I slammed my shield forward with more than enough force. The mass of glowing stuff squished against my petal-scales and deformed for a moment before it tumbled down into the hall below. I rushed to the opening and set myself between it and my friends, just in case whatever emerged from the ball didn’t give us a moment to breathe.

A wet squelch resonated from below as the mass spread out on the floor. And stayed that way. I held my breath in anticipation for whatever would emerge. It didn’t make me wait long. The colours swirled together to form a spinning vortex, moving faster and faster until I couldn’t make out any individual colour within the mass. Then it suddenly stopped. The colours didn’t get the memo, however, and flew out from the mass with enough force that they splattered onto the walls and floor in a large radius around the mass.

Leaving only a strange milky-white circle on the ground. With a sound like a zipper being ripped apart with someone’s bare hands, something began to rise through the milky white. First came a single head on a very long neck that looked like someone had stuck a grape onto a piece of cooked spaghetti, except the grape was a malformed skull and the spaghetti was a braided cable of dark brown roots. The head rattled and shook on top of its neck as if it were in the middle of a seizure, then roots burst out of the eye sockets and wrapped themselves all around the thing.

Within seconds the skull disappeared under thin muscle-like roots. The thing opened its bizarre mouth and let loose a clattering roar that forced me to lean backwards to counteract its strange attraction. One thing did not resist. The green the mass had thrown off earlier ripped itself from the wall and slammed into the head, knocking it away a few feet.

Twin nuclear green pinpricks appeared in the previously empty eye sockets. The roots puffed up for a split second, then seemed to breathe out in relief as the same green pulsed through them. I gripped my shield and gestured for Jun and Mortician to back away as two bony arms appeared out of the portal which were quickly covered and strengthened by roots. They pulled a body behind them that looked like the skeleton of a massive shark, which too was covered by roots as it emerged. But that wasn’t the worst part of it; not by a long shot.

Near where the single neck emerged from the torso hung another five vestigial stalks of root. As if the creature had, at one point, had more than one head. The root-shark-hydra pulled itself out of the portal completely with two thick frontal arms, spun around as if looking for something, then settled squarely on my shield.

//Blasted Guardian: Selachii Marrowroot Hydra.

//Hazard Rating: 27.

//Statistical description hidden for testing purposes.

//Abilities hidden for testing purposes.

As it focused on me, one of the vestigial necks began to shake. I watched in horror as a lump rose through it like a basketball being pushed through a sweater sleeve. Liquid sprayed out of the root-neck as the thing grew closer and closer to the end of the withered stalk, and out popped a mess of bones that slowly began to knit themselves together into what could’ve been described as a skull.

“Shit, it’s growing more heads.” I turned and locked visors with Jun. “I’m going down. Do as much damage as you can from up here, and make sure none of its attacks hit Mortician.”

“Will do.” Jun confirmed. “I’ll jump down if it looks like it has long-range defenses.”

I nodded and jumped… right into a barrier. A colourless and perfectly transparent thing that bounced me off and rippled like a stone-struck pond. I blinked in surprise and shifted my shield into a dagger, but that too bounced off without even sticking.

{Hello, again! It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?} The voice of the hazard cheerily spoke through my helmet. {The creature you are about to face has a grace period with which you can study its movements and regenerative abilities. Normally I would not reach out to tell you this, but I know that one of you has the power to break through the barrier. Take this warning to heart; if you rush ahead, there is a good chance you will bug out the system and you will not get credit for killing the creature. So stand tight and be ready to fight!}

Jun tilted her head to the side and put one hand on her hip. “That’s a little more information than I was expecting.”

“Far more.” Mortician agreed as a simple timer appeared on top of the barrier. One minute and fifteen seconds counting down. “Though it is good to know that we are on what appears to be a proper path.”

“But it also means we’re still dancing to the hazard’s tune.” I mused, shifting my weapon into a spear that I rested against my shoulder. “So the rest of the hazard is just a distraction, and this is actually how we ‘solve’ it. Or maybe we can only solve so much of this part of the hazard depending on how far we get in the other part of it.”

