Chapter 192: Swim

Chapter 192: Swim

The harbor, such as it was, was already bustling when Rain arrived, Tarny and Ameliah walking beside him. A floating dock was evidence of the progress that had been made, and the sound of sawing and hammering could be heard as people worked to construct basic rowboats, barges, and the like. Fishing had fed the city in the past, and it would again, but it would be a while yet before a fleet of any sufficient size could be constructed.

Rope for nets was the current problem, being in shorter supply than wood, but Rain was already working on that. Captain Bakal had agreed to let Ascension enlist Green for his services, and not an hour ago, Rain had set the Nature Mage to growing flax in the land already cleared of trees through the vigorous logging operation that was going on. Green could make plants grow quite quickly indeed, given enough mana, but even a hundredfold speedup wouldn’t be sufficient to replenish the forest on any reasonable timescale. Trees took years to reach a useful size. Flax, though, could be grown and harvested basically as fast as it could be planted and watered, provided that Green didn’t die from the headache.

To wit, Rain had lent the man ten of Ascension’s standard stat rings, five for Focus, five for Clarity, then crammed him so full of mana he’d feared he might pop and set him to duplicating their small initial stock of seeds. Rain had also arranged for laborers to help with the planting and to haul the city’s refuse up the cliff using the newly constructed pulley system. Though Green could compensate somewhat, soil depletion was still a major consideration. As much as he would have liked to keep the city clean and sparkling, Rain acknowledged that shit was a resource like any other. He also didn’t want people outside of Ascension to become reliant on his colon cleaning services.

“Right,” Rain said, coming to a stop and clapping his hands together. He sent a quick message to Dozer, warning him about the ocean being salty, then grinned at Ameliah. “Ready for a nice swim?”

“Are you sure ‘swim’ is the word?” Ameliah said, adjusting her bow slung over her shoulder. Like him, she was fully armored, though she didn’t have her helmet summoned at the moment.

“We’ll see,” Rain said, holding out his right hand to inspect the set of four—not three—Malleable Rings he wore there. He was wearing his helmet too, but with the visor raised. In lieu of a cloak, he had donned the Double Gamgee 2.0, though the large pack was empty at the moment. Remembering that he’d meant to do so, he triggered an essence exchange.

Progress Report

marker_1: tc_office_hour2 [3061 Seedlings 20 12:46]

marker_2: swim_day [3061 Seedlings 21 09:15]

Span: 20.5 hours

Skills

Suppression: +49,885 exp, 14 -> 15 (+1)

Winter: +2,112 exp

Mana Manipulation: +360 exp

Prismatic Intent: +1 exp

Rain made a fist, smiling as he dismissed the dialog and lowered his hand back to his side. “Even weighed down, we’re both really, really strong. Swimming shouldn’t be out of the question.”

“True enough,” Ameliah said with a smile.

“You are both insane,” Tarny said, turning to face her and offering her access to the open wooden crate he was carrying. “Are you sure you don’t want to test these first?” He turned to Rain. “I could get a bucket or something for you, Captain. You could stick your head into it.”

Ameliah laughed, reaching into the crate, and with a clink of glass, removed a sizable Waterbreathing potion. The bottle was about two liters in volume—more of a jug, really—and the liquid within shimmered with ripples of blue power. “The system will tell us if they work,” she said as Tarny turned to offer the crate to Rain next.

“Reason told us it’s an old recipe,” Rain added, smiling as well and taking a jug for himself. “Tried and tested.”

“If you say so,” Tarny said skeptically as he set down the crate, now empty of everything but straw. “He couldn’t have made them smaller, at least?”

“An airy stomach precludes unwetted lungs,” Rain replied in a mystical air.

Tarny rolled his eyes.

Ameliah chuckled, translating the rest of the Chemist’s message. “Reason says these should last for about four hours. It’s an all-or-nothing deal. Like most potions, drink less than a full dose, and you get nothing. It’s a shame, too.” She lowered her voice before she continued. “Apparently, each took about three hundred Tel and a half-dozen Crysts to make.”

Tarny’s eyebrows rose. “That’s...wow.”

