The surge of competence in a moment that wasn’t life or death was terrifying. It felt like my entire being was shot through with electricity, crackling and popping off into little arcs that bled away the short burst of power. I summoned as many slashes as I could in a flurry of motion that strained my battery, all of which hovered around me like buzzing sawblades.

I needed to isolate one head. And there was one right next to me that had done that job for me already. I sent all of my extra slashes toward the main body, leaving long gashes that bled light and a thick clear liquid that caught the light like a liquid prism. The hydra’s heads didn’t even react to the attack, all gathering their own power with their focuses absolutely and utterly fixated on me.

The rest of my slashes kept them at bay while I swept my spear around and charged. Both of my hands gripped the strange material as tight as possible, floodpetal-scales fluttering off of my weapon into the air behind me in a trail of destruction. The tip of my spear cut into the hydra’s extended neck with a sound like a snapping twig. Then I pushed floodpetal-scales to its limit.

Root and bone exploded under a blinding burst of green light. Halfway up the neck, just like I’d planned. The two halves of a broken neck flailed about like a fish out of water, dripping that same clear liquid as light bled out like a broken faucet. I shoved all of my slashes back with a mental command as the timer ticked down to zero.

I pulled my spear back and rolled to what I figured was a safe distance. {Go–}

Two quiet gunshots interrupted me. Okeria’s horrifically destructive bullets simply removed most of the hydra’s neck from existence, leaving only the head itself lying on the ground in a puddle of light and liquid. I glanced over at Jun with a question pinned between my lips, and yet again, I was interrupted by an explosion that obliterated the hydra’s head.

{Sorry, I had to reload.} Jun apologized. {And I’m going to have to come down in a second–there’s another barrier coming down. Try to lure the hydra away to get me some space.}

That was easier said than done. I nodded and pulled my remaining slashes close to me, then took off running away from Jun. The hydra wouldn’t fall for such an obvious bait so easily, so I had to find something else to capture its attention…

A cloud of black fog washed over my shoulder. Countless little warnings popped up in the corner of my visor, informing me that my armor was… trying to teleport away. I frowned and set a stop to that right away, but the warnings just kept popping up, even after the main cloud dissipated. Leaving behind a metallic black stain on my armor that gave me a horrible feeling when I looked at it.

Almost like it was permanent. Or at least that it wouldn’t go away until the hydra was dead. I winced and flickered my right gauntlet to see if the black stain went away, but it stayed with me.

“Damn it.” I hissed and set aside more brain power than I wanted to keep the teleportation rust at bay. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the hydra was slowly pulling itself towards me, its heads snapping and stretching as far as they could go to try and reach me.

Well, I was wrong about needing to get its attention. At least that was a positive. Jun hopped down from the plastic room and darted away from the hydra yet again, aimed her gun at the thing’s main body, and waved with one hand to make sure I saw that she was in position. The last head had mostly formed at this point, and the one we’d killed was already withering away. Probably to make another in just a few minutes.

I stopped running and fully turned, focusing all of my attention on the hydra. One head down, one currently regenerating. If we continued at this pace, there wouldn’t be any problem at all. The hydra’s metallic black head reared back, readying another teleportation-inducing attack. I sent my slashes at its mouth with a gesture and charged in, noting as I ran that most of the heads actually looked like they had something in common.

Three of them had light that concentrated deep in their throats. Two of them had light that ran down their jaws and soaked into the head itself. I forced a slash to cut the black head in half, hoping that the thing that sprouted from the piece of bone and root that crashed to the floor wasn’t anywhere near as bad as fighting off more armor that didn’t want to stay on me. A spray of a half-formed function erupted from the lower half that remained, halfing me in my stride and forcing me to backpedal as the one neck thrashed and squirmed as it mindlessly sprayed.

As I watched the strangely gory show, something off to my left splattered like a tomato thrown at a wall. I whipped around to see a small puddle of the off-white light spreading from under the half-head I’d removed from the hydra, pushing something out from underneath the top half of a skull that leaked clear fluid and black light. For the few seconds I could see it, it looked like a much smaller version of the hydra’s main body, but with fins that seemed like they’d gone through a shredder and gills that leaked black sludge.

Then Jun shot it three times. Cracks spread through the thing that bellowed in pain and anger. A fourth shot split the air and the creature, splattering root, bone and liquid across the floor in a long streak.

