The sea was frigid. I treaded water, far enough from land that no one would notice me, but I still cast invisibility over myself in case a ship passed by. I burned through a little MP channeling heat back into my extremities, and I watched carefully as the pod of whaloids approached.
Whaloids weren’t terribly aggressive creatures, but if hungry, a large sea creature was even more dangerous to me than a beast on land. My evasiveness and available toolset was significantly reduced in the water. Normally, I would just litter the sea with MP-infused fish and hope I got lucky, but the goal today was different.
As a whaloid approached me, I used magic to calm the beast like I had done to Buda. I reached out and stoked its snout, pleased at how well it worked, and pulled a fish I had caught earlier from my inventory. I infused it with MP, and reaching underwater, stuck the fish in the beast’s mouth. I kept feeding it infused fish, keeping my eye on the other whaloids, until I got confirmation that the one I was feeding had been tamed.
I came around to the side of the whaloid and pulled myself onto its back, holding onto the dorsal fin of the small, horned, purple and orange orca-like beast. Its seemingly vestigial, hippopotamus-like legs drifted uselessly in the water.
“Tell your buddies that we’re friends now,” I told the beast, and listened for the hum of underwater communication between the pod.
I appraised the new familiar, which was a rank E beast like Buda and post-evolution Treepo. I had raised Treepo from an unevolved baby treehopper, when he was a rank F beast, which is what Gregory was despite being evolved. An unevolved nodmouse was so weak that it was barely worth categorizing, but for the sake of my bestiary, I considered it rank G. There were no beasts I could even tame that were weaker than that, although there were some really small insects in this world that filled the niche of decomposers and feed for the weakest beasts. There was no word in the language spoken in the Horuth Kingdom to differentiate between them, though, and no one seemed to know anything about beast rank, so I was still figuring a lot of this out on my own.
I had tamed a few different whaloids on and off over the last year for travel purposes. That was how I had traveled south enough to find the dungeon, and again to return. I hadn’t advanced my taming skill at the time, so I couldn’t maintain control over them for very long, especially since it was hard to regularly feed them infused tamer treats to maintain the connection. With my limited taming skill I was also unable to control that many strong beasts all at once. I had, at one point, lost control over one when I tried to keep four evolved beasts at the same time.
I wasn’t sure of my new limits, but three rank E beasts and one rank F beast was entirely within my capabilities with advanced taming. I was out here to see if I could learn more about the deepwater pearls and blueclams, and I wanted to explore this before I finished training Buda and evolving him to rank D, just in case that became a problem.
I explained what I wanted to do to the whaloid.
“We’re looking for blueclams,” I stated. “I need your help to dive down deep, all the way to the bottom, so we can look for them.” The whaloid sung in response. “Now, keep in mind, I’m not built for deep underwater living. If I tap you three times on the back, we need to surface.”
I outlined a few other safety plans and reiterated the plan again, just to make sure the beast understood. The magic of taming seemed to grant beasts some measure of the tamer’s own intelligence, a mental connection between minds that was one of the most interesting pieces of magic this world had to offer, in my opinion. They were ultimately still beasts, though, and while they usually obeyed, they didn’t always understand complex instructions and sometimes failed to perform their tasks. From what I had seen, stronger beasts could follow more complex instructions and do so more regularly. Gregory, my weakest beast, was often lazy and failed to properly do what I asked… but that might have just been because he was Gregory.
I whipped up an orb of air around my head and cast a water dispersal spell around it to create a small, magical diving helmet. It would only last a short while, but it should be enough to get to the ocean floor and back. I sent a telepathic command to dive to the whaloid, and we started to descend.
I looked around as we sunk deep into the cold, dark water. There was a whole other world beneath the surface here. There were plenty of small fish, likely rank G, but a number of larger beasts I didn’t recognize. It occurred to me that if I could figure out a good way to take on the beasts in the sea, I would open up another avenue for earning experience from fresh beast kills. It was something I would have to think about. I had never killed a whaloid, and I didn’t feel great plotting it while riding a tamed one down through the ocean, but that would earn me a decent amount of experience. It might be something I had to do, in order to keep pushing my limits and to level up.
We slowed as we approached the silty bottom so that my whaloid mount wouldn’t disturb the water too much. I detached from the beast’s dorsal fin and swam around a bit, looking for clams. I felt around in the silt to see if there was anything submerged, and something snapped onto my finger.
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I yanked my hand back, and some kind of eel-like creature had bitten me. Some blood leaked into the sea water, the red cloud dispersing quickly from so much dilution from the water around us, but I worried about what the blood might attract. I pulled out my hunting knife, and slit the head off the eel creature easily, since it was already attached to me. I dropped the body into my inventory, healed my wound, and moved back to the whaloid’s back, tapping thrice to signal we had to surface.
