Rimelion: The Exploiter

We went towards the lights.

The swamp let us in, which was the first wrong thing.

After the Lurefin I’d braced for the water to fight us the rest of the way, and instead the dead trees opened and the channel widened and the going turned easy, the false lanterns hanging closer and warmer on every side until we were walking through a drowned village made of light that had never been a village at all. NightSwallow was right; everything bent toward the middle.

The center was a ring of black open water under the tallest dead trees yet, crowns of a forest that used to stand on dry ground and now just clawed up out of the deep, and the lights gathered over it thick as a nightclub Yuki said she was at.

Then the water moved.

The whole clearing humped up in the middle, the black sliding off something vast underneath, and it kept rising, water sheeting off scales the size of doors, a long neck unfolding up past the dead crowns and on into the dark above them, until a head the size of Lucy’s ship turned down to consider seven small people standing on a tongue of my ice in its front room.

It smiled, which not-a-dragons should not be able to do, and it spoke in a voice that came from everywhere and ran out of sync with its mouth.

“Little queen,” it said. “Little spirit. Little warriors, so many have come to me. So few stay long enough to be missed.”

Then it laughed, and the system caught up.

[Mourncaller, The Swamp Dragon Lv.60]

Type: 8-mythical | HP: 65,000/65,000

For a moment, nobody breathed.

“Charlie,” Yuki managed, “that says mythical. That says level sixty.”

I whispered back, “I can read.”

“That’s a big bloody lizard,” Lucy offered.

We had come to do a favor for a tribe of fishermen, and the favor was a mythical not-a-dragon with a level that none of us were reaching this year. Llama didn’t wait for me to find words. “It’s in the water and it’s huge. Big things carry big weight.” Shield up. “Hit it until it can’t hold itself up. Charlie, footing. Everyone, the neck.”

So we hit it.

Lucy went first and gladly, the wait finally over, the hammer coming up off the ice with the shouting ring turning her warcry into something the whole drowned forest flinched from; and it landed on a foreleg thick as a tree and connected, a real crunch, scales buckling under it. Luminaria threaded free-form lightning up the flank, nothing that would touch the water, and the hide lit white along every fork. I put three ice spears through the soft of its throat and felt them bite. Yuki’s light, NightSwallow’s daggers off a snag, all of it, everything we had, into a hundred meters of dragon.

It worked. Every strike landed, every strike showed impacts blooming, scales splitting, the beast rocking under Lucy’s hammer, and up in the corner of all our vision the number went down.

64,900.

64,720.

64,510.

The not-a-dragon watched us do it and laughed, and kept laughing, because at that rate we would be here until the swamp froze on its own, and it had all the time. It wanted exactly this. It wanted us to stand on a tongue of ice over open black water and pour ourselves into it until we had nothing left to pour and stepped wrong on our own.

I went cold and started counting.

I used to fight not-a-dragons, even nastier things. We shouldn’t have been able to damage it at all. Like maybe one or two points per Lucy’s swing, not a hundred.

Nothing in this swamp should be eight-mythical. A mythical is a thing kingdoms evacuate from, not a story Torks tell their children about pretty lights. The number was too big. The number was bragging. I couldn’t prove it; I could only feel it, and you couldn’t kill a not-a-dragon with a feeling.

“Yuki, this is wrong,” I said.

She glanced at me, nodded and stopped attacking. The Dawnfox Mirror was up in both her hands, turned flat toward the not-a-dragon, and she was staring into the blade at something none of the rest of us could see.

“Charlie.” Her voice had gone quiet. “It’s not in the mirror.” She turned the blade a few degrees, tracking something low and close to the water that the not-a-dragon’s bulk stood squarely on top of, and her ears came up. “It’s a hundred meters of not-a-dragon and it throws no reflection. We’re not too weak. We never touched it. We’ve been hitting the air it wants us looking at, and the real one is—” the Mirror steadied on a patch of humped black water dead center, small, barely breaking the surface “—there. Charlie, it’s tiny.”

The not-a-dragon stopped laughing.

That, more than anything Yuki said, was when I believed her. A hundred meters of apex predator, and the moment one pink historian looked at it sideways through a pane of honest glass, it flinched.

“Yuki. Take the costume off.”

She did the thing the sword was made for.

Light rose off her, a true dawn, gold and rose pouring up her three tails and down the length of the Dawnfox Mirror until the blade was a bar of standing morning, and she brought it across the air in one clean sweep, and the Mirror showed the not-a-dragon true an instant before it cut the not-a-dragon away.

The illusion peeled.

A hundred meters of it at once, the grand head, the door-sized scales, the laughing mouth, sloughing off into light and water and nothing, draining down out of the dead crowns and into the center of the clearing, off the small humped thing it had been draped over the entire time.

And there it was.

[Mourncaller Lv.41]

Type: 6-marvel | HP: 3,800/3,800

It was the size of a few houses and shaped like nothing that ought to be alive; a bloated, translucent sac half-sunk in the mud at the clearing’s heart, the dark of its organs floating loose inside it, a ring of mouth wide enough to take a person whole, and a crowd of pale eyes that pointed every direction and agreed on none. The lure-lights all over the swamp hung from thin stalks rooted into its hide, hundreds of them, every false lantern in the drowned forest growing out of this one mute thing in the mud.

