Authors: Dean Lorey
Everyone turned to Charlie. He shifted his weight uncomfortably.
“Well?” Violet said. “Is she going?”
“Um…”
“Do you want me to go, Charlie?” Brooke asked, leaning toward him. Her nearness was unsettling and thrilling, all at the same time.
“Have fun with this one!” Theodore said, laughing. “All I can say is, this is the first time I’m glad I’m not you.”
Charlie hated to do it, but clearly a choice had to be made. If he said yes, then Violet would claim it was because he had a crush on Brooke and was trying to impress her. But if he said no, then Brooke would say it was because he was Violet’s little puppet and did whatever she told him to do. It was a no-win situation.
Should he upset Violet or upset Brooke?
“I think,” he said after a moment’s careful consideration, “that it might be best for you to stay here, Brooke, and take care of our home base. I mean, it’s gonna be pretty dangerous and there’s no need to risk all of our lives unnecessarily, right?”
Brooke stared at him, clearly crushed and angry.
“Right,” she said finally. “Good luck, everyone.”
She turned, stepped back into the waiting dinghy, and quickly descended into the leafy branches below. Violet seemed very pleased, but Charlie wanted to die.
Not smooth, he thought. Not smooth at all.
“Well!” Pinch exclaimed, greatly amused. “Let’s head into the Nether and get that milk, shall we?”
Rex had once referred to the ocean on the 4th Ring as “the Chill Depths.” As usual, Pinch had argued with him, saying that he preferred to call it “the Terrifying Ocean.” Rex quickly dismissed the bearded man’s suggestion, saying that the name lacked beauty and poetry, but seeing the ocean now for the first time, Charlie thought that Pinch had it exactly right—it was terrifying.
So vast he couldn’t see to the end of it, the ocean of the 4th Ring was an eternity of water, rough and black and cold. High waves crashed at the shoreline in front of them in a stinging spray. The whitecaps were a dingy gray color, and the raw wind that whipped off the water’s surface had an unpleasant smell of rot.
“This place sucks,” Theodore said, looking around in dismay.
“Totally,” Charlie replied. He turned to Pinch. “So, what do you think we should do?”
“Me?” Pinch said in mock surprise. “You want my opinion? But I’m not the leader of this merry little band—you are.”
“C’mon, don’t be like that,” Charlie pressed. “We need your help. I don’t have a clue how to find this Mother Hydra.”
Pinch shook his head. “No, no, no—that’s impossible. The Headmaster put you in charge, so you must know what do. After all, if she thought I was the right person for the job, she would have put me in charge.”
Charlie sighed. He knew Pinch could be a pain, but this was more than he had bargained for.
“We should’ve brought Brooke,” Theodore muttered. “She may not know as much, but at least she would’ve told us what she did know.”
“Excellent point!” Pinch grinned at Charlie. “What a shame: your very first decision as leader and already your followers are doubting your judgment. I wonder if the Headmaster was wrong in picking you to lead us after all.”
“Knock it off,” Violet said. “This isn’t about you or us, it’s about doing what’s right, so do what’s right and help us!”
Charlie wasn’t quite sure if Violet really meant it or if she just didn’t want to be wrong about leaving Brooke behind. Either way, it seemed to work.
“Hydras prefer deep water,” Pinch said finally. “Which is why we won’t see any of them here at the shore.”
“Okay, good,” Charlie replied. “So we just need to find a way to get out into the middle of the ocean.”
“I could open a portal,” Theodore suggested. “Then we could steal a boat.”
“Great, how?”
“I don’t know how!” Theodore said. “I’m just the idea man, the dude with the overview, the guy who thinks about the big picture. You have to figure out the logistics.”
“Me? Why do I always have to—”
“Look over there,” Violet said before Charlie could finish. She pointed to what looked like a silvery raft bobbing in the water, just beyond the break line. “What is that?”
“That,” Pinch said with a slight smile, “is the solution to our first little problem.”
It wasn’t a raft. It was a jellyfish.
A giant jellyfish.
Charlie fought his way through the pounding waves to where the silvery creature floated in the dark, freezing water.
“Be careful of the tentacles!” Pinch shouted, as he and the others followed. “If you get stung, the poison will paralyze you.”
Great, Charlie thought, staring down into the murky water. Leave it to us to pick the only raft that can paralyze you.
He could see a tangle of glowing tentacles drifting below the large creature. Thick and long, they pulsed sickly until they disappeared, squirming, into the darkness. Careful to avoid them, Charlie grabbed onto the jellyfish’s rubbery back and climbed on top. It felt disgusting—like a sticky, wet slug—and he could see its organs beating gently below its shiny, translucent skin.
