Alarion met the onrush of water with the side of his mace.

And that was a mistake.

The weapon struck the elemental at its hip, to no effect. Waves rippled through the creature's churning form as it effortlessly dispersed the impact. Then it retaliated, its right arm striking with whiplike speed and flexibility. The attack nearly ended Alarion's life on the spot. The monster was slow, but its offense was quick and powerful. And it had him pinned, the head of his mace sunk deep within its liquid form.

Alarion made a split-second decision and abandoned the mace, spinning off to one side just in advance of a lash so sharp it carved a long gouge into the stonework. His weapon for his life was an easy trade, but one that still stung as Alarion created distance to reappraise his opponent.

The fluidic mass let him flee, its turbulent body roiling around its newest captive. It applied pressure, aiming to crush Alarion's weapon the same way it had so effortlessly destroyed the stone he'd thrown at it only seconds earlier. Its whole body seemed tense and focused as waves pulsed toward the dark metal at its core.

And failed to so much as bend it.

It tried again, this time devoting its entire attention to the task as it abandoned its humanoid shape in favor of an amorphous blob of agitated water. It flowed around his weapon, striking it from different angles and applying pressure that obliterated the small chips of stone it had scooped up during its most recent transformation. The monster strained and pulsed, all to no effect.

Alarion had just a moment to be smug at the monster's failure before the pressure shifted and the mace rocketed toward him at high speed. His only saving grace was that the sentient water had terrible accuracy.

The mace struck the wall behind him with enough force to send fractures all the way up into the already unstable ceiling. Large chunks of soil and fragmented stone collapsed from above, narrowly missing Alarion as he recovered his weapon and scampered away from his enemy's renewed attacks.

"If hitting you will not work…" Alarion grunted as he sidestepped another water whip aimed at his head. The monster's attacks were unorthodox, but predictable. It never struck at his limbs, always aiming for his torso or his head with killing blows. Better yet, it seemed incapable of chaining attacks in rapid succession, either due to physiology or inexperience. It made it easy to avoid, and even easier to counterattack when the moment came. "Void Crush."

Magic proved only marginally more effective than hitting it with his mace. It didn't cost him his primary weapon and magical tool, which was nothing to scoff at, but the [Void Crush] was lackluster in terms of damage. The wave of magical emptiness took the monster off at the knee and sent it staggering to the ground, but the wound didn't last.

When separated from its body, the water of the severed leg lost all cohesion and splattered against the ground as if it were nothing more than everyday water. But the elemental reabsorbed its missing limb with only a touch, drinking up its injury in seconds until it stood at its full height again, good as new and ready to renew the fight.

They repeated the dance once more as Alarion tested a new theory. His first cast of [Void Crush] sent the creature sprawling, while a second struck it in the head, splitting it almost cleanly down the middle.

The left side of the dismembered elemental wobbled on its remaining leg as the right side collapsed into another puddle. It teetered, then fell into its companion, the two liquids swirling together. Reforming. It took only seconds before his enemy reformed its humanoid shape, tendrils of water snaking out from its feet to collect small pools and droplets that had escaped its initial recovery.

"This isn't fair at all!" Alarion complained to an uncaring god. He dodged and parried a series of his foe's renewed attacks as he considered his options.

It was possible that he'd hurt it. If the monster were like any other Awakened, he should be able to kill it simply by depleting its HP with repeated attacks. But that included a lot of assumptions, chief among them that the monster had an HP pool to deplete, and that it didn't heal back to full by reabsorbing its severed parts.

Unfortunately, it was equally likely that the foe he faced was something entirely different. Some oddity that played by unfamiliar rules. Sierra's lesson about how to kill a fiend loomed large over his thought process. He couldn't rely on assumptions.

There were some things he could rely on, though. There was a consistent delay between each of its attacks, as though it had a cooldown between strikes. It needed to touch its severed parts to reabsorb them. If he could separate the parts, he might delay or prevent it from reforming. The largest part seemed to keep all the intelligence, such as it was, of the whole. If he made the pieces small enough, regenerating would take much longer.

If.

He had a plan, but before that, he needed to test a theory.

Alarion's mace smashed the ground, throwing a cloud of dust and rocks toward the elemental as it lunged toward him. The rocks struck it in the torso and remained lodged there briefly before the liquid flowed over them and brought them into the elemental's core, where they were promptly crushed.

