When his daze wore off, Kin found himself in a gigantic cavern of steel at least fifty meters across, illuminated only by soft glowing blue lights set in the ground. The ceiling disappeared into the blackness above, which absorbed his headlight like some elder beast.

He was lost.

Strangely, after he calmed down from the initial shock of seeing the huge creature, Mion measured his heartbeat and found that it was beating normally. Not overclocking, not thudding, just contracting and expanding as normal.

In other words, Kin was perfectly calm.

Exhaling, Kin turned to look at the bag in his hands. In his haste, several nutrition tubes had fallen out, leaving him with a grand total of eight. If he consumed one every two days, that would leave him with sixteen days of life, with seven days of getting progressively weaker before he starved. As for rebreathers, one would last three days, and he had eight.

He had just over three weeks to get home.

“Say, Mion.”

“Yes?”

“Why am I not crushed by the water pressure?” Kin knew that there were kilometres of water around him, and that the monstrous liquid pressure could crack domes and rip steel, yet the human body seemed unaffected by such forces of nature. How could Kin’s soft tissues be stronger than metal?

“Well…” Mion paused as she dredged up the necessary information from her registry, her parsing engine pausing while doing so.

“The rebreather you use has gas calibrated that is compressed at four thousand times of the atmospheric standard in the Outposts, so breathing it equalises your body’s internal pressure and prevents you from being crushed. It has nine point eight percent oxygen, because with the pressure of the gas, one breath of normal air would kill you from oxygen poisoning. The remainder of the gas is forty percent helium, twenty-nine percent nitrogen, and twenty-one point two percent silica treated with solium, which causes the molecules to dissociate, like in a gas, so you can breathe it harmlessly.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“...Ah.”

“Shall we go?”

Kin seemed to have forgotten that he was lost. “Oh, of course, yes, let’s…”

A familiar, sonorous wail drifted through the water.

“Oh no.” Kin grabbed at the pressure pistol that he stowed safely in a pocket. He quickly turned to go, but his ankle snagged on something hard. “What’s this?”

The object was the size of a paperback book and about six centimetres thick. One of the short sides had a small glassy dome on it, about four millimetres long, like a laser pointer.

Upon experimentation, Kin found out that it was a laser pointer. A long brilliant red lance penetrated the gloom around him when he pressed a button. “What’s this for?” Kin examined the black rectangle carefully and found that on the other side was a small screen that had three numbers of it. An idea started forming in his head. Kin swam to one side of the metal cavern and pointed the laser at the far wall, reading the numbers on the screen.

38.5. Kin hit a button. 385. Another one. 0.038. Finally, the centre one. 38.5 again. Now he knew. This was not a mere plaything or illuminator. This was a tool for measuring distance.

A ruler, with a staggering range.

Finally.

The wailing again. Closer, and more guttural. More hungry.

Kin looked to the top of the hall, shrouded in gloom, and pointed the laser ruler. 142. He slowly started swimming in circles, with an urgent relaxedness. 143. 141. 145, 146. Then, jackpot. 157.

A sudden change in ceiling height probably meant a hole. A way out. And Kin wasn’t keen on taking the other exits at ground level, where he might be ambushed by Sirens.

So Kin swam up, and up. When he reached the darkness that caked the ceiling, he swam up, when he reached the end of the tether of security provided by azure lights glowing in the black like will-o’the wisps, he swam up, when confronted with the yawning void ahead of him, he swallowed his fear and swam up, and up, and up.

Higher and higher, into the belly of the beast.