Chapter 351: The Lineage of the Seas

Going down without anyone who can shell the gallery from above limits our options.

We don’t have an area mage or any long-range support that could thin out dozens of Brinekin before contact. We could try to peel small groups off the patrols, but the hall is open and the walkways above cross between the pillars. The moment the first one screams, all of them will know we’re here.

So we do it head on.

"Veric opens. Zhang Xi stays with him. Rhayne holds containment and doesn’t let anything get around the sides. Freya and I take everything they hold and put damage into it."

Veric studies the way down and nods. Zhang Xi has already pushed her hood back, leaving her arms free, while Rhayne unspools part of the Battle Ribbon and looks at me expectantly.

"Come here..." she says, reaching her hand toward my face. Her eyes are inviting, still a little apprehensive.

I take her hand and bring it to my cheek, feeling the warmth of her palm start to pull at my soul with a cold freshness. The connection rises between us as a familiar pressure, quiet until my OXI begins to circulate through her.

[OXI: 4821/5000]

Before we go down, I weigh Kraken against Eventide. I have a bigger tank at Rank C, but every one of my skills got more expensive with it. This is going to be a battle of attrition, and attrition takes time, so I settle on Kraken.

We move.

The first Brinekin notice Veric before our feet reach the lower level.

Three come in almost together. A deliberate charge, and violently fast.

Veric takes the first impact at the center of the formation.

The bone spear cuts the air with a whistle and hits his guard hard enough to send a massive clang across the gallery, and he doesn’t give ground.

"Damn it, these bastards are strong as hell." Veric answers with Undertow in the same motion.

The water around him deforms into a circle and erupts upward. His boots dig into the floor as he shoves the Brinekin off its own axis. The second one tries to use that opening to slip past on the flank.

Zhang Xi is already there.

She touches two fingers to Veric’s back and a short rune lights up over the armor. His body sets in the next instant and eats the blow that should have punched through his side. The rune bursts, throwing the spear’s force upward.

Zhang crosses behind Veric before the spear can come back, comes out the other side, and turns the same Brinekin’s arm aside with her palm.

Veric finishes the first one with a thrust to the neck, opening the flesh and sending blood up in a high spray.

’Brinekin are monstrous for Rank C, and infinitely more fragile than a human body.’

"Keep going! They can’t take a hit! But one hit and you’re finished!"

The third comes from above.

Zhang Xi drops under the spear as it passes and slides along Veric’s side, close enough that her gray tunic scrapes the armor. A rune forms over the Brinekin’s forearm and bursts in a short pressure, pushing part of the attack upward. Veric takes it and lands a descending cut across the creature’s chest, hard enough to throw it against one of the columns.

A cut has opened along the side of his arm. Even with the deflection, he got hit.

Zhang Xi presses her hand to it while she’s still moving.

The skin starts closing before Veric finishes bringing his guard back up.

I’ve known good healers. She still gives me a small pang of regret that I only met her in this timeline.

Zhang Xi doesn’t stand behind Veric waiting for him to get hurt. She fights around him, using the space he creates and closing the space he leaves. Sometimes she’s at his back, sometimes she comes out on the flank, passes in front of him for a second and disappears behind the vanguard again.

It looks like a dance built around someone who doesn’t need to know how to dance. She turns a flawed vanguard into an impenetrable defense.

More Brinekin come.

Rhayne opens the Battle Ribbon.

The ribbon passes me, snakes over the water, and wraps the wrist of a creature trying to work around Veric. A second coil catches the leg. Rhayne pulls both directions at once and destroys the Brinekin’s balance.

’My turn.’

I move in with a diagonal cut and Kraken goes through between the gills and the shoulder. The resistance disappears almost immediately.

[OXI: 4781/5000]

The body hits the water and something pale slips out of the improvised guard it was wearing on its chest. A small shell plate.

I see the inscription cut into it and recognize the shape.

"A clue—"

Rhayne hooks the plate with the tip of the Battle Ribbon and throws it back behind our formation before the next group arrives.

I catch it out of the air.

[You obtained a clue.]

’Five more to go.’

The Brinekin are strong. Rank C isn’t decoration.

