image [https://i.imgur.com/x0Tektm.jpg]
I accompanied Ida for a lazy ride back to the manor. Jasper walked beside her mount on the widening trail between the Sternway guild house and town. Enough caravan carts had passed between the forest and the ferry to cut a trail of double ruts through the grass, but not enough to expose the soil.
As we passed a field of potatoes, Ida surprised me with an apology. “I apologize for causing a fuss over the relic. I assumed them to be valuable baubles you adventuring types go for. After missing our battles with the goblins, I didn’t realize the danger they posed. We don’t get goblins and orcs down south, so I figured Rezan’s resilience came from being king.”
Ida’s admission made me feel sorry for brusquely handling the power transfer. While I needed her to tell me if the relic broadcasted its influence, I shouldn’t have done so in front of her friends. I should have taken her aside and let her decide without peer pressure.
Leaders need to be careful about communication. One-on-one discussions should become my bread and butter. I also needed to hold my tongue with complaints. Bellyaching undermines my credibility. I especially couldn’t complain about subordinates. Gripes about poor performance call attention to my inability to manage people and unfairly undermine their social status. People took cues from the chief. One careless remark from me could wreck someone’s stature, which isn’t healthy for an organization.
“No—I owe you an apology. Worrying that the relic would drive you crazy wasn’t something I should have brought up in front of others. It shouldn’t have been an embarrassing conversation. I should have taken you aside and explained myself better.”
“That’s okay, L.T. You’re still young and stupid.”
She stifled a smile, but I didn’t hide mine.
“By the time you return from the south, I’ll have this town whipped back into shape.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
While Ida directed her steed to the livery, I let Jasper loose when we reached the edge of Hawkhurst Rock. “You go graze or enjoy the sun while I get wet. You’re off for the day.”
Jasper flicked his ears and trotted toward the edge of town, where the tallest grass awaited.
The lake’s rippling surface shined beneath the pink sun high in the sky. I wasn’t looking forward to another dive. These sunny conditions echoed none of the suffocating darkness waiting below.
Holding my trident, I plunged into the water. The first ten feet weren’t so dark, but the visibility grew poor. The pressure on my ears relented when I equalized by popping them and inhaling water. My Amphibious power endowed me with the ability to hold my position despite the underwater currents. Rezan’s fate would have been different had he been a citizen.
I wrapped a strip of linen around my mouth like a scarf to prevent me from ingesting the mud and particulate as I breathed underwater, a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Aside from the awkward movement and the inability to cast half of my spells, I acclimated easily to the chill of depth because a magic ring regulated my temperature.
With my scarf in place, I descended into the haze. Presence provided short-range visibility, but the murk’s opacity prevailed. A sea dragon could lurk 20 feet away, and I’d be none the wiser. For orientation, I descended along the wall of Hawkhurst Rock. The current smoothed and shaped the blue granite, yet freshwater barnacles and mollusks attached themselves, making its surface rough and spiky. I took care to drift away from it to avoid snagging my robe on its sharp edges.
The water darkened at a depth of 20 feet. My feet touched the bottom of what might have been 50 or 60 feet down, for I had no instruments to measure my depth—not even the game’s map interface worked, save for its compass feature, which I relied upon for direction. After five minutes, I realized the folly of my exercise. At depth, I had no sense of movement. I could cast Detect Magic but couldn’t see a glow 15 feet away through the opaque, swirling mud. Magnetize only worked in clear conditions. Mud interfered with the spell’s interface, effectively blinding me.
A steady drone of bubbles and swirling liquid assaulted my eardrums, and my fingers grew numb. It wouldn’t serve me to lose my grip on the trident or Gladius. My lungs and throat felt raw, and the claustrophobia got the better of me.
After minutes of searching, my mind began playing tricks. Somewhere in this cold darkness, the rotting corpse of a demon-possessed goblin drifted. And I wouldn’t know it until it bobbed into my face. I developed an onset case of the willies.
Despite the value of finding another core, the conditions made me want to give up.
As the map served as a compass, the game’s clock became my only connection to passing time. I stared at the digits, willing the minutes to tick by, for time and space felt elastic in this horrible place.
I braved through dungeons and other dimensions, yet an environment so close to where I laid my head at night scrambled my brain. The lake’s bed wasn’t solid like the ground. Every step kicked mud into the water, yet the bottom provided my only tangible tether to the world.
