I'm a Stingray?

Chapter 45: The holy protection

"What?" Tim questioned, genuinely confused as his tone stood mild in manner.

Although hesitant to explain, Amie chirped word by word slowly. "They want to attach a stink bomb on your fin, you're to sting it with your tail once finding where the most pufferfish stay. This chief said that the stink is so bad, whomever swims close to it or past it, dies."

Timmy let silence stretch for a moment, soon as he caught up on what this entire situation was all about.

Wanting a second thought, he turned to the system and got into counselling. "Is it a good idea to kill all those pufferfish?"

[In terms of spreading solitude, it's a terrible idea. You can't become neutral with every lesser species of the reef, if you go around killing fish just because you are asked to.]

"That's smart, I'm not doing it." The young boy thought out, this has been the most reason of which the system projected. There were wiser times of course but he can't understand everything.

Glaring at the pufferfish, he wholeheartedly asked even after considering the odds of ruining relations with these deal offerers. "Why would I want to kill them? Do they ruin families like the sharks?"

Rummy felt hesitant to translate this part, he even swam a few inches back as he started it off with one word to the pufferfish and then gradually explained the rest.

This tribe of course had something to say about it, and Amie was more than willing to translate. "As we said earlier, the war between these tribes lasted a long while by now. But... the opposing tribe did something uncomfortable in the most recent attack."

Most definitely intrigued, Tim asked. "What did they do?"

Upon such a question, he heard the two communicate for a long while. One would think that they were debating plans for world domination, but no they were fish.

And so Amie came with a grand explanation. "Looks like the enemy pufferfish did a lot of evil stuff. But the most recent evil deed was... ****."

"Oh." Tim thought, building up a rather stable reason to fight now.

"Child ****." Rummy corrected what his sister couldn't say.

"Oh!" At this point, the blue dotted sea pancake's rage topped that of 10 individuals under just a few short seconds.

Entirely woken up to this point, he immediately volunteered. "When can I bomb those losers?"

Apparently this was described earlier through conversations that seemed gibberish to Timothy, so granting an explanation was easy. "Not before you eat the holy protection. The den of these enemies has some kind of weird water that can kill any fish that wasn't born to handle it."

"Uhhh... this sounds dangerous. But what's this holy protection?" At this point he didn't know what to expect, but hoped that it would be marble shrimp.

"Well it's..." Amie tried to explain but got instantly interrupted by Timothy, demanding. "Wait wait wait. What's the pay for bombing these enemies? How many pufferfish will be sent to our tribe?"

Broke the cycle of laying out a good plan at this point, but after a bit of translations, Tim found out. "All 7 of them will join the reef. Their heritage is ruined due to the war and because of sharks as well. So they have nothing to stay here for, they're all in for protecting the reef."

His enthusiasm spiking like a needle when found in a haystack, Tim yelled out. "Yes! That's the boss stuff. Lay the holy on me baby!"

It took just a few seconds for the holy stuff to arrive, as the chief of these pufferfish literally spit it out.

The holy substance, that's what they called it. It looked like dead coral, grey and colourless. Well actually it was dead coral, so Tim didn't really understand what was holy about it, especially since it came out of a fish.

The bite sized chunk of coral was covered with this green slime, he wants to think that's because of it being in the pufferfish's mouth. Might be from something else, but he doesn't want to know.

"Okay, so I should eat that?" Tim asked, most definitely struck with hesitancy at this point.

But only saw the fish around him speak out and flap their fins, gesturing clear agreement. So he got closer to it and muffled, "Okay... can't be that bad right?"

Getting closer, he could sense that the piece of coral was abnormally hot... although it was underwater. This can't be because it was on the pufferfish's belly, "So the warmth makes it holy?"

And then he took a bite off it, his level 3 jaws struggled to crunch through it. So the young man had to crackle it through his powerful jaws a few times before it became crumbled enough to be swallowed.

After chucking it down, the only thing he could think of was. "I hope it's not that hard when I poop it out."

Later on they brought this blue, smooth textured tool, bean shaped. A pufferfish chewed on some sea grass and spat on the blue bean after placing it on Tim's fin.

Afterwards Amie reminded. "Remember, stay hidden and throw the stink bomb when you spot a lot of the enemies. Then just swim away as fast as you can. The enemy's den is that way."

Barely listening to what the needlefish said, Tim's surroundings started becoming weird, suddenly all the yellow coral around him became red.

Red and... well.

The coral began to speak, although in a language that Timmy couldn't understand, but yet it didn't sound gibberish.

"Niaaaaaaau!" Tim hollered with the strength of all his organs, piercing the water to what felt like 1,000 km/h.

Although, it was just his usual maximum speed of 3/mph.

After swimming about 50 meters, smelling the scent that became far too familiar.

His already corrupted vision, got captivated by what we can call a large green cloud, right after all the red coral went away.