Rain nodded. “I can’t say I’m keen to be drinking that much crystal, whether we’re talking about the monetary value or drinking rocks in general.” Shaking his head, he reminded himself that he didn’t have time to invent scuba gear, not with the myriad other engineering projects he had in the works. Eventually, maybe, but not now. Removing the stopper from his jug and tossing it into the crate, he turned to Ameliah and raised his potion to her in salute. “Bottoms up!”

Ameliah clinked her jug against his—one of the rare traditions that transcended realities—and raised it to her lips. Rain did the same and began to drink, gulp after gulp of thick, oily potion slithering down his throat.

The taste...wasn’t great. Like cold, used fry-oil infused with mint.

[Oh, Dozer, give me strength.]

[Rain-King! Strength!]

[Thanks, Dozer.]

“Pwaahh,” Ameliah gasped, finishing before him, then letting out a long and unsettlingly-wet belch. “That was foul.”

Rain nodded in agreement, lowering his now-empty jug and wiping away a trickle of the glowing liquid from his mouth. He burped as well, grimacing as he fought to keep the oily potion down. It felt like his stomach was full of bubbling tar, and his lips, mouth, and throat were tingling, almost numb.

“No activation yet,” Ameliah said, setting down her empty jug beside the crate. She belched again, so loudly and longly that Carten would have felt like less of a man had he been around to hear her. She waved her hand in front of her face, clearing the air as she continued. “He has made this before, right? If I just drank that sludge for nothing, I’m throwing Reason off the cliff. We’ll see if I can beat Tallheart’s distance record.”

Rain chuckled, then belched enormously as well, having no choice because of the bubbling gas expanding in his stomach. He spat, licking his tongue to try and get the taste out of his mouth. The tingling was fading, thankfully, and it seemed most of the fizzing was over with. “He said it could take a moment to kick in. Hopefully it won’t be— Ah, there we go.”

Chemical Effect Activated

Ald’s Wondrous Waterbreathing Potion

User may breathe water as if it were air for the next 3 hours, 59 minutes

“Yeah, it just activated for me too,” Ameliah said, releasing a smaller, much more polite burp. “I’ve got just over four hours.”

“One minute under for me,” Rain said before expelling the last of the gas from his stomach. He turned to Tarny, who was wearing an expression that was equal parts appalled, fascinated, and impressed. “Hold down the fort, will you?”

Tarny regained control of his face, raising an eyebrow. “Is that another Reason saying, or one of yours?”

Rain smiled. “One of mine. It means stick around. It’ll be a good chance for you to use Fall.” He gestured at the laborers, still toiling away and only occasionally glancing in their direction. “Looks like hungry work.”

Tarny nodded. “True enough. I might as well help, then. I know my way around a hammer.”

Rain smiled. “That you do. Thanks, Tarny.”

“I’ll message you if we need anything hauled up,” Ameliah said, gesturing to Rain’s pack. “Nails is with Vanna today if you need to contact us for any reason. She said she was going to come inspect the dock, but it doesn’t look like she’s here yet.”

“Got it,” Tarny said.

“Right then,” Rain said, adjusting his pack and turning to face the harbor. He glanced at Ameliah. “Shall we settle our bet?”

“Oh?” Tarny said, smiling and looking between them. “A bet?”

“Rain thinks people can run on water if they’re fast enough,” Ameliah said, looking around before settling down into a crouch. Her helmet appeared once more as she continued. “I say we’re going to sink.”

[Shit, Dozer! I told you, there’s—]

[SALT!!!!]

*ploop*

The space Dozer had occupied imploded, the water snapping back to fill the void he’d left behind with a crash.

Rain sighed, exhaling another cloud of bubbles. [I warned you,] he scolded. [Don’t say I didn’t.]

Dozer replied without words, conveying, basically, ‘big sulk.’

[What the depths are you up to over there?] Ameliah asked suddenly. [What was that sound? And why are you flickering?]

Ameliah herself appeared a moment later, swimming out of the murk at high speed and dragging a swirling plume of algae after her. With uncharacteristic gracelessness, she almost crashed into him, twisting herself out of the way at the last moment. She managed to stop her momentum before she shot completely past him and out the other side of his bubble. Exhaling a cloud of bubbles from beneath her visor, she turned to face him. Her helmet then vanished, allowing Rain to see her face as she inhaled deeply in clear relief.

