Chapter 13: Hydra(2)
Three days south of the Green Basin, in a stretch of swamp that had been civilized so long it barely remembered being wild, Gulk knelt beside a pool of stagnant water and listened to the earth complain.
The tremor had come eight days ago.
Not the gentle shake of a subsurface root collapse or the slow roll of a mana vent equalizing. This had been deep. Structural. The kind of vibration that traveled through bedrock and hit the soles of your feet before the ripples even reached the water’s surface.
Gulk had been cleaning his spear at the time. The shaft was ironwood — standard issue for scouts in the Western Patrol — and the head was a curved tooth of a river-shark, bound with sinew. A practical weapon for a practical soldier. He had felt the tremor through the haft, a buzz that traveled up the bone and settled in his wrist.
He’d looked north. Toward the deep basin. Toward the territory of the Toad Lord.
The Toad Lord’s feeding cycles were as predictable as the seasons. Every sixty days, give or take, the swamp shook as the ancient beast roused itself from the lakebed and spent fifteen days consuming everything that had been foolish enough to breed in its domain. The scouting contingent tracked the cycles like farmers tracked rain. You didn’t venture north during a feeding cycle. Not unless you wanted to be part of the menu.
But this tremor was wrong.
The feeding cycle wasn’t due for another fifteen days. The early tremor was anomalous. More disturbing: the aftershocks that should have followed — the rhythmic pounding of the Toad Lord’s hopping — never came.
One tremor. Then silence.
Eight days of silence.
That wasn’t how it worked. A feeding cycle was noisy. The Toad Lord’s roars carried for leagues. The ecosystem responded in kind — mass panic migrations, insect swarms, fish kills. The swamp spent two weeks screaming, and then the silence returned like a bandage over a wound.
But there had been no roaring this time. No migration waves. No panicked birds flooding the southern skies.
Just one tremor, and then nothing.
Gulk’s patrol commander, a bloated veteran named Threk, had waved off the anomaly. "Gas pocket," Threk had said, picking his teeth with a fish bone. "The lake is full of them. Nothing to report."
Gulk hadn’t argued. He was a scout, not an officer. Scouts reported what they saw. Officers decided what it meant. The hierarchy was absolute, and Gulk respected hierarchies the way a nail respected a hammer — through repeated, forceful experience.
But the silence had nagged him. Night after night, lying in his reed hammock with the green luminescence of Demeterra’s blessing humming against his chest, Gulk had stared north and felt an absence. Like a tooth pulled from a jaw. The shape of the swamp was wrong.
On the morning of the eighth day, the orders came.
Not from Threk. From higher. From the regional commandant at the Spawn Pools, relayed through a chain of croaking messengers that moved through the wetlands like a pulse through a vein.
Investigate the northern anomaly. Confirm Toad Lord status. Report all findings.
Five scouts. A standard scouting complement. Gulk as lead, four runners as his eyes.
Threk had handed Gulk the mission scroll with the careful neutrality of a man who was glad someone else was going.
"Don’t engage," Threk said. "Don’t feed. Observe, count, leave. If the Toad Lord is awake, come back fast. If it’s dead—" He paused. His throat sac inflated slightly — the frogman equivalent of a bitter laugh. "Well. If it’s dead, we have bigger problems."
Gulk had taken the scroll, checked his amulet — a small jade disc engraved with the Golden Mother’s wheat-sheaf sigil — and marched north.
The amulet hummed against his collarbone. Demeterra’s blessing was a subtle thing — no lightning bolts, no voice from the heavens. Just a steady, low-grade vitality boost that made his legs hurt less, his lungs work better, his eyes sharper in the green-filtered gloom of the deep swamp. **[Blessing of the Golden Mother: +15% Stamina Regeneration in Wetlands]**. A worker’s blessing. A farmer’s blessing. The kind of divine gift that kept empires running on time rather than running on miracles.
Gulk had never questioned Demeterra’s generosity. You didn’t question the rain. You used it.
He moved through the swamp with the easy, long-limbed stride of a creature built for the terrain. His webbed feet spread across the mud, distributing his weight so perfectly that he left no prints deeper than a leaf’s impression. His scouts — Pibb, Marsh, Noll, and the silent one they called Drip — followed in a loose diamond formation, each one invisible in the green unless you knew precisely where to look.
They were Frogmen of the Western Patrol. The swamp was their bloodstream. They didn’t navigate it — they *inhabited* it. Every pool, every reed bank, every submerged root was a page in a book they’d been reading since hatching.
The further north they went, the quieter the swamp became.
That was the first sign.
***
They smelled it before they saw it.
Blood and methane and something else — a sharp, chemical tang that burned the sinuses and made Pibb gag into his elbow.