"Three seconds," Alarion grunted under his breath as he deflected a lance of water with the head of his mace. It would be enough time. Assuming the monster didn't skewer him the moment it had the chance.

It was a bad idea, but if he had a better one, he'd have tried that instead.

He parried three more of the monster's attacks, waiting for the proper distance and the right opening. He needed it to be close to maximize the time he had to make his move.

There.

Alarion slipped a sharp-edged vertical strike, then rushed toward the elemental. He leapt as he ran, avoiding a sweeping fist as he slammed his whole body into its lower torso. The monster struggled momentarily, as though it intended to dislodge him. Then it reconsidered, its essence flowing across his body, drawing him inside.

Alarion waited two seconds, then shouted to the best of his ability.

"Ouler Urst!"

One moment, the elemental was rushing around him, reveling in its victory, its chance to crush the annoying human within its watery depths.

The next, it was gone.

His [Solar Burst] had obliterated the elemental. The central mass nearest to Alarion had evaporated under the searing fire of his [Solar Burst]. At the same time, its limbs were scattered to the far reaches of the grotto in thousands of individual droplets.

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Alarion landed hard on one shoulder, the uncontrolled fall a small price to pay for destroying an otherwise invincible foe.

Especially given he'd completely forgotten that he couldn't speak properly underwater. He was insanely lucky that the System cared more about intent than pronunciation.

The young man stood with a groan. With the jungle as damp as it was, he'd only just dried off from his time in the pond. And now he was once more drenched to the very bone. He was officially done with this challenge, his eyes searching for what he hoped would be a newly revealed exit.

Instead, they found motion.

It was a small thing, barely more than a glass worth of water shifting along the ground, drinking up small puddles and droplets as it went. And it wasn't alone. Three more equally sized threats sought more of their original mass, skittering across the uneven floor as they went.

"Oh for…." Alarion swore under his breath. Was there no end to this thing?

With no forthcoming answer, he closed his eyes and focused on his sixth sense. [Introverted Mana Sense] was still useless in a combat situation. To get the most out of it, he had to mute his attention on his other senses, shutting his eyes, ignoring his hearing, focusing only on the sensation of mana and how it flowed through him and the environment. All bad ideas when something was trying to kill him.

But with the elemental more focused on recovery, Alarion could get a better sense of its inner workings, hoping to find a way to destroy it. Each of the four 'active' blobs of water was a tangle of arcane energies. When one absorbed a sizeable chunk of water, its power grew, while the complexity of the three others diminished correspondingly. A strange sort of magical intelligence distributed amongst the water, focused on the largest portions.

If he were in less danger or better understood what he was seeing, Alarion would have been tempted to let the fragments devour one another, just to watch as the intricate strings of mana wove a tapestry of sentience.

As it was, he smashed the largest one with his mace.

It was a stopgap solution. While he busied himself 'dismembering' the little liquid critter, its contemporaries grew in size, but a stopgap could still buy precious seconds or minutes to devise a proper solution.

He had no way to contain or control the liquid, nor anything absorbent enough to soak it up, assuming that would even work. He briefly pondered flooding the small cavern in hopes of diluting the creature, or leading it to the waterfall, but that was both impractical and possibly suicidal.

There had to be a solution. Knowing Valentina, it was probably something obtuse and magical, but-

Alarion frowned deeply and returned his attention to his mana sense. Sure enough, the mana pathways embedded in the rock now glowed with renewed power at two points on opposite sides of the entryway.

Of course. Even her combat rooms were full of mana exercises.

This one, at least, wasn't hard to deduce. Connect one point to another through a convoluted maze inscribed into the wall. The mana circuits there were a conflicting pattern full of dead ends and false gates that made any attempt at progress a matter of trial and error. Worse yet, Alarion found that engaging with the puzzle required fine mana control that he barely possessed. If he touched the 'edges' of any mana circuit, the puzzle reset to its most recent checkpoint and sent a mana pulse through the floor, no doubt intended to rouse the elemental from its slumber if he had not already done so.

Solve the puzzle on your first attempt, without mistakes, or solve it while fighting off a killer elemental.

Valentina was a sadist.

Despite his incredulity, Alarion settled into a new routine. He progressed through the puzzle until he made a mistake, then raced around the room, smashing the largest concentrations of water.

