Chapter 463: Dark Waters
In the waters, Amarena found darkness.
She let the orb float beside her as she swam, enhancing herself enough to keep the rate at which she swam high. Swimming still wasn’t her strongest ability, she hated to admit. But between growing up on Hell and only seeing the ocean once in her life, she felt she had a decent excuse for preferring land. Or running on top of water.
Eventually, the narrow cave opened up to a wider area, and it was here that she saw something she could barely believe.
Large, gelatinous eggs floated in the murky water, their insides glowing with light that shifted between green and blue, with the occasional spark of red. Inside each, the shrivelled, still-developing forms of the heavenbeasts twitched and bobbed, almost infinite-seeming in their variety and density as Amarena swam to avoid them.
It might have been two days after the first Hellquake that signaled the arrival of this dead tree, and yet there were already so many of these things, ready to be born.
Enough, perhaps, to overrun any city of Hell at its most powerful, if even half of them were like the armored beasts.
Between them, she saw the same dragonfly-like creatures with their wings angled backward, swimming through the water as they inspected or plucked the eggs. Those that did the latter, invariably rose until they were out of sight, perhaps even out of the water for all that Amarena could see.
She was in the middle of reorienting herself when she felt a presence from behind.
A bladed arm slashed down on her, and had she not been enhancing herself, she would not have been able to block at the last second, pushed away instead of impaled as she saw a familiar-looking profile and a head whose neck was half yellow-white...
Shit.
She shouldn’t have stayed, but it had seemed prudent to learn more about the beasts at the time. Cursing her luck at having angered one that knew how to swim, she drew her second short sword and readied herself, because there was only one trick she knew that might work underwater.