Chapter 64 – Down Way Too Deep

Zooming through the ocean winds, Darya appeared above Fominel. He had just skewered a merfolk Shadow underwater. 

“Fom!” She yelled as she floated around with the weightlessness spell. 

“Princess?!” He yelled back, flipping himself around. 

“Nerima, where?!” Darya asked, pointing back where she came from. 

Fominel gestured at the water straight below. “Down!” 

Is she not back on the ship, then? Damn it all. 

Darya waved at him before targeting someone on the deck. It was a full battle against two merfolk Shadows that had climbed the hull. One of the sailors lay in a puddle of blood, and two of the mages were parrying luminous sparks with warding spells. Seris was bent over a young mage who had apparently gotten their arm sliced off the shoulder. 

The fight was raging exactly on the porting circle reserved for Nerima.

Darya targeted one of the merfolk shadows. 

[Vainfall: Frame Selected Entity]

She extended her gauntleted hands as she zoomed, using the momentum to land on them. The shadow drew a transparent mana veil with a swipe of their hand, and her gauntlets scraped against it. 

[Vainfall: Terminate]

As the world turned monochrome, she phased through the veil, passed through the shadow, and landed on the deck. 

One. 

Turning on her heel, she drove both gauntlets through its back, watching the prediction dots splash open. Steadily, she ripped it wide open. 

Two. 

[Skill: Wind Step]

-20 SP • 8s Cooldown

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She dashed through the shadow towards the second one. Phased halfway into it, and immediately readjusted her posture to sink her gauntlet forearm-deep into its gut. 

Three. 

She hunched forward slowly, and watched the prediction dots fly away. 

Half. 

The world caught up. The first Shadow’s torso ripped open, spurting black slime on the deck. The second Shadow flew into the railing, half its abdomen torn off.

Darya fell to the deck as the weightlessness spell suddenly ran out. Sliding on the wet Shadow blood, she ran up and kicked the second Shadow over the railing. She was doing a perfectly normal kick when her other leg slid on the wet floor, and she flew halfway into a dropkick. 

Grabbing anything she could with the gauntleted hand, she avoided throwing herself into the waves. The Shadow flew overboard, taking a piece of the railing with it. 

“Princess!” Seris’s surprised voice came from behind. 

Darya panted as the two mages surrounded the first Shadow struggling on the ground. They blasted the deck floor into splinters. 

Goddammit, this is why I didn’t want to fight on the ship. 

“Neh-Nerima, bring her back. Where’s the rope?” Darya asked, trying to catch her breath. 

“It got cut off when I was fighting a Shadow,” Seris showed her the fraying end of the rope still wrapped around her waist. “Lurim jumped after it, and dragged master Lam with it. They’re all underwater right now.”

“Well, fuck. Nerima got stabbed through her tail. She was bleeding.” 

“Oh, no!” Seris grabbed her head. 

“I’ll go find her. Do you have anything that can patch a hole like that? Maybe stop the bleeding?” 

Seris dug into her sidebag and pulled out several potion bottles with trembling hands. She picked one and pushed it into Darya’s hand. “Just throw the whole bottle. Bring her back; I can do the rest.” 

Darya saw Enta sleeping on Seris’s shoulder. He had been completely spent, all three stamina points gone. She had come back to the ship expecting a refill herself, but now that wasn’t possible. 

“Do you have any mana crystals?” Darya asked, looking at Seris’s bag. “Just give me one. No  need for more.”

Seris pulled out a small crystal ball and handed it over. “I only have three more. “Enta’s asleep. This is my last refill.”

Darya nodded, gripping the mana crystal with her gauntleted hand. White tendrils burst from it, traveling up her forearm. If this was Seris’s last refill, she had to bring Nerima to the ship as soon as possible. Seris bore the responsibility to heal everyone. It wasn’t fair to ask her to keep her mana reserved for Nerima if she wasn’t around, especially not in front of other injured people. 

“I’ll bring her back,” Darya muttered, handing the mana crystal back. She hadn’t absorbed all of it, but she hoped she at least had enough for a couple of spells. 

With a running start, she leapt off the railing. 

[Flying Celestian]

Floating away in the wind, she hesitated before activating the skill to slither around. Stamina was harder to recover than mana. If she ran out, she was out for good. 

She needed to locate Nerima first. 

Shit. I need something like an entity search for this one. 

She actually had one. It was called Vainfall: Search, and it was admin locked. It would’ve made life so much easier. She would just instantly find the artifacts, and she could find anyone in the world. 