I took a few deep breaths back above water, clearing out the stale air around my head. I pulled some cooked shagloth meat out of my inventory, chewing thoroughly before swallowing, to replenish some of the MP I was quickly burning through. I probably shouldn’t be eating while swimming, I thought with a snort.
“Ok, let’s head south a bit and try again,” I commanded. It was going to be a long day.
* * *
The blue mollusk shell was hard to spot underwater, but I finally found one. Unfortunately, the mollusk was alive, so I couldn’t just drop it into my inventory like I had planned. An oversight, but not fatal, as I still had air and some time before I needed to surface. I wiggled my knife in and pried open the clamshell, and extracted a picture-perfect deepwater pearl. I dropped it in my inventory, then considered the clam itself.
If I had ice magic, I could have probably frozen it for a humane death, so I could store the whole thing. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, ice magic wasn’t a known quantity in this world. I still hadn’t figured it out on my own, either. Instead, I held the clam in between my hands and flash-boiled it. The water bubbled out aggressively, but afterward, I was able to put the whole clam in my inventory.
I turned to return to the whaloid when something came at me through the murky water. All I saw was teeth.
I quickly blew through some MP creating a water funnel, forcing the oncoming predator to skate by me to the left as I pushed myself to the right. I kicked hard off the bottom to make some space and looked around for my underwater companion.
I only had a few minutes of air left, but over the last couple of years I had developed a response to being attacked. If I wanted to grow stronger and succeed, I couldn’t just run away. I had been attacked, and so if possible, I needed to face it. I could tactically retreat, but I would then come back and find the beast again, and in the ocean that could be impossible. No, I thought. I’ll face you now and turn you into my experience.
I saw the beast coming back at me again. It was some kind of shark-like thing, and those teeth looked incredibly sharp. My whaloid familiar pumped its tail powerfully in the water and slammed into the oncoming enemy, impaling it with its horn. The opposing beast thrashed, blood in the water. I bet the trail of blood I left while exploring the ocean floor is what attracted this in the first place. I had several of those biting eels in my inventory now, as well as a bunch of other underwater treasures to sort through later.
I shot through the water, accelerated with water magic, to come to the beast’s side, and tried to gut it with my hunting knife, but the scaly hide of the beast was surprisingly defensive. I was brainstorming over ways I could do damage underwater when I spotted the beast’s gills. I rammed my knife into them, slicing open a wicked gash deeper into the beast.
My enemy thrashed wildly, but impaled on the whaloid’s horn, it couldn’t go anywhere. I pulled my knife out and shoved my hand into the wound, reaching deep into the squirming creature. It was disgusting, but I forced my hand in even further.
I had no idea what I could grab inside the beast to kill it, so I opted to do something similar to what I had done to the clam. I poured heat into the still-squirming insides of the creature that dared to attack me.
The beast thrashed harder, then went stiff before finally dying. I had not liked that at all. I was already touching the corpse so I dropped it into my inventory, the water swirling to fill the space the creature had just occupied. I was already practically touching the whaloid’s horn, so I moved forward to grab it and tapped the beast three times, my vision starting to go dark as my oxygen ran low.
We just made it to the surface before I passed out.
* * *
I awoke on the whaloid’s back, my skin clammy from the salt, wind, and strong late-spring heat beating down on me. I groaned, and rolled over, patting its purple back.
“Thanks for the assist,” I said. “You really saved my butt.”
The whaloid sung happily in response.
I guided the whaloid back towards the shore outside of Mirut, returning to a frantic Treepo, Gregory, and Buda. I guess they picked up on my telepathic communication in battle, but not being able to do anything, they could only wait for my return to see if I was safe.
I chuckled, petting the three and whispering confirmations that I was fine. I healed myself of my dry, cooked skin and any other damages I might have taken from the whole event, then appraised and pulled the corpse of the beast out of my inventory to get a better look at it.
It was called a lorsh, and was something like a cross between a shark and a sea serpent. The mouth was very shark-like, and it had pectoral and ventral fins–which actually had small digits at the end of them, which creeped me out a bit–but no dorsal fin. Instead of a tail fin, its backside protruded and tapered off like a snake.
Now that it was out of the water, I could smell the cooked insides. I glanced at my familiars, and was surprised to see the whaloid had actually come up on the shore, and was standing on the four legs which I thought had been vestigial. It wiggled its tail at me, almost like a happy dog. I laughed, and touched the lorsh, returning it to my inventory to dismantle it before pulling out some cuts of the beast’s meat.
“Who’s hungry?”