Whether she is of Void or Beyond or some other realm entirely, we do not know. Vamisel''s reach is either omnipresent or nonexistent. The records are too universal, and too minimal. The name lingers long past its associated meaning has been forgotten.


    <hr>


    They didn’t end up getting to Raina’s layering before their window closed and they had to return to Orard, but she did get all but one of her imprints finalized.


    Jair’s estimations had severely underestimated how much his own resilience contributed to the speed of the process. He’d done it so many times it barely registered as anything but an obligation, but he had decades of manabody control to rely on.


    Raina had never done any of this before, and even reaching as far as she had was exceptional. After it took her so long to get each one completed successfully, he couldn’t bring himself to force her to try again just to get it a little faster. She’d fought through enough frustration and failure after failure to get this far, it wasn’t worth it to force her to retry even more. As long as they had basic mobility and enough attack spells and augments for Tempest so she could actually hit the thing while it was intangible, that was enough.


    Jair did add two of his own layers before they left, and began the process of erasing the nonfunctional imprint. Having been made with direct mana incision it would be slow to remove, but not fully impossible unless he ran too much mana through it.


    Eythron gave him a very, very judging look when they returned.


    Jair grinned and waved. He wondered how his mentor had spent the months of repeating the same few hours over and over, but decided it would be more amusing to just pretend nothing had happened. Eythron was far too dignified to make a fuss about it, especially when he’d been forewarned. Watching him quietly furious was so worth it.


    Avoiding time travel made the remaining weeks of preparation pass very quickly. With each day only happening once and their new spell loadouts fully prepared, there was plenty of practice to be done that didn’t require deadly danger.


    After the pervasive chill of Nuprima, it took Raina a few days to acclimate back to the damp warmth of the Oriad, but Jair was used to it by now.


    They avoided anything dangerous enough to require reverting, apart from twice when they joined Eythron and Uqiar in hunting more brobegs for their hide when the crafting project ran low.


    Froglike draconic cousins known for their antimagical abilities and the propensity for swallowing people—and other monsters—whole, brobegs were bulbous and territorial things that Jair felt no guilt in eliminating.


    The easiest way to do so involved waiting for it to glide down from its ambush above, then allow himself to be swallowed and slice it apart from the inside since its outer layers were resistant. Also, since they wanted to use the hide, the usual slashing and stabbing necessary to get to all its various essential and backup essential vitals would be best done from somewhere that wouldn''t leave the outside shredded.


    "What exactly are we looking at for timeline on this now?" Jair asked after the fight, brief as it was, as they carefully skinned the dead brobeg. "Curing the hide is a whole other process now to get done." He was normally a little more patient than this, but he''d discovered that not being able to freely revert without disrupting his mentor''s progress felt surprisingly restrictive.


    "You don''t need to worry about that part," Uqiar told him. "I can do it in three days."


    Jair squinted at him. "I don''t care how good you are, this isn''t a process that can be just done. Each step requires time."


    "Don''t question the expert," Eythron interrupted before Uqiar could explain his unreasonable speed. "He can do it. Three days, then another week of crafting to finish the rest of the armors." He eyed Jair sideways. "You''re surprisingly effective at brobeg hunting. If I''d had you fifty years ago..."


    "Well, you have me now, so that will have to suffice."


    Eythron nodded toward Raina. "Have you briefed her on hydra head protocol?"


    "Not yet."


    "Should do that."


    Jair nodded. "So, Raina, what do you know about a star hydra?"


    "They''re one of the rarest of hydra types, incorporeal and highly resistant to physical damage. Can only be damaged by attacks that take place during the same moment as it''s doing a physical attack of its own. Usually a bite, but it could also be a tail swipe, claw, or stomp," she recited with the clear enthusiasm of someone who knows a thing because they chose to, not because knowledge was pushed upon them. "This does mean that most star hydras are engaged in mutually destructive attacks, but while it can afford to sacrifice a head or two to get its teeth into your soul, you can''t survive the inverse."


    "What about its non-physical properties?"


    "Those are unknown. Depends on the specific hydra. Since they grow new heads to embody the soulspell of the creatures they''ve consumed, it depends on what this specific hydra has eaten to tell you what its abilities will be. They don''t always match up with the powers of the thing they consumed, but they do in the majority of cases. There are not very many actual examples out there, though. Majority of known cases is like... three out of five."


    Jair chuckled. "Yeah, something that bites your soul out and can''t be hit in return is surprisingly difficult to study."


    "Easy to study," Eythron grunted. "Hard to survive to report your results."


    "Same thing." Raina waved it away. "So, what''s this hydra head protocol?"


    "First, we need to all concentrate on dealing with a single head at a time. When one of us calls out either a number or color that''s the one to focus attention on. Order of operations, in case you end up in a position to be the caller for the next head, is most damaging first. Anything unsurvivably devastating needs to be taken out immediately. After that, weakest first. The more dead weight it has to haul around, the harder it''ll be for it to do anything properly."


    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    "Since this one is local to the Oriad," Uqiar put in, "it''s most likely to have powers similar to these creatures."


    Maelstrom was pretty similar, in a way. It and the star hydra could almost be cousins. Except it was a violent monster and Jair''s sword wasn''t.


    "If you had to put a quality grade on the hydra, what grade would it be?" Raina asked.


    "Legendary." Eythron didn''t even pause to think it over before answering. "This particular one is hundreds of years old, had a minimum of eight heads last I saw it, and has ruled its riverside for the entire time I''ve lived here."


    "Did you say riverside?" Raina stared at Eythron incredulously, her hands falling still. "And it''s still alive?"


