The cloud of sand rose to five metres, then ten metres, then finally fifteen metres—casting a wide shadow over Marisol as she clenched her throat in anxiety.
It wasn’t a cloud of ‘sand’, to be exact, but rather a swarm of finger-sized crustaceans stuck together to take the form of a bioluminescent, bluish-purplish-reddish tree.
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[Identification Complete]
[Common Name: Luciferase Copepods]
[Strength Level: Critter-Class, B-Rank]
[Hexichor Art: None]
[Brief Description: Slender, double-segmented, clustered—gaussia princeps is a deep-sea copepod distinguished by its light-producing glands. It emits striking bioluminescence used primarily for predator evasion through distraction and counter-illumination. Its antennae are also prominent and feathered, aiding in both propulsion and sensing changes in its environment as it moves through the sea, but when they are gathered in numerous clumps and clusters, they become highly aggressive]
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“... Copepods,” Aidan mumbled, patting her shoulder from the back as the three of them walked past her, shrugging their pistol shrimp arms. “They’re the most generic aquatic bugs you’ll find down here, and while they ain’t particularly dangerous in clumps of a hundred or two, when they’re all clumped up in the thousands like that, they can easily rend all flesh from your bones in under a minute.”
“There’s not supposed to be so many of them just hiding up in Depth Two, though,” Helena said, driving her heel into the ground and casting her free hand back, telling Marisol to stay where she was. “Either they drifted up here incidentally, or they were starving for planktons down in Depth Three. Whatever the case, this is the point of the patrols: we get rid of any bugs that are out of place.”
Finally, Bruno glanced back at Marisol and gave her a curt, confident nod. “We’ll handle this and show you how it’s done. They’re a poor matchup for you, so stay back and support us if we–”
The cloud of pulsing, glowing copepods was impatient. Hundreds of them shot towards the Imperator siblings like a dozen living roots, and in turn, the siblings whipped their shrimp claws towards the copepods.
[Marisol.]
Got it!
She already knew what to expect, so she clamped her ears and winced as the three of them clicked their claws, using their Hexichor Arts and releasing a burst of shockwaves. Water trembled around her as the living roots broke apart. The waves may not do any damage above the surface, but down here? She’d no doubt they could pop her skull if she ever got hit by one of them directly, and the copepods weren’t any different. A hundred of them were immediately crushed and flattened by the waves, making the entire copepod tree reel and wobble in the distance.
While the commercial divers fled and scrambled away, Bruno shouted orders at his younger siblings. Helena fanned out to the right, blasting several copepod roots away as they tried to go for the divers. Aidan leapt onto a coral on the left and blasted down several more, taking a higher vantage point. From three separate points, Bruno gave the order again—‘fire’—and they sent three coordinated blasts at the trunk of the copepod tree, wedging a significant chunk of biomass off the clump.
“Estimated number of copepods: four thousand or so, all streaming out from that conch-like shell!” Aidan shouted from the left, blasting several more roots without looking as he glared at the copepod tree. “Core located! Highest density congregation cluster is ten metres up, halfway point within the ‘crown’ of the tree!”
“No distress pheromone signals have been sent away from this sector, either!” Helena shouted from the right, covering the retreat of the last of the divers. “It’s just us and the copepods! No other leviathan is in the vicinity or coming to its assistance!”
Bruno stomped down on a living root, blasting a hundred or so copepods to shred underfoot. “Begin Mass Critter Extermination, Protocol Five! Aidan, Helena, to me–”
“Here!”
In the blink of an eye, both younger siblings dashed back in front of Bruno, shrimp claws braced in front of them. Bruno passed his own giant claw between the two of their heads, and when he clicked his to send a giant shockwave the copepod tree’s way, the two of them clicked theirs as well, softening their waves such that Bruno’s attack folded theirs into the mix—a combination attack of resonating waves.
Marisol’s eyes widened as the resonance wave slammed into the root of the tree, dispersing at least a thousand copepods and scattering them like a mound of sand being hit with a child’s foot.
They’re good.
[Of course they are,] the Archive murmured. [Even if they are only initiates, they are still Harbour Imperators trained to fight aquatic bugs, chosen and promoted from the best of the Harbour Guards. if they were to fight you again with full knowledge of your speed and agility, they will certainly not be taken off-guard.]
Really?
The Archive shrugged, pointing at their backs as they dashed forward as one unit. Helena and Aidan batted away any living roots that tried to intercept them while the copepod tree regenerated its sturdy form, regathering copepods around its central cluster, but all of it was just a bit too slow for the Imperators. The younger siblings were the ram, the spears and the shields, and the eldest brother was the charging cannon. Dozens of roots stabbed at them from the sides, none even coming close to breaking their formation as they slid to a halt right under its exposed trunk.