“The voice and the laugh are fake, like everything else,” I said. It only sat in its mud and gulped at us, which was somehow far worse than the not-a-dragon.

“Oh,” Lucy said, deeply offended. “It’s hideous. I take it back. I don’t want its teeth.”

She pressed on with the attack.

“Three thousand eight hundred,” I said, and felt the fight tip over in my chest from impossible to merely hard. “We can do that much damage. Everyone—”

The water in front of Llama turned to ice.

Pale blue, solid, mine; except I hadn’t made it. Llama, who had spent the whole swamp demanding a floor and finally been given one, put his full armored weight onto a fresh patch without breaking stride, because by now trusting my ice was the most settled thing in his world. The ice wasn’t mine. The ice wasn’t anything. He went straight through a sheet that had never existed, all of him, shield and plate and every kilo, into the black with a curse I’d never heard him use.

It had copied me.

Of course it had. It had watched me make a floor out of a swamp for an hour, and it was a thing that turned what you trusted into the place you drowned, and I had handed it the blueprint.

The center of the clearing bloomed with ice that looked exactly like mine; patches, paths, whole stretches of pale blue laid over open water, indistinguishable, every one a hole with a lid painted on.

Phèdre had Llama by the gorget before he went fully under, flat on the real ice with her arm in the water to the shoulder, holding a very large man in very heavy armor until I drove a real shelf up beneath him and he hauled himself out, streaming and furious and alive.

“My Queen.” Soaked to the elbow, perfectly serene. “I don’t like this, it is making your floors now.”

“I noticed.”

After that, I stopped helping kill the thing in the mud because I couldn’t, and I gave myself to the only job that mattered: keeping seven people out of the water.

The Mourncaller couldn’t beat us and knew it, so it fought by lying about what was on the ground. For every real shelf I laid, it set a false one beside it, and they were moving, fighting, repositioning on instinct across a floor that was half lethal.

So I anchored, and I felt for my own.

That was the one thing it couldn’t counterfeit: it could copy how my ice looked, but not the cold humming back up the link to where I’d pulled it from. Every real patch I’d laid sat in my hand like a finger I still owned.

The fakes were pictures. I planted at the center of the real footing and built and called it a step ahead of every boot, “Left of Lucy, real. Path to the snag, fake, go around. Llama, the island under you is mine, hold it,” and it was juggling while a second person threw extra knives in, and I had not one scrap of attention left for anything else.

I didn’t need any. Yuki had the rest.

She’d planted beside me with the mirrors up, and where my sense of my own ice ran out, her honest glass took over. She could see the fakes, every one, dull and reflectionless in the blade while the real ones threw the light back, and she called them with me, the two of us turning a death-trap into a floor one named step at a time. “Fake by the eye-cluster.” “Real, real, Lumi you’re fine.” “NightSwallow, the dark patch is solid, go.”

And on the floor we held for them, the others took the Mourncaller apart.

NightSwallow reached it first, a dead trunk’s shadow at its flank, and then her daggers in the soft of it, three strikes and gone before a single eye could fix on her.

Lucy got onto a real island under its bulk and brought the hammer down again and again, no roar this time, just wet collapsing give and a number that finally, actually fell.

Luminaria couldn’t spend the big strike, not over water, but she stitched free-form lightning into the wounds Lucy opened, earning back a little of the fish one careful arc at a time.

Llama joined in deflecting its desperate attacks, Mourncaller tried to kill us, but it felt as if there was a wall exactly where was needed and what he couldn’t cover, Phèdre patched up, as I kept us on a solid ground and Yuki deflected attacks aimed at myself.

2,400. 1,500. 900.

It played its last card at the end.

Every false lantern in the swamp swung toward us at once, and the ice under all of us shimmered, flickering together until even my own fingers couldn’t swear to what was solid.

“Charlie,” Yuki said, calm now, the historian all the way through. “Eyes on me. The mirror doesn’t blink.”

I put my eyes on her and on the blade, and the blade showed me the truth. The lie broke against her. It always was going to.

“Go,” I smiled at her. “It's yours to claim.”

Yuki gave me a smiled back, stepped off the real ice we’d named together, walked up onto the Mourncaller’s sunken back through the wreck of its own lanterns, and put the Dawnfox Mirror down through the largest of the disagreeing eyes into whatever it kept instead of a heart.

Every lantern in the swamp went out at once.

The body sagged. The stalks went dark, and the whole bloated mass slid off the mud into the deep with a long wet sound and was gone, and the black water closed over the place it had sat for longer than the Torks had names.

For the first time since we’d come into the drowned forest, the dark was only dark.

Yuki stood on its sinking back until the ice I’d left her was the last solid thing for thirty meters, then stepped back onto it, and looked at me across the dead-quiet water. “It really was tiny,” she said, a little stunned. “The whole time.”

“That’s what she said!” Lucy boomed, and we all laughed.

Except Llama, who was soaked through and standing on ground he’d watched me verify twice, surveyed the empty black where the dragon had never been.

“I—” he announced, “We need a floor. This isn’t it.”

“It’s about to be.” I pulled the cold up out of the water and started building us a road to Torks.