“Ugh, this is pretty gross,” Violet said, climbing up after him. “So what do they call these things?”
“Bang-Jellies,” Pinch said, as Violet pulled him up.
“Bang-Jellies?” Theodore repeated, scrambling onto the back of the creature, as well. “What kinda stupid name is Bang-Jellies?”
“An appropriate one, trust me.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “So how do we get this Bang-Jelly to take us where we want to go?”
“Easy, really. They’re simple, instinctive creatures. They either propel themselves toward food or away from harm.”
“Perfect,” Violet said, walking to the side of the Bang-Jelly nearest the shore. She took out her ax and poked the creature with a corner of the blade.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The Bang-Jelly quickly began floating away from shore—and the sting of Violet’s weapon—toward the deep, dark water beyond. Charlie was surprised by Violet’s cold efficiency. He would have done the same thing, probably, but it would have bothered him to do it.
“Sweet!” Theodore exclaimed as the Bang-Jelly carried them out into the open ocean. “Now we just gotta keep our eyes peeled for a Hydra.”
A half hour later, they spotted one.
It was navigating through a giant school of Bang-Jellies that were floating on the dark water like bobbers. Charlie was surprised by how large the Hydra was. The size of a bulldozer, it had six heads, all with shiny, sharp teeth. Its green, scaly hide made it look something like a dragon with a wide tail that propelled it forward through the choppy waves.
“Is that the female?” Charlie asked.
Pinch shook his head. “Wrong size, wrong color. The female is much bigger and bluish in color, or so it is rumored. No one has ever seen it, of course, which is why we don’t know where it is.”
Suddenly, the Hydra let out a howl of pain. It began to thrash, kicking up large sheets of ocean water. Around its paddle-like feet, Charlie could see glowing tentacles stuck to it in great spaghetti-like mounds.
“That Bang-Jelly’s got him!” Violet said. “And the others are moving toward it!”
“So is ours,” Charlie added, noticing that their Bang-Jelly was homing in on the struggling Hydra.
As the Bang-Jellies surrounded the writhing creature, it became entangled in their poisonous tentacles—the harder it struggled, the more hopelessly wrapped up it was. The Hydra snapped violently at its attackers with all six of its heads, successfully tearing open large gashes that oozed a thick, clear fluid.
“Hey!” Theodore shouted. “Look, they’re turning red!”
Sure enough, every Bang-Jelly fighting the Hydra was slowly changing color from silver to a deep scarlet that glowed brightly from within.
“Uh-oh,” Pinch said softly.
“What?” Charlie demanded. “What ‘uh-oh’?”
“Perhaps you’d better steer us away from them.”
“Why?”
One of the Bang-Jellies suddenly exploded with such immense force that it nearly ripped the six-headed Hydra in half. One by one, in a nightmarish chain reaction, all the Bang-Jellies began to explode with thunderous crashes, each as loud as cannon fire. Great gouts of flesh and goo rained down on Charlie and his friends.
“That’s why,” Pinch said, pulling sticky bits of flesh from his beard.
As they neared the exploding creatures, Charlie dashed to the front of their Bang-Jelly and jabbed his rapier into it, hard. The creature moved in the opposite direction, away from the other Bang-Jellies.
“C’mon, c’mon…,” Charlie urged.
Their Bang-Jelly drifted away from the explosions with agonizing slowness, and Charlie was sure they were going to get caught in the last wave of creatures to detonate—but they managed to sail just out of range before the final one blew up in a disgusting, violent spray.
“Nasty,” Violet said as they wiped chunks of meat and ooze from their faces.
“Nasty? That was awesome!” Theodore shouted. “What a show!”
“I admit it was pretty spectacular,” Charlie said. “But it doesn’t make any sense. They intentionally kill themselves to take down opponents? That’s crazy.”
“Bees do it,” Pinch said. “After a bee stings you, it dies, because a single bee doesn’t matter—only the swarm. The same is true of the Bang-Jellies. They sacrifice the individual to protect the group.”
“I guess.”
“You guess? Do you think I’m lying to you? Do you think I’ve just gone insane and decided to spend my day feeding you misinformation like some kind of lunatic?”
“No,” Charlie replied, taken aback by Pinch’s weird outburst. “I’m just saying it doesn’t seem like a very good survival strategy.”
“And what do you know about survival?” Pinch roared, clearly getting angrier by the second. “Nothing terrible has happened to you! You’ve had nothing to overcome—your parents are still alive, you’ve still got the Gift, and you’re here acting like you know more than me when I was once the greatest that ever was! My power was so strong that you would have looked like a fool in comparison, Charlie Benjamin—you miserable, arrogant little child!”
Whoa, where did that come from? Charlie wondered.