"Throat sac fluid," Gulk murmured. "The Toad Lord’s."
They were two days into the march. The swamp had been gradually thinning — fewer cultivated plots, fewer signs of Demeterra’s touch. This was the border zone, the wild stretch between the Green Court’s territory and the Toad Lord’s domain. Normally, it hummed with the nervous energy of prey animals caught between two predators.
Now, it was empty.
Not empty like "the animals are hiding." Empty like "the animals are gone." The insect chorus that should have been deafening was a sporadic clicking. The fish that usually dimpled every pool were absent. The reeds stood motionless in a breeze that should have been there but wasn’t.
The mana felt wrong. Gulk wasn’t a mage — he couldn’t quantify it — but he had lived in mana-rich environments his entire life. The ambient energy of the swamp had a rhythm, like a heartbeat. Here, the rhythm was disrupted. Arrhythmic. Something had punched a hole in the local mana field, and the wound was still bleeding.
"Spread," Gulk ordered. "Eyes open. No sound."
They crested the last ridge — a natural levee of packed clay and root — and looked down into the Green Basin.
Gulk’s throat sac contracted involuntarily.
The Toad Lord was dead.
The carcass lay on the mudflats like a collapsed building. The warty, grey-green hide was torn open in multiple places, the flesh beneath exposed and partially consumed. The massive golden eyes were clouded, glazed, staring at a sky they would never see again. The jaw was locked open in a permanent gape, the remnants of the tongue — once the fastest weapon in the swamp — hanging in shredded ribbons.
It was enormous even in death. A mountain of flesh that had ruled the Green Basin for longer than any frogman’s memory. Gulk’s grandfather had told stories about the Toad Lord. His grandfather’s grandfather probably had, too. It was a fixture of the swamp’s power structure — as immovable and eternal as the lake itself.
And it was a carcass.
But the Toad Lord was not the worst thing Gulk saw.
The worst thing was coiled around it.
Three heads. Black scales that shimmered with an unnatural iridescence. Eyes that burned a steady, unholy crimson.
Gulk had never seen anything like the Hydra. It was not in any of the Western Patrol’s bestiaries. It did not belong to any known species catalogue maintained by the Green Court’s scholars. It was alien — a creature that radiated a mana signature so foreign it made Gulk’s amulet vibrate in protest.
"What is that?" Pibb whispered, his wide eyes reflecting the crimson glow.
"Trouble," Gulk said.
He lowered himself behind the ridge, pressing flat against the clay. His scouts followed. Five sets of bulging eyes peered over the edge, watching the Hydra tear strips of flesh from the Toad Lord’s belly.
"It killed the Toad Lord," Noll breathed. "How?"
Gulk didn’t answer. He was looking past the Hydra, past the carcass, to the far shore of the lake.
Smoke.
Thin, grey, rising from behind a line of structures that should not have been there. Walls. Huts. A gate fashioned from logs. And moving among them, small figures — reptilian, bipedal, scaled in greens and browns.
Lizardmen.
Gulk’s training kicked in. He began to catalogue.
Estimated population: thirty to forty, including juvenile units. Settlement type: fortified village, early stage. Construction materials: mud-brick, ironwood, and — bone? That’s new. Military presence: minimal. Six to eight armed adults with crude weapons. Spears. Bark shields.
He looked for indicators of divine affiliation.
*There.* A tall figure near the center. Thinner than the warriors, holding a staff with a red gemstone. The gem pulsed with a steady light — not the warm green of Demeterra’s gifts, not the bloody red of Valdor’s blessings. Something else. A color Gulk couldn’t place. Like the heart of a forge fire.
"A priest," Gulk said.
"Whose?" Marsh asked.
Gulk checked his amulet. The jade disc was warm — almost hot — vibrating with a frequency he’d never felt before. It wasn’t reacting to Demeterra’s presence. It was reacting to the *absence* of Demeterra’s presence. The mana in this zone was unclaimed by the Golden Mother, and something else had filled the vacuum.
"Unknown," Gulk said. "The signature is foreign."
"New god?" Pibb asked, and the question hung in the humid air like a bad smell.
New gods were not supposed to exist. Demeterra and Valdor had divided this region of the world between them centuries ago. The few minor spirits that lingered in the cracks — water sprites, moss ghosts, the odd ancestral haunt — were beneath notice. They didn’t build settlements. They didn’t field priests. They didn’t have creations capable of killing a Lord-ranked apex predator.
Gulk studied the lizardmen camp for another hour. He tracked the movements. The labor patterns. The guard rotations. The way the tall one with the staff moved through the camp — not like a warrior, not like a chief, but like a *shepherd*. Organizing. Directing. Placing each worker exactly where they needed to be with quiet words that Gulk couldn’t hear.
