Chapter Text
You decide to toss your cloak for this fight, weighing heavy down upon your shoulders. Not that your armor is any lighter, but the solid gold spaulders don’t help all that much with your movement, and you’ve figured out from your last few fights that you need mobility. You wonder how much you’ve lost from your leg, to be replaced with stronger jumping and a new spring in your step. Literally.
You shrug it off, tossing your cloak over the chair by your table, which makes this room one of about four places that you feel like you could move into. You don’t know why, probably something to do with the dryads, but you ignore it most of the time. You unlatch your fishing pole from the wall, and you make your way to the beach. You really need to clentaminate sometime.
The bobber plops in with a worm on the end of the hook, and you settle in to wait. It doesn’t take super long before it’s dipping beneath the water, and you pull it up. The line snaps, and you can’t help the flow of annoyance that comes from your chest, before the water’s rippling about once more, and it’s replaced with focus. Get ready to fight.
The water slides off of the mutant terror, and, for a moment, it nearly looks angelic. Like some kind of misbegotten deity from a long time ago. You’re not sure. All you know is that it spots you, you and your baggy clothes that hide chlorophyte plating beneath, and it sees red. Now, usually, people would freak out when a pigron shows up, since they’re dangerous, and really love to take bites out of people’s limbs. But you’re not most people, so seeing that thing , the Duke Fishron, as Timmy calls it, isn’t terrifying. Rather, it’s a challenge.
You dash back, heel slamming into the water and propelling you upwards as it dashes at you, chasing you down with its mouth wide open and ready to eat you. You avoid the first wave, to which it spits bubbles at you. You fly away, waiting for it to burst through the bubbles before you start shooting again. Fishron’s fast, but you have experience with fast enemies, and a dash, and every way possible to stay away from that thing.
Except, of course, for a teleport.
The sharknadoes nearly eat your other leg away, one latching onto your calf and refusing to let go at any cost, until you ripped its head off and threw its body into the water. It’s a cycle you can get used to pretty quickly, five dashes, bubbles, five more dashes, two sharknadoes. The standard of the dodging is great for you, since you can just turn your brain off.
What gets bad is when, in order to dodge a shark and Duke at the same time, you dip your body into the water. On one hand, you don’t like being sopping wet, and your clothes stick to your body. On the other hand, however, you have bigger concerns, as the Duke has the advantage in the water (for obvious reasons, duh) and it dives in after you. You can’t quite swim away from it, because for some odd reason you don’t have that ability unless you drink a potion, so you’re not too surprised when its teeth latch onto your leg and spin you around.
Well, at least it’s not your prosthetic, you think as the fish rips you to shreds underwater. You’re not sure if you drown or if it eats you first, but what you do know is that you die, and you’re 100% going to have to retrieve your leg from the depths of the ocean.
As soon as you awaken, you check your actual leg, just to make sure that it’s still there. It is. Good.
As it turns out, the Rod of Discord is one of the worst items you’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to obtain from the underground hallow. It’s not so bad as, say, mimics, which still send shivers down your spine as you think about their teeth closing in around you or their tongues strangling you once you’re inside, but it still revives bad memories. Soul farming is a bitch. This’ll be worse.
Chaos elementals are the only things that have a chance of holding it in their possession. Apparently, there’s only a handful that actually hold them, and the others just leech the magic from the rods, making them teleport less and less over time. And by a handful, you mean a handful . The old wizards made them, and, you’ll be honest, Merlin isn’t exactly in much of a state to do any magic, let alone enchant things. The rods have been scattered to the far reaches of the lands, making them a rare sight at best .
But you want one. And you’ll have it. No matter how many times you get stabbed directly through the stomach by an armored skeleton who catches you off guard, or a flaming arrow through your head that cooks your brains, or a slime that eats directly through your chest, or a bat that goes straight for the neck when it sees you—there’s a lot of things that happen. Your most recent demise was granted by an enchanted sword which cleanly severed your spine from your skull and sent you back home with a new scar across your neck, adding onto all of the others.
You look in a pond, and see that it almost looks like strings are twisted around your neck. Fitting, since you feel like a puppet for the ancient dryads.
Kicking away the body of a now plundered mimic, you trudge on through the darkness, raising a torch when you slam into the wall in front of you. The pearlstone has weird grooves in it, and it gets glitter all over your hands and in your clothes, so you don’t like touching it. You send an arrow through a bat, watching the light explode against the walls before going back into the darkness, and you continue on, crawling into a small hole that leads to a larger opening with a lava pool.
You do like the fact that you’re able to walk on lava, but your cloak always comes back singed. Generally speaking, your cloak is a problem, and you’re considering ditching it, but it makes you look badass, and bigger than you are, and it makes people and animals scared of you. You like looking badass, and bigger than you are, and scaring people and animals, so you’re going to keep it, for now.