They hadn’t come to a complete stop yet when all three of them lined up their shrimp claws, clicking in unison to decimate the trunk from within—fast, bold, and extremely painful for Marisol’s ears even from a distance. Her vision blurred as she stumbled a few more steps back, watching the shockwave rip through the top of the tree before dispersing the entire copepod cluster.
None of the smaller clumps of copepods immediately swam to regather with the other clumps, and the Imperator siblings high-fived each other as they trudged back towards Marisol.
[Copepods are not typically aggressive in small numbers, but when they congregate in dense swarms—especially in nutrient-rich waters where food is abundant and ripe for the taking—they can form giant clusters that attack every living being on sight,] the Archive explained. [Destroy the dense core of a cluster, and the rest will lose their will and instinct to fight. After all, they are as generic and basic as aquatic bugs go.]
Marisol couldn’t smell very well underwater—because she wasn’t even inhaling—but she still felt she was catching the thin, subtle undertone of some sweetly sick pheromone swirling around her.
You sure about that?
My remipede earrings… those olfactory nerve thingies… I feel–
Whatever she and the Imperator siblings expected to happen, it wasn’t one, two, three more copepod swarms bursting out the corals around them with muted booms, the dense clusters sucking up the survivors of the first tree as they each became fully-fledged trees of their own.
Helena didn’t see one of the trees firing a living root at her head, but Marisol did—she kicked off the ground, spun mid-air, and smashed the root apart with the War Jump while she dragged Helena back to safety, holding the lady in a princess carry.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“... That ain’t four thousand or so, brother,” Bruno grumbled, backing up towards the two of them alongside Aidan, the brothers’ claws poised before their faces. “What, the clusters are smart enough to launch coordinated attacks now? Do they have a super cluster beneath us or something?”
“I ain’t no whirlpool carcinologist. Hell if I know what the fuck this is,” Aidan mumbled back, eyes narrowing as the three copepod trees grew larger, larger, and larger. None of them were quite as imposing as the first one, but they were still five-metre-tall monstrosities each with writhing roots and glowing, flickering ‘leaves’ for a crown.
This time, the copepod trees launched a volley of two dozen roots at them. Some came from the left, some from the right, but most streaked down the centre; the Imperator siblings exhaled sharp bubbles and met the first volley with a resonating wave, scattering half the roots in a single blow.
The other half that didn’t scatter reeled back like worms, swirling over and around them until the second volley came.
Bruno didn’t ask for it, and he didn’t need to; Marisol jumped into the fray and skated a full half-circle around the Imperators’ backs, lifting her glaive and cutting through the roots that tried to stab them from behind. It was like a hot knife through butter, but she immediately understood what Bruno had meant when he said the copepods were a poor matchup for her.
Realistically, she only killed a few dozen copepods with her devastatingly powerful kick, because the rest simply reformed a few seconds later and stabbed at them again.
Gritting her teeth, she spun and lashed out with her glaives again and again, intercepting as many backstabbing roots as she could. The Imperators weren’t faring so well against the front-facing roots, though. The trees were only a short ten strides away, and while that meant the Imperators could probably blast them apart much easier, the fact that they were closer also meant the travel distance for the roots was much, much lower—and the constant stabs were suppressive, keeping the Imperators from training all their claws on one tree at a time.
If even just one of the siblings stopped firing defensive waves and batting away attacking roots, they’d all be impaled to death.
“Not good, brother!” Helena shouted, grimacing as a root cut her on the cheek, neck, and shoulder, drawing thin and wavy streams of blood. “It’ll take more than the three of us to dislodge the three of them, and we ain’t got the firepower! Even if we manage to blast one apart, we can’t blast the other two quick enough, and the first one will reform with so many copepods in the vicinity—it’s either we get all of them at the same time, or we run!”
“The commercial divers have yet to evacuate completely!” Bruno snapped, growling as he caught one of the roots with his bare human hand, crushing a dozen copepods into a murky cloud of blood. “We stand our ground and fight a war of attrition. Sooner or later, we will whittle their numbers down!”
But Aidan didn’t need to speak, and Marisol didn’t need the Archive to tell her; all three siblings were already bloody, worn-out, and they wouldn’t hold for much longer. The roots were attacking so fast and violently that they were beginning to blot out sunlight, slowly wrapping them in a living, thorny cage.
If there was some way to gather all three copepod trees in a straight line, then–
[There is.]
[The new mutation you unlocked just this morning.]
Marisol almost opened her mouth to speak, but fortunately, she was dashing and kicking around too much to unclench her jaw.
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[T4 Mutation: Ether Discharge]
[Brief Description: Your glaives have small jets in them that allow them to suck in and eject air at will, allowing you to propel yourself underwater]
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The Archive had advised her to unlock the tier four mutation first thing in the morning, and Victor had said it was a strong mutation as well, but…
Ain’t it just for moving around underwater?
How am I gonna gather all the copepods with this?
