A sound like a rain of pebbles smashing against a car windshield drew all of our attention away from what we were doing. It lasted for far too long, going on for what felt like almost a minute before being joined by the sound of metal scraping metal. When everything eventually went quiet I pushed myself to my feet, powered through my wobbly knees, and went to check out whatever the hell had just happened.
I was expecting something like a train, since this place reminded me pretty heavily of a train station back on earth. Or maybe even a ship on rails because of the lighthouse motif of the main building. What I wasn’t expecting was a replica of a fucking aircraft carrier that glided along the rails like a roller coaster, cutting rocks and creating more and more of that thick black oil underneath it.
“What the actual fuck.” I muttered, staring in disbelief at the flat-topped boat that absolutely dwarfed everything else in the hazard by a longshot. “That’s an aircraft carrier.”
“Is that what ya call these?” Okeria asked, stepping up to the stone boat and rapping his knuckles against it. “We call them trawlers, since we use chains ta drag em down ta the bottom of the ocean for safe travels. They cut up the bottom something fierce, but that’s the price ya pay for safety.”
I glanced up at the stone aircraft carrier and noticed a few things I’d overlooked in my moment of disbelief; two massive chains hung off either side of the boat, made of the same material as the tracks that now held the ‘trawler’ in place. There were absolutely no portholes on the side of the ship, nor a bridge up top for anyone to actually captain the ship. And finally the most obvious thing I’d missed; numbers and letters painted on the side of the ship in the flaking yellow that Okeria had told me to look out for.
“First Honourable Eightfold Matria of the Thirty-First Squadron.” Jun read aloud. “What in the abyss does that mean?”
She turned to look at Okeria, who was tugging on the closest chain with one hand and rubbing the chin of his helmet with the other. “It means I’m not giving ya two any more clues, but I will reiterate one: anything inside the main building’s light is safe. Do with that what ya will, but I’m going to go back inside and sort out some reports I have ta give when we get ta Rainbow Basin.”
I watched Okeria do exactly as he said he would. Jun grumbled to herself about how much of a help the grand warden was being, then stepped up to the chain he’d been yanking. “Is that how your people name their ships?” I asked.
Jun studied the chain for a moment then shook her head. “We don’t name our trawlers. We give them a number and a symbol, and that’s it. This is an entire sentence, and I don’t think anyone’s ever described someone as an ‘eightfold Matria’. It has to be a puzzle or something, right?”
“Or something indeed.” I agreed, straining my neck to try and see what was on the ship’s flat top. “Maybe it’s a code we need to put in somewhere? Or do we need to make note of all the ships that come in and go on the one specific one that’s a common link between each and every one of them?”
The curl of metal painted yellow had summoned this ship, so maybe it could summon another. I glanced up at the lighthouse-like top of the main building and noticed that the air was now filled with something that looked like the eye floaters I got when I stared at something for too long. They flitted through the air like bacteria under a microscope, reaching out to just a little further beyond the ship before they disappeared completely. The trawler was under the main building’s influence.
“The entire trawler is inside the main area’s influence.” I said, turning to Jun to see if she agreed with my observation. “Uh, what are you doing?”
She turned to look at me from halfway up one of the massive chains. “How else are we supposed to get up there?” She called down, letting go with one hand to gesture for me to come join her. “It’s a hazard, right? So it’s meant to be solved. We can’t do that from down where you’re standing.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but realized that I didn’t actually have anything to dispute. I shook my head and walked up to the edge of the platform where the trawler was less than a foot away, staring up at the text on the side of it that had to be something. I opened my interface to a blank space and typed in what Jun had told me for the chance that we found a safe or the like, then grabbed onto the highest thigh-thick chain link I could find and began hoisting myself up.
It was made difficult by the fact that I was still recovering, but the surface of the chains somehow made the climb a little easier. My hands seemed to stick to the strange metal when I pressed tight to grip down, but that stickiness completely disappeared when I went to remove my hand. It was almost like there was a magnet inside that activated only when I tightly squeezed the metal, but if that was true, then I wouldn’t be able to release my hands once I gripped on tight. Maybe it was the thick oil inside of the chains doing whatever this was.
