Chapter 58: Adapting to the Abyss

Chapter 58: Chapter 58: Adapting to the Abyss

"Be formless, shapeless, like water. Be water, my friend." Bruce Lee

The reward arrived two streets into the relic district. As always, the system delivered it in full, without delay and without a hint of warmth.

Joel felt the credit come through while clearing a doorway for a possible ambush. He stepped away from the column and checked the system message under the jellyfish light.

[Ding!]

[ LETHAL EVENT SETTLEMENT: GASTRIC IMPALEMENT, THROUGH-AND-THROUGH ]

[ SURVIVAL PROBABILITY AT WOUND: 0.4 PERCENT ]

[ SETTLEMENT: +2 FATE POINTS. BALANCE: 17 TO 19 ]

Two Fate Points for taking a harpoon through his gut seemed like a fair deal to Joel. The alpha had used its weapon, and in return, it had gotten a corpse that refused to stay dead.

But the reward wasn’t what interested him.

The squad had stopped at the entrance of a drowned scriptorium. Through a broken wall on the west side, Joel could see the relic district stretching down in terraces toward the one building the entire Necropolis had been built around.

The cathedral.

The church stood a kilometer away, completely submerged. Roan’s atlas showed fourteen meters of water inside the main hall. The vault markers on his chart surrounded the church, but every squad that had reached them was now dead, scattered, or screaming somewhere behind them.

The return beacon in Joel’s pack had dimmed again. Kole’s sabotage was getting worse by the hour, and the surface was becoming harder to reach.

A bell rang through the stone at long intervals.

DOOM.

Beneath the ringing, something deep in the water kept breathing. It was slow and steady, as if it had all the time in the world.

Joel had listened to that sound for two days before finally accepting the truth.

Something lived inside the church.

The Stratum Boss.

It never left the water, and every valuable route left in the city passed through the flooded halls beneath its altar.

[Ding!]

[ STRATUM BOSS ZONE: IDENTIFIED ]

[ NAVE: FULLY SUBMERGED, 14 METERS STANDING WATER ]

[ NOTE: THE TENANT HAS RUNG THAT BELL FOR THREE THOUSAND YEARS. RENT IS DUE. ]

"I can hold my breath for four minutes at rest," Joel said. "While fighting, I can manage two. And nothing in my weight class has ever settled a fight in two minutes."

He looked at Roan, then Sybill. Both straightened under his gaze.

"I don’t make bets I can’t win. Before we take this one, I’m going to change the rules. It will be loud, and there will be blood. Roan, seal this room with your strongest muffling lattice. Double it and anchor it to the floor script. Sybill, cover me with the Cadaver-Shroud and keep it active. Blood travels in this city, and blood attracts things."

Sybill’s hex-thread went still around her fingers.

They got to work without asking a single question. Joel took note of it.

Roan drew doubled silence-script across the walls while Sybill wound her thread and spread the shroud over Joel like cold silk.

Joel sat cross-legged on the drowned marble, the black water reaching his waist. He closed his eyes and considered his options.

He could buy a cheap water-breathing charm from the expedition stores for eleven merit chits. It would give him an hour of air, but the moment the boss cracked it, he would die.

The house didn’t rent its equipment. The house built its own infrastructure.

And tonight, Joel was going to build that infrastructure directly into his ribs.

The cost would leave him weak, just like any large withdrawal.

[Ding!]

[ WHEEL OF FATE: WAGER ACCEPTED ]

[ STAKE: 1 FATE POINT. BALANCE: 19 TO 18 ]

[ APPLICATION SELECTED: C, BODY EVOLUTION. TARGET: RESPIRATORY SYSTEM ]

[ SPINNING ]

[ MULTIPLIER: X12,000 ]

[ ALLOCATION: 12,000 EVOLUTION UNITS ROUTED. RESTRUCTURE BEGINNING. ]

The wheel spun inside Joel’s head. The pain started before it stopped, telling him the multiplier was high.

Heat spread behind his sternum like a furnace. His lungs began to change. Every passage was examined, broken apart, and rebuilt.

The air in his throat turned hot and thin. Breathing felt like sucking air through wet cloth, and every heartbeat pounded inside his skull.

Then his ribs began to move.

KRRK. KRRK.

One after another, they pushed outward. Six slits tore open along his sides, from beneath his arms to his lower ribs.

SHRRK!

Blood poured into the water around him, spreading in red ribbons.

Thin filaments unfolded from the slits like wet silk. They were crimson at first, then darkened to slate. Each one moved on its own.

