Dawn peeled away the mist in ragged ribbons. Herons lifted from the shallows, legs trailing like inked brushstrokes, and the reeds clicked softly as tiny frogs decided to be brave again. Blue Fang lay half-submerged on a sandbar, letting the river write its temperature into his scales. The bead the lizardmen had given him clicked and settled, a small weight against his brow ridge. It felt ridiculous and right.
Hunger woke like a friendly dog nudging his ribs. He rolled into the channel and let the current cradle him south, where the river's song lowered into something heavy. Silt thickened; tannin-dark water hid submerged boulders like sleeping hippos. He could sense the contour of it all through skin and sail—the way pressure parted around stones, the way a deep pocket yawned just ahead like a giant throat.
His throat flexed in sympathy. The old human in him noted the poetry and sighed. The new thing in him bared its teeth.
He hunted clean. Not for sport—nothing in him loved cruelty—but because a king who wastes leaves his waters thin. He took a broad-shouldered carp with a sideways snap and swallowed it over the course of three gargling, graceless gulps. Warmth broke in his belly and strobed outward, the way coffee used to.
[Predator's Maw: Minor Aquatic Muscle Efficiency acquired.]
The words unfurled in his head, and he felt his kick tighten, tail-flicks sending him farther with less effort. He laughed under his breath, bubbles trickling past his teeth.
The river changed key.
It wasn't sound so much as pressure dropping and then spiking in erratic stamps. Small lives fled. The taste of the water shifted metallic, then medicinal, then wrong. He slowed. The channel ahead widened into a basin. The surface was very still.
When he slid to the edge of the bowl, the stillness wasn't peace—it was attention.
Something moved beneath him with a weight that bent the river's grammar. Seven somethings, braided to a single center—a coil like a moored ship's rope suddenly tightening. A head broke the surface thirty yards away, black eyes glossy as old coins, frill ridged with poisonous moss. Then another head surfaced ten yards to his left. Then another behind him. Their movements were too smooth, too coordinated.
Blue Fang did not know the taxonomy word for the thing that lived in this bowl. He didn't need it. Every nerve he owned said hydra.
The nearest head drifted closer, tasting him. The mouth opened and a drip of green spooled into the water like watercolor paint dissolving. It eddied toward him, a tendril of burn.
He backed, slow. His tail swayed, adjusting the current around his legs, tugging him into the thin lane of clean water he could feel by pressure alone. Seven heads followed like lanterns floating on a funeral river.
He could leave. He could ease backward into the narrow and let the squeeze of the channel deny the hydra's bulk. Predators with options live.
But he saw the remains along the bottom. Shell fragments. A child's loop of reed-cord caught on an underwater root. A spear haft. Bones. The river had been paying a tax.
He felt his human jaw tighten, though he didn't own one now. The hydra drifted within striking range, mouths opening. He tasted bitterness on his tongue like chewed aspirin. The eels from yesterday had been an introduction. This was the sermon.
Blue Fang sank.
At the bottom, the world brightened in a way air-breathers never see: the silt turned sunrise gold as the angle of light shifted through water. Sound went thick. Pressure became the cleanest language. He set his feet in muck and felt the weight of seven necks anchored somewhere behind that distant boulder. He counted the pull like counting heartbeats.
Then he pushed.
Tail, thighs, back flexed in one long chord, and he launched out of the silt like a harpoon loosed by the river itself. His sail throbbed, catching the thrust, and his jaws found the first neck an instant before the mouth could mind. Teeth met tendon and cartilage. He shook. Something snapped. Hot, bitter blood flushed his palate like a slap.
[Predator's Maw: Extracting.]
[Result: Toxin Resistance (Hydra)—moderate. Coagulant Saliva—minor.]
