[Book 2] Chapter 1: Water, Water, Everywhere

Parth could say with certainty that he was getting tired of this floor of the dungeon. Even for someone who grew up in a coastal city, this was just too much water.

The time since they had entered the next level of the dungeon had been a mixed bag. On one hand, they had managed to cover some distance. On the other, they were not prepared for the trial of water. They had arrived here early, after all.

The weather was volatile, and as a result, they were impeded quite severely a couple of times. Generally, they followed the same strategy as before. Andrea created a platform of ice, which she levitated with the aid of Emilia and carried forward. Unlike before, mana was not the only issue with such a method.

The main issue was the storms. In a dimension made almost entirely of water, storms were problematic. Especially thunderstorms.

It was an odd experience for Parth. In the previous trial, there were no oddities in terms of climate. This one was quite the opposite. A calm climate was rare in this level of the dungeon. Of course, the data packet built into their signet rings informed them of such. For both the trial of water and the trial of the sky, the climate played a major role in how the levels expressed themselves.

To top it all off, there were the occasional monsters that worsened it as well. In this domain, the monsters they had faced so far were hostile hippocamps: beasts that had the upper body of a horse and the hind parts of a fish. On paper, it painted a beautiful picture of an aquatic creature of myth. In reality, the monsters looked horrible.

Parth suspected that the teeth played a major factor in it. Horses with sharp fangs did not look good. Not to mention that the forelimbs did not have hooves, but fins instead. The entire ensemble just looked odd.

Just like shug monkeys, these too traveled in groups. Heck, Parth did not know what exactly to classify them as. They were half horses and half fish, but neither “herd” nor “school” sat well with him as proper terms. Nonetheless, the things were annoying whenever they came across them.

The jets of water that the creatures spat were not that much of a bother, as he often vaporized them with his flames. The main issue was that the things jumped an insane height from the water.

Apparently, the vile creatures liked to jump out at unassuming prey and drag them deep underwater for a snack. Parth had no intentions of testing that out.

Thankfully, the voyagers were not alone. The two teams working together took down the beasts easily. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t annoying. Such fights cost them mana. Especially for Andrea and Emilia, since they had to maintain the flight trajectory.

Nonetheless, hippocamps were the only monsters they had faced in the domain so far. It was both weird and relieving.

This coupled with the atrocious and downright hostile climate had forced them to stay put on a few islands for extensive periods of time.

When they entered, they had a little over two days remaining. Most of that had been spent. Now they had a couple more hours left before they would be pulled back to safety; back to Viz.

For two days of travel, they hadn’t made as much progress as they would have liked. Compared to their traveling speed in the first trial, this one was a major downgrade.

Then again, they were not fully prepared for this trial. Most of their survival gear and provisions were aimed towards clearing the trial of the land. Only when they would come here in earnest for the actual trial would they be able to gauge their actual rate of progress.

Parth, for one, would love to approach this trial again with a rebreather and waterproof armor on him. His current armor was resistant to most mundane things, but constantly being barraged by water tended to make the difference between waterproof and water-resistant quite obvious.

Even then, progress was progress. This was a freebie. They would get seven full days to finish this trial. Anything that they had done so far was a bonus they had during the leftover time of their first trial, which alone was impressive.

They had not come across any other voyagers so far, which was once again quite out of the norm, especially considering their track record.

It brought back the feeling of unease in Parth. Whenever things had been smooth sailing for a while, it immediately went to shit. He was merely waiting for the inevitable confrontation with something that would once more threaten his life in earnest.

Whatever they had gone through so far was tame in comparison to whatever would happen in the future. The dungeon would ramp up, after all.

“What are you brooding about now?” asked Andrea, breaking him out of his train of thought.

“Nothing. Just thinking about this trial,” he said. The two were sitting in a makeshift camp, again. He took a sip of the vile coffee that he had to bear with. He couldn’t wait for when he could taste proper coffee on the outside.

“Heh. Amazed at my might?” asked the taekwondo expert.

“What might? All I see is someone cheesing the setting,” he retorted.

“Not my fault that you didn’t use the forest to your advantage. We all have possible exploits. You can’t complain when I use mine.”

And what an advantage it was. It was one of the few times where Parth had seen how utterly absurd Byrone’s artifacts could be. Especially in the hands of a competent user.

