Chapter 412 – VS the technically-not-a-true-jellyfish-but-actually-a-siphonophore

Chapter 412 – VS the technically-not-a-true-jellyfish-but-actually-a-siphonophore

A storm of jelly flew his way as 199 man’o’wars jumped out of the ocean with movements that their bodies should not have supported. This happened all so suddenly that only Sylph reacted in time, but her wind failed in doing much more than disperse the cloud a little bit.

John became subject to the disgusting experience of looking at several hundred kilos of jelly splashing against his Mana Protection like flies against a windshield. Stacking on the small ship or bouncing right back into the ocean, only the fewest of the bunch actually took any damage from that action whatsoever.

Interested, John, who felt in no way threatened, reached out of his protection. As to how he did that, it wasn’t that hard. Because Mana Protection was a fixed circle around him, trying to simply punch or pick up anything outside it that was registered as an enemy (which was basically everything animated outside of his group), was impossible. How did he fix that? Well, higher Intellect and Wisdom levels allowed for easier and easier control of the bubble’s form. He couldn’t expand it, but he could temporarily bend it inwards to allowed him to grab something outside of it without the skill going off.

Thus, the Gamer reached for one of the regenerating specimens that had landed on the ship. ‘It seems he is healing through energy from his uninjured comrades,’ John thought and then was hit by a mildly unpleasant prickling in his left arm. One of the Jelly colonies had wrapped a tentacle around him. Many more soon did the same.



‘Okay, yes, I get it!’ John thought as Purgatory engulfed his left hand in fire. With that protected limb, he simply cut and ripped off the tentacles holding onto his right. As he shook that hand to get rid of the sticky remains, the Colonies that had landed on the boat around him were now trying their best to jump off as quickly as possible, likely afraid of the display of fire.

“That should have knocked him out flat!” Junior screamed in the background, interrupting his own triumphant laughter. “His body is filled with poison!”

“Sorry, but I play by other rules than everyone else, at least in this aspect,” John grabbed one of the Jelly Colonies trying to get off with his left and squished the soft body. It was like squeezing a cushion, the clawed gauntlet cutting trenches into the jellyr and ultimately crushing the whole thing with ease.

“NOOOOOOOO, JEREMYYYYYYY!” Junior cried out, his giant hat tipping as he gestured wildly. In a flurry of motions, he both pointed at John and kept his hat in place, “You will pay for that.”

“HAH, the loss of one of these guys bothers you already?” Salamander’s voice came from above, shifting their attention to her. The endflame elemental was condensing power between her raised hands. The new flames, probably the name giving endflame (as edgy as that was), was the normal gold at the centre but surrounded by a mantle of grey instead of crimson red. Overall it looked quite menacing.

“Salamander, no!” John cried out, who could see something that was horribly overkill.

“Salamander, YES!” she screamed back with a wild smile, the same fire breaking out of the dense network of lines surrounding her left eye as she hurled her arms downwards. The condensed ball became a cone and set the air on fire as it travelled downward.

John did the only sensible thing and jumped overboard and into the water. The ocean did him a favour in the shape of one of its elementals, Undine, stretching a wave out to him to encapsulate him before the fire hit.

He could feel the heat boil away the surface of the ocean behind him. Undine making sure that the bubble of air she had caught with him remained in placed by stretching her own slime body around him. Things above turned into a obscuring steam cloud, so he was temporarily blinded for what was going on up there.FOlloow newest stories at no(v)el/bi/n(.)com

Down here, however, he saw all of the Jelly Colonies that had made it out. They made their ways over to their hurt or pretty crispy looking fellows. Salamander’s attack had dealt a lot of damage, predictably, but for level 30 to 40 creatures, these things were really durable. No, that was the wrong way to put it, they were actually weak to damage, it was just that they had an annoying healing mechanic.

Undine carried John back to the safety vessel. No matter how enchanted, this thing was slowly seeing the effects of hanging around John, with the dragon claw and now burn marks that covered it. The damage looked worse than it actually was though, the thing still floated.

John wiped the saltwater off his face and looked over to the enemy ship, where Junior was standing straddle-legged with his arms crossed behind a barrier. “Muahahahaha, my army is invincible,” Junior said. “I was just baiting you into attacking them to exhaust your power.”

“Salamander, how often can you repeat that attack?” John just asked the flying endflame elemental.

“Three, four times without pause? I need the time to charge it though,” Salamander answered.

“Okay,” John used Shardbound and united all of the energy into one, hurling it straight at the barrier. A shockwave went through the blue bubble, looking much like John’s own Mana Protection. The Gamer hummed as he thought about this.