The hydra screamed through all its throats at once. The river shook. Two heads lashed from his blind side, teeth raking his sail. Pain flared white. He turned with it, letting the force spin him rather than resisting, and used the spin to drive his tail like a club into the base of another neck. Bone popped. The head went slack and the body convulsed, rolling the bowl into a tornado of bubbles and black blood.
The poison hit him, then hesitated, and then slid through him like oil through a sieve. His tongue tingled and went numb, and his heart hammered twice as if surprised and then settled. The new resistance folded itself into him like an extra layer of scale.
He broke surface for breath he didn't need and roared anyway, because sound is a weapon. The nearest head recoiled, frill flattening, a reptile's unintended flinch. He lunged, caught the hinge of its jaw, and wrenched. Tooth shattered. His own, not the hydra's. Pain sang up into his eyes and detonated there as bright shards of anger. He bit again with the other side and felt the jaw go loose under his bite like a popped cork.
Something heavy looped around his ribs and squeezed. Another neck. Then another. His vision funneled, heat lightning coruscating along the edges. He dug claws into the nearest thing that was hydra and pulled, planting his feet against the boulder at the basin's center and grinding backward.
[Savage Evolution: Triggered.]
[Effect: Scale Density ↑ | Micro-fracture repair initiated | Pain dampening engaged.]
His sail, torn and screaming moments ago, stiffened. The pressure of the coils became pressure against an object the river had known forever. He pushed harder. The coils loosened a fraction as the hydra reconsidered the virtues of squeezing a stone.
He could feel the core now—where seven necks thickened into a trunk buried in silt. He let go of the damaged jaw, ducked under a flailing head, and dove. Mud blinded him; pressure told him where everything was. He hit the trunk and bit.
It wasn't elegant. It was a machine stripping gears, a mountain shearing. His teeth didn't quite meet; his jaw muscles screamed against the reality of physics. He didn't let go. He hauled his head side to side, claws raking, tail digging a trench as he levered his entire body against the hydra's spine. It writhed, and a head found his flank and tore a ribbon of flesh loose. Cool lakewater bit the wound. He stayed.
Something gave. The trunk went from log to rope to frayed cloth between his teeth. He wrenched upward, breaking surface with a mass of hydra flesh still gripped, and flung it toward the bank like throwing up something you don't want to meet twice. The creature convulsed, heads thrashing out of timing with one another, their coordination ruined by panic and pain.
He didn't celebrate. He did it again.
The second time, the voice in his head didn't bother with polite notices. It simply poured a cold clarity into him, the way snow- melt sinks through spring soil.
[Predator's Maw: Major Extraction.]
[Results: Poison Immunity (Hydra-class) | Swamp Adaptation (Major) | Regenerative Coagulation (Minor).]
His blood slowed its bright leak into the river, thickening and sealing as if someone had painted his wounds shut. The hydra's poison slid into his belly like a late bill and dissolved.
A head lunged for his eye. He snapped his sail sideways. The bony spines along its ridge rang like a struck xylophone as the jaws glanced off them. He hadn't known he could do that. Now he did.
Three heads remained with true malice in them. He softened his knees and dove, tail whipping behind him into a corkscrew that the river seemed pleased to amplify. He came up beneath the nearest throat and took as much as would fit in his mouth.
It wasn't pretty.
When at last the bowl stilled and the water cleared from churn to stain to a lighter brown, Blue Fang floated among drifting frills and stumps, breath sawing in and out. The hydra's body, monstrous even in death, rolled once and settled where the basin turned to deeper channel. Scavengers would write a new map of the place tonight.
He hauled himself onto the muddy shelf and lay there, heaving, ships-of-sail shadow crawling over him as clouds knitted and unknitted above. Pain burned and then dulled and then became a map of small campfires along his flank. His jaw throbbed; a tooth wiggled when he tested it with his tongue and then seated itself stubbornly, refusing to be lost.
The river lapped his ribs, as if tallying him and finding him still on the ledger. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the sun had moved and the bead bumped his brow in a different rhythm. Footsteps hissed in the mud.