He noted the toad-bone construction. The lizardmen were harvesting the Toad Lord’s remains. Using the bones as structural pillars. Stretching the hide as wall reinforcement.
They were building with the corpse of a god-tier predator. That took either supreme arrogance or divine guidance.
"We’ve seen enough," Gulk said.
"Do we engage?" Drip asked. The silent scout’s voice was barely a whisper — not for stealth, but because Drip simply didn’t use his voice enough to keep it strong.
"No." Gulk’s response was immediate. "We observe. We count. We leave. The commandant decides what happens next."
He looked at the Hydra one last time. Three heads, six eyes, a body built for killing. The creature that had slain the unkillable.
*Did the lizards summon it? Or did their god?*
The distinction mattered. If the lizards had somehow tamed a wild chimera, they were dangerous but containable. If their god had created it from nothing and dropped it into the Basin as a weapon...
Then this wasn’t a minor divine squatter. This was an act of territorial warfare.
And Demeterra would not share.
"Move," Gulk said. "South. Fast."
The scouts melted into the reeds like raindrops into a pond. In thirty seconds, the ridge was empty.
***
Tor saw the tracks an hour after the Frogmen left.
He had been running the perimeter sweep — a full circuit of the camp that Krug had mandated every four hours. The route took him through the outer reeds, past the boundary stones that the tribe had re-set after the flood, and along the southern edge of their territory where the swamp thickened into dense vegetation.
The tracks were in a mud bank. Soft, wet clay that held impressions like wax.
Webbed feet. Five toes. Splayed wide. Larger than a lizardman’s foot by half.
Tor stopped breathing.
He knew these prints. Every lizardman from the burning village knew them. The Frogmen had left their mark in the sand outside the village the night of the raid — not as a warning, but simply because they were too many to move without leaving evidence. The prints had been the first things the survivors found when they crawled from the wreckage.
Frogman prints in the morning mud. The prelude to fire.
Tor dropped to a crouch. His training — the stealth protocols Krug had drilled into them — took over. He scanned the environment. Reeds. Still. Water. Murky. No sound. No movement.
They were gone.
But they had been here. Recently. The tracks were sharp-edged, not yet softened by the slow seep of groundwater. An hour old. Maybe less.
Tor counted the prints. Five distinct sets. A scouting party.
He followed the trail south for fifty paces, confirming direction. The Frogmen had come from the south, circled the camp from the ridge to the east, spent time at a vantage point overlooking the settlement, and then retreated south again.
Reconnaissance. Classic scouting pattern. They had been watching.
Tor didn’t chase them. He wasn’t a hero. He was a scout. Scouts reported.
He turned and ran.
The camp was busy when he arrived. The third shift was hauling toad-bone plates to the west wall. The potter was firing her second batch of bricks. Runt was feeding the hatchlings in the Hollow.
Tor went straight to Krug.
"Frogmen," Tor said. "Five. Scouting. They saw us."
The word fell into the camp like a stone into still water.
Krug’s hand tightened on the Shepherd’s Stick. The red gem flared once — a sharp pulse that faded immediately, as though the artifact was reacting to its bearer’s heartbeat.
"Where?"
"South ridge. The overlook. They watched for at least an hour. Then withdrew south."
"Did they see the serpent?"
"They would have had to be blind to miss it."
Krug closed his eyes. When he opened them, the doubt from the morning after the battle was gone. Not healed — *shelved*. There was no room for existential questions when the Frogmen were scouting your perimeter.
"Vark. Grak."
The two came immediately. The camp had gone quiet. The workers had stopped. Mothers were pulling hatchlings closer.
"Frogmen," Krug said. "Five scouts. They know we are here."
Grak’s reaction was instinctive — his claws curled, his lips pulled back from his teeth, and a low, guttural growl vibrated in his chest. Not aggression. Memory. The burning village. The screaming. The flight.
"They come to finish it," Grak hissed.
"Five is not an army," Krug said. "Five is a question. They came to look. They will go back to their masters and tell them what they saw."
"And then?" Vark asked. The enforcer’s hand was already on his spear.
"And then their masters will decide." Krug’s voice was level. "If we are lucky, they decide we are too small to care about. If we are not lucky, they send a war party."
"How long?" Vark asked.
Krug calculated. He didn’t know the distance to the Frogman settlements. He didn’t know their military structure or their decision-making speed. But he knew one thing: armies didn’t move in days. Armies moved in weeks.
"Ten days," Krug said. "Maybe more. Maybe less."
𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦
"Not enough," Grak said. "We cannot fight the Frogmen. We are twenty warriors at best. They fielded a hundred against the village, and that was just a raiding party."
"We are not fighting," Krug said. "We are preparing. There is a difference."
He looked at the walls. The toad-bone reinforcements. The training pit. The Hydra in the lake.
