I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 23: Regret, and things.

It was a little awkward, trying to treat someone that had their body situated in such an odd position. Nevertheless, he got it done eventually, and Aris took a step backwards, still holding his breath even after a few minutes had passed.

He was already starting to feel the dungeon shift its attention from the man, towards him.

Fair enough, he supposed. That guy didn’t looked like he was in any shape for fighting.

He wasn’t really interested in fighting either. If anything, he could just unleash his aspect and grind down this place into dust.

However, there was someone else here, someone that he needed to save.

So he was going to have to do this the hard way.

Hard as in, it was going to be messy.

He genuinely didn’t want to get his clothes dirty. These cargo pants was one of his favourite because of how comfy it was.

He clicked his tongue again, turning around to look down at the scenery. He had landed on top of one of the scale mountains, it looked like the chase had led this guy to the top. Aris was a little impressed to say the least, the guy had managed to live long enough for him to arrive. Which was extremely hard for someone to do inside a dungeon alone.

The blood-sea stretched out below them in every direction, slow and breathing and deeply uninterested in being a reasonable landscape feature. The other scale formations rose around him at irregular intervals, pale and ridged, like the exposed spine of something that had been buried here long enough to become geography.

Below him, approximately three formations to the east, something large was moving through the blood-sea.

Not a mass like the one he destroyed. The motion was wrong for a mass, too intricate, too direct, cutting through the viscous red with the single-minded momentum of something that had a destination rather than a route. It was heading toward the living signature.

He looked at his cargo pants.

He looked at the blood-sea.

Then looked at his pants again.

"Sorry," He said to no one in particular, or his pants specifically, before jumping off the mountain, towards the sea.

He didn’t use the wings this time, he fell instead, controlled and deliberate, catching a scale formation on the way down with one hand to redirect his momentum, then another, descending in a series of quick redirects that shed velocity without making the kind of impact that echoed.

He hit the surface of the sea a moment later, simultaneously releasing his aspect as he touched the fluid.

Up there on the mountain, he had to worry about the man.

The same was not the case down here.

The change was immediate.

The viscosity of the sea immediately dropped, like something being boiled, it started bubbling, then evaporating entirely. Aris let out a curse from how gross it felt against his skin, then, concentrating his aspect, let out a ray of it in the general direction of the incoming adversary.

The ray didn’t announce itself. That was the nature of entropy concentrated into a directed beam—no light, no sound, no dramatic visual indicator of what was traveling through the air. Just a thin line of wrongness, the kind that the eye slid off of rather than tracked, moving toward the large shape in the sea at a speed that didn’t leave much room for the concept of reaction time.

It hit.

The section of blood-sea between Aris and the shape dropped away entirely, the fluid boiling off in a spreading circle of sudden evaporation, the churning red surface simply ceasing to exist in a roughly ten-meter radius around the point of impact. In the newly exposed seabed—if it qualified as a seabed, if anything down here qualified as anything—the large shape was revealed mid-motion.

Aris looked at it. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

It looked back.

The thing was more wide than it was tall, shaped like a fish specifically designed to traverse a sea of blood. It’s size was hard to make out from the distance, but from what he could tell, it was definitely larger than the mass of flesh had been.

It’s face, or where its face should have been, was pointed directly towards him.

He could tell because of the eye. Singular. It sat in the center of what should have been a face, large and lidless and the same deep red as the sea it had been swimming through, and it was looking at him with the patient, unblinking quality of something that had never needed to blink. And definitely didn’t have the intention of starting anytime soon.

It had teeth, though. Plural. That part had to be specifically pointed out.

They lined the lower half of its face in three staggered rows, each one a pale ridge of the same scale-material as its body, and they were moving—not in the way a mouth moved, but in the way a mechanism moved, each row cycling independently, a slow continuous rotation that suggested the teeth were not there to bite so much as to process, to receive, to take in whatever came in front of them and reduce it to something the dungeon could use, namely, the blood surrounding them.

Then he looked at the size of it.

Then at the seabed between them, still steaming faintly where his aspect had cleared it, the exposed surface pale and ridged and slightly damp in a way he was choosing not to investigate.

Then at the eye.

The eye had not moved. It was tracking him with a stillness so complete it had crossed back over into motion, the pupil—if it was a pupil, if the terminology applied—a thin vertical line that had oriented toward him with the precision of something that had been looking for exactly this specific thing and had found it.

The dungeon’s attention, which had been pressing in from all directions since he’d released his aspect, pulled tight.

Everything went very quiet.