[Gods, breathing the water before you cleaned it was such a mistake.]

Rain smiled, beginning to walk in her direction, taking his flickering bubble of cleanliness with him. With the weight of his armor holding him down, he found that he had no trouble staying on the bottom. True liquid offered quite a bit more resistance than the magically-thick air in the Sparkscale Deep had, but it was much the same in effect. The difference was that here, swimming would be far more effective if he had to go any sort of distance.

By the time Rain reached Ameliah, her hair had spread out to float around her head like a golden halo. Raising his visor, he opened his mouth to speak, though he didn’t expect he’d actually be able to. As he’d feared, his words escaped in a warbling gurgle, any meaning completely lost in the swarm of bubbles.

[Try again, genius,] Ameliah said, smirking at him.

Grinning back, Rain switched to hand code. “Quickest way to find out is to try. The flicker is me mixing Detection and Purify. Speaking of finding out, have you tried Airwalk?”

[Yes, and it doesn’t work,] Ameliah replied, making the sign for negation at the same time before switching to hand code herself. “Hardly surprising. Would have been nice, though.”

Rain shrugged. “Oh well.”

“What was that sound?” she asked for the second time.

“Another genius that likes finding out quickly,” Rain replied, smiling. “I told Dozer we were going to be in the ocean before we came down here. I told him that it would be salty. Does he listen? Why does nobody take my word for things?”

Ameliah laughed, switching back to Message. [Because half of what you say sounds absurd. I’ll admit, you were right about the lizards, though. It’s your win. It IS possible to run on water, and it WAS fun. With more speed or less weight, it would likely be even easier. Someone like Velika could probably run right across the ocean, if not for, you know, Leviathans.]

Rain felt a shiver run down his spine at that, even with the comforting sense of Ameliah’s soul beside him and with Detection assuring him that there was nothing monstrous out there. It was still dark beyond his Purified sphere. Contemplating that darkness, he felt the pressure of the water and the fear of the unknown suddenly pressing down on him.

He’d been doing some reading.

The ocean was terrifying.

Leviathans weren’t just big and tentacle-y; they were full-on eldritch horrors, not only sensing magic but using it too. Each one was unique and an ecosystem unto itself. Like Dragons, they laughed in the face of rank restrictions, rising to the surface at will and staying there, sometimes for months at a time. The sheer power emitted by the colossal creatures was sufficient to sustain lesser monsters in their vicinity, essentially raising the area rank around them wherever they went. Occasionally, one or more of the shipping lanes would have to be closed because a particular Leviathan had drifted too close. Mercifully for the existence of society, however, no Leviathan had ever been recorded in sight of land. Rain could only conclude that there was some instinctual preference holding them back. Dragons, too, restrained themselves. They seemed to prefer Karmark over other continents, sometimes flying over others but never landing on them, though there was nothing saying they couldn’t.

[Can you clear up the water further than this?] Ameliah asked, gesturing at the murk and seemingly oblivious to his thoughts. [I’d like to see the Whale that’s probably coming to eat us in time to do something about it. On that note, I should test my bow.] Not waiting for a response, she unlimbered the weapon and reached for an arrow, one of the ultra-streamlined ones Tallheart had made her.

Rain nodded, pushing aside his fears. Leviathans weren’t a concern here. Even Whales had never been sighted in this harbor. Ameliah was right, though, that the visibility was a problem. The Fist of Progress was heavily warded against Divination, and those protections seemed to have survived its sinking. Detection only reported scattered scraps of metal around—tools, coins, and the like, and perhaps the occasional metal-heavy rock. Definitely not two halves of an enormous wreck. There was no sense swimming all over the harbor looking for it just to avoid a little more ecological devastation.

Who knows? With the algae gone, the ecosystem might actually bounce back stronger... He said, justifying it to himself.

PURIFY NOVA!

At his mental command, Aura Focus overrode and crashed his scripts, Detection failing and taking his HUD along with it. He’d expected that, though, already having played around a bit with Aura Focus. The metamagic didn’t tolerate any interleaving of the aura it was boosting, just as it didn’t tolerate being used on more than one aura at a time.

