I hit darkness, and for an instant, my entire body felt like it was trapped in a vise. My flesh squeezed against my bones, and my ears popped. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Then it was over, and I was on the other side. The water was still murky, but I was within the lower region of the forest of tentacles. They stretched dozens of meters further to their source, the kulu, a titanic blob of flesh resting at the bottom of the lake. Dozens of eyes speckled its vast body, but there was only one mouth, a toothy cavern large enough to swallow a bus.

This was a problem. Still spinning, I flung out my arms and legs to stabilize myself. The fast-ball momentum had mostly dissipated, but I was sinking fast, weighed down by armor and the partial limbs that were still slithering over my body.

My hangers-on seemed to lose steam, and the one around my waist slipped off, finally dead. But the kulu had more tentacles down here, and they were already reaching for me.

The wall of darkness wasn’t darkness anymore. It was a kaleidoscope of shifting forms and light, too indistinct for me to make out what was happening on the other side. I didn’t have time to ponder what that meant. Only a few seconds into my arrival, a zombie slammed through the barrier, spinning as I had been, and much less able to deal with it.

Hacking at the tip of the first tentacle to approach me, I tried to kick up, but the best I could do was mitigate my descent. Too heavy. Not enough enchantments. Another limb snagged the zombie almost immediately, dragging it down toward the kulu’s waiting maw. Instead of fighting to swim up, I maneuvered toward the outer rim of the pit. It was more of a cliff than a slope, but if I mined my way inside, I could get myself away from the tentacles and dig up.

Another zombie popped through the kaleidoscope. Where were they all coming from? The mobs avoided the lake, and there had been none in the water with me. Fighting off another tentacle slowed me down, but the kulu seemed more interested in the ongoing rain of zombies than it was in me. I came down on the edge of the pit, a wall of pure bedlamite, and hacked it with my ax. It wasn’t as efficient as the pick would have been, but I wasn’t going to mess around switching tools while I was still being harried by a sea monster.

The first block popped, and I had to turn to defend myself again. A tentacle snaked out of the way of my swing and wrapped around me like a sash. This again. One blow severed it cleanly, and I got back to work. A couple more blocks, and more limbs were coming. It was taking me too long to dig out a hollow.

A flash caught my eye, one of the coins I had thrown, rotating as it sank. I crouched down with my back against the rise, dug a handful of Warp Stone out of a pouch, and started laying a wall. Fighting off kulu limbs was still a problem, but at least I could work facing the monster. Once I had a four-foot screen covering my position, I quickly filled in the sides and the top, putting me completely out of reach of the nightmare squid.

It was a tiny box, not even big enough to stand in, but I shifted myself around and went back to tapping out a section of bedlamite. Over the course of a few minutes, my private space expanded, and with no fresh assaults from the kulu, I felt comfortable enough to switch the ax out for Pickle Rick.

Bedlamite vanished under its touch, thankfully bug-free, as I mined out a channel to take me back to the upper lakebed. Things were going great until my heart bar started flashing. My helmet was still clear of water, but the air tasted wrong.

I was hyperventilating; shallow, quick breaths. My heart beat faster and faster. Aqua Affinity had reached its limit. There was air, but no oxygen. Why was I still underwater? Each block I cleared created a gap of air, but the gaps filled in seconds, even though the channel had no openings connected it to the lake beyond.

Bedlamite was porous. Warp stone wasn’t.

My channel was a dozen feet high, and I was climbing by pressing my back to the wall while planting my feet on its opposite. Adrenaline was pumping so hard I could barely control my fingers, and I didn’t apply the first coin correctly. It floated down, and I felt fascinated, watching it fall away for far too long. My head hurt.

Focus.

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I stuck a coin to the wall directly beneath me, and a bluish block popped into existence. One more, and I had a seat. Crafting a floor only took a few more seconds. Then a ceiling. The channel was too thin for me to box myself in without expanding it first.

My vision was already fading, narrowing to a tunnel, but I mined a layer deeper into the bedlamite all around me and filled it back in with Warp Stone. My head kept nodding, and my breathing slowed even as my heart continued to ticker-tap madly in my chest.

