast flinched back and widened the gap even further.
Gurgle. A moment later, an enormous bubble rose from the lakebed, and the startled Kelpie hunched its body.
Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle! As more and more bubbles of every size came surging up from all directions, the beast sensed something and ground its hooves.
PUHUK! HIHIIING!!
Furious, the beast fired a sonic blast and a volley of water lances at Reus simultaneously — but their trajectories were plainly visible, and a light sidestep was enough to evade them.
Even as he dodged, he turned his palm upward and slowly raised it, and from every corner of the lake the bubbles came boiling up in a simultaneous eruption.
The Kelpie's scales stood on end. It could feel the water around it growing warmer, little by little.
“How's it feel? Like a frog trapped in a pot.”
PUH, PUHIHIHIING—!!
The magic he was weaving now was the Temperature Control Magic he'd learned before. He had simply expanded its scale and reach to swallow the entire lake.
The Kelpie thrashed this way and that, trying to swim toward some patch that wasn't yet scalding — a futile struggle. The moment it understood that fleeing was pointless, it charged Reus at top speed.
Concentrating on his magic left him unable to move freely, and in that brief hesitation, the Kelpie stretched its seaweed mane long and spat it out.
The mane lashed around Reus's body again and again, binding him and hauling him forcibly onto the beast's upper body. With him mounted on its back, the Kelpie dove straight for the deepest point of the lake.
“You son of a — don't tell me…!”
Instinctively grasping that Reus was breathing down here by some means, the Kelpie resolved to drown him before it could be boiled alive.
A simple either-or: the Kelpie boils to death, or Reus drowns.
With the first pale sunlight, the area around the lake was slowly beginning to brighten. There wasn't much time left.
Reaching the very bottom, the Kelpie flipped its body and slammed Reus, still lashed to its back, against the surrounding rocks with all its strength, then dragged him grinding along the lakebed.
It didn't know what trick Reus might still have up his sleeve, but of everything it had ever hunted, none had been dragged this deep and lived to endure it.
On top of that, with him being hammered against rock and floor without a moment's rest, his limit was bound to arrive all the sooner.
The instant the Kelpie grew certain of its victory, Reus raised his hands to either side of the beast's ears and murmured, very quietly.
“Thaaank you, dummy. You've saved me the trouble.”
A mocking laugh that told the beast in a heartbeat that something had gone horribly wrong. Panicked, the Kelpie hurriedly loosened its mane to shake him off — but—
“Goodbye.”
Reus was faster. The moment it felt the inside of its skull suddenly flare white-hot, the Kelpie's eyes bulged wide open.
The hotter its head burned, the wilder its thrashing became. Clinging to the mane of a beast stampeding madly in every direction, Reus gritted his teeth and held on.
Thick clouds of silt billowed up from the lakebed, and an impromptu rodeo erupted. Desperate to shake Reus loose by any means, the Kelpie shrieked its monstrous cries at random.
But it couldn't last. Like a fish boiled alive, the Kelpie's eyes cooked completely bone-white, its body went limp, the strength drained from its mane — and Reus came free.
[Mode: Kelpie] has been eliminated.
Seeing the window pop up before his eyes, Reus finally let out the breath he'd been holding. The oxygen left in the bubble over his head was down to a razor-thin margin.
“That hurt like hell, you horse-faced bastard. Ow, ow-ow, aigoo…!”
Even with his water armor layered as thick as he could manage, his back and shoulders, slammed into rock and earth, throbbed with every beat of his heart. If he'd taken that bare-skinned, he'd have been reduced to pulp.
He lashed the Kelpie's corpse tight with a rope of magic and hurriedly lowered the lake's temperature. If the heat from moments ago had persisted, every living thing in here would have died.
“Exhausting. Just exhausting.”
Casting large-scale magic back to back with barely a gap between them, he could feel his body turning to lead. It was that day-after-soreness feeling, like the morning after your first day of training at the gym.
Once the lake's temperature was restored to normal, he drew water together between his palms, pressed his hands flat, and spread it into a thin, spinning circular blade.
He pressed the rotating water blade against the boundary between the dead Kelpie's horse half and fish half, and it parted cleanly. When he dropped the fish lower body to the lakebed, small fish and crustaceans swarmed in within seconds to tear it apart.
The horse upper body he left to float up to the surface. With this, the monster Kelpie would vanish from the world… and all anyone would find was the corpse of a horse that had met an unfortunate end. And there — the ending was perfect.
It had actually been lucky that the Kelpie seized him with its seaweed mane to finish him off for certain. Thanks to that, he'd been able to drive the heat spell directly into the beast's skull.
Every last brain cell must have been simmered with the utmost care and devotion. He'd given it a generous, rolling boil — more than enough to stew it alive.
With the cleanup done, he hurried for the surface. His remaining air was running thin, and impatience pushed his speed higher.
Just short of the surface, the oxygen in his bubble ran dry. His breath seized, his focus fraying — and in that moment, his hand caught a tattered, broken net snagged on an underwater rock, and he hauled himself up by it.
Holding his breath, flailing his limbs, he swam with the last of his strength. Just a little more — just a little farther!!
PWAAHAACK!! The instant his face broke the surface, he gulped down air in ragged, desperate pulls. He hurried toward the lakeshore and scrambled out on all fours.
“I nearly… died…!”
Yes — a flash of bravado had driven him into the lake to fight, but fighting in someone else's home turf really was pure madness!
Just as he resolved to never do anything like this again and moved to flop down in the reeds for a rest, he heard the sound of someone running toward him.
“Over here! The sound came from somewhere around here!”
“Quickly! The culprit may be hiding nearby — no one stands down!”
The knights and soldiers keeping watch over the area, was it? Far off beyond the horizon, the last edge of sunrise was peeking through. So he'd managed to finish before morning after all.
“You there! Identify yourself and step forw— wait. You're…?”
The knight who had answered his questions yesterday recognized him and tilted his head. Given his state — soaked to the bone — it was fair enough.
“Lord Reus? What in the world are you doing out here at this hour?”
“Well, you see… ah, I came out for a stroll, and suddenly felt like a swim, so I dove right in — and only after I jumped did I remember that I can't swim! So I hurried and paddled my way out.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
Hearing the low-grade excuse he'd scraped together out of sheer exhaustion, the knight shot him a look of pure incredulity. Don't look at me like that — I know it doesn't make any sense either.
Water-attribute magic has advanced by one stage.
As if it were some token compensation for all his suffering, a half-hearted system message appeared. My gratitude truly knows no bounds — I hardly know where to put myself.
As he wrung the water from his clothes, he caught sight of someone rising from the undergrowth. Elaine, scanning her surroundings, was walking toward him.