Even crashing into it at great speed, the water felt wonderful. I didn't know if it was just naturally a pleasant temperature, its rejuvenating properties offset any frigidness it might have had, or my greatly enhanced body shrugged off any unpleasant chilliness, but the moment I plunged into its depths I felt like I was being baptised in ambrosia.
I didn't dwell on the sensation, though. It turned out [Levitate] didn't function in the same way as a typical superhero's self-propelled flight, immediately releasing its grip on me when I entered the water, removing my propulsion and leaving me momentarily flailing about as the great, dark shape drifted along beneath me. Getting away.
A quick search through my menus yielded [Emissary of the Water God] and then I was shooting through the water like a torpedo. The Spell wasn't just supernatural swimming prowess, however. It let me 'see' through the water with a kind of sonar-like vision, giving me an awareness of the entire bloody lake. Super OP and super cool.
I didn't let myself get distracted by the sheer abundance of life in Shass' depths, though. My attention was instead riveted by the leviathan I was now chasing at great speed.
If you laid it out and measured it tail to tip, it wouldn't have surprised me if the bloody thing was longer than many of the skyscrapers in New York. Its scales were each the size of a car tire, and boasted every shade of green and blue, glittering with a mirror sheen like they'd been meticulously polished. The King's eyes were a molten gold, glimmering like stars set into an enormous skull that I could definitely confirm was at least four times longer than an adult Najavi—making it probably about ten times longer than me. Its smallest teeth were easily longer than my arm. The whiskers waving around its snout looked like they could mummify a vanwithout any trouble.
It was also, to be blunt, a dragon. Not the fire-breathing winged drakes of western lore, to be clear. This was right out of a piece of ancient Chinese artwork, complete with that intimidating spined mane.
I was pretty sure I'd never seen a creature so beautiful before. It almost felt sacrilegious to mess with it.
But I was gonna.
I rocketed towards it, [Emissary of the Water God] propelling me at lightning speed. I might as well have teleported.
And yet, the King of Shass saw me coming, somehow. Despite its big molten eyes looking in a completely different direction, it twisted its body at my approach, moving with the speed of an eel yet looking graceful as a dolphin. I shot past its head, missing by metres.
It evidently didn't count on the possibility that I'd be able to completely halt my absurd momentum on a dime, because its counterattack was clearly calculated to follow ahead of my trajectory.
Its jaws opened wide, and a beam of opalescent light erupted from its gullet with no warning, no build up. In movies, you'd usually see a dragon was about to breathe fire because its belly would light up with inner fire, shining through the creature's scales from its intensity. There was nothing like that here.
The beam didn't seem to affect the water. It was wide as two buses and bright as the sun to my eyes, but [Emissary] didn't even register it at all. As far as the water was concerned, it wasn't there.
The same could not be said of the floor of the lake it drilled into. Drilled might sound like a strange term for a laser beam, but closer inspection revealed it to be apt; the shimmering colours of the beam were actually spinning around each other, forming a kind of vortex. Did that mean the beam was multiple different effects weaved into one?
It was hard to get a good read on what the beam did to the place it hit since [Emissary] granted me awareness of the water and what was in it, rather than what bordered the water, but I could see the different types of particulate that were thrown up into the lake from the beam's effect. Some seemed frozen, others charred. There was glass, obsidian, coal, as well as some bits of muck that appeared to be going through strange mutations.
My heart was thundering in my chest. The sensation of adrenaline cascading through my veins was oh so familiar and oh so sweet.
Part of me wanted to test my durability against the beam, but logic won the day, and I decided that was too reckless even by my standards.
Instead, I rocketed away to one side when the great dragon finally realised it had missed, and started to track the beam towards me, only a few dozen metres away from its opalescent attack. That might sound like slow reactions, but it was actually the opposite; my assessment of the situation had sped up my mind to ludicrous speeds again, and in reality the dragon had taken less than a second to realise the situation and adapt.
How the hell did the snake warriors mess with this thing without getting messed all the way up?
Focusing on the great beast, I activated [Observe] as I avoided the beam.