It was a race against time. Even if he devoted himself to destroying the mini elementals as they appeared, eventually, he would run out of stamina. Devoting time to solving the puzzle sped up the monster's reconstitution, but there was no other option.

He just had to be quick.

—

"I said I'm busy!" Alarion shouted angrily as his mace smashed through the half-formed water elemental. Its upper body burst under the strength of the blow, the lower body already moving to recover its lost mass when Alarion struck it with a follow-up [Void Crush].

He was so close he could almost taste his victory. Unfortunately for him, his foe didn't seem keen on letting him have it.

Things had progressed well for the better part of an hour. He'd pass a section; he'd smash the monster as a reward. He'd fail a section; he'd take his anger out on one of the half-finished puddles as it wormed around the floor. But that had all changed the moment he entered 'The Corridor'.

True to her nature, the unholy 'goddess' had saved the worst for last. There were no checkpoints in the last fifth of the maze, nor any maze at all. Instead, only a long, switchback pattern grew increasingly narrow the closer one got to the end. It was a challenge where one was far more likely to fail at the finish line than at the start, forcing one infuriating failure after another.

But that had not been enough for her. Oh no.

Sensing their imminent defeat, the elemental's shards had changed their tactics. They no longer focused solely on increasing their size, to the exclusion of all else. Instead, they soaked up water until they were large enough to form a roughly four-foot-tall humanoid form, then they attacked.

The first time had nearly been the death of him. He'd been focused on his mana to the exclusion of all other senses, and the elemental had almost taken his head off for his arrogance. Only the sudden change in its mana had brought him back to reality in time to turn a decapitation into a nasty cut across the cheek.

Since then, he'd had to devote at least some of his attention to the physical realm, which made The Corridor even worse.

"This time," Alarion assured himself, pushing his finger to the wall. The unbound field reacted under his finger, allowing him to take control of the mana within the wall, leading it through the trail of hard right angles that made up the final challenge.

It was nerve-wracking. At its narrowest, the corridor was barely large enough to permit the mana trail. A quiver of his hand, a twitch, anything was enough to force a failure, to send him back to the start for yet another attempt. He'd lost count of how many times he had failed on that last stretch—at least thirty, if not more.

The elementals were getting stronger, and he was running out of time. It wouldn't be long before one of the larger ones met its fellow, before they were too big for him to break apart. What would he do then? Would the same trick work twice? Or would it be smart enough to reject him if he tried to enter its body once again?

He needed to focus.

The last leg of The Corridor was a series of ups and downs, like ocean waves. In his opinion, it was the easiest part, a back and forth, and ebb and flow that he had grown accustomed to. One that filled him with confidence. He could make it.

Behind him, one elemental had taken a body, its footfalls wet slaps on the stone floor as it rushed toward him. It was far enough away. He had time.

I'm so close. Alarion leaned into his mana sense, excluding everything else. He let his finger move with the flow of the puzzle. Up and to the left. Down and to the left. Up and to the left. Down and to the left.

Up.

… and to the left, through the narrowest passage of all.

Click.

Alarion whirled on his feet, his weapon swinging at the elemental that should have been upon him. He struck nothing but air. There was no opponent. No elemental. Just blue-green water running toward the center of the room, as if on an incline that didn't exist. A small hole had opened in the floor, drawing all the water inexorably toward it, until it closed with another quiet 'click'.

"Well done," Valentina said from the cavern's entrance, a sickeningly sweet smile on her lips. "How did it feel to defeat a god?"

It was a bold declaration, but somehow, Valentina's words weren't the most exciting—not compared to the notifications that all but screamed for his attention.

Level Up! Congratulations, your Stubborn Swordsman Class has advanced to Level 25! STR +18. AGI+12. VIT +18. INT +18. PER +18. WIL +6.

Level Up! Congratulations, your Orphan Class has advanced to Level 15! STR +15. AGI+15. VIT +15. INT +10. PER +10. WIL +10. LUK +192.

Skill level increased. Introverted Mana Sense is now Level 5. INT +4. PER +4. WIL +4. Skill level increased. Unbound Spellcraft is now Level 4. INT +2. PER +2. WIL +2. Skill level increased. Lucky Strike is now Level 3. LUK +30.

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