My numbing grip on the trident reminded me I had another weapon, one that left a trail behind it. I drew Gladius Cognitus and used its ribbon of light as a breadcrumb trail.
The water augmented my sword’s vibrations, and Gladdy’s voice reached my tender ears as if I wore headphones. But he cheered and distracted me from the surrounding blackness. “Hello, Wielder Apache! This certainly is unexpected! When we last parlayed, goblins monopolized our attention.”
“They still are. I’m searching for Rezan.” When I answered, my voice cracked, as if I had a sore throat, as my vocal cords strained with use in the chilly water.
“Destroying his relic, are we?”
“Yeah. You can do that underwater, right?”
“Absolutely, but I must warn you, water is denser than air. Undoing a relic underwater will intensify the shockwave. The inequality in pressure will create a phenomenon called cavitation that will be quite potent.”
“Can it kill me?”
“Proximity is a factor. To project a relic-killing rune, I must have a clear line of sight. In these conditions, you’ll fall inside the lethal shockwave.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Can I move it with Move Object or Magnetize?”
“You can, but controlling a cursed item equates to possession, rendering you susceptible to its power.”
“Great, so I have that to look forward to. Luckily, it doesn’t seem like we’ll find it.”
“Thank your lucky moons that you wield me. Normally, one couldn’t trigger a rune underwater. The conductivity foils such attempts. Scrivening tears through space itself, a circuit so potent not even water can diffuse.”
“And that adds up to you being able to destroy a relic, correct?”
“Quite so.”
“Can you see it? I’m practically blind down here.”
“I’m benighted as you are, my wielder. But the irony of looking for a relic that augments divinity is simply delightful!”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”
Seeing his ribbon of light gave me the idea to perform a grid search, a pattern that cops use to find clues at a crime scene. Being able even to perform a grid search while blind proved difficult. Crossing back across the bottom once my feet stirred it up made no sense, even if I could articulate such precise movements. The only thing I could see in the grid search entailed the thin line of light—that it formed a grid shape made little difference. Plus, with a current, Rezan’s body might drift into previously searched areas.
My game clock showed that only a few minutes had transpired since I pulled out my long sword. It felt awkward simultaneously wielding Gladius and the trident. Neither weapon could slash swiftly underwater. At best, they offered feeble jabbing weapons when used in tandem. Yet I needed to breathe and keep Gladdy aloft to use his trail of light as a thread through this muddy maze. The luminous line penetrated the darkness beyond Presence, but its disappearance into the gloom spooked me.
“That reminds me. If I hit an opponent underwater with an Imbued Weapon, that won’t hurt me, will it?”
“You’ll be perfectly safe. Imbue Weapon discharges arcane power to a target creature. I believe you’re confusing magic with electricity.”
I grunted. My throat ached between casting Detect Magic and conversing underwater, so I saved it for casting spells. My eardrums acclimated to the pressure but picked up every little sound. I never imagined the depths to be so loud. In every direction, a blanket of mud smothered my senses.
Gladius hummed above the burbling, clicking, swirling noise. “How do you know he’s this deep?”
“He attached a metal crown to his head.”
“Decomposing bodies produce gas. Depending on the amount, a dead goblin might equalize its buoyancy at different depths.”
Rezan could float over my head, and I’d never know. I’d been thinking in two-dimensional terms. A planar grid search achieved very little. Was there such a thing as a volume search?
Turning a grid into a cube held no appeal. After only ten minutes of searching, an agility debuff appeared and then disappeared. Curiosity got the better of me, and I removed my Circle of Temperance to see what debuff might have affected me.
Debuff
Onset Hypothermia
-1 Agility
Duration
Until core rises to normal body temperature
Hypothermia wasn’t so bad, but at least I’d found a use for my ring. Hypothermia -1 agility effects probably stacked the longer swimmers stayed underwater, similar to Exhausted debuffs.
This wasn’t going anywhere. I called off the dive and rose. Without the rock face, I did not know how fast I ascended. I rose slowly but couldn’t be sure without modern devices like a depth gauge.
As I climbed, I panicked when daylight didn’t appear after what felt like fifty feet. Was I even going up? Without the ability to make bubbles, I couldn’t be sure. How would I reach the surface if I went down or sideways instead of up?
“Gladdy, are we going up?”
