Chương 538: Water Elemental

Since the other villagers already knew that the four of us could communicate somehow over long distances, I immediately informed the other villagers of what Sallia and Anise had seen. I still didn't know exactly what they were looking at, but a strange monster heading our way wasn't something I wanted to wait to address. Then, I took one of the boats we had traded for with one of the nearby cities, and then headed into the ocean with Felix and Veritum.

Felix and I were a team - and Veritum was one of the few people in the village who were truly qualified to make decisions about how the village as a whole would react to a potential crisis. It only took us six hours of sailing to reach the giant water monster, which wasn't a good sign. Even worse was how easy the creature was to spot. Given the absolutely massive size of the monster, we could spot it from several kilometers away.

The only real upside was the fact that, much further in the distance, I could see a tiny little brown dot. <Is that you in the distance? > I asked. <I see something a bit northwest of the giant water monster." <Yeah, we're over here! Let me wave a red piece of cloth above the boat for a second, just to make sure you don't head towards something else that Sallia and I didn't notice, > said Anise. A moment later, I saw a distant flash of red come from the little brown speck. <I saw a flash of red.

I'm heading your way. > <Make sure to stay at least a few kilometers away from the water monster. We've seen it attack several other creatures living in the water as it moved forward, and two kilometers seems to be the limit of its attack range, > said Sallia. <Two kilometer? > Felix asked. <This thing has a ridiculous attack range. > <That might not even be its limit. That's just the longest attack we've seen so far. It seems to pick up and devour anything that moves too close to it.

> I resisted the urge to curse as I maneuvered the boat around the giant water monster. The one and only upside was that it wasn't moving too fast - though, the fact that it was aggressive and had such a huge attack range was far from reassuring. Sallia and Anise also moved their own boat closer to us, and after several minutes of travel, we finally got close enough that we could hear each other without using our communication bracelets. That meant that Veritum could finally participate in the conversation.

"What on earth is this thing?" asked Veritum, the moment we got close enough to converse with Sallia and Anise.

"We don't know either," said Anise.

"We're guessing it's some kind of monster, since it maintains a shape, seems to consume other life forms, and visibly attacks other creatures near it. That being said, we haven't found anything like a core or other component to its body, despite the time we've spent observing it. It just looks like a tsunami that somehow maintains the same shape." I paused, and then realize I hadn't actually inspected the creature using my soul sight. Peace had dulled my instincts. I activated my soul sight, and took a look.

The first thing I confirmed was that the giant tidal wave was, indeed, some kind of monster. It might have just looked like a giant wave of water to my physical eyes, but it had a clear, distinct soul. The second thing I confirmed was that there was no way we could kill it. It didn't have as much life force as the fog pillar had when it left, since the fog pillar had hit something like grade 90 or 95 [Fortitude] when it departed from the island.

However, the water elemental monster had at least grade 70 [Fortitude]. Given its size, the fact that I had no idea how to effectively attack it, and its ridiculous fortitude, I seriously doubted we could just kill it before it reached the island our village was located on.

"Any idea how it kills creatures? You said it attacked monsters and animals near it," I said.

"There are two ways we've seen it attack," said Sallia.

"First of all, it has some kind of… water whips that it can use to attack nearby living beings. They move pretty fast, and like we mentioned earlier, they have a huge range. They hit like a train, too. One of them crushed a giant sea leviathan with a single hit."

"What's a train?" asked Veritum. The four of us paused, as we realized that unlike us, Veritum hadn't seen the wonders of alchemy. Felix cleared his throat.

"It's an experimental idea I had that I've talked about a lot. That's beside the point. What matters is that trains are very heavy, so if they hit something like a house, the house would turn into splinters." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Veritum grimaced.

"That much force?" Sallia and Anise both nodded.

"The water whips are very dangerous."

"Got it. What's the second attack?" I said.

"Dissolving. Anything that the water elemental directly absorbs into its body dissolves very quickly. We aren't sure if its body is made of acid, or what. But anything that enters its body dies pretty fast and then becomes part of it." Sallia shuddered.

"I don't fancy the survival odds of anything unfortunate enough to touch it." I grimaced. So melee attacks were a terrible idea against this water elemental. That meant Sallia would struggle to contribute to a fight against it - and so would several of the higher level villagers, since the former kids from the great migration hadn't had time to catch up on levels with the adults who fought during the fog bank conflict yet. It had so much life force that killing it was probably impossible for us.