    Eythron snorted. "Soul killers know to respect one another''s territories. In a way, the hydra did me a favor. Without it guarding the river there, I''d never have been able to set up my reservoir and dispersal systems in the first place. Now, even once it''s gone, my streams will be secure."


    "It''s done all this work for you and now you simply murder it? How cold."


    "It''s a soul-eating monster. You expect me to let it live just because it''s convenient for me? What if someone else comes by that swamp? What if it decides it wants to expand its territory? What if it finds a mate?"


    Jair shivered at the thought of that last one. Hydras were not native to Neptus, one of those pests that ended up importing themselves through various combinations of accident and mischance. It only took one hydra egg to slip through and suddenly you''ve got twenty tiny almost unkillable monsters running around trying to hide under and behind everything, eating your rats.


    That latter part briefly made them the novelty pet of choice in many societies around the first initiation of the lunar passages. Who wouldn''t want an adorable six-headed maybe-dragon who would keep your warehouse free of pests?


    They were cute at birth and small in their youth, but though they grew slowly, they didn''t stop. There was no ‘adult size’ for a hydra, only the size it had reached so far.


    By the time people started to realize that their cute little pets would outlive and outpower them—by a lot—the popularity quickly sank. The number of hydras being requisitioned for parts grew exponentially as the market for eggs and infants plummeted.


    But wild hydras were wild hydras. There were enough of them out there and they reproduced fast enough and in large enough quantities that Neptus would never be free of them. And occasionally one got big enough to claim their own territory and hold it against all comers.


    Star hydras were among the rarest of an already rare breed, made scarcer by their unique disadvantage in being largely non-physical beings. While they could sustain themselves on pure magic on their home moon of Nuprima, even there they needed food to grow, and Neptus was a much less magically abundant location. The adaptation between magical predator and helpless slitherlings who needed help to even eat was a difficult one.


    While most forms of hydra were running around being cute destructive balls of fire or ice or whatever their alignment ended up being, star hydras struggled to survive. Without their parents to manage the transition between physical and nonphysical, regurgitating prepared food much like a bird mother to their young, many star hydras never quite figured out how to eat things for themselves.


    As a result, star hydras often ended up attacking their own heads or eating others of their nestmates in lieu of accessible prey. Fortunate for the survival of any other species on Neptus. Otherwise, the invasive hydras could have wiped whole continents clean faster than anyone could do anything about it.


    Generally, any time you had a soul-eating predator on the loose, it was a good time to take drastic and immediate countermeasures.


    Being able to selectively phase through anyone or anything gave a star hydra several disturbingly effective fighting styles. It could bite out your heart without the rest of your body showing a scratch, claw your soul out through your eyes, or simply walk through you until you were inside its stomach.


    Raina nodded understanding. "So we take out the fireball head first, then anything injured or vulnerable, and work our way up from there."


    "That''s one part of it. The other part is to try to assess its abilities as quickly as possible. Anything you notice, even if you think everyone else also saw, be sure to call it out. Along with the color of the head''s eyes that can do it. The most important thing to do in the early moments of the fight is to get the threat fully assessed. Since there''s no way of knowing until it starts doing things, communication is vital."


    "That sounds like it could get very dangerous and confusing very fast."


    "Yes. That''s why people normally don''t fight these. And those insane people who do don''t survive."


    "We''re going to do both."


    "Yes."


    "Truthfully, boy, if not for that sword of yours I''d still be planning this for another decade before being ready to move forward with it."


    "Yes, I know that. You would have sent me after it but not tried to face it yourself."


    "Alternate potential futures don''t qualify you as knowing what I''ll do," Eythron grumbled.


    "They really do. I''ve seen you in so many different situations, I think it''s going to be more of a shock if you manage to do something I truly don''t expect."


    Eythron tried to stab him without warning.


    Jair had already darkflamed himself to the other side of the clearing.


    Eythron chuckled. "Keep up that kind of reaction time when we find it and we might all survive after all.”


    “You expected we wouldn’t?”


    Eythron shrugged. “This has been the focus of my life for so long, if I go out taking it down with me, my life will have been well spent.”


    Jair’s insides all tightened in something akin to panic. “Wait, you don’t want to kill the hydra for any greater purpose, it’s just your arbitrary goal before you die?”


    “Don’t be absurd. I’m not planning to die.”


    “Sounds like you are.”


    “This is one of the things I’m willing to die for. Doesn’t mean I want to.”


    But what about after, Jair wanted to ask. He’d anchored himself with Raina’s survival, and that was a blessedly ongoing challenge. Sure, he didn’t need to figure out how to deal with Ryenzo any longer, but she was still a person traveling through an unsafe world. The nature of his anchor had changed, but it remained as strong as ever.


    If Eythron’s reason for living was to destroy this hydra, that wasn’t an ongoing anchor. Once it was dead, it would be dead.


    Suddenly, Jair’s eagerness to help with this fight dropped significantly. He would follow through, because he’d promised to, but fully prepared to take his mentor hostage if necessary once it was over. Overreaction? Maybe.


    It surely wouldn’t be as bad as with Mercurios and the volcano, but having seen Eythron in such vulnerable states—not to mention knowing that he’d actually died to Sekir at one point—had left Jair with a drastically shaken perception of his teacher’s survivability.


    A year ago, he’d have laughed at anyone suggesting Eythron was even capable of dying. Now, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling of impending doom.


    He’d just need to be extra vigilant. As long as he could revert time, things couldn’t get too bad.


    <hr>