[It is not only ‘air’ that you can store and eject at will,] the Archive said, [you can also suck in water and eject them at high speeds.]
[Do you understand what I am talking about?]
A switch flicked in her head as her eyes lit up briefly.
What I did back then, when I cornered and boxed in the Mutant-Class skeleton shrimp.
[That was on the surface where you could freely activate your Storm Glaives without electrocuting your entire body, but down here, even without your Storm Glaives–]
I can still box the copepods in with this.
Maybe she could’ve said something to the Imperator siblings, but frankly, they had neither the time nor the energy to listen to her plan; they were trained professionals, so she’d just have to trust they’d follow up on whatever she did.
Without a word, she kicked away from the three of them and skated to the far right, cutting through the dense wall of copepod roots with her Preapical Claws. A dozen more roots immediately chased after her, but she still remembered the step sequence for the ‘Storm Stride’—glide, spin, pause, raise arms, then twirl and caper as the basic form—and underwater, above the water, there was very little difference in how the dance was performed.
She just needed to put more speed and strength into her moves.
Arms spread out, fingers twirling as though she were paddling through water, she skated around the copepod trees until she’d spun a full clockwise circle around them, and by now, she caught the copepods’ full attention. Every root that’d been battering the Imperator siblings zipped after her instead, and some of them were dangerously close to stabbing through her back.
Tightening her throat, she willed her right glaive to ‘gather’ droves of water through the jets in the chitin, and then ‘discharged’ them as violently as possible from the left side of her left glaive. She didn’t stop skating in circles around the trees as she did, and the result was immediately apparent: the trees were being shoved closer and closer together by her discharging water, and it was like they were being constantly blasted by a torrent of underwater waves from every direction.
She grinned, spinning a full circle around them every three seconds or so, and the propulsion, the circular motion, just the speed of it all… she’d raised her perceptivity level to almost match her speed, but with Ether Discharge added on top of it, she could barely even see her own arms in front of her.
[Careful now, Marisol.]
[Victor told you as much, but if you cannot control your rate of discharge, the propulsion will fling you to the other side of the whirlpool.]
I… know!
But… if I go back to the surface… and skate with this mutation… just how fast do you think I can go?
It was a pointless question that didn’t need to be asked now, but the rush was getting to her head, and the copepod trees were shrivelling under her constant discharge of water—so the Archive sighed in response, sounding only slightly amused.
[This is a new top speed, even for you.]
[Perhaps you will be able to dodge Victor grabbing your collar in the mornings.]
[Now duck.]
She did as instructed, stopping the discharge from her glaives—they were instantly beset with muscle cramps and fatigue the likes of which she’d never experienced before—but she’d already done her part. The waves had shoved all three copepod trees close together, and their trunks were almost touching.
The Imperator siblings had long-since recovered, gathered their energy, and now they were lining up their claws to fire in a straight line.
“Not bad, Marisol!” Bruno bellowed, grinning through bloody teeth. “We’ll take it from here!”
Their outstretched claws rippled with energy as they punched forward all at the same time, throwing the shockwave out like a javelin, and the resonance wave tore through all three trees with a nasty, bone-rattling shockwave.
So close to the impact, Marisol had to clench her ears with her arms and bury her face in the ground just to avoid getting caught in the resonance wave… but after all was said and done, she lifted her head slowly, groggily, and saw the clouds of copepods dispersing for good.
[... Even down here, I see anomalies still swirl around you like a never-ending storm.] The Archive sighed, shaking its head as it floated by her nose. [Though multiple copepod clusters appearing at once is nothing new, it is most certainly a strange occurrence by Depth Two standards. Even still, you must get up and continue patrolling. There may be other commercial divers who require assistance–]
Not good.
Her ears were twitching. Her vision was swimming. She felt lightheaded and heavy as lead at the same time, and though she tried to crawl onto her feet, her harness only dragged her back down to the ground.
Need… oxygen.
Skyball corals… where… are they–
Someone ripped her box of candies from her back and stuffed a piece of candy into her mouth between her gasps, forcing her to swallow by keeping their hand on her mouth—she choked and coughed and instinctively exhaled through her nose, squeezing her eyes shut as she expelled the excess pressure in her head.
She felt much better by the time she peeled her eyelids open, and Helena smiled down at her, flicking her gently on the forehead.
“Not bad at all,” Helena said, as her older brothers patrolled the area and checked the nearby corals for any more copepod clusters; Marisol didn’t smell any, and Aidan didn’t raise his voice either. “We’ve still gotta finish our patrol before we can head back up and make our report—and we’ve gotta check on the commercial divers, too—so do you think you can continue walking, or do you have to rest in the diving bell for a bit?”
Marisol blinked tiredly up at Helena before looking down at her shaky glaives.
Mama always says it’s not good to just collapse after an exhausting dance, after all.
Get up and stretch your legs, Marisol.