“What are you talking about?” I looked around and it still seemed to be the edge of the bay between the middle island and the eastern one, “Why… Where do you think we are?”

“I convinced you to turn back and explore the western side of the island, but this looks like the eastern bay… So how did we get here?” EMP was shaking even though she had a stern and serious expression on her face.

“Umm, no, I convinced you to keep going east, and we did… Hence why we’re at the bay, but I’ve got a really bad feeling. Like something terrifying is going to pop out of the water at any moment and eat us, so maybe we should start paddling towards the fucking shore now instead of freaking out?” Without waiting for EMP to respond, I used my paddle to turn away from the open bay and head back towards the shore… But it was way slower with just me paddling and her looking around anxiously with that shotgun in her hands.

She eventually said, “We’re being hunted by a Siren. Hopefully.”

Hearing that, I obviously started paddling way faster than before. Even though I didn’t really know what a Siren was, I honestly didn’t want to find out if it could be avoided.

EMP’s voice trembled as she softly spoke, “The bay is incredibly dangerous. There’s no way I would have taken you out so far if I wasn’t being manipulated… Michael, I’m really sorry. It was such a wonderful ‘date’ but I ended up putting you in danger.”

She seemed like she was about to start crying, so I looked back to check and see if she was fine. And then I yelped really loudly in a high-pitched voice, almost falling out of the boat in shock. What? How the fuck would you react if you looked back and saw a bunch of giant purple tentacles shooting up out of the water around the back of your canoe?!

Before I had time to react, the tentacles grabbed the back half of our boat, one of them even smacked EMP across her chest as she turned around to see what was happening. The combination of the boat stopping caused her to fly into my chest and drop her shotgun into the front hollow part of the canoe… Basically it was unreachable in an emergency situation.

Although she was injured, it didn’t stop her from reacting quickly. She screamed, “Don’t stop rowing! I’ll deal with this!” Then she grabbed the gun in my holster, turned off the safety and started firing rounds like crazy into the meaty tentacles that were latched onto the canoe.

Pissing yourself in fear is kinda unrealistic in my opinion. After all, I have a super hard time pissing even when I’m slightly anxious, much less in mortal peril. So my first reaction was to first, have Ana sit down on the ground and close her eyes, completely entering that nice state when both our brains are functioning at full power.

After that, I rowed the boat. Technically not rowing, since that’s when you have two paddles and use them both at the same time in a certain way… Well, you get what I mean. I moved the canoe forward with my singular oar as quickly as humanly possible, while the tentacles were slowly being removed as the gunshots rang out. A .357 magnum is actually pretty powerful. And while the tentacles were huge, they weren’t Kraken level 3-masted pirate ship sinking size. Realistically, hippos are one of the most dangerous animal on Earth, since they can flip over small fishing boats pretty easily and murder the people inside. But that occurs in a settling where the water level isn’t too high.

Even if that giant octopus or squid tried its hardest, there was no way for it to flip the boat over directly as long as we kept our balance well enough. Not to mention that I was actually pulling it along, rather than it pulling us. So I shouted, “Don’t waste your ammo! We’re almost to the shore! If it doesn’t let go, we’ll pull it onto the beach and have calamari!”

“I have to keep hurting her so she can’t fuck with my mind! Raaah~!” After hearing her ‘roar’, there was suddenly a loud crackling like a goddamn lightning strike that caused me to look back out of reflex. What I saw was EMP lying down against me, while panting hard and struggling to lift up her arms to keep shooting, but she was out of ammo. Meanwhile, there were scorch marks on the wood near the back of the canoe and a flash-fried tentacle still twitching uncontrollably only a few feet behind me. It was totally amputated and blue blood was squirting out of the burnt stump that was sticking straight up in the air.

“Aaaaah~!” Followed by that terrible screech that made me feel like my ears would start bleeding, if they weren’t already aching so bad from the gunshots and thunder. The other tentacles started to come loose, but at that moment I got up and ran to the back of the boat with the long wooden oar in hand. Let’s just say it was ‘instinct’ or maybe I went a little crazy in the heat of the moment, but we had already hit the sand, so I knew that this was probably the best chance I had to deal with the problem once and for all…

I jumped off the back of the boat and slammed the ‘sharpest’ edge of the paddle down onto the face that was revealed once the waves pulled back. And then my knee hit her solar plexus, though she was already unconscious at that point, so she didn’t react much. I honestly thought she might have died from the combination of blood loss, head trauma and electrocution, but when I dragged the massive body onto the beach… She was actually breathing and bleeding.

