First Deep Sea Construction Worker

[Private Message to: Nettle]"I want to test something, but I need your steamboat. Are you in?"

The reply came back almost instantly.

[Private Message from: Nettle]"Yes!"

Arista grinned at the sheer, unconditional speed of that answer, then opened a second message.

[Private Message to: Bram]"We need to do something on Nettle's ship. You free?"

[Private Message from: Bram]"I have a bad feeling about this."

[Private Message to: Bram]"That's not a no."

[Private Message from: Bram]"...I'm coming."

They boarded the ship an hour later, the ridiculous, non-functional wooden helicopter creaking gently overhead as always, and sailed out until the depth gauge read a clean fifty meters below the hull.

"Okay," Arista said, handing Bram the freshly forged prototype, full-scale hexagonal panel, adamantium frame, sturdy grip handle welded to the back. "Hold this."

Bram took it, testing the weight with a grunt. Despite Vitality being his primary stat, years of leveling had still left him with more than enough Strength to carry the mass, even if the sheer, awkward size made it genuinely unwieldy to actually maneuver. "...Why am I holding a five-meter shield."

"Just hold it. Both hands. Good grip."

"Arista—"

She shoved him overboard.

Bram vanished beneath the surface with a startled shout and a considerable splash, riot shield still clutched firmly in both hands as he sank.

Nettle, watching from the railing, didn't even blink. "...Was that necessary?"

"Completely necessary," Arista said, checking a small timer on her own display. "For science."

Two minutes passed. Then, right on schedule, Bram's head broke the surface, sputtering, treading water with the shield still awkwardly clutched against his chest.

"...WHAT," he said, spitting out a mouthful of seawater, "was THAT for?"

"How was the pressure?" Arista called down, entirely unbothered by his obvious indignation.

Bram blinked, momentarily thrown by the actual question buried inside the assault. "...Fine? Why?"

"Great!" Arista beamed, already signaling the crew to bring the ship back toward deeper water. "Next test's at a hundred meters."

"...What."

"Same thing. Hold the shield, get shoved off the boat, tell me how the pressure feels once you're back up."

Bram treaded water for a long, disbelieving moment, staring up at her. "For the record, once again, I did not consent to this specific experiment."

"Consent was implied by prior participation pattern," Arista said, echoing Thoth's exact phrasing with unmistakable delight.

"That is still not how consent works!"

"Get back on the boat, Bram. We've got depth to test."

Nettle, watching the whole exchange with open, unrepentant amusement, helped haul him back over the railing, water streaming off both him and the massive shield in equal measure.

"...For what it's worth," she said, patting his shoulder, "this is genuinely useful data, if it works the way she's hoping."

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"I don't care if it's useful," Bram said, wringing out his sleeve. "I care that I was thrown off a boat with zero warning."

"You held the shield voluntarily."

"I did not know holding the shield meant being thrown off a boat."

"Details," Arista said cheerfully, already resetting the timer for the next depth. "Ready?"

Bram stared at her, then down at the shield still sitting heavy in his arms, then back up at the horizon where the ship was already turning toward deeper water.

"...I hate that I'm actually curious now too," he admitted, grudging.

"That's the spirit!" Arista said, delighted. "Hundred meters. Let's go."

The hundred-meter test went much the same way as the first, though Bram flatly refused to let Arista push him this time and jumped overboard himself. The pressure still wasn't causing him any obvious distress, which was enough for Arista to push the experiment one step further.

At a hundred and fifty meters, Bram surfaced considerably less indignant than before, treading water with the shield still gripped firmly in both hands, expression thoughtful rather than outraged for the first time all afternoon.

"...Report," Arista called down, leaning over the railing.

"Stamina's draining faster," Bram said, still catching his breath. "About twice the normal rate, compared to a surface swim. And I can't hold my breath quite as long down there, noticeably shorter than usual, though not dangerously so." He paused, working through the sensation properly. "But the pressure itself? Nothing. No crushing sensation, no pain, nothing that felt like it was actually hurting me."

Arista's grin spread slow and delighted as the pieces clicked into place exactly the way she'd hoped.

"...It's the Strength," she said, mostly to herself, working through the confirmation out loud. "Has to be. Not your main stat, obviously, but you've still accumulated a ridiculous amount of it by now. Vitality's just a bigger health pool, more damage you can soak up before something actually kills you. It doesn't reinforce anything structurally. If it did, I'd be better at this than you, and I'm definitely not. At three hundred meters, I would've only lasted a few minutes before the pressure started winning."

She tapped the railing, thinking it through properly now. "But Strength, real, stacked, unreasonable Strength, that's not just about how hard you can swing something. It's about how much force your entire body can physically resist without deforming. Real-world human bodies can't handle a hundred and fifty meters of water pressure unprotected, that's genuinely dangerous, potentially fatal territory back home. But your character isn't a real-world human body. It's a stat sheet wearing one, and that stat sheet's currently holding enough raw Strength to physically brace against something no unmodified human tissue ever could."

"...So the game's letting my Strength compensate," Bram said slowly, understanding dawning. "The pressure's still there, mechanically, draining my stamina and oxygen faster than normal, but it's not actually crushing me, because I've got enough Strength to just... hold the line against it."

"Exactly. Remember what the AI told me, way back at the very start? Low-level crafting follows real physics, and it only starts diverging from that the more magic gets involved." Arista's eyes lit with the specific delight of a theory clicking fully into place. "Nobody ever clarified what counts as magic, though. I think stat points do. Enough raw, system-granted Strength isn't just training or muscle anymore, it's bending what a body should physically be capable of, the exact same way a rune or an elemental binding would. It's just wearing a much more boring name." She pulled him back up over the railing, practically vibrating with satisfaction. "I hoped this would be the case. I wasn't sure until we actually tested it properly."

Bram set the massive shield down on the deck, flexing his arms, genuinely processing the implication. "...So I could theoretically work down there. At depth. Without needing a full submarine hull around me the entire time."

"Without needing any pressure protection at all: yes." Arista beamed at him, delighted. "Guess we found our first deep sea construction worker."

"...I would like it noted," Bram said, wringing out his sleeve for the third time that afternoon, "that being thrown off a boat repeatedly has apparently qualified me for a job I did not apply for."

"You're extremely qualified for it," Arista said, entirely unhelpfully.

"That's what you said about the hydra spotting mission too."

"And you were extremely qualified for that. Statistically speaking, anyway." Arista was already sketching notes, the whole dome construction plan reorganizing itself around this new discovery.

"This changes the whole build strategy. If players with sufficiently high Strength can work at depth without pressure protection, we don't need every single panel installer sealed inside a submarine. We need a proper deep-sea labor crew, players who meet the Strength threshold, actually assembling the hexagonal lattice by hand at the construction site itself."

Nettle, listening with growing interest, leaned in. "...You want to recruit an entire underwater construction crew. Strength builds specifically."

"Strength builds specifically," Arista confirmed, grinning. "Same logic as everything else. Right person, right specialty, matched to the actual problem instead of trying to force one solution to cover every job.

Bram sighed, the long, familiar, resigned sigh of a man who had, once again, been quietly, thoroughly conscripted into something considerably larger than he'd originally agreed to.

"...I want it on record," he said, "that this started with you shoving me off a boat, and it has now become a career."

"Character development," Arista said cheerfully, already drafting the recruitment post in her head. "Welcome to deep sea construction, Bram. I think you're going to be very good at it."