Chapter 10.
' This cheeky little bastard... He's mocking me, right to my face, isn't he...' I thought, my left eye twitched in irritation as I stared at the boy's annoying calm face.
"What's wrong? Can't you do it?" Artria chimed in, her voice dripping with a fake sweetness that was far more insulting than an outright scream.
"Since you were so eager to claim them as yours, you should be able to catch them all without any trouble, right? Or was all that talk just for show?" The girl joined her friend, the two of them crossing their arms and staring at me with identical smug looks that made me want to grind my new teeth together.
These two little pricks were just standing there, waiting with bated breath to watch me make a complete and total fool of myself.
"Tsk, to think such a simple task would be enough to stun the two of you. You really are ignorant," I snapped back, refusing to let them see me sweat.
Not wanting to end up as the loser in this pathetic power struggle, I decided I had to at least try my luck, even if I was making it up as I went along.
"Just stand by and watch. I'll show you what a real merfolk is capable of," I scoffed, flicking my powerful shark tail with as much arrogance as I could muster before swimming upward toward the shimmering silver cloud of the school of fish.
I stopped a few meters below them, the sunlight glinting off thousands of scales like a million tiny mirrors.
I didn't even need to glance back down to know that those two were still staring at me, their eyes likely wide as they waited for me to fail.
They were a pair of rotten apples, through and through, but as I looked up at the sheer volume of fish, my bravado began to leak out of me like air from a punctured tire.
'Still though... how on earth am I actually supposed to catch these things?' I wondered, my mind racing through every nature documentary I'd ever seen.
'I could try picking them off one at a time...' My inner voice trailed off as soon as the thought formed, mostly because I realized that was a fool's errand.
Sure, my new hands were designed with webbed fingers and claws that could easily snatch one of these little things out of the water, but there were just too many of them.
They easily surpassed hundreds; honestly, there were probably thousands of tuna swirling in that bait ball.
Picking them off one by one would take hours, maybe even days, and I'd probably starve to death before I made a dent in the population.
As I hovered there, a realization hit me. Why were these two even looking to catch this many fish in the first place? It didn't make any sense.
It would be far easier for them to hunt the smaller groups or the random stragglers scattered all over the reef.
'Could they be hunting for a large group? But why?' I pondered, my eyes narrowing as I studied the school.
'If the people they were helping were injured or starving, it might make sense, but judging by their earlier expressions, I highly doubted it. Those two didn't look like the grieving or desperate types at all; they looked like kids on a failed errand.'
The idea of them doing this to sell the catch was plausible, but I hadn't noticed any signs of a developed civilization, in the area which made that notion far less believable.
Realizing I wasn't going to get an answer by staring at fish, I turned around and swam back down toward the duo.
Of course, the looks on their faces grew even more insulting the closer I got, but I forced myself to endure it until I reached them.
"Oh? Given up already?" the boy commented, doing a truly useless job of trying to hide the humor in his voice.
"What's the matter? Feeling a bit overwhelmed by a few little fish?" Artria added, her smirk widening.
I let out a long, slow breath to steady my nerves and keep myself from snapping at them. I needed information more than I needed to win an argument.
If I could possibly know where their settlement was, perhaps I could flee there and hide from that sea witch for awhile until I could safely reach the surface.
"Just why are the two of you trying to catch them all in the first place?" I asked, raising a brow and looking from one to the other. "It seems like a lot of unnecessary work for two people."
"I don't think there's any reason why we should tell someone like you," the girl said, frowning deeply. She was clearly unwilling to give an inch of ground to a "wicked shark."
I wasn't actually vexed by her prickly reaction; rather, I was even more intrigued by their secrecy. There was definitely something going on here that I wasn't privy to.
"How about this," I suggested, glancing at the two of them as I patiently waited for their defensive walls to drop just a fraction.
"Why don't the three of us work together to catch all of them? I have a plan that would definitely work, but I can't do it alone. We help each other, and everyone wins." I watched them closely, wondering if their pride was stronger than their desire to actually succeed for once.