Though, maybe not in the caverns.
You’re making your way through a steep slope of pearlstone and sharp stalagmites when a hand made of pure light pierces your chest, and you have only moments to think before there’s blood pouring from your mouth and you’re gasping for air. On instinct, you shoot your crossbow at the foe, and the hand dissipates. And now you’re bleeding all over the place, and you think if you look hard enough you can see parts of what are supposed to be your lungs, but you can’t really.
When you come to retrieve your leg, you find yourself met with a cute surprise in the form of one of those rods laying on the ground next to your body. You take your prosthetic back, shove the wooden leg into your inventory, and quietly fix the past rendition of your’s mask, not at all grimacing at the ability to see straight through your chest. So what if you’re used to dying, it doesn’t mean that you like seeing your own corpse have gruesome injuries.
And now comes the question of actually using the rod. You have no idea, as you teleport home before some creature made of light can take this small victory away from you.
“You point to where you want to go,” Fizban—or, whatever his name is, since even he doesn’t remember—says, book in hand. You’ve noticed that it’s an old spell tome with handwritten notes all over each page, but he’s holding it upside down, and his hat is pulled over his eyes, so you think that he might just be doing it to look sophisticated. If he even knows what that word is. “Ah, let me see that.”
You pass him the rod. And then he spends twenty minutes inspecting it, all while you’re awkwardly standing there and waiting for him to give it back.
“This was made by my old friend—what was his name again? Oh, yes, it was Fizban!” You almost laugh. Almost. “It’s got his sigil right there, you see? He used to make rods like there was no tomorrow, even in his old age! And these enchantments are fine! Lovely letter work as always, Fizban!”
You take it back.
“Yes, yes, you point it where you wish to go. Let an old man reminisce, won’t you Emily?” And then you display your confusion about the far too simple instruction by doing it, and you stare Fizban in the eyes as you don’t teleport away. “Maybe you need to wave it!” He pulls a wand out of his beard, which you have no idea how he stores things in, and waves it in the air before shooting a beam of ice at the ground. Which, somehow, freezes the daytime sand of the desert solid. “Try waving it, my…I can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl!”
Honestly, you can’t either.
You try waving it. The end lights up by just a little, but still nothing. You ask him if maybe, just maybe, the rod doesn’t work.
Then he takes it, waves it once, and he’s outside of the building.
And now you’re grumbling as you walk home with literally no idea how to use it. You’ve tried concentrating super hard on where you want to go, tried waving it like Fizban did his wand, and you’re at the point where you’re considering asking Jumandi if you just can’t use this. You walk to the backyard and shoot some dummies, before you sit down and just stare at the night’s sky.
The trees rustle, and you jerk in that direction, arm flinging the rod—
You stumble backwards and fall flat on your ass, bright pink particles sparking off of your body and dissipating quickly. You think you might be glowing pink, with how many sparkles you’re giving off, and your gloves shine seem to agree with you.
Then you feel sick, and your head is spinning, and you lay down on your side until the feeling passes. You shoot the zombie that’s coming towards you dead in the eyes with your crossbow, barely even bothering to spare it a glance as you do so.
“You’re gonna kill Duke Fishron?!” Timmy asks as soon as you pass him the fish that he requested. It was much less violent than a spider fish, this time, a star fish which you grabbed from the lake that Shiitake’s little island is build over. “I dunno, seems like a bit more of a challenge than you can handle, with your missing leg and all. That thing’s super dangerous, you know! It’ll rip you up, and then I won’t have a super helpful servant to get me fish! I mean, not servant…Friend!”
You really want to tell him that you know that the duke fishron is dangerous. You want to pull up your sleeve and show off the bite marks that run through your side, or the stomach acid burns that you got from Plantera, or you want to tell him about that time that you got blended by a big mechanical skull. Or, better, about how you lost your leg. The only thing stopping you is your thin sense of morality, because, fuck’s sake, he’s a child . You can’t just traumatize him like that. He doesn’t need to know that his Supreme Helper Minion (he means Friend) dies on a regular basis.
“Yer killin’ that beast,” Jake says, matter of factly. “Ye ask that green person about that thing, he’ll tell ye that ye ain’t standin’ no chance against it.” You cover Timmy’s ears and remind him of your…Estrangement. “Yer just askin for trouble. But I ain’t gonna stop ye, go on and die as many times as ye want!”
“You’ve died before?” Timmy asks, and you and Jake both meet eyes, even through your mask, with concerned expressions. The child takes a few moments to let that sink in, before he breaks into this super wide grin. “That’s…So cool ! You’re an immortal minion! Even better! Now I don’t have to worry about you dying on the job!”