{Drown me, I didn’t think it would blow up like that. Sorry.} Jun apologized in frustration. {Is that going to summon more things?}

The answer to her question was given almost immediately. Pieces of the destroyed shark-thing were surrounded by their own individual pools of light, which seeped into the chunks and gave them their own much smaller bodies of root and bone. I frowned at the change, since a good chunk of the new creations shouldn’t have had enough bone to sustain themselves, but they proved me wrong as they each opened their mouths and screeched with little black singularities growing in their throats.

Fuck. That was not good. A moment’s hesitation before I shifted my weapon into a shield cost me a few notifications of my chestplate trying to teleport away, and once the sphere of petal-scales closed me in, I found myself surrounded by an onslaught of notifications. Each telling me that one single petal-scale was trying to teleport away. I didn’t try to fight those, instead letting them teleport away and dismissing them the second I felt them leave my effective range.

That had the unfortunate side effect of calling away all of my slashes that were in the process of holding the hydra back. Leaving it completely free to attack as it saw fit. Something crunched down on my sphere of petal scales and dug in deep, and not a second later, bright red fangs punched through before my eyes with a sensation like molten metal. I backed away as far as I could, but then I was thrown against the back of my protective sphere.

The hydra shook me like I was its favorite chew toy, other impacts that I assumed were the other close-range heads slamming into my petal-scales with bone-jarring force. I ground my teeth and let the back of my sphere fall away, which sent me flying away with one more mighty shake from the hydra. Little notifications piled up as I was pelted with a barrage of teleportation-inducing darkness, but only for the moment the sphere was broken. The little fuckers had been pelting it for so long, and they still had more than enough power to spare.

I twisted in midair as the ground came closer and closer. I raised my shield and slammed it down onto the ground in a spray of petal-scales, creating a tall barrier that I cowered behind as I caught my breath and tried to calm my thoughts. It wasn’t easy. All the notifications were doing something horrible to my concentration, and I felt two new attacks slam into my barrier. One of them turned into something unbelievably heavy the moment it splattered against my scales, and the other drained the battery I’d put into the scales with terrifying ease.

A stream of sparkling neon yellow light burst through my scales and poured against my shield. I braced myself for an onslaught of battery draining proportions, but once it ate through the scales, it did next to nothing. Sure, it was draining a little battery from me, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to worry me. The surge of spiraling blue light that followed, however, was infinitely worse.

It splashed against my shield. The splashes solidified instantly, turning into something that was heavy enough to drag down my empowered strength. I grunted in surprise and dropped to my knees behind my shield as gunshots rang out through the room, followed by the blue stream dropping off completely. Jun had made the executive decision to kill one more head, and that would cost us valuable breathing room.

But I couldn’t fault her. The stuff on my shield cracked the ground as I was forced to let it go, unsummon it, and resummon it in my hands. The heavy blue gunk fell to the ground uselessly, but my barrier also disappeared at that moment. Leaving me completely open to a hydra that had gotten a lot closer than I was comfortable with.

The one remaining ranged head was turned away from me to focus on Jun. The blue head was in tatters, leaking light just like the black one had, which now hung dragged uselessly along the ground, trailing metallic black along the ground like a sickly snail. Both of the close-range heads opened their mouths and summoned fangs that corresponded with their colours; blood red and a newly fully-formed turquoise that flickered like a dying lightbulb.

The red fangs were long and few; only four in total, but I knew how much piercing power they had. In comparison, however, were the saw-like teeth of the turquoise head. Rings of them, like the strange maw of a lamprey, rotated fast enough that they sprayed out clear liquid and made a low buzzing sound. If that got on my armor, there was no way I could survive. And if the red one got on first, it almost guaranteed that the turquoise one would get its follow-up attack.

Puddles of white light appeared under the scattered remains of the blue head. My shield would have to protect me, or I’d have to get very good at flickering my armor. A single splotch of that blue stuff on my bare skin would spell the end for me, and now I had to dodge through a mess of it as well as the black mist.

I set my jaw in a grim line. Being overwhelmed by pieces of a hydra wasn’t how I’d expected this to go, but it’s how it was going. I needed to find some way to clean away the little shits so they didn’t kill me while I dealt with more important things.