The octopus tongue thrashed about wildly, whipping left and right. It was searching over the chairs and reaching for more easy food. Declan scrambled to stay out of the way, backing up over chairs and luggage floating in the water. The prehensile tentacle brushed against him, and then immediately slithered back, detecting his presence and coiling in to launch another piercing strike with its harpoon-tongue.
The panicking kid screamed.
Declan had exactly one card to play and he played it – “Scorching Spear!”
The spell exploded into another vent of steam, launching him out of the way.
As the harpoon-tongue stabbed into the luggage racks, the broad-faced man lunged forward and swiped at it with a broadsword made of golden light. It hacked through cleanly, severing the tentacle into a stump and leaving a thrashing broken segment spraying black blood into the water.
“We can kill it! Use your abilities!” He roared.
“Yeah– ABOUT THAT!” Declan shouted. “We need to bail!”
There was a golden thread glistening in the water. It was a misty line of light, trailing out the escape door and into the darkness. It provided a tiny bit of illumination and that was a godsend, because the water was getting darker by the second, graduating through shades of ever-deeper green and towards black.
“That movement skill is incredible!” The blonde woman shouted. “Hold on, I got a survival bag from my lifeline. I might have a light we can use underwater!”
“Everyone! I can sense enemies in a short distance, so you should stick close to me!” The broad-faced man yelled. “And will someone shut that kid up!?”
In the background, the kid was still mumbling to himself, his voice peaking with terror.
“No!” Declan yelled. “We NEED to LEAVE. I can see a golden thread. It’s leading somewhere, and we need to FOLLOW.”
“Where is it?” The man asked, turning left and right.
“I think only I can see it.” Declan explained.
“Holy fuck–” The kid rocketed out of his seat, clambering desperately for the opposite window. “It– I saw– Look!”
Something was coming. It was huge, and a glowing orb hung in front of its ugly face, illuminating a massive rictus mouth full of incredibly long teeth. It resembled an anglerfish but elongated, becoming something like a sea serpent with an awful and hideous face revealed under the dim blue light, its eyes milk-white and sightless.
“Get out! Get OUT!” Declan shouted. He followed the thread to the emergency door and engaged the valve. The pressurized emergency slide engaged, punching the door out of its frame. “There is INCOMING! We need to MOVE!”
They dove through one by one, the woman out first carrying something like a glowstick. Then the other man, keeping up the middle to get as many people in his threat-detection radius as possible. Declan was last out, urging the kid to hurry. But the boy held back, shaking his head.
“I can’t swim… I c-can’t do this…”
“Oh for fucks sake.” Grabbing the kid under the arms, Declan hauled them both through the door and let off another Scorching Spear, forming a brilliant point of fire that spat out a plume of steam that launched him forward again. He sailed away from the broken plane cabin just in time to see the angler-beast’s jaws clamp down around it, crushing it with a long low rending roar of metal.
Like feeling an earthquake pass through their bones, the rippling wave of force as those massive jaws slammed down sent them all rolling back, tumbling through the water. The pull intensified as the creature dove downwards, the plane still trapped in its teeth. The descent of so much weight – it was truly the size of a mountain – threatened to pull them with it, the water sucking at them as a dim whirlpool formed in its wake.
Declan watched with horror, but he didn’t stop moving. That freakish octopus thing was still out there, and the vastness of the dark sea could hide any number of horrors. Whether he looked up or down there was a dizzying amount of water between him and anything. He could only tell which direction was which by allowing himself to sink.
As he caught up to the rest of the crew, they were looking on in horror. Declan shouted, “C’mon cadets, move move MOVE! We have ten minutes! That’s TEN MINUTES to find OXYGEN before we choke out and DIE so MOVE!” Without even thinking twice, he’d snapped back into old form, his voice bellowing across the empty water.
“Shouldn’t we go to the surface?” The man asked.
“This isn’t Earth.” Declan said, already paddling with his free arm to move past him. “We don’t know if the surface is even still there – I can’t see sunlight, can you?”
The man shook his head.
“Then don’t assume. Assuming gets you killed. Here, take the kid–” The boy had basically gone limp, and he shoved him into the broad-faced man’s hands. “I can’t swim too well with just one arm.”
He looked back. The shape of the enormous angler-serpent was still vaguely visible, a shadow of light diving down into the deep water. The octopus was nowhere to be found – but in the half-green dark of the sea Declan didn’t put any faith in his eyes. He looked to the woman, who tugged a glowstick out of her backpack and cracked it.
“Let there be light.” She said, face shining with excitement under the pale green glow.