Having nothing better to do while he waited for the magic to work, Rain summoned the skill card for Purify to check the range, though he already knew what it would say.

modmon.sh: [‘amplify aura’, ‘extend aura’, ‘aura focus’, 'channel mastery']

modmon.sh: Channel Mastery: +100%

Purify (15/15)

Purify poison, corruption, and contamination

Range: 626 meters

Cost: 320 mp/s

Ridiculous.

Smiling, he gave it a good ten-count to compensate for the decreased speed of the spell in water, then dropped the magic and opened his eyes.

Holy shit!

He exhaled a huge cloud of bubbles, looking around at the dazzling and bizarre landscape revealed by Purify’s light, still racing away from him in an expanding shell. Fish shimmered in the morning light, zipping all around him in startled, flashing schools. The seafloor sloped down into the far distance, speckled here and there with the bizarre broccoli plants and other splotches of color from plantlife. Amidst boulders and outcrops of stone, Rain could see the burned wreckage left over from the ships that had been unfortunate enough to be in the harbor when the Adamants attacked. The last of the magic faded, but there was still plenty of light from the sun filtering through the pristine water.

All of that was backdrop, though, as not far down the slope, perhaps thirty meters distant, was what they had come for. The Adamant Empire ship was enormous, even at this distance, lying in two pieces surrounded by a greenish cloud of algae. The metal had clearly robbed Purify of some of its strength, but not enough to stop the spell entirely, and the ocean currents were rapidly taking care of the rest. The ship gleamed, silver and shining, visible for all to see. Rain released an Aura-Focus empowered pulse of Detection, just to check, but the spell swore that it wasn’t there.

[Nice work,] Ameliah said in his mind. [Your Purify is getting insane.] There was a thrum as she released an arrow, and Rain watched it streak over the wreck of the ship to sail off into the fathomless depths. If the projectile was slowed at all by the water, Rain couldn’t see a difference. She loosed again, and this time, the arrow split, sizzling and leaving thick streaks of bubbles as Fire magic flashed the water to steam. [Great, that’s working. Come on. Let’s go check out our new ship.]

Thrast goggled, staring at the pair of armored figures on the ocean floor. There had been an enormous wave of light, almost blinding in intensity as it burst up from the ocean. When it had finally cleared, the Adamant Empire’s ship had been the first thing he’d noticed, revealed as if the murky water had been changed for air. After the cries of surprise and terror had faded, the entire harbor had gone entirely silent, everyone, like him, simply staring in awe. Except for Commander Vanna, that was.

“See? There he is,” she said, standing beside him near the newly-constructed dock, utterly unperturbed by the overwhelming show of power. “Like I said, he’s busy.” She gestured toward the breathtakingly-clear expanse of ocean. “If you want to take up your complaint about your community service placement with him, be my guest and jump right in. Otherwise, get back to the lumberyard and back to work. Just because you’re awakened, it doesn’t mean you can’t take orders from someone who’s not. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really am quite busy.”

She slipped away, and Thrast didn’t have the presence of mind to do anything but let her go. He shook his head numbly, watching as Rain’s companion on the seafloor did something that sent streaks of bubbles away from her in a fan. It was clearly an attack of some kind, though against what, he couldn’t see. Regardless, his instincts were screaming at him, telling him in no uncertain terms that whatever she’d just done was far more deadly than it had seemed.

And Rain...

The man had been using magic constantly since he’d arrived in the city. Only now was it dawning on Thrast what that meant. He hadn’t been doing it with the level of power he’d just displayed, obviously, but to keep that up for so long...and to still have enough mana left to do something like this...

His mana pool must be as bottomless as the ocean.

Thrast licked his lips. Rain and his organization weren’t on the same level as the Sea Kings like he’d thought. No, they were above them. They were soft, ruling over the city with none of the brutality that their predecessors had employed, but it wasn’t because they were weak. They simply didn’t need to be brutal, and he’d been the fool who’d refused to see it. It was like being in a DKE city or under the thumb of one of the stricter Guild leaders. The rules were the rules. Interfering with those that enforced them was courting death, whether those enforcers were stronger than you or not.

Thrast swallowed heavily, squashing his pride as he turned away to do as he’d been told.

Maybe munity service thing...isn’t so bad, after all.