Melee attacks were nigh-suicidal against it. It could kill anything within about two kilometers with a single water whip. I felt a surge of frustration. Was this was a Tier 9 world was actually like? The first challenge we had found in this world was the fog banks. From those, at least, this world had felt… manageable. Not catastrophic, at least. I'd felt like we could still influence the world and change things. Now, a single roaming monster left us almost unable to influence it at all.

I shook my head in frustration, and tried to think of a different way forward. Abandoning the village and all our stuff would sting, but perhaps we could escape? If we stuck everyone on boats, and then sailed away, we could preserve some of the people from the village. The boat that the city of plants had left for us could accommodate around 50 people, and while the other boats had returned to the city of plant people afterwards, we had traded for more boats afterwards. We had five total boats now.

Each boat might be able to accommodate seventy or eighty people each, if we ditched supplies and just tried to cram people onto the boats as tightly as they could fit. The problem was that there wasn't enough room for everyone. There were around twelve hundred people in the village now, and at best, we could fit four hundred on the boats. The rest would be killed if they didn't have a way to escape the water elemental, and there weren't any nearby islands we could ferry people to to take shelter for a while.

"The water elemental is approaching a smaller, outlying chunk of rock. This is a good opportunity to see how it acts," said Sallia. I jolted myself out of my thoughts to observe. A moment later, the giant water elemental ran into an outlying tiny island. Rather than a proper 'island,' it was more like a rock that happened to jut above the surface of the ocean.

I could see a few small animals on it, as well as some patches of grass - but it was such a small island that there wasn't much room for large patches of wildlife to exist. I could have ran a full lap around the island in two minutes flat. The water elemental didn't go around the island, or avoid it. Instead, the water elemental just crashed through the island as if it were an annoying speed bump. The water elemental's body subsumed half of the island in seconds.

Rabbits, grass, and a few smaller mammals I couldn't identify were instantly pulverized by the sheer mass of the monster, before they were dragged deeper inside of its body. A few of the rabbits, to my surprise, seemed to realize the danger they were in. I felt flickers of essence pour out of their body, before they tried to leap away from the island. However, several tendrils of water snaked out of the water elemental's body, and then pulverized them into paste.

Then, the carcasses were dragged inside of the monster's body, before they dissolved into chunks of protein and red smears. I shuddered as I imagined the same thing happening to our village. The water elemental hadn't just been migrating - it had actively hunted down anything that tried to escape. It had also tried to swim through an island, in order to kill and eat everything nearby - and it had largely succeeded. We needed to deal with this threat, but I had no idea how. A moment later, I got another idea.

I had looked at this creature with my soul sight, but I hadn't looked at it yet using my conceptual sight. Perhaps on a conceptual level, I could find some sort of weakness to exploit, or new information we could use? I activated my conceptual sight. The physical world turned into a collage of chaotic images, ideas, concepts, and blurred madness. I looked around for several seconds, as I tried to sort out what I was looking at.

Around me, there were faint concepts that I could barely recognize, since they were so faint. Next to me was the concept of craftsmanship, invention, and thinking - I couldn't tell whether it was coming from Felix, the boat, or both. There were other undertones to that set of concepts, too - like a bright, coppery tang underlying the taste of a sweet smoothie. Further away was the concept of melee weapons, and fighting, and magic, and combat - things that I suspected came from my other friends and Veritum.

Beneath us was a chaotic blend of other ideas. Water. The Ocean. Boundlessness. Mysteries. Depth. Pressure. Movement. Currents. All of those, and dozens more, entangled into a soup of different concepts, all mixed together in ways my mind couldn't fully fathom. More importantly, in the distance I could see one other mix of concepts. I expected it to look much like the ocean, but it looked quite different from that.

Of course, it had some concepts similar to the ocean mixed into it - water, vastness, depth, pressure, and life. There were also other concepts mixed into it - digestion, magic, hunger, inevitability, and many more that I had a harder time identifying. However, there was one final concept that I had an easier time identifying. One that I had never seen in conceptual form before, but which I was quite familiar with.

It was the musty, woody scent of a tree, mixed with the concept of dimensionalism, hunger, and vastness beyond words and imagination. The universal tree. The moment I saw the concept of the universal tree on the water elemental's body, the surface of the abomination's body roil, like a pot of water that had been brought to a boil. A moment later, a few tendrils of water shot straight towards us. It forced me to stop focusing on my conceptual vision, and focus back on the physical world.

I resisted the urge to curse. It had noticed us.