Hydra Bow

I took a breath, sighted my target. Lessons taught to me — to Herakles — by Chiron floated in the back of my head, ensuring my posture and my technique were both perfect, flawless. Memories of perfecting this skill, of conceiving of it and applying it in the fight against the Hydra, danced alongside them, guiding my hands and fingers. The act, now, of releasing the arrow itself was mere formality; in my mind, the trajectory had already been calculated and the attack had already occurred. In my imagination, the head of my arrow had already hit.

Now, it was just a matter of proving it to the world.

In a voice like gravel, I spoke.

Shooting the Hundred Heads
“Nine Lives.”

My fingers uncurled and released the bowstring. The sound barrier shattered. The wind cracked and howled. The backblast sent those closest to me stumbling as all those within thirty feet yelped and slapped their hands to their ears. Somewhere nearby, I heard glass windows break.

My arrow flew like a rocket, a streak of barely visible color moving so fast that it outpaced Leviathan several times over. Almost the moment it left my bow, it fractured and split into nine different lights, each one racing towards a different part of my target’s body. It reminded me — the me that was me, rather than Herakles — of Legend’s lasers.

Nine Lives: Shooting the Hundred Heads. Herakles’ technique, a style of martial art he could apply to each and every weapon he owned, from bow to sword to lance. It was a skill specialized for monster slaying, an anti-monster technique that delivered punishing final blows in rapid — or even simultaneous — succession, killing the target over and over again, no matter how many times it revived.

I held out no hopes that it could kill Leviathan, nor even that it would be enough to force him to retreat. The Lernean Hydra had been the first victim of this technique, and its heads had been chopped off one after the other after the other, no matter how many times they regrew or how many sprouted in their place. But that was a monster that could be killed, to whom wounds mattered, and Herakles had eventually discovered the secret of its defeat. Leviathan was an altogether different kind of monster, such that Nine Lives would do little more than superficial damage.

A flesh wound, against a creature that attached no meaning or importance to its flesh.

But…I wanted to be sure. I wanted to prove to myself, both that Khepri’s knowledge, the things that she had taken as fact, and that my own powers were correct. Herakles could not kill Leviathan outright — my power had indicated as such. Khepri’s knowledge said much the same. With enough time and effort? Maybe. Almost certainly. But with one blow? The answer had been no.

And now I would find out if it was true.

The nine rays of light struck Leviathan at once, each one targeting a different part of his body — his neck, his shoulder joints, his hips, his chest right in the center, his head, his neck, his belly, just below where the navel would be on a human. They struck with force and with power equaling, no, surpassing the twin beams of searing light Purity had struck him with, carving into the facade of his flesh and gouging away enormous chunks. Crystalline flesh, glittering scales, and black ichor flew through the air, landing in the water of the bay, and the enormous, echoing splashes told the story of exactly how deeply he’d been wounded.

Leviathan reeled back as if in pain, and my mind substituted a furious roar for his eerie silence. He lost balance and skidded on the water, stumbling and rolling along the surface like a car spinning out on a wet highway, and eventually came to a stop less than thirty feet from the shore, collapsed face down into the sand and the bay.

I let out a breath through my nose, grimacing.

[The beast lives.​]

There was no way that had been enough. Not a chance in hell. If it was that simple to undo an Endbringer, then they would all have been slain years ago and the world would not be living in fear of them. We could have laughed them all off as mere monsters and gone about our lives.

And sure enough, after a long few seconds of tense waiting, Leviathan pulled himself to his feet. He was close enough, now, that he touched the bottom and still stood above the surface. In the spots I had hit, more of that ichor oozed, running down his body and seeping into the waters of the bay. His chest and shoulders were mangled messes. A large chunk was missing from his stomach, and the injuries to his hips gave his legs an even more comical and lopsided look. My strike to his head had gouged out one of his four eyes.