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Static electricity pulsed through my veins, starting from my left hand’s fingers and shooting through the entirety of my body before leaving through the right. I glanced down in confusion at the massive chain link I was clutching on to, and saw something drift through the thick oil inside. It looked like a small pebble of red-brown rock that was so full of holes that it didn’t look structurally sound, and before it disappeared back into the oil, I saw a tiny spark of electricity roll through one of the holes like a worm through an apple.
“Are you okay?”
Jun’s words from above snapped me out of it. I stared up at her staring down at me from the top of the carrier, her posture ready to move at the drop of a pin if I was in trouble. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just got shocked by the chains.”
She nodded as if that was the most normal thing in the world, then paused. “Wait, what? How did you get… right. Not the trawlers I’m used to.” She laughed. “Hurry up to the top. There’s something here that doesn’t feel very safe to me, but it's not moving yet.”
That couldn’t be good. I glanced down at the chain that had shocked me one last time, hoping to get a glimpse of the hole-filled rock one last time, and saw nothing but oil. I reluctantly continued upwards, tensing each and every time my hands touched the chain now that I knew there was a possibility of being shocked, but it never came. The wind blew harder and harder the further up I went, going from barely a breeze to the wind of a low-grade rainstorm, and then there was no more chain left for me to climb.
A black and yellow hand entered my field of view. “Let me help.” Jun offered.
“Thanks.” I said as my hand clasped hers and she helped yank me onto the top of the carrier. “So what did you…” I started, then my eyes fell on the thing that Jun had obviously been alluding to.
A pile of stones sat in a pool of thick oil, but these weren’t the small pebbles I’d seen so far. They varied from the size of baseballs to one gigantic stone that was the size of a lifted pickup truck, and they seemed to be breathing. The oil underneath slowly leaked outwards for a handful of seconds before being sucked underneath the pile once more, then repeated the cycle over and over again while I stood there watching enraptured. With the trepidation I felt at moving closer and a sense of danger in the future, it was like we were watching a wild animal sleep.
Jun gestured at the floor beneath us, then guided my eyes to just before where the thing slept. “It’s blocking us from getting inside the trawler. Should we, I don’t know, try to move it? Or kill it if that doesn’t work?”
“How about we try and see if it’s actually a monster first.” I suggested, asking The End for analysis the moment I finished talking.
//ANALYZING: COMPLETE.
//CORE BEARING SPECIMEN: SLYK INFESTER.
//CURRENTLY UNDER THE EFFECTS OF ‘SWITCHPORT’S STILLING’: ALL STATS REDUCED TO ZERO AND INFESTATION DISABLED.
//Bacteria-infested oil that uses the rocks found in the hazard to create a body for itself. Found deep in the bowels of the underground tunnels, these sentient specimens only surface if they find themselves on a trawler that is called to the switchport.
Core Mastery: 17.
Hazard: 12.
Core: Bituminous Core.
Core Function: Oil Manipulation.
Battery: 28 Speed: ?? Power: ?? Resilience: ?? Recovery: 22
There was a little more information on this creature than the time I’d identified the eel. I quickly read through everything and swallowed the lump that had been forming in my throat; this thing couldn’t hurt us as long as it was up here with us. I took a cautious step forward, a gesture that was mirrored by Jun, and called my Copperbound Mossblade to my hands. It hadn’t been long since I held it, but it felt like returning to an old friend after the pain that the Slitherburn stuff had caused me. Maybe I could get Okeria to upgrade it himself, so I wouldn’t have to waste so much potential on it.
Another step towards the pile of rocks and oil. Jun filled her hands with her own sword, leveling it at the Slyk as she matched my slow pace. The creature didn’t so much as stir no matter how close we got to it, and I found myself uncomfortably close to the Slyk before I had a plan to deal with it. A smell that had been carried away by the wind finally struck me; a combination of the stench of spilled gasoline and the earthiness of wet clay. I’d always sort of enjoyed the smell of gasoline, but I also knew what raw oil like this smelled like. And it wasn’t this.
“It smells wrong.” Jun said with disgust. “Let’s get this over with.”
Tendrils unspooled from Jun’s gauntlets as she activated the Floodforest’s gift. She pointed at the closest stone and the tendrils latched onto it, dragging it out of the oil and up to her feet. She placed one boot on it and glared down at it like it owed her money, then kicked it to me.
“I couldn’t take it into my inventory. See if you can do something with that while I dismantle the rest of it.”