A well-placed spear will go through flesh, and the OXI discharges some of them produce have the force to break stone. Their problem is what happens when they can’t keep an enemy at range.

Their bodies are built for mobility in water. Exposed gills, relatively thin joints, little natural protection, musculature distributed for fast bursts. They have the firepower to kill someone of the same Rank, but they weren’t built to receive clean hits from another Rank C.

Freya sees it as fast as I do.

She falls back a few steps while Veric draws another concentration into the corridor between two pillars.

The water around her boots goes white.

"Permafrost."

The cold crosses the gallery.

Ice takes the shallow water in a fast expansion, climbing the edges of the walkways and sealing two side routes. The Brinekin trying to spread the formation out are forced back toward the center, stacking up in front of Veric while Rhayne closes what’s left of the space with the Battle Ribbon.

Freya has just turned dozens of mobile enemies into a line.

Ice wings appear at her back.

We all know that image.

Even so, seeing it now, with an entire room prepared for what comes next, makes it very easy to understand why the future would choose such a specific name for Freya Gunnulf.

The Great Ice Valkyrie lowers her scythe.

"Pegasus Wrath..."

She whispers it, and then she’s gone.

There’s no explosion. Just a line.

Freya crosses the formation at a speed my eyes barely follow, wings holding her body steady while all of that acceleration arrives with the blade. The first Brinekin opens before it can raise its weapon. The second is hit together with the third, both thrown against the ice. Others behind them try to scatter, but Permafrost has already frozen the floor and there’s nowhere to go.

Pegasus Wrath keeps going.

When Freya comes out the other side, an entire band of the formation has simply stopped existing.

The Brinekin still standing are dangerous.

There just aren’t many of them.

"Damn it, Freya... stealing the leader’s spotlight..."

I smile.

After that, the fight turns into work.

Veric holds the center with Azure Dividend running. Zhang Xi keeps orbiting the vanguard, feeding buffs ahead of the impacts, and with Azure Dividend active she doesn’t even need to close a wound. Rhayne keeps applying crowd control while I take the openings she makes.

Freya finishes a Brinekin pinned between two layers of ice and sees another shell plate drop with the body. She picks it up, eyes already going down to the inscription.

"Freya. Later."

She looks at me.

I point at the creatures still left.

"Finish the room first."

Freya puts the shell away and goes back into the fight.

It doesn’t take much longer.

When the last Brinekin falls, the shallow water of the gallery is marked with dark blood, broken ice, and abandoned crude weapons. None of us came out untouched, but Zhang Xi handled anything that mattered during the fight itself. Veric is carrying new marks on his armor, Rhayne is breathing faster from the buildup of the Link, and Freya spent a considerable amount of OXI.

Even so, nobody is anywhere near their limit. I held back through most of the fight, because I know what waits at the end of this dungeon and I need something left for it.

Three Rank C change the math of a room by a lot. They don’t change the math of the last fight.

Before we collect what actually matters, I ask Rhayne to cut the Void Link between us. She nods.

We pick up six shell plates, and I leave the Scales with Freya and Zhang Xi as a thank-you. Nothing else worth taking shows up.

Each plate carries a shade along its edge matching the color bands of the six pillars spread through the gallery, but none of them carries a name or any direct indication of which statue should receive its coins. What they do carry are sentences cut into the surface.

We lay all six out on a dry section of the passage.

I look at them for a few seconds.

It’s the same riddle. It isn’t the same answer.

In the other life the clues had a different composition, the pillars stood in different positions, and the contradiction showed up at another point in the lineage. I remember the logic used to solve it, but Causal Dissonance tore away my ability to simply repeat a memorized sequence.

’Fine. A riddle is still a riddle.’

Rhayne picks up the first plate and reads.

"’The Central Sea is the youngest of the lineage: the child holding the oar.’"

Everyone looks at the statues.

The smallest of them is holding exactly that.

Rhayne points.

"So the first statue is the Central Sea pillar."

"If that plate is telling the truth," Zhang Xi corrects, calmly.

Rhayne looks back at the shell.

"Because one of them is false?"

I nod.

"Don’t pick the lie off the first contradiction you find. We need to work out which five can form a single structure."

Veric takes another plate.

"’The North Sea is the son of the East Sea.’"