You’ll omit how many times you’ve died. Or how many ways you’ve died. Or any of the finer details.
For the sake of simplicity, you’ve switched into your lightest armor and tossed your gun, leaving you with your bow and the rod. You’re still sticking to ichor arrows—you’d be a fucking idiot if you didn’t—and are keeping most of your accessories on you, though the cloak has got to go. You strap your prosthetic on super tight, making sure that you won’t lose it to the water that you can’t swim in without a potion (for some reason), and then your golden bobber plops into the water and you settle in to wait.
It’s fifteen whole ass minutes before the bobber drops beneath the water and you’re reeling in. The line snaps, naturally, and you pull out your bow, knocking it and aiming at where the water is rippling. There, from the depths, rises Duke Fishron, and it looks just as pissed as always. You’re not quite at that point, but you’re sure that you will be later on.
It dashes at you, as the fight usually goes, and you shoot at it. Pretty simple, as you move away and keep out of the bubbles. It’s when what you like to call phase two hits that you actually have to turn on your brain to not get eaten by sharknados, and even then it’s not that big of a deal. The water ripples around where the tornados break the water, and you can feel the wind lapping at your face and thrashing your hair, though you keep your distance.
It’s almost easy, now that you’ve gotten used to it.
And then the moment that you break the barrier that you’ve been hitting, you fumble.
It stops moving. The wind ceases.
And then the water from the ocean, all the way from the shoreline to the basin, is dragged upwards to the sky, blocking out the sun and leaving you in a blue, misty arena where you can’t see five feet in front of you. The only thing you can make out is Duke Fishron’s eyes, piercing yellow throughout the fog, and even those disappear after a moment.
You hear a woosh, and then a growl.
You whip around—
Teeth, right in your face. You have no time to react—
Panickily, you swing the rod to the side, and then you stumble, glowing pink through the blue. Your moment of safety is interrupted by another woosh behind you, followed by a growl that feels far too close .
You dash out of the way, rolling on the platforms to maintain your momentum through your stumble, and then draw back your bow. Fine. Be that fucking way. If the fish can have a hat full of tricks then so can you.
It dashes twice, so you do too. You roll along your platform until it stops, then you shoot it. And then you decide to try something new, and you try to shoot it while you’re dashing, because whatever, if you’re going to die a horrible death then make it now rather than later.
One of the dashes catches your prosthetic leg. And, in classic you luck, it slips right off, and you fall on your next step back.
Instead of letting this be the end, though, you grit your teeth and drop down platforms, free falling to the bottom of the ocean while the fish follows you. It gives you free shots that you could only see in your dreams, and you’re pretty sure your mouth is watering from how delicious it feels to be able to shoot at something while it can’t reach you, before you slam into the basin and you think you feel your back break.
And then a pile of blood and guts comes down heavy on you too, and you think you feel even more of your bones snap.
And then the entirety of the ocean’s water content comes down too, all at once, a torrential storm that finishes you off. Either that or it’s the lack of air in your lungs at the depths of the sea which does the trick.
Fetching your leg was a nightmare, but hey, at least it’s all in tact.
The treasure bag stinks like rotten fish, which makes sense if you think about it hard enough. Which, you don’t bother to, because why would you think super hard if you could just not ? You rip into it, and out spills the contents of the bag onto the floor of your living room, hearing metal and wood clatter into each other, along with some sort of yucky, oily fish stuff that deeps into your floorboards.
Fucking disgusting. You’re going to need to replace the floor again, aren’t you?
However, there’s something really nice that catches your eye in the pile of things that sit before you. And it isn’t the wings, though you’ve heard that they’re better than your current ones. You push aside a weird water gun looking thing, and then the purple and blue staff, and then the flail and the truffle too.
There’s a turquoise bow, with spines and a mouth looking shape where you would notch the bow. It glimmers in the candlelight of your living room, and, for a moment, you forget about the putrid stench in favor of taking ahold of the new bow, gently, like a newly spawned terrarian, and inspecting it.
You take it out back and ready your shot with it. The hold is a little awkward, but you can manage, and you stick an arrow on the string, knocking it, before you draw it back. And then you let go, and five arrows shoot from the bow, each imbedding into the target dummy’s chest. It just about destroys it, as it tips over and you see the hay stuffing that’s used in place of guts spill all over your lawn.
You kick the pressure plate on the floor of the concrete path, and the statue turns red and dripping as a blood zombie emerges from it. You shoot it, and its guts are flung all around as you watch the bow rip into it.
You think you’ll call it Tsunami. Something just seems right about that name.