“Hmmm…” Once the adrenaline started to die down a bit, I let out a sigh and didn’t really know what to do. The harsh sunlight was definitely unhealthy for most sea creatures, but it wouldn’t cause instant death, especially to something so damn tenacious. Even though she was probably trying to murder us, I couldn’t just bash her fucking head in with the oar until she stopped looking so… ‘Human’, right? And she did look like a human from the waist up. To the point where I honestly thought she was some kinda mythological creature.

She had a bald head, not surprising since she was basically a cephalopod and hair wouldn’t really make much sense. Her skin was soft and bouncy, but she was relatively skinny, as if she was missing some of her lower ribs. Not that normal human anatomy really makes sense for a person who is half-squid, but you get what I mean. The facial features were kinda flat overall, but not to the extent of having no nose. She had relatively wide nostrils, maybe so that she could breathe in more water or something? There weren’t any gills though, which kinda confused me. Then I looked down and noticed the big ‘holes’ where her hips should be, then remembered what octopi looked like, before realizing her upper body probably had lungs, while the lower body had the gills.

I’ll admit that my mind immediately went to how kinky it would be to fuck an octopus in those holes but, fortunately I’m not that depraved yet. I could see her unnecessarily large breasts heaving up and down as she struggled to breathe through her nose, while blue blood dripped from her forehead that was split open by my oar earlier. She was surprisingly not that muscular; maybe because she didn’t use her upper body much and mostly swam with her lower half? At most she just looked like she wasn’t fat, but not skinny or beefy, just kinda neutral. Umm, maybe my aesthetics are a little skewed from being around muscle-girls and literally ‘being’ a muscular woman myself, but she could probably pass as a mainstream pornstar I guess? Why am I thinking so hard about this shit? Let’s get back to the story.

I literally only looked at her for a few seconds before EMP screamed, “Wait! Michael, please don’t kill her!” Well, I was holding the bloody and slightly chipped paddle over the body of an unconscious woman, so it wasn’t strange that she thought I was going to finish the job.

“Pft~!” I started laughing hysterically as I saw the crying face looking at me from the boat a few meters away, “Honestly I thought you were gonna be upset that I wasn’t killing her… But then again, you are a vegetarian, so I guess it’s not that weird.”

The tall, skinny blonde-girl hobbled out of the canoe as she rearranged her straw hat back onto her head, then came over and handed the empty revolver to me, “Sorry… I thought, well, I know she tried to kill us but still… Her name is Scylla. She’s Eve-91c. Well, maybe she didn’t really want to hurt us? After all, she could have easily tricked me into shooting you in the very beginning. Maybe that’s why she hit and disarmed me first? She could have been afraid that I would accidentally hurt you or myself in the confusion?”

“So you know this girl?” I sighed and holstered the revolver, then bent down to try to carry the giant octopus-girl over to the boat… From waist to head, she was about the same height as my entire body. Yeah, holy shit. I was wondering if it was even possible to fit her in the canoe to be honest.

Fortunately EMP suggested, “Don’t put her in the boat. Let’s just tie her waist with rope and then hurry back home… Umm, I mean, my home. I have a saltwater fishtank in my house that’s big enough to keep her in…” With her help I was able to carry the huge ‘Scylla’ over to the boat and tie her up a bit, then we got in the canoe. Of course, we had to be careful when we pushed off or she would’ve gotten crushed under the keel in the process…

“I know this sounds really weird, but I actually umm, kind of raised Scylla. As a pet. I know it’s wrong, I just, she was just so cute as a baby and I was afraid she’d be eaten by all the big fish in the ocean. I let her go when she was big enough to fend for herself and she still comes by every so often… But there are a lot of other Sirens out there. I had no idea which one was attacking us or why. Now that I can see it’s Scylla, I’m guessing she probably… Well, she probably wanted to mate with you. And even though I’m her ‘mother’, that wouldn’t stop her from trying to capture you.”