I didn’t realize I had finished at first, my hand running on automatic, applying another stone to a corner I’d already filled in. My box was in place, but it was still full of water. My body was screaming at me, but it was a quiet scream. I was going to sleep.

Focus.

I could harvest water. Needed a bottle. Didn’t have a bottle. Thermos. Had a thermos. The thermos was already full of water. Didn’t matter. Try it anyway.

I unclipped the thermos from my waist. Throughout my extended wrestling match with various tentacles, it had remained in place. Excellant design. Uncapping it, I swiped at the water, and the top layer disappeared. A few square feet of air that wasn’t filling back in.

I sat up straight, getting my head out of the water, and breathed.

Immediate relief. Still dizzy and weak, but so much euphoria was flooding my brain that all I could feel was good. For long moments, I just breathed.

The thermos was officially full. When I swiped again, the water level didn’t go down. That meant my air supply was still finite. The moment I opened my box, it would be gone. I waited until my body felt like it was functioning normally again, lifted the thermos, and upended it in the open space, which was instantly filled with water.

That was a good thing. After swiping it again, the water cleared, and I once again had fresh air to breathe. It wasn't an ideal solution, but I was going to survive. I could keep working my way up, craft a new airlock when I ran out of oxygen, and make it back to the surface. Well, not the surface, but the upper lakebed.

I'd still have tentacles to deal with, but if I was careful, I could work my way back to the shore using the same method once I saw what direction I needed to go. Ten minutes later, a problem presented itself. The barrier extended through the bedlamite, though here there was no kaleidoscope effect. It looked like regular rock, only it wouldn't mine, and when I touched it, my hand went numb.

The air in my helmet tasted stale. I would need to make another airlock soon. Pins and needles in my hand told me the brief contact with whatever this was hadn't done inalterable damage, and I could open and close it normally. I gripped the pick and tried hitting it harder. Nothing happened.

Up was a no-go, so I mined a few more layers to the side away from the pit and ran into the same issue. It was difficult not to panic. Creating bubbles of air for myself with the thermos was not a permanent solution. There was something magical going on here, and I didn't like it. My first thought was of Bojack's warning, inescapable pools of altered time. However, there had been no obvious distortion.

The kulu was active both above and below the barrier. One creature on both sides. So that couldn't be what this was. Maybe the elder squid had an ability that allowed it to create a protective bubble, something like the runic force fields, but one that it could freely pass through. I dug my way back to the pit and mined a window to look out.

Still a giant squid there, busily eating a zombie, tentacles everywhere, and a kaleidoscope barrier just above. It was the same barrier, even though it looked different underground. There had to be a way out of this. I swam back to my first airlock, let myself in, and went through the entire process of reoxygenating my bloodstream before returning to the window.

One after another, I went through every tool at my disposal, and none of them could harvest, or even scratch, the blocks above me. If the squid was responsible, I was going to have to kill the squid. With my helmet refreshed, I could breathe for a while at least. Had to harvest the Warp Stone to get back to the bottom of the channel. Then that left the question of how to get across the bottom of the pit without the kulu wrapping me up and treating me like finger-food. Then what? Fill its mouth with rock?

There wasn't much I could do to something that size. If it had a brain, it was buried somewhere in a hill of flesh, and for all I knew, the tentacles would keep doing their thing even if the main body died. Another zombie came tumbling through the barrier only to be summarily devoured. The kaleidoscope was acting up, becoming brighter near the center, the drab color-scape taking on blue tones.

Any change was good change from my perspective. Was the spell wearing out? Or did the kulu dismiss the barrier when it didn't feel threatened? If it weakened, this could be my shot. And if I wanted to swim properly, ditching most of my armor was a must. That would make me more vulnerable, but did I have another choice?

What if I didn’t have to kill the squid. This was a magic problem, and I had recently acquired a magic eating metal. Four coins should be more than enough for a knife. A crafting table first, and then I would be out of here.

The blue got brighter and brighter, as if a sapphire sun was blazing on the other side. It was mesmerizing.

A lance of azure light pierced the barrier, and instead of shooting straight down into the massive body sprawled across the pit, it curved, arcing for my window. I lacked the presence of mind to duck. The world turned blue, blinding bright, and then went black.