His feelers bunched suddenly tight and straight, and he shot backwards, at the same moment spouting a jet of black fluid from beneath his beaked mouth.

The black jet spread instantly in a thick cloud, staining the clear, green water so deeply that Little Sword could not see through it at all.

Instead of the soft flesh he had expected it to pierce, his sword met nothing but a mass of sticky anemones, shearing them from their base.
"In a fury, Little Sword dashed this way and that, trusting to luck that he would strike his elusive enemy in the darkness.

But that enemy's eyes, with their enormous bulging surface and the jetty background to their lenses, could see clearly where the jewel-like eyes of the young swordfish could make out nothing.

Little Sword, emerging into the half light at the edge of the cloud, was just about to give up the idle search, when something small but firm fastened itself upon his side, so sharply that it seemed to bite into the flesh.
"Little Sword's tense muscles quivered at the shock, and he gave a mighty leap which should, by all his customary reckoning, have carried him fifty feet from the spot.