That only tells us the North Sea sits one generation below the East Sea. It isn’t connected to the Central Sea yet. We need more.

Freya pulls the next one closer. ℯℯ𝑙.

"’The East Sea is the grandfather of the Central Sea.’"

The two clues complete each other. If East is Central’s grandfather and North is East’s son, then North occupies exactly the generation between the two.

"So if all three are true, Central is the child, North is second, and East is third," Freya concludes.

"We’re assuming so," I say.

Zhang Xi chooses another shell.

She reads it once in silence before she speaks.

"’The South Sea is the father of the East Sea.’"

She sets the plate down with the others.

That doesn’t contradict the chain.

It confirms the direction.

South stands one generation above East, which means that, following the increasing age of the sculptures, it takes the fourth position.

Rhayne starts counting on her fingers.

"Central, North, East, South..."

The old man is still missing.

I pick up another plate.

"’The Deep Sea holds the old man’s spear and is the great-grandfather of the North Sea.’"

I look at the last statue.

A bent man, long beard, aged hands around a spear.

The piece fits.

Veric crouches near the shells and rearranges the five into a line.

"Deep is South’s father. South is East’s father. East is North’s father. North is Central’s father."

Rhayne follows the sequence backward, looking at the five statues.

"So Central is first. North second. East third. South fourth, and Deep is the old man."

Five plates.

No contradiction.

More importantly, the structure they form matches the aging of the statues exactly.

One is left.

Freya pulls the last shell over.

"’The Central Sea is the father of the Deep Sea.’"

She goes quiet after reading it.

Zhang Xi is the first to name the problem.

"That would create a cycle."

Veric nods.

Deep produces South. South produces East. East produces North. North produces Central.

If Central were the father of Deep, the youngest descendant would become the ancestor of the very man who starts the lineage.

The chain would close on itself.

Impossible inside the logic laid out by the other five plates, and impossible against the ages of the sculptures themselves.

I look at the pillar matching that shell.

West.

"We found the false one," I say.

Freya sets the plate aside.

Now we have the distribution.

I point at the statues as I go.

"First, Central Sea. Rhayne."

She nods.

"Second, North Sea. Me. Third, East Sea. Freya. Fourth, South Sea. Veric. Fifth, Deep Sea. Zhang Xi."

Zhang looks at the old statue, then back at me.

"Thirty-nine coins?"

"You picked the worst possible moment to be old."

She gives me a serene look with something teasing under it.

I sigh without understanding it and decide not to pursue it.

The West Sea is out.

We spend the next few minutes getting everything ready before touching a single chain.

Rhayne goes to the Central pillar and separates seventeen coins. I take eighteen from North. Freya counts out another eighteen at East, Veric carries nineteen from South, and Zhang Xi has to haul thirty-nine coins from Deep all the way to the last statue.

We check every count twice.

Then we check the order.

Rhayne.

Me.

Freya.

Veric.

Zhang Xi.

No mechanism has been triggered yet.

That’s exactly how I want it.

Once everyone is in position, I go to my statue and pick up the chain. The metal ring at the end is cold and heavy, wide enough to close around a waist.

"Only lock in when I say. The moment the fifth link closes, it starts."

I wait for everyone to confirm.

Rhayne fits the chain around her body.

I do the same.

Freya closes hers, then Veric.

Zhang Xi is last.

I take one look at the drainage ducts, at the level marks on the pillars, and at the gates where new Brinekin will come out if we get this wrong.

"Go."

Zhang Xi closes her chain.

The effect is immediate.

OXI leaves my channels in one continuous pull and runs out through the metal at my waist. The five chains take on a weak blue glow while hidden mechanisms start moving inside the walls.

[OXI: 4705/5000]...

[OXI: 4695/5000]...

[OXI: 4685/5000]...

Stone grinds across the whole gallery.

The first floodgates open.

Water starts coming in while Rhayne is already standing in front of the child.

She pours the seventeen Central Sea coins into the statue’s vessel. One after another, they hit the stone bottom until the last one drops.

The vessel sinks.

It stops.

No alarm.

No gate opens.

Rhayne breathes out and closes both hands around the oar.

We’ve solved the lineage.

Now we only have to execute the rest.