Joel toppled sideways into the water. The transformation shook his body violently, as if someone were forcing a debtor to pay what he owed.

His scream should have echoed through three city blocks, but Roan’s doubled lattice swallowed the sound. The loudest noise in the scriptorium was the ticking of the wards.

Roan held Joel’s shoulders down through the entire process. Sybill rewove the shroud twice as the water filled with blood.

Neither of them spoke.

They had signed the oath. They were no longer witnesses.

They were staff.

The shaking stopped. The water settled red and then cleared, the filaments kept sorting the current, and the system spoke into the quiet with something which read almost like respect.

[Ding!]

[ PASSIVE TRAIT ACQUIRED: ABYSSAL ADAPTATION ]

[ GRADE: EPIC. ORIGIN: BASELINE HUMAN RESPIRATION, FORCIBLY RESTRUCTURED ]

[ EFFECTS: PERFECT AQUATIC RESPIRATION. HYDROSTATIC PRESSURE IMMUNITY. ENHANCED AQUATIC MOBILITY ]

[ NOTE: THE FLOODED RUINS HAVE UPDATED THEIR APEX PREDATOR. THE PREVIOUS HOLDER HAS BEEN NOTIFIED POSTHUMOUSLY. ]

Joel opened his eyes. Air felt wrong in his mouth, thin and useless, while the black water below looked inviting.

He slipped beneath the surface without asking permission. Cold water closed over his new gills, and he took his first breath in the Necropolis.

Water flowed in through the slits along his ribs and came out clean.

His old instincts screamed that he was drowning, but his new body ignored them. Oxygen flooded him, cold and powerful, like drinking from a mountain spring in a land he had just conquered.

No bubbles escaped his mouth. He had nothing left to exhale.

The deep around him fell silent.

Sound worked differently now that his body had become part of the water. He could hear the instructors fighting above the terraces, the muffled sounds of KEEN and DOOM carrying through the depths like a distant market closing.

The crushing pressure that had weighed on him for two days now felt like a handshake.

Joel kicked once and crossed the hall before he had even finished thinking. He swept around a column without slowing down.

The water moved aside for him, like staff clearing the floor for its owner.

"He’s breathing it," Roan said from the edge of the water. His voice was flat, as if he had run out of things that could surprise him. "He’s down there breathing the ocean."

The blood from Joel’s transformation drifted through the west wall with the current. The Necropolis sensed it immediately, like a market reacting to a rumor.

Within a minute, five Drowned Ghouls came down the canal. They were pale and eyeless, with jaws hanging open. They followed the scent of wounded prey, confident that nothing could threaten them in their own territory.

Joel waited beneath them in the water, holding the alpha’s harpoon. The house always kept its receipts.

He let the first ghoul swim overhead before making his move.

SHNK!

The harpoon pierced its jaw. Joel used the impaled ghoul as an anchor and swung upward toward the second.

KRRAK!

He struck it with the force of his movement, then let go of the harpoon.

The third ghoul rushed toward him. Joel fired a Meteor Piercer along his new, level path through the water.

THWOOM!

The blast tore through the water and destroyed the ghoul’s spine.

The fourth attacked before the bubbles had even settled. Joel met it with a closed-fist Kinetic Bastion.

KRK!

He kept all the force within his fist and crushed the creature.

The fifth understood the situation and fled.

But nothing in this water could outrun Joel now.

He caught it at the mouth of the canal and killed it with quiet, almost apologetic efficiency.

[Ding!]

[ DROWNED GHOUL: LEVEL 25, X5: ELIMINATED ]

[ EXPERIENCE: JOEL +60 ]

[ SURVIVAL ACCUMULATION: 0 PERCENT. UNCHANGED. ]

[ NULL-BAND PROFILE: FLESH-GUIDE, F-RANK, LEVEL 1. STILL BROADCASTING. ]

Joel climbed out of the canal and onto the terrace steps. Water streamed off his body, and the gills along his ribs folded flat.

Sybill watched him approach. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

"The contract," she said. "Tell me it covers whatever you are now."

"The contract covers everything." Roan answered before Joel could speak.

"Waterproof your wards and redraw your glyphs for working at depth," Joel said, squeezing the water from his sleeves. "From here on, we’re no longer visitors."

The cathedral stood farther down the terraces. The vault key was warm in his pocket, and its bell would ring again soon.

Beneath them, the deep continued to breathe.

But for the first time since their descent, Joel listened to it without owing it anything.

The deep had spent three thousand years perfecting the art of drowning its visitors.

The house needed one evening to buy the water outright.