He had to overpower his fire in this dimension to burn anything, since everything was so damn wet. Andrea, on the other hand, was having a blast.

The same thing that put him at a disadvantage was a massive advantage for her.

Since water was everywhere, and everything was wet, it just froze all the more easily at the feet of the Crylleret.

He could confidently say that if it were just Emilia’s team here, they would be moving even faster with Andrea doing most of the heavy lifting. But with more numbers came stability and security at the cost of speed. So, they were sticking together, especially since Parth was at a disadvantage here. This would change in the next level, where Andrea would be at a disadvantage and he would have the edge.

“Speaking of the environment… are you sure you didn’t see your skin tone flickering when we came to this level?” he asked.

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“I’m sure. Out of all of us, you are the only one who has seen it so many times. I would write it off as a hallucination, if not for my own vision and the episode in the tunnel. There’s nothing about it in the data packets, so what can we do?” She shrugged as she munched on a nutrition bar.

Parth just sighed in response and looked at their camp. Apart from the two elemental voyagers, everyone else was asleep. This particular pit stop had dragged on for too long, and they had done their rotations, resting and recouping their mana. But all of them would rather move and cover as much ground as they could before the timer hit zero on the pullout.

“I wonder whether—” He didn’t get to finish his sentence, as his eyes caught sight of something concerning. “Stefan, wake up!” He immediately pounced at their teammate who could make the most sense of what he was seeing.

Andrea followed his line of sight, cursed, and began rousing the others frantically.

Both of them were panicking. How could they not? A typhoon had formed out of nowhere, and was heading towards the small island they were camping on. It was traveling over water, so it had sucked up a huge amount of it too.

All in all, the situation was grim. A part of Parth felt vindicated that he was right about things going south quickly. Although… the majority of his thoughts were screaming random obscenities as he tried to make sense of what was happening.

There were two saving graces to this, though. One, it was still far off. That would give them enough time to decide on a course of action. Two, it was not really that big. It seemed more like a small waterspout traveling over the surface than a proper hurricane.

“What happened?” asked a startled Stefan as he stood up. The synthire once more proved his superior senses, as his head snapped towards the oncoming disaster without prompting.

“Emilia, pack everything up,” said Andrea, pointing at the typhoon. The next moment, the Hollow Crown materialized on Emilia’s head, and everything began floating back into their storage boxes. Within moments, everything was packed.

“What’s the verdict?” asked Parth as he continued staring at the typhoon.

“Ready the platform. We can’t sit and weather this. The wind alone is not the issue. It has accumulated a lot of water. All that weight and the force behind it will be really bad if we get caught,” said Stefan, his artifact coming through with the necessary information.

Andrea did not waste any time and stomped on the ground with her armored boot. The next moment, an all-too-familiar platform of ice formed beneath her.

Everyone hopped on it as it continued expanding.

“Would it be possible for Andrea to freeze it before it reaches us?” asked Emilia.

“Pointless. She might be able to do it, but it won’t help us,” said Stefan.

“Why?” asked a nervous Kwame. His mini wrecking ball of an artifact was circling him rapidly, as if it would protect him. If he could have boosted its speed even when not moving in a straight line, maybe it would have been possible for him to spin it in the opposite direction and do something. Unfortunately, he was as powerless as most of them against what was coming.

“Because it is artificial. If it is a deliberate attack on us, then I’m pretty sure that there could be more,” said Stefan.

While they were talking, the two teams had already ascended into the air. Andrea had made several extra handholds for them to leverage, and they grabbed on tight.

But now that Stefan mentioned it, Parth could see what he meant. The thing had formed abruptly. Moreover, the winds in their location were still relatively calm. Not at all agitated and screaming like they should have been in such an event.

“Is it really safe in the air? We could have burrowed and hidden in a trench or something,” said Moira.

As a fairy, she would be more used to dealing with crazy winds and situations like this, of course. Parth did wonder how fairies in their homeworld of Funar dealt with weather disasters when they got caught over oceanic routes.

“I will navigate us. My artifact is already giving me the direction and speed required,” Stefan said, and he began directing Andrea and Emilia to fly away from the swirling mass of wind and water.

Right at that moment, several other waterspouts formed. All of them were heading in different directions. But the water below was a massive mess, pulled into these various swirls that each veered their own way.

For a second, Parth’s heart almost stopped at the absurdity of the sight.

