Sometime before Light’s painful reunion with his older brother, Mera found herself staring down adversaries from the Demonkin Nation in front of a Human Kingdom border village. She had transformed into something monstrous to intimidate her opponents, and she let her rasping, signature cackle reverberate around the area to add to the effect.
“Is this some dumb joke?” Mera sneered derisively. “I thought I was finally about to face somebody who’s actually worth my time, but all I see before me is another pushover!”
Yet this was all an act, since Mera already knew she was facing someone whose power level dwarfed her own. She had forced herself to say that bombastic line more to encourage herself to engage in what would most likely be a losing battle than anything else.
Mera’s opponent, Goh, groaned in response, the freak of nature towering over him obviously proving to be a letdown. “S’far as I can see, you’re the only pushover here. For god’s sake, why do I gotta take care of this goofy-lookin’ lightweight? This is such bullshit.”
Unlike Mera, Goh wasn’t putting on an act. Prince Voros of the Demonkin Nation had ordered Goh and Doc to lead a company of demon soldiers to lay waste to the Human Kingdom village nearest to the border between the two nations. Prior to this mission, Voros had repeatedly sent soldiers to destroy this same village to punish Queen Lilith of the Human Kingdom, but all of the assault teams had been wiped out by a mysterious defender.
On approaching the village, Goh’s team got to witness the enigmatic warrior that had been giving the Demonkin Nation so much trouble for themselves: a two-meter-plus tall monster with the body of a voluptuous human woman, but with the head of a cobra, and arms and legs that resembled a dragon’s, complete with boulder-like scales and long, flesh-ripping claws at the ends. In fact, the chimeric being’s four limbs were so thick, they looked disproportionately out of place.
The demons following Goh and Doc cowered in fright at the sight of this monster, but Goh’s reaction was markedly different, in that it was one of complete, undisguised disappointment. Even Doc found himself unable to view the snake-headed creature as any kind of threat, the masked Master merely looking on in mild fascination at it, like a researcher observing the behavior of a newly discovered life-form.
“It doesn’t appear to be a living creature that has been artificially created using a human,” Doc mused. “On the other hand, I doubt this type of creature occurs naturally in the wild...”
Mera threw back her cobra head and cackled. “Keep up the cool act, dopes! We’ll see how long it is before you run off scared!”
✦ ✦ ✦
Mera lunged forward at a speed that belied her massive frame and swung one of her dragon arms at her adversary. If she had been facing A-rank adventurers, they would have been sliced up into mincemeat by her claws before they’d even realized what had happened.
“Graagh!” But when the dust cleared, it was actually Mera who had come off worse, having been slammed to the ground on her back, though while she’d had the wind knocked out of her, the rocky scales covering her body had prevented her from sustaining any real injuries.
The chimera immediately leaped to her feet again and attempted another sweep with her arm at the Masters, but before she could fully execute the move, something grabbed one of her claws and forced her to drop to one knee. All of a sudden, it was Goh towering over and looking down on Mera, who he hadn’t even needed to hurt to bring her to her knees. All he had done was grab a claw and send her off-balance.
Mera began chuckling nervously, her other hand planted firmly on the ground to steady herself. “What are you, some kind of mage? Or did you use a magic item to pull off this trick?”
“Why would I need to use magic or an item?” Goh retorted, sighing with slight irritation. “But I guess I don’t really expect a freak show like you to know how I handled ya. All you’re here to do is wave around a bunch of muscles, claws, and fangs that’ve been given to ya to put on a show.”
Despite his phrasing, Goh wasn’t intentionally mocking Mera, but instead speaking in the kind of laconic tone of someone presenting the facts as he thought he saw them. Once he felt he had done this satisfactorily enough, he released Mera’s claw and took his first swing at her. His fist didn’t travel particularly fast—in fact, the attenuated speed even gave Mera time to cross her arms in front of her in an attempt to block the punch—but he still managed to tear through the chimera’s arms, and land a blow that crushed her fangs and sent her large frame hurtling backward, plowing a Mera-sized rut into the dirt.
“B-But how?” she grunted. “I thought I’d shielded myself perfectly.”
“You think you have time to cradle your bruises, ya little freak?” Goh bounded over to Mera in a flash and aimed a low kick at her dragon-like feet. He wasn’t using his full strength, but the shock of the strike was enough to make both of Mera’s legs go limp, despite the layers of scales and muscle designed to protect the bones underneath.