“We can chat on the way.” Declan said, heading off any more dissent. At this point even a good idea was a bad idea if it took more than a few seconds off their timers. “MOVE!”
The other two nodded, their faces pale and strained with a tense, held-in worry. Declan swept his arms back in a broad stroke and swam past them, tracing the golden thread. It was leading down, which was worrying, but not straight down. Already he could see by its faint and dwindling light a gleam of stone in the distance.
And anywhere solid to land is a win right now…
The closer they got, the more Declan could approximate their situation. The abyssal darkness the angler-serpent had vanished into was some kind of rift in the ocean floor, yawning open. The thread was leading them somewhere close to the divide, but not directly into the rift.
As they fled downwards, hearing distant sounds like the cries of whales echo eerily through the underwater world, more details came into view. Waving fields of dark black algae shivered in the current. Massive stones stood covered with a layer of colorful corals, clinging sea-moss, and encrusted shellfish. There were even remains of buildings, a scattering of broken pillars and ruined, drowned houses.
Huh…
Down below, there was a faint light. It was shining out of a cave mouth near the kelp forest, and as Declan squinted to get a good look, something briefly moved in front of the light and went scuttling out. His eyes tried to follow, but it was already gone, its sinuous motion lost in the back-and-forth shiver of the kelp forest’s drift.
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“We’ve got movement, and we’re headed right for it!” He shouted back.
“I’m not getting anything? Maybe it’s friendly!” The man called forward.
Declan shook his head. I’m not buying anything down here being ‘friendly’. But the thread was leading him right past the kelp forest, and the dim light was so valuable he’d rather risk a fight where he could see than wander blind in the dark and hope he found the thread on the other side again.
Diving, he brushed through the forest, strands of sticky kelp slithering over his skin. Already the cold of the water was setting in, and his numb exterior barely registered the touch. He had to push flat, noodle-like strands out of the way as he fought to follow the thread, finally able to see the sandy bottom of the ocean.
“Behind you!”
He turned, and saw the octopus lunging for him. It had totally slipped his notice – its skin was able to transform in both color and texture, totally resembling a mossy seabed boulder. Now it shot quickly across the ground, each tendril reaching out and pulling its floating body forward in a rolling, bouncing run.
Acting on instinct Declan shot away with a blast of Scorching Spear, only needing to think the name to conjure a blast of steam that sent him rocketing through the forest. In one moment, he was so far ahead he could no longer see the rest of the group. Wherever he looked there was only oily black tangles of kelp.
Grabbing an outcropping of stone to slow the last of his momentum, he spun around and crouching behind it, sinking a knee into the seabed.
“Dude!” He heard the woman’s voice. “Where are you?”
“It’s still out there!” The boy screamed.
“We can’t see you! We need a signal, we don’t know where you’re going!”
But although their voices carried through the forest, in the dark and confusion he couldn’t tell where they were. Instead, his attention was focused on the palm of his hand.
He’d only barely touched the stone, but dozens of small, sharp shells clinging to the rock had slashed a dozen thin red lines across his palm. Blood was drifting into the water – and it was doing something strange. Instead of simply lifting upwards and floating towards the surface in a red trail, it was collecting into little bubbles of red, which hovered briefly above his hand then ent streaking away to the left.
!!WARNING!! Floor Boss has been awakened! Seek sanctuary or prepare to fight!
Oh fuck–
He heard it before he saw it. The roar of a predator carried through the waters, not a full-throated growl but a high, keening note like a knife being sharpened, a harsh scraping sound that set his teeth on edge.
Yeah, not sticking around to see what the local sharks look like. “HEY! I’m drawing them off of you! Head north, I’ll try to make a light. KEEP TOGETHER, KEEP CALM!” He shouted out, kicking off from the rock and firing his Scorching Spear one more time. With every use a brutal exhaustion was growing in his chest, a cold hollow feeling like the was being scraped clean from the inside. An alert had appeared in the lower left of his vision, like the exclamation mark that had started all of this.
!!WARNING!! Mana Reserve below 33%!
Before the burst of speed had run out, he was through the kelp forest. The mouth of the massive rift was just in front of him, a diving point where the stone and sand gave way to a deep plunge and infinite dark. But right in front of it, nearly falling over the edge, was what Declan first saw as the abandoned shell of a giant black lobster.
But following the light of the thread, which led into the shell from a giant tooth-marked hole in the tail, Declan realized it was some kind of machine – it glinted like metal in the light, with exposed wires and beams underneath the outer shell. The eyes were covered by glass portholes, and there were mechanical joints underneath the segmented armor.