[Vainfall: Overlay Depth Buffer]

The world turned into gray shapes again. This time, she had a new thing to try. She pulled out her telescope as the wind carried her away from the ship. First, she kept the zoom levels low. Keeping Desert Rose at the center of the frame for reference. 

She could feel the presence of sea monsters below. There was something gigantic way down. Something the size of an island. It was alive and moving. Everything else she could see was arranged against that backdrop, everything like colossal sea monsters, big ugly fish, and things with long tentacles. 

Finding Nerima in this mess was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. 

She found easier targets to track, and the largest fishes closest to the surface made great visual anchors. The Cartogar belugas were the easiest to see. They were moving in a pattern, pulsing either mana at approaching Sea Monster. 

It was only now that Darya saw the amount of effort they were putting in just to keep them away. She counted way more than she thought. It seemed the number had grown. 

Wait. Where’s Lurim’s friend? It should be one of the small ones!

Fominel flew near her, waving curiously. She gestured down and pointed at her telescope. He nodded and dove down, going back to finishing merfolk Shadows. 

Darya saw several smaller belugas, but they weren’t as small as the supposed five-year-old that she met. She knew sizes really well with her heightened depth perception. The smallest one was still the size of a school bus.

As she watched for a few more seconds, she saw a strange pattern in their behavior. All the belugas were spiraling around the Desert Rose, but it wasn’t a circle. They were doing it in a diagonal ellipse going really deep on one side. The shape looked stretched, as if they wanted to circle something else as well. 

Darya saw it just then: the smallest beluga idling at the deepest point of the ellipse right around the turn. 

Panicking, she looked for Lurim or master Lam. She caught a glimpse of the boy swimming circles around his friend Beluga. He had a rope in his hand, and one around his waist. The waist one was broken, and the other went deep into the depths. 

Her stomach dropped when she realized what had happened. Lurim had found the end of Nerima’s rope. He had tied it around his friend. He was trying to pull her up. Master Lam had cut the rope connecting him and Lurim, likely because he wasn’t that good at diving. He wasn’t as ‘Merfolky’ as Lurim. 

But Darya could now see things that Lurim could never see with the telescope and depth sense. She found Nerima at the end of the rope. She was in the unfathomable depths, right in the middle of the Sea Monsters, only protected by two adult Belugas. 

An oversized anglerfish-looking thing bounced off their mana pulses even as she watched. It seemed Nerima was unconscious, or held there by something. 

Lurim’s plan should’ve worked. He should be able to pull Nerima up with the whale. It wasn’t happening. Two Belugas had gone down to protect Nerima just because it wasn’t working. 

Darya observed the nearby Sea Monsters. She saw a cylindrical one far below Nerima emitting a mana beam like a torch. It had used some upside-down UFO-lifter-beam-style thing to capture her. 

“Fuck. This. Shit. I’m going to throw up.”

Darya targeted Nerima through the telescope. First, she had to seal that wound on her tail before she lost more blood.

She took a huge breath in and held it. 

[Vainfall: Terminate Twice] 

[Frame Selected Entity]

Zooming in usually happened within a second across great distances, but this time, it felt like two seconds. She had gone two times the normal great distance straight down into the water. She actually felt sick. At this depth, if she missed a Terminate, she would get crushed from all directions like a tin can. 

She came to an abrupt stop a few feet away from Nerima. The prediction dots warped around her, showing her impact on the water as she slowed. 

Moving fast, she tucked the telescope in and grabbed the potion. It left her fumbling fingers and floated off. She managed to grab it again with great effort. 

Three seconds wasted, and she had mostly forgotten to count. 

It had to be activated again. She was paranoid. 

[Vainfall: Terminate Twice]

That didn’t activate. 

She counted seconds. 

One. Two. Where’s the fucking half!

[Vainfall: Terminate Twice]

[Vainfall: Terminate Twice]

[Vainfall: Terminate Twice]

Finally, it activated. The new Terminate made the world around her flicker into visual artifacts. Everything wobbled. Four of them broke the world straight back to the /dev void. 

The problem was coming straight out of the /dev void. The /close command momentarily flushed all existing commands, leaving her with a blank slate. This is how she ended up face-first in the mud when she fought Sarka. If that happened this far underwater, she was doomed.

Quickly moving towards Nerima, she popped the bottle open and just shoved it straight into the wound. She pushed it slow enough to ‘punch’ her with it, possibly making the wound worse by jamming the bottle into it. Prediction dots showed this was going to work. 

She grabbed her telescope again. She had to find Lurim or his whale directly above. That was the closest way she could go back to the surface. 

[Vainfall: Overlay Depth Buffer]

She spotted the little whale and targeted it from below.