Next, Goh drove his fist deep into Mera’s abdomen, causing her to double over in pain, then without wasting a second, he booted Mera in the chin, and with his leg still raised, swiftly landed another ankle strike on top of her groggy head. Goh then piledrived Mera’s body into the ground with enough force to cause cracks to spread outward from the point of impact.
Goh had made short work of the cobra-headed monster and had done it with such seamless artistry, the feat wouldn’t have looked out of place on the stage. But instead of admiring his work, the Master was visibly annoyed at a mistake he had made.
“Crap. I let her get some of her nasty blood on me,” Goh muttered, lazily wiping some of Mera’s sprayed blood off his cheek. “Thought I’d done it clean.” He proceeded to wipe his bloodstained fist on his clothes until eventually being interrupted by Doc.
“Mr. Goh! Mr. Goh!” Doc finally chirped up. “Would you perhaps allow me to retain this creature for research purposes?”
“Free country, so to speak,” Goh shrugged. “But I’m afraid you’re jumpin’ the gun.”
Goh leaped backward just as Mera regained consciousness and roared at her opponents, her mouth breathing fire laced with poison like a cobra-headed dragon would. He then jumped up into the air to avoid the venomous flames that followed, while Doc directed his own bodyguard to position himself in a spot where the mad scientist and the demon soldiers could use him as a shield.
“M-Mr. Goh, why aren’t you protecting us?!” Doc yelped. “If it wasn’t for my bodyguard just then, we would all have been reduced to ashes! May I remind you that I’m not anywhere near as adept at combat as yourself?”
“Well, if you’ve got a bodyguard, put him to work, for pity’s sake!” Goh snapped back. “I’m not gonna go around doin’ his job for him!”
It should be mentioned at this juncture that Doc hadn’t instructed his bodyguard to shield the demon soldiers purely out of the goodness of his heart. No, Voros had given Doc an extra assignment of brainwashing some of the soldiers to assassinate Diablo on their return to their homeland, so as it stood, he could ill afford to lose a section of the soldiers, let alone all of them.
Despite bleeding everywhere, Mera cackled again, her defiance indomitable. “I’m not down and out yet, you worms! It’ll take a hell of a lot more than that to beat—”
But before she could complete her attempt at further provocation, her eyes landed on the cloaked figure who had just shielded Doc and the demon commandos from her dragon’s breath. The heat from the flames had burned away his hood, providing her with a full view of his face.
The owner of a second pair of eyes was just as shocked at what she was seeing. The real Mera had been watching the scene unfold from the shadows in order to gather some intel about the new opponents. The cobra-headed Mera fighting Goh was a spawn the original chimera had created using more than a third of her body tissue.
That guy in the hood... thought the real Mera in her hiding place. He looks just like our master!
In fact, the only real points of difference between the two were that this human male was slightly older and had dark brown hair, while the youthful Light’s hair was jet black. Otherwise, the bodyguard could easily have passed for Light’s look-alike, at least when it came to his facial features. In that moment, Mera could have sworn she had seen a vision of her beloved dungeon master as a grown young man. Like the other denizens of the Abyss, Mera’s devotion to Light ran deep enough that she could instantly recognize him in a crowd, and Doc’s bodyguard looked too much like Light for her to dismiss it as merely a close resemblance.
The only other explanation Mera could come up with was that, by sheer happenstance, she had stumbled across Light’s long-lost older brother. The shock of this realization was so complete, she forgot all about the mortal threat posed by Goh and nearly swooned.
“What the...” the Master yelled. “Guess we got one more rat hiding out back there.”
This menacing pronouncement quickly brought Mera back to her senses. Oh, shoot! I can’t let Dreadlocks waste me here! I need to take this info back to master, pronto!
Mera’s momentary lapse in composure over the sight of her master’s would-be relative had caused her to completely forget about concealing her presence, and the energy inadvertently released by the Level 7777 chimera didn’t escape Goh’s senses. This meant that even though she wanted to stay and collect more intel, she instinctively knew it was time to leave.
The chimera and her spawn locked eyes for a brief moment, which was the signal for the cobra-headed fighter to do everything it could to stall Goh so that Mera could escape. The spawn was already aware of the duty it needed to fulfill if the situation called for it. After directing the spawn to carry out its final task, Mera released her SSR Teleportation card in order to go tell Light of this game-changing news: that someone who looked like his brother was working with his enemies.