A submarine? A weird submarine, but maybe, just maybe, it still has breathing equipment. Here’s hoping…
But just as he was about to rush towards it, and try to maybe send up a sign for the others…
He froze.
There was a rough, rust-stained patch of metal immediately above the hole in the tail. It was absolutely the same shade as the rest of the ship, but he couldn’t see rust anywhere else. And if there was a patch of rust, right above the entrance – what were the odds it had a blobby middle body and eight extending limbs?
The octopus had circled around and arrived exactly where he needed, like it already knew.
And behind him, the blood from his hand was still trailing away. Something was moving through the kelp forest now, something terribly big and unpleasantly fast pushing the strands apart and tunneling straight towards him.
He looked forward, he looked back. Danger to both sides. One predator hunting, the other lying in wait.
Wait for it…
He felt the knowledge of what he needed to do hit him square in the chest, and he grinned, feelingly the tension at the back of his spine loosen up, an almost ecstatic rush of adrenaline surging up his veins and flooding his brain with the feel-good, make-happy endorphins.
Danger without a plan was hell. Danger with a plan was a winnable game.
He began to swim forward, but slowly, slowly, letting the thing in the forest rush along his trail. Letting the octopus think he had no clue it was there, waiting to grab him the moment he went for the entrance.
And then the ‘shark’ burst out of the kelp. It had a skull shaped like a drill, a closed bud with a pointed tip. Five distinct lines separated the skull into segments, which snapped open, revealing a red mouth like a flower of teeth, a second ring of sharp spines surrounding the central throat to keep anything from escaping.
Declan felt the world slowing down as it lunged for him–
He called out “Scorching Spear!” and sent a beam of bubble-frothed water and violent steam surging from his right palm.
And in that moment the octopus’ dim bead eyes widen as it realized he wasn’t heading for the hole in the ship’s tail, but straight for the point between those eyes, with an angry monster-shark following his trail. In an instant its flesh lost the rust-colored camouflage, shocking white with fear, and it blasted off in a spray of ink.
“Scorching Spear!” As the last of his mana drained away, he redirected by firing off from his second hand, lobbing himself blindly for the hole through the ink cloud. He crashed into the lip of the opening, bounced off hard with an impact that bruised his midsection, and scrambled to run his fingers along the walls. He had no sight but for the thin light provided by the thread, which he followed like a madman. The metal was oddly smooth. The world was deadly cold. He could only be split-seconds ahead of the shark.
But his hand grasped something red and circular, and he realized he’d found his way into an airlock. Grabbing the wheel he braced as best he could, threw his weight against the valve, and saw a door began to swing shut behind him. The water made the work heavy and slow, but the weights inside the mechanism were still in good repair somehow, counterbalancing the motion and helping him along.
But even as the door began to swing shut–
A red mouth exploded through the narrowing gap, snapping open and shut as the main body struggled to fit inside. The door jammed, its weight crushing into the side of the shark but unable to push with enough pressure to close all the way.They were stuck fast, and Declan could feel the valve starting to roll backwards as the bizarre shark forced its way inside.
“You want a taste? CHOKE ON IT!” With a howl of fear pushed past reason and into rage, Declan lifted up his foot and slammed it directly into the shark’s open gullet. The spikes caught and scraped; the flower–shaped mouth snapped shut with brutal force; and with a sudden backwards tug, the shark simply ripped his leg clean off and vanished back beyond the airlock with a wriggling retreat into the water.
Seizing the valve in both hands, Declan pushed with every inch of muscle he had, his remaining leg braced against the doorframe. The door slammed shut with a locking click, and then, slow seconds later, he heard a bubble and a hiss as the water drained away to be replaced by sweet, cool air.
For a long moment Declan lay on the ground, only moving to cough up the water in his lungs before the spell letting him breathe that water expired. Slowly, exhausted, he rolled onto his back and looked down at the damage.
Honestly? Losing a leg sucks less the second time.
His prosthetic was completely gone, leaving only the bandage-wrapped stump behind. The shark had gotten a mouth-full of the finest metal the V.A. cared to buy. He hoped it tasted like a happy meal toy.
On the other side of the airlock, dim lights had come on. The lobster-shaped submarine was still functional, and the air tasted tinny but not foul.
The others...
I can't go back out there right now, so I just have to hope they're on their way.
You have reached your first Sanctuary. This zone will remain safe and free from monsters for the next 48 hours. Additional features of the High Command are unlocked while in a Sanctuary, allowing you to spend Faction Tokens, inspect and sell your treasure, and convert your previous life skills into Path skills.
Begin analysis of previous skills?