Theodore and Violet glanced uncomfortably at each other. Neither knew quite how to respond.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said finally. He figured it must be pretty tough for a proud man like Pinch to have to answer to a thirteen-year-old. “I know you lost your parents when you were our age, and I know it wasn’t right what the Division did to you all those years ago. I never meant to question you. I was just—”
“What? You were just what?”
Charlie was about to answer when he felt an odd swell beneath his feet. “Did anyone else just feel that?”
“I did,” Violet said, alarmed.
Charlie looked over the side of their Bang-Jelly and peered into the dark water below. It was like looking into an inkwell.
“I guess it was nothing. It just felt like—”
A Hydra exploded up from the depths and crashed down on top of their Bang-Jelly, capsizing it. Everyone fell into the murky water of the 4th Ring. The multiheaded creature tried to swim after them, teeth snapping, but it was quickly entangled in a gooey mess of stinging tentacles from the now upside-down Bang-Jelly.
“Swim!” Charlie shouted. “Get away! It’s gonna blow!”
Sure enough, their former raft began to glow a brilliant red.
They swam frantically away from the Bang-Jelly as the Hydra tore into it, but the more it fought, the more it got twisted up in those paralyzing stingers. Soon, the two creatures were an undifferentiated mass of teeth and tentacles and thick, spraying ooze.
“Keep going!” Charlie screamed, spitting rank, salty water from his mouth. “Just a few feet more! I think we’re almost in the clea—”
The Bang-Jelly exploded, killing the Hydra instantly and sending a massive shock wave through the water. It hit Theodore with such force that it knocked him unconscious.
He began to slip into the black, fathomless depths.
“Theodore!” Charlie yelled, trying desperately to stay afloat himself. The water was freezing and his muscles were beginning to seize up. He swam toward where Theodore had gone under, but he was still many yards away.
“I got him!” Violet yelled, and dived down into the murk.
Find him, Charlie thought with growing panic. Please, don’t let him die.
He counted seventeen endless seconds before, to his great relief, Violet burst back above the surface, holding an unconscious Theodore against her chest.
“Wake up, Theo!” she shouted. “I can’t get a good grip on you!”
Theodore’s eyes fluttered open. “Are we there yet?”
“No, we’re nowhere,” Charlie shouted back, treading water. “We’re alone in the middle of the ocean on the 4th Ring of the Nether!”
“Not alone,” Pinch said, staring grimly into the distance. “Not anymore.”
Charlie looked up to see another Hydra rapidly approaching them. “Great,” he muttered, drawing his rapier.
Within moments, the beast arrived and snapped at him with its six sets of pointy teeth. Charlie felt a familiar feeling of calm wash over him as his Banishing skill took over. He fended off attack after attack from those vicious jaws with a speed and grace that seemed almost supernatural—and, in fact, was—but he knew he couldn’t keep it up for forever.
If only I could open a portal, he thought. Then the water would rush through and take us all out of here with it!
But, even though he was a Double-Threat and could both Banish and Nethermance, he knew he couldn’t do both at the same time. If he stopped fighting for even a second to open a portal, he and everyone else would surely die. Theodore was too weak to help, and it took all of Violet’s strength just to keep Theodore from drowning. And Pinch…well, it had been decades since he had been able to open a portal—the Nightmare Division’s repulsive process of Reduction had stolen that from him.
Charlie was still swinging his rapier to ward off the Hydra when he noticed two more of the vicious beasts swimming toward them.
Now there were three.
“Stop fighting!” Pinch shouted. “You can’t win this!”
“What?” Charlie yelled back. “Are you crazy? If I stop fighting, they’ll eat me. They’ll eat all of us!”
“Just do what I tell you!”
“That’s suicide.”
“Listen to me or you will die! Now put…your weapon…down!”
What is he talking about? Charlie thought. Had Pinch just given up? Did he just want to end it all?
“Listen to him!” a voice called out from somewhere behind Charlie. It was Violet. “We can’t beat them anyway! Do what he says—we don’t have a choice!”
Fighting every instinct in his body, Charlie lowered his rapier.
The moment he did, one of the Hydra’s mouths clamped down over him, swallowing him up to his waist. He could feel its sharp teeth pressing against his back and belly. It was wet in there and as black as a closed coffin. Charlie could smell the stink of the creature’s previous meal drifting up from its stomach—it smelled like spoiled fish and rotten seaweed.
So this is how I die, he thought. This is how we all die.
An image of his parents appeared to him then, smiling kindly, always loving. He hadn’t seen them in months—the Nightmare Division had hidden them away somewhere and given them new names and identities to protect them from the monsters of the Nether.
He wished he knew where they were and if they were happy and safe.
He wished he could hug them one more time.
He wished—
But then the darkness took him.