"Double the watches. South and west. Tor — I want scouts in the outer reeds at all times. If anything larger than a rat enters our perimeter, I want to know."
"The serpent," Vark said. He didn’t need to finish the question.
Krug looked at the lake. The Hydra was feeding, as always. Three heads, six eyes. A weapon with no leash.
"It is between us and them," Krug said. "If the Frogmen come from the south, they must pass the lake. The serpent does not care who it eats."
A grim thought. But a practical one.
The tribe resumed work. But the energy had changed. The mechanical numbness of rebuilding was replaced by something sharper. Urgency. The bricks weren’t just bricks — they were fortification. The bone pillars weren’t just pillars — they were barricades.
They weren’t building a home anymore.
They were building a position.
***
Zephyr saw the Frogmen before Tor did.
Five green dots on his map, moving south at a disciplined pace. He had tagged them the moment they crossed into his territory awareness radius — a circle of detection that expanded with each believer in the tribe and which now covered most of the Green Basin.
[Entity: Frogman Scout (x5)]
[Faction: Demeterra’s Green Court]
[Divine Affiliation: The Golden Mother]
[Threat Level: Low (Individual) / HIGH (Faction)]
He clicked the lead dot.
[Entity: Frogman Scout Captain]
[Name: Unknown]
[Level: 12]
[Class: Pathfinder]
[Divine Blessing: Blessing of the Golden Mother (+15% Stamina Regen)]
Level 12. Not high by endgame standards, but against his tribe of unleveled lizardmen and a single level-3 Acolyte, a level 12 Pathfinder might as well have been a raid boss.
And this was a scout. A forward observer. The grunts.
Zephyr leaned back. He clicked through to the faction profile — what little the system would reveal about an enemy faction at his current intelligence level.
[Faction: Demeterra’s Green Court]
[Territory: Southern Wetlands + Central Basin (Claimed)]
[Population: [INSUFFICIENT DATA]]
[Military: [INSUFFICIENT DATA]]
[Divine Rank: [INSUFFICIENT DATA — Enemy Faction Obscured]]
All locked. He didn’t have the intelligence infrastructure to see behind the curtain. But the faction existing — having a name, a territory claim, a deity — told him everything he needed to know.
This wasn’t wilderness anymore. This was the edge of someone else’s empire.
Demeterra. The name floated up from five years of game knowledge. In Theos Online, Demeterra — or her equivalent — was a mid-tier agricultural deity. Domain: Life, Growth, Decay. The triple package. She made things grow, fattened the harvest, and then fed on the resulting worship like a farmer eating her own crops.
She was popular. Stable gods always were. Players who chose Demeterra built slowly, expanded gradually, and drowned their enemies in resources and population rather than military force. Death by logistics. Death by being outbred.
And her Frogmen had destroyed Krug’s village. Not out of malice — out of *management*. Overpopulation in the southern swamp had pushed the Frogmen north. The lizardman settlement was in the way. The solution was efficient, impersonal, and absolute.
She doesn’t hate us, Zephyr thought. We’re not even on her threat list. We’re a pest control issue.
That was almost worse.
He watched the green dots retreat south. Three days’ march to the nearest outpost, probably. Then a messenger chain. Then decision-making. Bureaucracy moved slowly, even divine bureaucracy.
He had time. Not much. But some.
He pulled up his priority list and reorganized it:
1. Bind the Hydra. The Divine Binding Protocol required saturation. The Hydra was eating. The clock was ticking.
2. Fortify. Toad-bone walls, improved perimeter, training.
3. Convert the tribe. He needed Devout believers generating serious faith by the time the Frogmen returned.
The Hydra was the keystone. Without it, they were a Stone Age village facing an organized empire. With it, they were a Stone Age village with a siege weapon.
"I’m playing the early game against a late-game player," Zephyr murmured, staring at the retreating green dots. "No army, no allies, no divine rank. Just system knowledge and a lizard with a stick."
He grinned. It wasn’t a nice grin.
"Wouldn’t be the first time."
He opened the [Divine Binding Protocol] tab one more time. The requirements glowed in steady gold text.
[Active Chimera: ✓]
[Willing Mortal Vessel: Pending]
[500 FP: Available]
[Chimera Saturation State: 68% — Estimated Completion: Day 60]
Twelve days.
The Frogman scouts would reach their outpost in three. Report in four. Council in five. Decision by day seven. Mobilization by day ten. March north by day twelve.
If Demeterra’s bureaucracy moved at standard speed, the Frogmen would arrive the same week the Hydra reached saturation.
It was going to be close.
"Story of my life," Zephyr said to the empty room, and pulled up the [Creation] tab to see what else he could afford to build with 750 FP and a prayer.