Gloorp. Air bubbles formed at the bottom of the lake and floated toward the surface.
At the sight, the fish and animals swimming nearby immediately tried to flee—but a tentacle shot out without warning, coiling around their bodies and freezing them in place the instant it made contact.
Among those snared by the tentacle, the largest fish—nearly a full meter in length—could have been considered the apex predator of this lake.
Being carnivorous, the many fish that populated these waters were nothing more than prey to it.
Fully aware of its status as the king of the lake, it seethed with rage at the presence of something overwhelmingly above it on the food chain. Yet what gripped it now was not anger, but the pure, instinctive terror that it was about to die.
Its body, capable of outswimming anything else in the lake, could not break free from the tentacle wrapped around it. It was being dragged down, inch by inch.
And then...the fish was effortlessly dissolved and digested by the tentacle's master.
Still unsated even after consuming the other fish and animals it had caught, the master extended more tentacles in all directions, searching.
But having devoured every fish and animal within reach, nothing remained in the vicinity.
Gloorp.
More air bubbles rose from the lakebed, but nothing came of them.
It drifted its tentacles through the water, hunting for prey that would quiet the hunger gnawing at it—but found nothing.
If staying here yielded no prey, then there was only one thing to do. Where there was no prey, it had to go to where prey existed.
And so, that presence drifted upward from the lakebed, rising toward the surface in search of food.
It had no sense of self. Its actions were driven solely by the instinct to satisfy its hunger.
But precisely because of that, it was free of extraneous thought. Faithful to its instincts, it arrived at its answer with direct, uncomplicated certainty.
Having ascended well above the water's surface, it suddenly detected a powerful magical presence not far away.
Judging that this immense concentration of magic would surely satisfy its hunger, it turned toward it, obeying its instincts.
The closer it drew to its prey, the more sharply it could sense that enormous magical presence.
The tentacle's master had been heading in that direction when it noticed the presence had moved.
It did not question why the target now hovered directly above it. It simply shattered the water's surface and thrust its tentacles upward to feed.
Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.
Even as that ravenous hunger consumed it, the tentacles that broke through the surface suddenly found their target gone.
It hadn't even registered that it was under attack—or perhaps it had, but dealing with the threat above took priority over anything else, so it simply kept extending its tendrils.
...Strictly speaking, they were not tentacles but thin extensions of its body. From an objective standpoint, however, calling them tentacles would not have been inaccurate.
Many, many of those tentacles were destroyed. And still, the hunger-driven motion did not stop.
Driven by pure instinct, it continued extending its tentacles—but as time passed, it could not capture the thing that would satisfy its hunger.
Eventually, it must have concluded that it would never obtain food this way.
The presence beneath the water abandoned its tentacles and decided to devour its opponent directly. Its main body began rising toward the surface.
Time rewound. Rei and Set had been watching the Lizardman Children playing in the lake when Set suddenly let out a sharp cry and fixed a hard stare on the water.
"Grrrrrrrrrr!"
The sound was unmistakably a warning—Rei could hear it in every syllable.
"Set? What's wrong?"
"Gruu, grrruu, grrrrrruu!"
At Rei's call, Set growled without taking his eyes off the lake.
From Set's demeanor alone, Rei could tell that something was in the water—something dangerous, something Set felt compelled to guard against.
After all, when they had surveyed the lake from the air earlier, Rei had spotted something he had never seen before: what appeared to be an animal in the water whose fur was completely dry.
...Of course, this world was not the Japan where Rei had been born and raised, and this lake itself was likely something teleported from another world entirely. If so, the presence of something unknown to Rei was hardly impossible.
"Zozo! Get the children out of the lake and take shelter in the Birth Tower!"
At Rei's shout, Zozo, who had been standing by a short distance away, sprang into action immediately.
The Lizardman Children couldn't understand the words, but they could read the tension in Zozo and Rei's body language. At Zozo's forceful urging to get out of the water, they scrambled out of the lake and broke into a run toward the Birth Tower.
Watching them go from the corner of his eye, Rei told Zozo to be ready to respond to anything at a moment's notice, then mounted Set and took to the sky above the lake.
He figured it would be easier to get a read on things from the air than from the shore.
With that in mind, Set soared above the lake with Rei on his back—but from what they could see, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. At least, that was what they thought at first.
"Gruuu!"
Several minutes into their aerial patrol, Set suddenly let out another sharp cry.
What exactly had Set on edge, Rei couldn't tell at first.
But fortunately—or perhaps that wasn't the right word, but in any case—he understood the reason soon enough.
Something semi-transparent was extending up from the lake's surface.
And it was reaching toward Set at an altitude of roughly a hundred meters. There was no way Rei could miss it.
Semi-transparent, water-like tendrils—one, two, three... eventually more than ten—were rising from the surface of the lake.
"Set, is that what you were warning about?"
"Gruu!"
Set answered Rei's question and, as if to punctuate it, shattered a tentacle lunging toward him with a single swipe of his front leg.
Set's strike was powerful, to be sure, but more than that, the water tentacle simply wasn't very resilient.
"Fragile."
"Gruu."
Set gave a short purr of agreement at Rei's murmur.
That said, even fragile tentacles were a problem when there were this many of them.
There had been about ten before; now there were over thirty, and their numbers kept growing.
