Page 104 of The Princesses of Ruin
I blob my body like a nod.
She scoffs. “Bastard.”
There’s my hellion.I squeeze her thighs just below her round ass. She yelps and tries to escape.
“Jasper, they can see us,” she whispers. “And I’m still angry with you.”
She’ll get over it when she sees that I’ve done everyone a favor.
Not all the ga’hanoi are going out to collect from the serpent, and the end of the procession is near. I wrap Reina closer and turn myself into a long, arrow-like shape. The water parts around us and we enter the waste passage.
It’s just as foul as I was expecting. Detritus of all organic kinds clings to the sharp bits of the rock, and I vow that not a single inch of this passage will touch my love. It’s too narrow for me to avoidtouching it, but with my power to affect the water’s flow, I manage to get out mostly unscathed.
We tumble into the abyssal dark of the Deep. There’s a sharp drop-off just beyond the light of the domed crater, and the serpent is doing its very best to get back into that black nothingness. The ga’hanoi sink their hooks under the creature’s scales and then shoot hidden harpoons from the other end that anchor to the wall. Hundreds of such holes exist along the crumbling shelf.
It twists its upper half, and its face swings overhead. I dart down between the wires and come about, getting a better look at the head. It has two mouths, one that’s long and full of teeth above one that gapes and sucks. A ga’hanoi is unfortunate enough to get near the lower and gets pulled in.
The creature regurgitates it into its upper mouth and chomps down, ending the ga’hanoi quickly before letting its corpse drop once again to the lower mouth. What a strange design…
“Fuck,” Reina murmurs. “Get me under its belly!”
I swim through the others going about various collection tasks and get right between the two front fins. Its scales are iridescent this close to the lighted dome. Color ripples under them, revealing that the scales themselves are translucent, and the serpent underneath glows just like the ga’hanoi do.
Reina lines up her needle. The serpent thrashes hard, and its flat tail smashes through three ga’hanoi, inking them into nothingness. The movement has set the creature off alignment with us. I move again and risk grabbing hold of it with my tentacles.
That.
Was.
Stupid.
The creature bucks, curling in on itself until its lower mouth is right in front of my face. The ga’hanoi are flashing brilliantly and gesticulating, but there’s no time for a translation from Vek’ihr.
I pull Reina out of the way and scramble up the side of the serpent to its spiny dorsal fins. They almost look like the shoulder joints of where a dragon’s wings would’ve once been.
The fucker arcs in the other direction, presenting me with a long, snapping maw of razor-sharp fangs. I dodge again, but there’s only so much I can do in this form. The cunt is really coming for us.
Another snap forces me to use my magic and throw us leeward against the shelf. Reina yelps as she fumbles the needle. The heavy metal spears toward the darkness and she screams. A ga’hanoi dives faster than I can, though I do move to give chase—only to be blocked by a stream of yellow liquid that singes my tentacles.
It seems the serpent has eyes for us and only us now, and it canspit acid.
The bile. We can get it tospit its bile.
But how will we capture it?
I dodge another sharp clack of its teeth and pull Reina away from the acid cloud. I launch off the wall with a quick thrust of all my limbs. We drop into the depths, and the serpent tries to follow, but the ga’hanoi’s anchors hold steady. It thrashes wildly and another stream of yellow shoots after us from its lower mouth.
“That’s the bile!” Reina yells. “I think Adrik can isolate it if we get some without too much seawater, but—ah!”
How to get it? My thoughts, too, my love.
I dodge another spray of painful yellow muck.
The ga’hanoi that went after the needle returns with it. It’sVek’ihr.
Reina takes it and squeezes the rubber end firmly. “Back to Plan A.”
She pulls a vial from her pouch and attaches it to the puckered opening of the rubber stopper.