“As you can clearly see, this fight is useless,” Susie chimed in. “Junior is our fighting expert! Just give us Captain Boss Senior back and we will be on our way.”

“Audible gasp, John, we cannot win, what do we do?” Sylph landed on their boat and then dramatically collapsed at his side. “After all the things we have won against, like, uhm, an insect with a mane and that weird maggot thing and, uh, those invisible stuffs,” she was clearly trying, and failing, to remember any of those names, “and ‘member Huan?”

‘Ready to unleash?’ he asked Salamander.

‘What do you think? I am just waiting for you to get off your ass and cast something!’ came the joyful voice of his fire spirit.

John pooled the rest of his mana into Shardbound as he kept running. As per usual, they spawned as four individual shards above his shoulders. They combined into one above his right hand.

“I will get you... eventually!” Junior enthusiastically lashed at John, who was just waiting for the guy to make a mistake. That moment came when John had circled the Behemoth far enough that only his right tentacles could reach him. So when Junior used both of those to lash at John at once, that was his chance.

‘Undine, Sylph, go!’ he mentally screamed. Undine used her own body to block one of the tentacles while the tempest elemental provided a jumping John with enough tailwind that he was able to sail right over the horizontal swipe. Up there in the air, John took aim.

‘My turn,’ Salamander’s voice was one of a voracious hunter, ready for some new meat. The light purple crystal over John’s upwards pointing palm suddenly became golden, and a grey fire surrounded it. Then he fired it, the spell moving much more quickly than usual.

The sharp shard ripped right through the body of the Behemoth and left behind a tunnel. A tunnel which was burning with that golden, grey fire at the walls, fire that wasn’t put out by any regenerating factor.

“Ow, what’s that, OW!” Junior screamed as the fire dug in deeper.

Salamander’s unleash was a damage cooldown, to put it simply. Every minute she could empower one spell of an ally. Her unleashing wasn’t a thing that fit the hot-headed character, being entirely dependant on other people. Still, it was powerful, and everything that forced her to be a bit more of a team player was fine by John.

Junior, despite being in pain through sharing a body with the now innerly burning Behemoth, was not ready to give up. While himself unharmed, John had purposefully aimed away from the octopus-man, the amount of conviction he had for the matter was still admirable. The previously blocked tentacles now stretched for John again.

John felt the air on his right hand again as Salamander transformed back. “Fine, give me something more to do!” she shouted out and caught one of the tentacles between her hands. John had the luxury of Mana Protection, the defensive skill’s buffer getting finally smashed by that last attack. While that left him without defences or mana, it also stopped the attack and allowed him to land on the unsteady surface of the ocean.

The thing with Salamander evolving wasn’t just her new abilities, it also had filled a certain hole in her Stats. “I am going to punch you, really fucking hard!” she shouted with clenched fists engulfed in grey as she took a lash and then flew up close to finish the guy off.

Whether it was just a natural weak point or if the stress the burning hole in the Behemoth’s body caused was lowering his bodies surface tension, Salamander managed to ram her hands into the dome that was protecting Junior and ripped it open. She reached inside, grabbed Junior by the tentacles of his beard and then pulled.

Panicked, all four arms of the Behemoth lashed at her, hitting her all over her flaming form. The more she exerted herself, the more pronounced the flame around her left eye became. The hole that had been fixed was her Endurance, being previously in a state that made her a glass cannon. Now she was more of an offensively weighed all-rounder, allowing her to pull off stunts in melee as well as ranged situations.

With a wet squelching sound, Junior was finally pulled out of the Behemoth, who exploded into the Jelly Colonies that made it up at that point. Salamander whirled him around by the tentacle beard two times and then smashed him against his own ship’s one-way barrier.

“Junior!” Susie did the only sensible thing and lowered the barrier to get the tentacled fellow back on board. John took that opportunity to have Sylph and Salamander carry him onto the ship as well. He would have just run, but by now the buff had ended. “Are you okay?” She turned to John when he didn’t react, “You monster!”

“Relax, nobody turned him into calamari,” John tried to calm her down.

“Yet,” Salamander added with a cackle.

“What I am saying is that he is still alive and largely unharmed. Do I need to remind you that it was you who attacked us? Also, can you admit that the molestation accusation was a hoax? I really don’t like being accused of things I didn’t do.”

“I mean, yes it was, I just say that to get Junior into a fighting mood, it works every time,” Susie admitted rather easily.

“Well, it is a bitch move every time,” John said, now feeling way less guilty about the ultimatum he was about to put forward. There was just a major difference between taking from those with different morals and those who were morally bankrupt.



“You have a very nice boat.”