Chapter 535 | You Giant Wet Bastard

Chapter 535: 535 | You Giant Wet Bastard

The whole shelf lifted a full inch under my boots, and every person on it dropped into a crouch at once because the ground had started breathing. Basalt cracked in a long jagged line from Jordan’s position to the spire, and seawater came up through the crack in a hissing sheet that soaked my shins. The kelp stalks around us bent flat against the surface, and the gold light through the canopy went green and then dark as something rose underneath all of it.

"Everyone off the seam and onto the high side!" Misato’s voice snapped across the rock, and six clones moved before the words finished.

I grabbed Javier by the collar and threw him toward the spire, because he was still writing the time down and I refused to let the last thing in his notebook be a number. Belle scrambled after him on her hands and knees, crossbow clutched to her chest, her torn suit flapping open at the hip. Jordan rolled uphill with a groan that sounded personally betrayed by gravity.

Then the water forty meters out stood up.

A dome of green sea rose higher than the kelp and kept climbing, and the ocean poured off its sides in white sheets that crashed back down hard enough to shake my teeth. Underneath the water was skin, pale grey and speckled with glowing phosphor spots the size of car tires. The dome split open along a seam I hadn’t seen, and a mouth unfolded out of it. The mouth kept going, and I stopped trying to measure it because my brain filed the number under do not look.

It was a frog-seal in the way a wildfire is a campfire. The same milky eyes sat on top of the head, except there were six of them in a crooked row, and each one was bigger than Naomi. The tentacles around its jaw were the long pale ones with dinner-plate suckers, and I counted nine of them before one of them came slamming down on the right edge of the shelf and cratered the rock where Belle had been standing ten seconds earlier.

"That’s the thing that tried to take my pants!" Belle screamed from behind the spire. "That’s the pants monster, Jace, and it brought its whole body this time!"

"I see it, Belle, and I’m handling it!"

"You’re standing there, and that’s not handling!"

She had a point, and I hated her for it. My legs were locked, and my spear was in one hand while the kama smoked in the other, and a very old part of my lizard brain had quietly concluded that I was a snack. The graft kicked against my ribs like it wanted to climb out of my chest and fight the fish itself.

Vale’s voice floated up out of the back of my skull in his stupid lazy drawl, telling me that the day I learn saving everyone is impossible will decide whether I become useful. I told him to shut up. He didn’t, because imaginary Vale has the same listening skills as real Vale.

"Blair, give me a burn on the left eye cluster," I shouted. "Naomi, get back up that spire and keep it looking up!"

"The humidity is eating my fire alive," Blair shot back, but her hands were already glowing blue-white, steam pouring off her knuckles in thick ropes. "You know I’m at forty percent out here, Monroe!"

"Forty percent of you is still scarier than all of Charles!"

She made a noise that was half rage and half a laugh, and then she threw a beam across the water that screamed the whole way out. It hit the left eye cluster dead center. Two of those enormous eyes went white and bubbled, and the alpha threw its head back and roared, and the sound hit me in the chest so hard that my vision went grey at the edges.

Naomi was already climbing. She went up the spire barehanded, staff strapped to her back, her suit stretched tight across her thighs, her half-loose braid whipping behind her. She reached the top and swung the staff off her shoulder in one smooth arc, and the Gold buff lit her up from the inside until she glowed through the neoprene like a lamp behind a curtain.

"Hey, ugly!" she yelled. "Over here, you giant wet bastard!"

I would have paid real money to hear my apologetic little fisherman’s daughter say that on a normal Tuesday.

She fired. The spiral that left her staff was wider than a truck, spinning so fast that the air around it shrieked, and it slammed into the alpha’s lower jaw and folded two tentacles backward in a spray of green blood. The creature twisted its whole head toward her. Every remaining eye locked on that spire.

"Good, now it’s looking at Naomi," Jordan said from the ground, voice flat. "I love that for her, and I hate that for us."

"Jordan, pin the tentacles on the right when they come in!"

"You want me to pin those? They’re the size of buses, Jace!"

"Then pin them like buses and stop complaining!"

He swore at me in three different registers and put both palms flat on the wet rock. His shadows came out slower than usual, dragging against the seawater, but they came, and when the next tentacle slammed down on the right edge, a dozen black ropes wrapped it and dragged it flat against the basalt. The tentacle thrashed. The shadows held for two seconds, then three, and Jordan’s nose started bleeding down over his lip.

"Hikaru, take it!"

Hikaru moved, and then the tentacle came apart in four clean sections. I never saw her arm go up. The pieces flopped against the rock and slid off into the sea, and the alpha screamed again, and Hikaru was already three meters away watching the water with her red eyes dead calm.

"Two tentacles down and seven left," she called. "It’s favoring the right side now."

"Thirty-five minutes," Javier yelled from behind the spire, clutching his waterproof notebook to his chest. "Count is forty-seven with the big one, and the tide is rising three centimeters a minute!"

I looked down. The water was at my calves now, cold and heavy and full of floating gore that bumped against my shins. We had maybe ten minutes before the shelf turned into a wading pool, and after that the whole ocean belonged to the fish.

Belle leaned out from the spire and started calling shots, her voice sharp and fast, and her amber-brown eyes had gone bright gold at the edges from the Silver buff. She’d stopped shaking. Belle Fox does her crying later, on a spreadsheet, and right now she was working.

"The core is behind the third eye from the right, down about six meters inside the head! It’s huge, Jace, and it’s bleeding value everywhere!"

"Can I reach it from the surface?"

"You’d need to get inside its skull," she yelled back. "So no, you can’t, and don’t even think about it!"

I thought about it immediately.

The alpha brought its remaining tentacles up out of the water in a ring, seven of them rising and curling over the shelf like the ribs of a closing hand. Misato’s clones spread out under them, steel poles up. The shadows at Jordan’s feet flickered and thinned. Blair was breathing hard, her suit hanging open to the navel and her skin shining with sweat and seawater, and the burn scar on her side had flushed an angry red.

"It’s going to slam all of them down at once," Misato said, and her voice had dropped low and flat, which scared me more than anything else in this ocean. "We can’t hold seven, Monroe."

"I know that, Misato."

"Then give me a call, field lead."