“I was right,” Stefan said. “This is not natural. The temperature and wind patterns do not match. It couldn’t be the dungeon doing it, as the point of origin of all these is too localized. It is coming from that island.” He pointed at an island in the distance.

Now that multiple miniature typhoons were barreling outwards, it did seem like the epicenter of all this.

“So, we can’t stay put at this rate and double down,” Parth said. “Because whatever is causing this doesn’t seem like it wants to stop.”

“Correct. Moreover, the Inspectacle tells me that all of these have mana. Mana which is dissipating with every passing second,” said Stefan.

By this point, they had moved out of the way of the first mini typhoon, but they hovered in place, as any more movement would put them in the path of another one.

“So these twisters will start losing intensity?” asked Kwame.

“They already are,” the synthire answered. “At least in terms of the mana sustaining them. The other factors still keep them going strong. But I suspect that without the proper winds and temperatures, they would disappear summarily.”

Parth couldn’t see it. But his artifact couldn’t analyze every single detail of whatever he saw, so he would leave it to the expert at hand. Once again, it drove home the fact that Stefan was godsent when it came to charting their way to victory.

“I think it is the Tempestuous Bauble,” said Moira, which caused Parth to jerk his head toward her.

“Now that you say it…”

Stefan nodded. “I suspect it as well. But I can’t confirm it, as I have never seen the artifact in action. Much less in an unusual case like this.”

As they hovered in place atop their platform, a few more twisters formed in the distance.

Thankfully, now that they realized that the twisters were losing power, they knew how to tackle them. Especially since the distance gave them adequate time to outmaneuver the blasted things.

“This seems indiscriminate. Too random. I suspect that the owner of the Tempestuous Bauble is engaged in combat with someone on that island,” said Stefan.

Andrea scowled. “So, all this is just the spillover? Missed attacks going over the water body and making a mess?”

“Most possibly, yes,” he said.

“So, over the ground, it wouldn’t be this bad, right?”

“No. It’s still wind rapidly spinning in a vortex. But the only reason it is ramping up so much is that the bad weather of this dimension is amplifying it as it moves over water. At its point of inception, it should not be this powerful.”

Parth realized that this was the most he had heard Stefan speak at one time. Generally, he stayed silent. But then again, the situation was crazy enough to warrant it. Ever since they had started facing insane odds inside the dungeon, Stefan had indeed begun speaking more. It was a byproduct of how crazy their lives had become.

“What do we do?” asked Moira, voicing the question in everyone’s mind.

“We can’t stay in the air forever,” Emilia said. “Nor can we camp in peace. We have two options. Either we retreat beyond the scope of these waterspouts, or we take the fight to the Bauble.”

“I vote we go for it,” Andrea said. “As long as Stefan is confident that he can guide us through, we can make it. Worse comes to worst, I can encase us in a hollow sphere of ice and focus on getting away.”

“How confident are you, Stefan?” asked Parth.

“Very. For us, it seems like these waterspouts are forming out of nowhere. This is due to the distance. Mainly because he must be using them as attacks on the island first. The closer we get, the easier it will get for me to predict them.”

“We only have a couple of hours left,” Emilia said. “If we leave him be, we will have to start this trial in earnest with this nuisance right next to us. Even if we retreat, we would have to either circle around, or keep following someone who would be a constant hindrance.”

“Wait, do you all want to go and kill him?” asked an alarmed Kwame.

Parth looked at him, and Kwame turned back with a grimace etched on his face. Then Parth’s eyes met Andrea’s. Once again, both of them seemed to be of the same mind. Kwame was right. But that did not mean much in this situation. The dungeon was brutal. More so for their team, since everyone wanted to kill them as a preemptive measure. Parth did not want to take out people who did not initiate hostilities. Also, they had other options. There was an advantage in numbers, after all.

“We don’t necessarily have to kill the wielder. What does the data packet say about them?” he asked.

“Benjamin Blackbog. Fairy. His team seems to have no other alliances. So, either he is fighting some voyagers, or going after a monster,” said Moira, who had been perusing the data packet ever since they brought forth the theory about the Bauble.

“So, if we save him and whoever he is with, we possibly earn new allies. That’s in case he’s engaged in a monster attack. Otherwise, if he is hostile, then no skin off our backs. It’d be business as usual,” said Andrea.

“Indeed,” said Emilia as they all peered at the island, most of their minds made up.