“We’ll never know until we get further in.” Jun said. “For all we know, killing this Selachii thing could open the last part of the hazard. Maybe we’ll get to meet the face behind the voice and whatever god ended up winning the fight in this version of the future.”

Maybe she was right. Or maybe we were only dipping our toes in the ocean that was this hazard. I couldn’t tell from where we were at the moment, but by the time this monster fell, we would have a much better idea of what lay ahead.

In the minute and a half we were forced to watch the hydra, it sprouted three more heads, for a total of five. Each of them drew one of the colours from the splatters into them once they’d fully formed, and now the hydra’s root body shone with a chromatic light. Radioactive green, blood red, pastel blue, neon yellow, and a metallic black. All five heads reared back and roared as the timer ticked down to zero, along with the final vestigial neck that slowly began to push bones through its roots to create a sixth head.

And another half-dozen sprouts that looked ready to replace any head that was destroyed. I wasn’t sure if hydras worked the same in Staura mythology as they did for mine, but the word had translated exactly to ‘hydra’. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

I probably should’ve asked earlier, but I’d been distracted. “Jun, what kind of a monster is a hydra for your people?”

“A propagator. Whatever’s carved from it becomes its own creature.” She explained.

Well, it was a damn good thing I asked before leaping. “So don’t just cut off its heads and burn the stumps?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. The meaning got through her armor scarily well. “Uh, no. That’s literally the worst thing you could do. We need to focus on cutting it apart piece by piece, and completely destroying those pieces before we move on to the next one.”

Alright. With the little gun’s destructive power, that seemed doable at worst. I swept my spear in an arc in front of me as the barrier went down and hopped on it to take me down into the arena. Three more slashes joined it on the way down, and everything that wasn’t on cooldown for the moment joined in to make me as powerful as physically possible. The cruel world’s partition tugged at the back of my mind before it reappeared on my arm, and I summoned it behind a column that would hide it pretty damn well.

All five heads focused on me as I touched down and flourished my spear. Mortician’s golden protection shimmered around my body, and I locked on to the head that looked the weakest of the five. The one with metallic black light coursing through it, with a head that looked like a malformed hammerhead shark’s.

The light in the hydra’s body shifted from its chromatic rainbow to a solid green. I barely had time to react as the first head opened its mouth far too wide and surged towards me as teeth as large as railroad spikes grew from the roots. Droplets of green sizzled and crackled against the plant matter as the hydra’s strange body struggled to propel it forward, but its horrendously large front limbs did more than enough work.

I sent two slashes to block the thing’s jaw, kept one to myself, and sent the fourth for the base of the black neck as I ran out of the way. My movements were much smoother with my oil powering my armor, but something seemed off. Not wrong, per se, but like there was something missing. I set wipe-away against the hydra with a thought, which I’d thought was what I’d missed, but no. It was something else.

Okeria’s communicator crackled to life with Jun’s voice. {The black-light head?}

{That’s the one.} I responded. {Weaken the main body as much as you can, and I’ll cut off the heads one by one. Can you destroy them completely?}

Silence for a moment. {If you cut them off about halfway up the neck, I should be able to finish them off in three Okeria-shots. But then the necks will probably push more heads up through them…}

She trailed off in thought while I was busy dodging caustic fangs and slashing at stray roots that tried to hold me down. I risked a glance down at the ground and saw that the roots had burst through the stone in tiny little puddles of milky white. Not the coloured splotches that gave the hydra’s heads extra effects, but more of the stuff that had summoned the hydra itself. If it could summon those things, then I had to get rid of them.

I stomped down hard right next to the puddle and swept my foot through it, severing the root and scattering the liquid light in one swift motion. The hydra snapped its head forward like a snake and brought its fangs down where I had been a split second ago, but my slash shoved me out of the way with a single thought. It bit into my armor and caused some serious damage, shearing away metal in a spray of sparks and oil.

My adrenaline flared. The slash no longer hurt, but it still carried me.

//INTERVENTION ACTIVATED.

//DURATION REMAINING: 2 SECONDS.

Two seconds. No time to think. Only to act.