Aincrad Excerpt - Demon of the Swamp! · 1:26am Feb 27th, 2020
Excerpt From Episode Episode 31 - Coming Tuesday!
The swamp on Floor 57 was way off the beaten path. There were no dungeons nearby and the closest town was a few hours walk. Times like this were when Sprint came in handy. It dramatically cut down on time spent traversing long sections of the Floors. Floor 57 was a good deal smaller than Floor 1 because Aincrad slowly tapered up, but it was still a large area to travel.
The swamp slowed Bladescape down. She couldn’t sprint through it, especially when she was on the hunt for a creature. All reports had come in with only a few being spawned at a time, which would make missing them a lot easier. As well as making hunting longer.
She needed 30 pieces of their hides. No one had drop information on them. They could drop a single hide, or they could drop 10 to a creature. It was a complete unknown. Bladescape was ready for the long haul of killing 30 or more of them.
Her Search skill helped Bladescape navigate through the swamp with as little time spent fighting the giant flies and weird toad creatures in the swamp as necessary. She finally got to the center of the swamp around 9am, which wasn’t bad considering how early she had left. That and she had needed to buy a lot of standard sacks before she started.
Her Search skill picked up something surfacing in the water. It looked like a shark head, and it was coming towards her. Bladescape didn’t have the Swim Skill. Drowning would be a horrible way to die. That was assuming something in the water didn’t kill her while she was defenseless.
The grey shark head rose out of the water, connected to a large, upright body. As it came out of the water, Bladescape gulped. This was not going to be easy going solo against such a creature. Ironically she also knew it would be hard to have more than two players on the patches of land in the swamp. The only Wondercolt who would be advantageous to have with her would be Astro for her spear’s reach, but she should already be in the Labyrinth by now and thus, unreachable.
Bladescape backed up to give the Dagannoth more room to come onto the land. He was bigger than she expected. The smiling shark head was only carrying a single row of large needle like teeth. A set of large spikes stuck out from its spine. Its thickly muscled arms were almost dragging on the ground and they ended with a pair of large, wicked looking claws. It leaned forward as it walked because of its heavy arms and a short, bony tail swing behind it, attached to its body above its hips. The whole thing looked like it stalked the floor of the swamp more than it swam. If it even could swim.
