The impact rang through Marisol’s body like a bell being struck. Glaive against glaive, lightning against lightning—her clash with the S-Rank Mutant-Class water strider sent a thunderous ripple across the sea, shoving foam and debris away in a violent burst.

  The Mutant still had strength to spare.

  Its attribute levels are just higher than mine across the board, huh?

  She didn’t wait for it to overpower her eventually. Teeth bared, she activated spraying discharge and expelled a sharp burst of air out of her glaives. The air kicked up a cloud of water vapour around them, obscuring her from view, and she kicked backwards with a snap of her legs to put some distance between the two of them.

  Twisting mid-air, she landed lightly on a tilted mast sticking out of the water. Beneath her, the dark wreckages groaned as waves shifted around. Her water vapour haze expanded rapidly, swallowing the sea in a thirty, maybe even forty metre radius.

  She didn’t stay still. Kneeling perched atop a mast was just waiting to get struck down, so her best bet was to stay hidden within the haze and take a short reprieve.

  Her heart was pounding in her chest, and it wasn’t out of exhaustion.

  Its aura…

  The strength of its killing pressure is quite literally double mine.

  A-Archive. Can’t you do something about—

  [Stimulating release of perception-enhancing and fear-dampening compounds.]

  Icicle in the back of her head. Her vision expanded. Widened. By now, she’d all but gotten used to the Archive’s adrenaline boosts, but it wasn’t a complete fix. Her hands were still trembling slightly. Her balance was still a little wobbly as she backflipped off the mast and landed on a plank of wood, disappearing into the haze. She took deep breaths, still trying to steady the pounding in her chest.

  I’m… terrified of it?

  Even though I’ve faced down Rhizocapala and Eurypteria before?

  [You were always surrounded by other humans back then—powerful humans with powerful auras that can combine with your own, I might add,] the Archive explained. [You have never truly faced an Insect God alone before. Not to this extent, at least, in the middle of nowhere where the closest human beings are children several hundred metres away from you.]

  This feels like the skeleton shrimp all over again—

  Her thoughts cut off as a high-pitched whine pierced the air.

  She whirled around just in time to see the Mutant dashing through the haze on her left, its body vibrating at insane speeds and creating an anti-water barrier that shredded her cover.

  Its kick was going to be devastating.

  “Hydrospines!” she spat, leaping off the plank just before it exploded into splinters.

  She landed on a broken hull ten metres away, her glaives skidding on the slimy wood. The Mutant didn’t slow down. Recovering swiftly from its missed kick, it barreled toward her, its glaives carving deep and thunderous grooves into the debris-strewn sea.

  Her breath hitched as she activated ‘Reflexive Vision’. Her world sharpened. Every detail snapping into clarity. The Mutant's erratic movements became a sequence of precise, calculated attacks she could just barely follow, but for a second, she wished she couldn't—because it wasn’t just fast. It was recklessly fast.

  [Just like you.]

  [Do not forget that the Swarm is the source of all bioarcane, and that Humanity is merely borrowing their power. The water strider has every mutation you have, for it is the ‘original’ water strider.]

  Thanks for the pep talk!

  The Mutant was relentless. Every kick of its glaives sent wreckage flying, every skate forward leaving the sea boiling in its wake. She couldn’t even look for an angle to counterattack.

  Damnit! She darted onto the slanted deck of a capsized ship, her legs sliding across its barnacle-encrusted surface. The Mutant followed, cutting through the mast as if it were paper.

  [Be careful. This is an S-Rank Mutant-Class water strider. It is one step away from becoming an Insect God. If you die here, it could stand to evolve from consuming your corpse and doom the warship fleet behind you.]

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I know! she snapped, launching herself off the ship. Her glaives slashed through the air as she landed on a drifting barrel, the force of her movement sending it spinning.

  She kicked off again, zigzagging through the wreckage, trying to lure the Mutant into overextending. But it was too smart. Too fast. Another glaive slashed toward her. She twisted mid-air, the blade missing her by inches. She landed on a section of a different broken hull, only for the Mutant to shatter it beneath her feet.

  She plunged into the water, her body sinking for a brief, sudden moment before she kicked herself back to the surface.

  The Mutant was waiting.

  It lunged, its glaives crackling with electricity, the energy arcing off its legs in jagged streaks. Marisol barely had time to react. She activated spraying discharge again, blasting herself backward in a spray of water and mist.

  Her glaives hit something solid—a partially submerged cannon—and she used it as a springboard, launching herself back into the fray with segmented flexion preventing her glaives from just snapping outright.

  Reckless against reckless!

  Speed against speed!

  The War Jump—

  Didn't work. She did the ‘launch’, she did the ‘spin’, but she couldn't stick the ‘landing’. The Mutant intercepted her before her kick could even fly out, lashing out at her chest with a standing kick that was just half a second faster than hers—and it completely knocked the wind out of her sails, drove the air out of her lungs.