From the look of it, Rei couldn't even guess how many there would end up being. He couldn't—and he didn't want to think about what would happen if one of them actually touched him.
They were tentacles that could be destroyed with ease, but depending on how you looked at it, that ease itself suggested they had more than enough power to serve their purpose.
If that was the case, then destroying them before they could make contact was unquestionably the best strategy.
"Flying Slash!"
Still straddling Set's back, Rei drew the Death Scythe from his Misty Ring and unleashed a Flying Slash that carved clean through the tentacles.
Just as he had expected, they were brittle.
The Flying Slash severed one tentacle effortlessly, lost almost no momentum, and cut through the one behind it, then the next, then the next—slicing through them in succession.
Flying Slash had reached Level 5, and its power had increased dramatically compared to before.
As a characteristic of Beast Magic, when a skill's level hit 5, its performance skyrocketed.
Flying Slash's power had surged as a result, but even so, Rei hadn't expected it to cut through the tentacles this easily.
(So these tentacles don't bind and restrain their prey—they capture them some other way? No, wait—I'm attacking them right now, but what if they actually have no hostile intent...)
Rei considered this for a brief moment, then immediately loosed another Flying Slash and dismissed the thought.
The tentacles surrounding him and Set were unmistakably reaching toward—not Rei, but Set. Where the tentacles were headed made that clear.
How the tentacles were tracking Set's location, Rei had no idea.
But the fact that they were targeting Set was an unmistakable truth.
And Rei couldn't imagine that such an opponent was friendly.
"Grrrrrrru!"
At Set's cry, dozens of Wind Arrows materialized around him and fired simultaneously, shattering tentacles one after another with ease.
Beyond that, Set deployed Earth Arrows, Ice Arrows, and the Magic Eye of Shock, destroying the tendrils in rapid succession.
The most impressive of all was his Fire Breath.
Released from Set's open beak, the Fire Breath incinerated more than ten tentacles at once.
(Should I just use Flame Magic and burn them all in one sweep? No—if I do that given the current situation, the lake itself could take damage.)
While alternating with Flying Slash, Rei hacked and smashed the approaching tentacles with the Death Scythe and the Twilight Spear.
This lake had only just teleported in. Rei had no way of predicting what might happen if he provoked it carelessly.
It was entirely possible that his magic could become the trigger for the Birth Tower—located right next to the lake—to suffer catastrophic damage.
Inside the Birth Tower, a large number of Lizardman eggs were currently being sheltered.
If the tower collapsed, it was not impossible that every last egg would be destroyed.
If that happened, the Lizardmen would never forgive Rei.
Zozo, loyal as he was to Rei, might find it in himself to forgive.
But Gaga—currently in the position of a friend who got along well with Rei—would not hesitate to come after Rei's life.
"Set, this'll take a while, but let's stick it out until this tentacle master gives up."
"Gruu!"
Set let out a cry that seemed to say, Leave it to me!
Rei muttered a quiet apology to him.
(Come to think of it, that Eyeball I fought in the winter had tentacles too, and now it's tentacles again. Seriously... don't I get liked by tentacles a little too much?)
Was he doomed to fight tentacled monsters every time something happened from now on? The thought gnawed at him unpleasantly as he kept up the assault for over ten minutes.
Even after cutting and smashing tentacles for that long, they showed no sign of thinning out. If anything, they were multiplying.
At this rate, they might be holding their own now, but eventually they would run out of stamina.
The moment that thought crossed his mind, the tentacles protruding from the surface all retracted into the lake at once.
"Huh?"
"Grrruu?"
Rei and Set voiced their confusion in unison.
Rei's side had been winning their encounter, but the endlessly regenerating tentacles had been a persistent nuisance.
They hadn't figured out what abilities the creature possessed, but if they'd kept fighting, they would have learned—painfully, through their own bodies.
In the worst case, they could simply flee from above the lake. But then the Lizardmen, the Adventurer, the Knight, and everyone else near the shore could be caught in the crossfire.
Given those stakes, it was necessary for Rei and Set—no, since the tentacles were targeting Set specifically—for Set to keep fighting in the air above the lake. But for some reason, the enemy had abandoned its war of attrition and pulled its tentacles back into the water.
Rei and Set's questions about the tentacles' behavior were answered almost immediately.
Because something enormous surfaced from beneath the water.
It was a semi-transparent entity, just like the tentacles.
In appearance, it was a translucent, oval mass that could have been described as a small hill.
"...A Slime?"
The word slipped from Rei's mouth.
Setting aside its size, it looked exactly like an ordinary Slime—one Rei would have recognized without a second thought.
But that size was on an entirely different order of magnitude. So overwhelming, so incomparably larger than a normal Slime that trying to calculate how many ordinary Slimes you'd need to match it became an exercise in absurdity.
"Grrruu."
Set purred, a warning to Rei not to let his guard down just because their opponent was a Slime.
Rei nodded to him and called out that everything was fine.
Any opponent that warranted this level of vigilance from Set was not something Rei would even think of underestimating.
"Anyway, it attacked us. That means it's not the type you can reason with—not like Zozo and the others. ...Well, Zozo did attack us without listening to a word we said at first, too."
At Rei's murmured words, Set purred. Ready to respond to whatever the giant Slime did next, they held their position and waited for their opponent's move.