Chapter 89: Gone Fishing

The first time William Oh ever went fishing, he caught ‘The Big One’ without a fishing rod or bait…one handed.

And blind.

…Technically he was the bait.

• Nathan Oppy, level 16 Climber

“Will! Get out of there, you idiot!” Loth’s voice crossed the rolling waves, reaching him just as Will was about halfway to them.

Will took only a fraction of a second to understand what she meant, glancing down at the chunks of skyfish littering the bloody waters.

A shadow swept over him, covering the light of the sun, and an instant later, the water around him began flowing backwards.

Then the sun was completely gone.

Ack! DAMNIT!

Will tumbled backwards for a moment before miasmatic fish-corpses began to crush down around him. Will had never been to the ocean or fishing, but he’d seen fishes a couple times. Mostly stuffed, and there were a couple people eating it when they’d visited The Ring.

They looked…weird. Like a tube with little water-wings at the back that propelled them forward. These particular fishes that were being crushed in around him had much bigger teeth than the ones he’s seen mounted above rich people’s fireplaces.

Will hissed in pain as one of the dead fish’s jaws, complete with massive daggerlike teeth, smashed up against him, lacerating his neck and side. Will tried to shove it off of him, but lacked the strength to move the serrated teeth away from his body.

The darkness was complete, and all Will could tell was that there was some kind of flesh pressing in around him from every direction.

Will’s ears popped as the pressure inside the creature began to spike, ice cold water covering his face as whatever had swallowed him forced all the air out of its mouth before diving.

To the Abyss with that.

Will summoned his Phantom Hand to himself.

He unleashed the cannonball straight up.

The water Will was entombed in flooded with more coppery blood, strangely no warmer than the ice-cold water around them.

Will caught the cannonball before it got too far away from him, then brought the Phantom Hand back through the man-sized hole in the creature’s stomach.

Or, he tried.

The Phantom Hand, once it had followed the cannonball through the wound, was having difficulty going back through the wound as it closed. Phantom Hand was averse to going through a creature due to it’s magical nature. He couldn’t phase it through a creature when it was fully intangible, and tangibility didn’t make it any easier.

Damnit. Will grit his teeth and started climbing, reaching up and pulling himself into the wound, catching more flesh and pushing with his feet.

Just another kind of climb, right?

Bloody flesh, soft organs, and sharp, fractured bone scraped against him as he pulled himself out of the leviathan’s body.

Will felt as though he’d travelled a quarter mile through the thing’s chest cavity, his lungs burning with the need to breathe, but it must’ve only been fifty feet when he finally burst out into the open ocean.

For anyone else, it might’ve been too dark, and too bloody, but Will’s Acuity made it fairly simple to determine which way was up, as the faintest blood-tinted light filtered down from above.

Will pulled himself up with the Phantom Hand and burst out of the water, hitting the surface with a desperate gasp for air, his feet wobbling in place for a moment as Aspect of the Immortal Serpent seemed to consider whether or not it was willing to support him when he was so sodden and salty.

So clearly at one with the ocean.

When he was sure he wouldn’t fall back in, Will glanced up and spotted the others in their raft, nearly a quarter mile distant.

That leviathan moves FAST.

In the thirty seconds or so it’d taken him to comprehend what had happened and enact his escape, the creature had traveled this far.

It looked like it swam lazily under the ocean, but that was just a matter of scale.

Will was now on the other side of the raft, out in open ocean while the raft was closer to the flotsam, where June, Bee and Ria were waiting for pickup, unable to actually walk on open ocean.

Will started jogging back, giving himself a boost with Phantom Hand.

By the time he arrived, everyone else was already on-board, and Will was shivering, a crust of red-tinted salt forming on his skin as he climbed over the inflated rib into the raft.

One of the ribs was popped, causing the raft to tilt wildly as he clambered on, but they still had enough buoyancy to keep them all up.

There was a sharp pain as Loth plucked an ivory triangular tooth out of his shoulder. “Souvenir?” She asked.

Will waved her off and collapsed back onto the surface of the raft, his arms and legs turning leaden as he yanked out one of their clean wool blankets, balling up underneath it beside Bee and Ria to regain heat.

Will was so cold he could feel the sun itself giving him its warmth. Normally it was difficult to feel beneath the chill wind, but now it felt like a warm hug from the sky.

The warmth went away, prompting Will to open his brined eyes to see who or what dared steal heat from him.

“So…you can get wet.” Travis quipped smugly, standing in Will’s warming sunlight.

Travis gave a squawk as Phantom Hand yanked him off the side of the raft and into the water.

Will wasn’t proud of his response, but he was in no mood to play the responsible Party Leader while shivering and miserable.

Minutes later, Travis was balled up beneath wool covers beside them while the rest of the Party made themselves busy.

“H-How i-is the w-water so c-cold!?” Travis demanded, his skin pale, lips blue.

“Salinity lowers the freezing temperature of water.” Loth said from where she was studying insect larva with a jeweler’s lens, brought to her for inspection by a line of ants, seemingly sorting them based on some criteria that Will didn’t understand. “It is possible for ocean water to be colder than freezing, but typically that’s only in arctic biomes. This is not an arctic biome, so the water was likely closer to ten degrees.”

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“What’s ‘salinity’?” Will asked.

“Salt content dissolved in a body of water.”

“I figured.” Will mused, scraping more salt off himself.

“Ten degrees is below freezing,” Travis said.

“I’m using Celsius.” Loth replied.

“Wha?” Travis groaned, frowning.

“It’s resurfacing.” Alicia whispered.

Will and the others wrapped their blankets tighter around themselves, putting their heads back in the wind and huddling by the edge of the raft to peer down at the water below.

Will was eager to get a look at the thing that had swallowed him. He knew it was big, but he wanted to know exactly how big.

For bragging rights.

Everybody has one of those ‘the thing that swallowed me was THIS big’ stories, right?

Below them, a massive form rose to the surface, silver scales the size of houses glittering in the sun.

Then it just…stayed there, waves rolling over it like an oblong sandbar.

“Is it…dead?” Jean asked.

“It’s dead,” Alicia whispered, nodding. “Heart’s not beating.”

Will nodded and got back out of the wind.

You are now a level 26 Resourceful Climber!

Apparently larger monsters take longer to decay into miasma, because it wasn’t until half an hour later that the ribs of the giant fish even started to become visible as the flesh turned to miasma.

I wonder if it’s bad to be hanging directly above this thing as it bathes us in foul magic. Like lizards on spits.