  She blocked it at the last second with her apiclaws pressed together for double the toughness, so she didn't get cleaved in half, but the blow did send her flying back. Ten metres, twenty metres, thirty metres. Hydrokinetic redirection significantly softened her landing as she bounced off the surface of the sea, rolled a couple extra metres for good measure, and came to a painful, screeching halt on the island's black sand beach.

  For a moment, she just lay there, her chest heaving, her vision swimming. Her ribs ached, her glaives felt like lead, and the Mutant's distant killing pressure pressed down on her like a physical weight.

  Out of the corner of her hazy eyes, she saw the Mutant skating towards the island, slow and deliberate.

  It was toying with her.

  Taunting her.

  “... Strider… challenger,” it rasped, its voice low and guttural. Kuku and the crab children rushed to her side, their small hands tugging at her arms and shoulders in an attempt to help her up, but her focus was locked on the Mutant in the distance.

  It could speak.

  It was this close to becoming a true Insect God.

  Can't… let that… happen.

  Marisol spat blood, her hands gripping the heads of the children around her for support. She forced herself onto her glaives, every movement a pain, every breath a struggle. She simply couldn’t let the water strider make it to the island.

  If it did, the children would get caught up in the chaos of the fight.

  Think. Think, think, think.

  But just as panic threatened to take hold, the Mutant stopped ten metres from shore.

  Marisol blinked. She wasn’t the only one who noticed—the crab children’s wide, curious eyes, just like the Mutant's, were fixed on the distant horizon.

  There was movement there, and she squinted to make sense of it. Slowly, steadily the shapes began to resolve into a fleet of a dozen warships, their massive sails straining against the wind. She recognized the giant Whitewhales towing them. Their pale bodies glimmered in the sunlight, pulling the ships through the sea of wreckage, inching closer to the giant horseshoe crab island by the second.

  A small flicker of hope sparked in her chest, but the relief was short-lived, because as her mind pieced together the situation, the distant sounds of cannon fire and the flashes of gunpowder told her everything she needed to know. The Imperators were fighting off Kalakos, Rhizocapala, and the endless tide of pursuing crustaceans. She couldn't exactly see the bugs yet, but give another minute or two, and she was sure she'd be able to see the black wave chasing after the fleet.

  [The horseshoe crab island is still on track to intercepting the fleet in exactly five minutes,] the Archive said plainly. [No delays. No slowing down. Right here, right now—]

  The Mutant-Class water strider made its decision.

  With a sudden turn, it began skating in the opposite direction, bursting away with a crackle of lightning and the faint mutterings of ‘strider challenger, strider challenger’ under its breath.

  Marisol’s eyes widened in realization as her pulse quickened.

  It wasn’t heading toward the island anymore.

  It was going straight for the fleet.

  She cursed under her breath. She didn't even have to imagine it. If the Mutant made it to the fleet, there was no doubt it’d tear through at least one, maybe even two or three ships before any of the Imperators could respond to it.

  Without thinking, she pushed herself off the sand, propelling herself toward the water with all the speed she could muster. The sand kicked up behind her, but as she took her first few strides, her glaives slipped on the uneven ground.

  The next thing she knew, she was sprawled on her stomach, face in the black sand. A sharp sting shot through her hands as the sand scraped her skin, but… she barely felt it.

  She’d tripped. She’d fallen.

  And her hands were still shaking.

  … Fuck off.

  She gritted her teeth. Rapid rehydration cleared her mind. Her muscles tensed as she shook her head and crawled onto the tip of her glaives, wiping away the remnants of that fear. She couldn’t afford to freeze now. Not when everything and everyone was on the line.

  Inhaling deeply, she pulled calmness back into her system. Her eyes turned to the Mutant. It was still gaining on the fleet, and it'd reach the first warship within two minutes.

  But Marisol wasn’t going to let it win.

  She wasn’t going to be outpaced at her own game.

  Think, think, think.

  It has everything I have as a bug-slayer, so what do I have as a human that it doesn't have as a bug?

  Then the answer came to her like a strike of lightning, before the Archive could even interfere—what had she been doing the past eight months that no wild water strider could possibly have done?

  She whipped her head around to the crab children. Their small, wide eyes watched her with confusion, but they didn’t hesitate to force smiles onto their faces when she spoke.

  “Chant,” she whispered, “and plead for the giant horseshoe crab to raise its tail again.”

  It’d worked against the Mutant-Class skeleton shrimp. Just by itself, it wouldn't work against the Mutant-Class water strider, but now she had a plan.

  This time, she wasn’t going to trip on her own fear.

  She'd make it impossible to trip on anything.

  Chapters remaining: 13

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