As soon as Anaxa drove his spear into the eye socket, he felt a sudden, violent tug- stronger than anything he had ever experienced. The silvery tilapia, jolted out of its lethargic swim by the surge of searing pain, exploded into a frenzied motion, beating the water with its monstrous tail and rocketing itself forward.
The speed it managed to summon was not that different from its usual top speed too, as the attached Anaxa, barely weighing a fifth, felt little more than an unnecessary tag along, and something its shocked mind barely registered against the produced raw force.
"Ahhhh… ahhhh…" The tiny lizard thus could only gasp, struggling to hold on with all it had as his breath turned ragged and his heart pounded.
"Crap! I can't hold on much longer! The spear… I feel it… starting to crack! Ahhhh…!"
And soon, the spear lodged into the socket also began to tremble under the strain as the beast blindly surged ahead, desperately thrashing its head in an attempt to shake free the weapon. In fact, Anaxa's sensitive tail could literally feel the fibres of the wood snapping one by one.
It was only a matter of time before the fish escaped.
"No! This cannot go on! I must stop this!" Thus the desperate man quickly cried inside his mind, "If I let this fish go, I will surely fail the mission. I do not have the speed to quickly catch up to it and if I lose this spear… I will not have the time to make another one."
"Ahhh.. Anaxa, your greed and hubris really got the better of you this time, didn't it! Ahhh! I really do not want to follow it to the depths of the pond."
Anaxa quite heavily blamed himself for the poor choice of target he made- he could have actually chosen something smaller and closer to the system's requirement- however at the moment that tilapia with the 450 biomass appeared greatly alluring to him.
This was because currently Anaaxa's biomass accumulation stood at 800/1200, so if he was able to devour this fish, then, he could go attack the coucal chicks still on that mango tree to get that karma point and thus level up before the day was over.
He figured the increased stats would greatly aid him during the 'Red Moon' that was due today.
It was frankly a good plan- it was just that the tiny lizard overestimated its ability and bit off more than it could chew. And now it was at risk of losing both the egg and the goose.
"Okay! Let's go! I need to use my power bites to quickly stop this runaway freight train. Just losing an eye was not enough for it!" Faced with the constantly deteriorating situation, Anaxa decided to stop thinking and willed himself to finally act.
Thus making his tail curl up around the spear, he pulled himself closer to the fish, before
Snap!
He took an enormous bite out of the fleshy belly of his prey, feasting on the juicy, fatty flesh with ecstasy. The taste was even better than what Anaxa could have imagined, as the meat almost melted away in his mouth like butter, spreading throughout the tongue like a velvet delicacy.
His stomach roared for more.
Bubble! Bubble! Bubble!
Yet, although the strike was successful, creating quite a bloody wound and making the fish profusely bleed, it did not produce the intended effect.
Rather, it caused the inverse, as the tilapia let out an enraged scream and turned even more frenzied.
Having one eye gouged out was already bad enough, and now it was also being eaten alive?The pain naturally drove it nuts.
Creak!
And this wild thrashing soon created a sound that made Anaxa's heart drop a heartbeat for his black slitted eyes had noticed a huge splinter growing on the wooden twig like spear.
The moment the tiny lizard dreaded was rapidly approaching.
"Dammit! This is not working! This fish is too big and my bites are too small!" Anaxa thus cried bitterly, looking at the penny sized damage he had inflicted and sniffling, "Ahhh.. I do not think I can even eat it all. My stomach can only hold at best twice my body weight. Ahhh… What was I thinking!"
But the man managed to recollect himself the next moment, his eyes suddenly blazing with a kind of life or death desperation,
"No! Stop whining! I need to complete this mission no matter what. Tsk! Forget the belly! My spear will be broken long before the time I can do any meaningful damage to it. Let's go for the fins... no, the tail instead! That is what is really powering this beast! Eating it will definitely help!"
Following the decision, Anaxa then managed to pull off what could be described as one of his most death defying feats yet, as using the stuck spear like a level, he used his tail like a fulcrum to literally jumped onto the back of the fish, grabbing onto it using his long, sharp claws and securing himself by letting the fierce talons sink as far as they go into the soft flesh.
The position was almost a carbon copy of what Anaxa did with the vole mother.
Only this time…
Snap!
That maneuver seemed to have spent the last of the wooden spear's durability and it instantly snapped with a dull thud, leaving Anaxa's tail to helplessly dangle with the broken bit.
"Tsk!" The scaly reptile clicked his tongue at the development, his heart aching at the thought of just how much time and effort he had spent to create that spear. This was not like the pebbles he could pick up from anywhere along the forest floor.
Just finding a suitable raw piece was hard enough, forget the hassle of refining it into a proper weapon. Thus Anaxa had hoped this formidable weapon would at least last him some time.
"Dammit it! Everything that could go wrong with the hunt is going wrong. Dammit it!" Anaxa cursed himself as his tail flicked away the useless bit, wrapping it around the tilapia's neck next.
Now, Anaxa was not trying to strangle the fish with it. It would not have worked anyway given fishes used gills to breathe, not the trachea. There was no windpipe to constrict.
Rather, Anaxa used the fleshy rope to properly anchor himself to the speeding behemoth, steadying his body before swiftly making his way towards the tail fin.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
The abnormal water dragon bit off a quarter of the flashy tail as soon as he in range, gulping it down in a single bite. And he was not done with only one strike as he immediately followed it up with two more similar bites, shredding the beautiful organ almost like ripped paper.
Bubble! Bubble! Bubble!
The grievous pain made the fleeing fish once again let out many bubbles of water- roaring out in distress.
While Anaxa also found it hard to continue his attack as with the tail cut, the fish found itself unable to control itself. So it began to veer around in impossible ways, letting its wild thrashing take it wherever it wanted.
Anaxa quickly saw his world suddenly spinning like he was on a rollercoaster, and he found the fact that his spear broke to be actually a boon. Otherwise, if he had not grabbed on the fish's neck with his tail but only relied on the wooden twig, he would have surely been thrown off by now.
Thus for now he simply focused on holding for dear life- tightening his tail grip and digging his claws with all he had while occasionally taking bites of the muscles around the tail. The idea was to sever these tendons so that the fish could no longer transmit power to it and propel itself.
This furious tussle between prey and predator went on for what to Anaxa seemed like an eternity, until finally,
"Ding! Target successfully hunted!"
The chime of the notification had never sounded so melodious to Anaxa. So the exhausted reptile eagerly lifted its head to survey its prey.
And indeed, it was quite a terrible sight to behold.
Floating lifelessly in the pond, the unfortunate fish was still bleeding profusely from its injured eye, the broken wooden tip sticking out with bloody stains.
There were a few bloody bite marks on its belly while its tail was entirely missing as was much of the flesh around the tail- in fact, surrounded by bloody teeth marks, Anaxa could even see traces of white bones peeping from underneath there.
"Ding!
Target Locked- Catfish
Biomass- 3,000 micro-units.
Spirit-5, Karma-2
Threat- Extreme, Note- Don't!
"Crap!" Anaxa was jolted out of his thoughts by this helpful note and instantly understood the danger he was in, "There is no time for me to feast. My breath is dangerously low and I lost my weapon. Forget it, I already completed my mission. Let's get out of here."