[Name: Yinyin
Race: Suilong
Level: 8,486]
There was a bunch more info about its skills and levels and stuff, as well as another bloody biography about the beast, but I swiped that crap away, uninterested. All I'd wanted was its level, and it was definitely a powerhouse by this floor's standards, if Sssanya's father, a warchief, was 'only' 5000. The water dragon stood high above the snakes.
Though it was way below me, of course. That took the wind out of my sails a wee bit, just because it stymied the feeling of danger quite considerably, and I briefly regretted using [Observe] on it. But I could at least be content that I'd confirmed the so-called King was… probably sand-bagging with the warrior Najavi that rode it? Was humouring them, for some reason?
Certainly, Sssanya hadn't mentioned anything about it firing a laser beam. No one had ever been killed messing with the King, according to her, and I was sure that attack would have wrecked any given Najavi's shit.
So, it's just being a dick to me? Is it because I'm human? Is it racist?
Telling myself that made me feel a lot less guilty when I propelled myself to it at blinding speed, [Emissary] working overtime. The dragon tried to track me with its beam, but I was too fast, darting below it and circling around towards its head. It cut off its attack, twisted itself to try and swipe at me with its tail. It was whip-fast, the water putting up no resistance.
Again, I couldn't help thinking it was putting in rather a lot of effort to stop me, but shrugged it off. Things were more fun this way.
Our battle continued. It became clear to me that the dragon knew what I was trying to do. It was constantly contorting and twisting itself to keep me away from its head, placing its body in a position that halted my advance and forced me to redirect, where its beam would inevitably be waiting.
The game was great fun, if I'm honest. My sense of danger evaporated, but there was something to be said for the rush of challenge. It wasn't quite as heady as the thrill that came from knowing your life was potentially on the line, but I knew there was satisfaction to be found in a triumph of skill or wits, and this was proving to be both.
Hence why I kept to [Emissary] and nothing else. I had no doubt there was something in my repertoire that could have ended this in an instant. A quick [Blink] would have trivialised matters. Hell, if I'd put my body's Level-enhanced strength into it, I probably could have just launched myself right at the great lizard before it had time to react—on the other hand, it was equally likely I'd accidentally blow away all the water in the lake and depopulate the oasis from the shockwave.
Ultimately, I wanted to work for it. So I let [Emissary] launch me through the water, chasing after the belligerent beast. Multiple times, my fingers came tantalisingly close to snatching up its whiskers, only for the maddening monster to twitch them away at the last moment. Its energy seemed endless, whatever energy stores powered its beam functionally infinite.
The grin never left my face the entire time. This was awesome. Even if I'd fucked everything up and made myself giga OP, there was still fun to be had, thrills to be sought.
In the end, I didn't bother with elaborate plans, either. It was a pure showing of speed and power that won the day. The dragon was fast in its own right, and that beam was incredible, but it had to get lucky every time, and I only had to get lucky once. Eventually, inevitably, inescapably, my fingers wrapped around one of its blue whiskers, and once I had them, there was never any chance of letting go.
The dragon immediately tried to thrash me off, but I simply had [Emissary] hold me still in the water, and I might as well have been temporarily frozen in place. Yinyin only ended up flailing itself around. It was a kind of comical sight. The fury in its molten gold eyes was delicious to behold when it finally fell still, glaring at me.
I could only grin back.
Moments later, I had the other whisker in hand, and I was standing atop its head, holding them both like reins.
"Giddy up!" I cried around a mouthful of water.
It only then occurred to me that I'd been underwater for a good few minutes by that point, and my lungs weren't showing a hint of burning, despite having failed to take a breath in all that time. Whether that was [Emissary] or my natural levelled up ability at work, I couldn't say. Didn't care.
I gave Yinyin's whiskers a sharp tug, and it made its first sound since the beginning of our encounter. Its roar was musical, high-pitched. It was to whale song what a trained opera singer was to an untrained child trying to belt a high note. The beauty of it stole my breath for a beat.
Then the King of Shass launched itself to the surface of the lake, breached with an eruption of water that had to have been a mile high, and let out a great opalescent beam towards the sky. All with me still clinging to its head. No thrill ride could compare.
[Achievement unlocked: Dragon Rider]
I hadn't felt so alive in years.