He raised his head carefully.
A band of lizardmen stood at the tree line, spears angled down. Their leader wore a collar of shell plates and scar-faded stripes across their snout. They looked from the floating hydra remains to him and back. Their crest feathered and smoothed and feathered again—a muscle trying to become certainty.
The leader stepped forward and knelt, palms flat in the mud. "Guardian Fang," they said, mouth clumsy around the honorific—but the reverence in it lifted hair along Blue Fang's spine.
He wanted to tell them he wasn't their god or their monster. That he had simply gotten angry at an old debt and collected. He settled for lowering his head until the bead touched mud and holding still.
Another lizardman—older, with a limp that found rhythm in the muck—pointed at his wounds and chattered to a child who peered around their legs. The child whispered something that tasted like big, like safe, like ours. Blue Fang's chest did something complicated and mammalian in reply.
He forced himself to rise—slowly, carefully—so as not to panic anyone holding a sharp stick and no clear plan. The leader flinched despite themself, then straightened visibly and gestured at the carcass, at the river, at the sky in a series of motions that had the shape of an invitation.
"Share," they said. "Feast."
He had not realized how tired he was until the word settled. He tried another word of his own, tongue clumsy against too many teeth. "Safe," he rumbled. "River… safe."
The leader's crest lifted. The band echoed the word, not so much repeating it as agreeing with it, making it law with sound.
He waded back into the water and put his shoulder to the hydra's trunk. It moved a grudging inch, then another, a barge reluctant to leave the dock. He levered it onto the shelf while the lizardmen hurried to cut lengths of sinew, to saw at flesh with shell-blades, to laugh breathlessly whenever the river tried to steal their dinner back. Blue Fang worked until his legs shook, because kings who help carry are remembered differently than kings who watch.
When at last the worst of it was dragged above the waterline and the scavengers of the air were screaming their outrage from the canopy, he lay down with his forearms in the river and let the current cool the fire along his flank. The child from the day before crept closer, eyes enormous.
They held up something cupped in both hands—a lump of wet, pale clay shaped into a crude fish with a wedge of a fin. They offered it up with solemn care, as if handing a star back to its sky.
Blue Fang extended one claw like a finger and let them press the toy into it. The clay was cool, soft, imperfect. It sat absurdly small against the killing tool that held it.
The Voice chose that moment to behave with ceremony.
[Notice. Title stabilized: Guardian of the Swamp.]
[Notice. Reputation effect: Local morale ↑ | Monster aggression toward villages ↓.]
He huffed, which in his new body was a sound like a furnace settling. The child giggled. The leader smiled, sudden and bright as fish-scale, and everything inside Blue Fang that had tightened around old floodwater loosened a fraction.
He waited until the band had begun to sing—thin, reedy voices layered with the rip of gutting meat—and then slid back, easing himself into the deeper channel. The current lifted him. Mud lifted with him, and then fell away as the river claimed him again. He floated, letting the bead tap his brow in the same rhythm as before. Tap. Tap. Not a crown, exactly. A reminder.
He had taken something ugly from the river and returned something cleaner. He had eaten and bled and been named, again and again, until the names started to fit different parts of him. Blue Fang for the beast with the teeth. Guardian Fang for the thing that put its body between children and harm. There was room in him now for both. The river could hold that contradiction. So could he.
As the sun burned a clear path through late day, he found a quiet eddy where floating leaves collected, and he dreamed with his eyes open. He dreamed maps: channels dredged just so; sandbars placed like seats for tired backs; weirs shaped, not to trap, but to persuade a flood to go where it would do the least harm. He pictured the lizardmen's children learning where to wade and where to wait, and he pictured a hydra's bowl turned into a story that ended with roasted meat and laughter.
When he finally moved again, it was with the easy grace of something that had realized its body and its purpose could be the same thing.
The river, grateful and greedy, gave him more to do.