“I’m sorry, Wielder Apache, but I cannot say. The mud clouds have compromised my directional sense.”
My pounding heart reacted to the irrational fear of getting lost. I reminded myself to stop, breathe, then think. After a few seconds of controlling my breath, I turned and looked for orientation changes in my map UI. Ignoring the clicking sounds of the water and surrounding halo of mud, I coordinated my body’s orientation with the interface map until I was sure I floated upright.
I realized Presence foiled my ability to tell if I neared the surface and doused it. Gladdy’s ribbon of light provided a better frame of reference in greater darkness. A gradual haze of light surrounded me as I drifted until I spotted the refracting light on the surface. The plane of rippling water wasn’t exactly in the direction I expected, but a simple course correction reoriented me.
After slipping my sword into its sheath, I breached the surface only thirty feet away from the wall of Hawkhurst Rock. It surprised me I wasn’t further out in the lake.
Even with a trident and the Amphibious mandate from being a Hawkhurst citizen, our end of Otter Lake proved too difficult to navigate. Anyone able to retrieve Rezan’s relic already possessed powers beyond my own.
The Orga River carried cold water from mountain streams. I hoped that looking for an underwater relic in the stagnant southern waters wouldn’t be more of the same. It should be warmer and not as muddy, although it was only a guess. Fighting underwater seemed a dubious prospect. And being unable to survive an underwater relic’s destruction posed a challenge I hadn’t considered. At least I had Gladdy to help me figure it out.
Seeing no way to find the relic, I changed tactics and experimented.
I noticed that my water-breathing trident was easy to hold underwater. Its wooden shaft and metal headpiece balanced each other out, making the weapon neutrally buoyant—it neither sank nor bobbed to the surface.
I unequipped gear that wasn’t cloth and held a small sack of coins, approximately the metal weight of the relic.
Though I wasn’t goblin-sized, a little experimentation might show if I sank to the bottom or drifted. I surfaced and positioned myself roughly in the same area where the relic bearer splashed into the river. The key difference involved deactivating Amphibious and going with the flow.
The deeper I sank, the slower I descended until I equalized midway between surface and bottom. Once Rezan drowned, his lungs would empty of air, approximating someone using water-breathing.
The murk utterly blinded me. I couldn’t see, so I used the game’s coordinate system to track movement. Using the interface clock, I drifted with the current for ten minutes.
As the coordinates changed, my hopes for finding the core vanished. In just five minutes, the flow carried me into the lake.
The overall strength of the current surprised me. After I stopped swimming with my mandate power, the water took me hundreds of yards offshore after ten minutes elapsed.
Since I didn’t need to use my muscles and the cold didn’t bother me, I ignored the danger of stacking Hypothermia debuffs. I made the same trip three times. Each test run ended me in different parts of the lake.
The current didn’t carry me in a straight line, and I moved at different speeds, depending on my depth—which I could only estimate. How far down a goblin corpse might float? Finding the relic wouldn’t be a matter of covering square yards but square miles. I could spend the rest of my game life searching and never find it.
After my third run took me midway between Flat Rock Island and Hawkhurst Rock, I engaged Amphibious and propelled myself toward shore. I headed for the shipyard on the west side of town.
I jumped onto the dock from the water. As I stood dripping, the realization of the lost celestial core struck me. The settlement had suffered so much to defeat Rezan it seemed unfair that we’d lost it. Celestial cores were game-changers. Still, it was better lost than in the hands of another player.
Gretchen spotted me from the shipyard. Though we shared the same age, she wrung her hands in apprehension over talking to the governor. Still, my sudden emergence from the lake called protocol into question. She braved an approach as I peeled off my soaking equipment. Curiosity conquered her fear. “Governor, did you fall in?”
“I did. And it serves me right for horsing around near the water’s edge. How are things at the inn?”
“The merchants didn’t stay long, so it’s quiet again. I sent Otto to the market to stock up on dry goods and ale.”
“Wasn’t Marketday yesterday?”
“The cloth fair keeps their stalls open all week.” Gretchen grimaced. “You’re white as a ghost—if you don’t mind me saying so. I have leftover stew on if you’d like to warm up.”
I exhaled in relief. “You have no idea how much I’d appreciate that.”
“Come on over. You can dry your robe by the heath. I’ll put on the kettle.”
I gathered my dripping belongings and followed her to the inn. Scuba diving wasn’t for me.