Chapter Seventeen.

We floated silently in absolute darkness. My instincts told me we were alone for now, but I was still too petrified to move. Each time I tried to summon the will to get us moving again, the image of those eyes shining up from the depths came back and scattered my courage.

I had identified a critical weakness of my [Law] domain in situations like this—namely the ‘lightshow’ as Veris called it. The… whatever it was... had clearly been attracted to the lights of the team in the water, and I was in absolutely no hurry to repeat their mistake. So I get to sit here, effectively blind in an unknown body of water with an unknown number of horrible monsters lurking around me. The thallassophobe’s dream come true.

It felt like I’d just been dumped into a swimming pool blindfolded, knowing that somewhere in here was a hungry great white shark.

*Thump*

What was that!?

*Thump Thump*

A repeating thumping sound reverberated into the water. Casting my senses around frantically, I quickly found the source. Me!

My ‘passenger’ had awakened, and despite his injuries had managed to lever himself upright and started trying to bash his way out of the worm’s hard carapace. Which accomplished nothing against the strengthened chitin, but it did manage a very nice bass note. Keeping this in mind, I quickly formed the upper half of a body close to the man and politely asked, “What the hell are you doing!? Are you trying to get us all killed?!”

Ok so by ‘politely’ maybe I came off as more of ‘terrified/enraged hiss of disbelief’. Either way he stopped, gasping and scrambling back from my voice.

“Who’s there!? Where am I??” He croaked out hoarsely, his eyes darting back and forth in fear. He can’t see me? I realized that while my vision was fine, for him it was probably pitch black. And it was fairly obvious we were inside something’s belly, so I suppose his concern was fair enough.

His frantic movements obviously aggravated his injuries, as he clutched his side and hunched against one of the ribs after scooting away from me. This didn’t help his obviously rising panic, and I had to think quickly to calm him down or risk making enough noise to attract very unwanted attention.

Suppressing my anxiety, I reached to my latest… acquisition… in shapeshifting and felt my upper body change into a very familiar form. For a moment I was blasted with nausea, trying unsuccessfully to bury a wave of self-loathing underneath the necessity of the situation.

I ate him… oh my god, I ate him…

I’d never felt so… vile. But if I wanted to live, then I had to calm this guy down. So for the first time in this world, I spoke softly with a human voice.

“Shhh… You’re safe for now, but you need to be quiet or we’re both gonna die here.”

The voice was wrong, and I hated it immediately. It was eerily similar to the man I’d killed, a mostly clear tenor that promised an excellent singing voice—one I might have envied before if the grotesqueness of speaking with a dead man’s stolen voice didn’t make me want to vomit.

It seemed to help the man a bit though, as he came back with a harsh whisper.

“Who are you? Where are we? Last I remember, I thought I was dead for sure.”

I took a minute and tried to come up with a good explanation that didn’t start off with me being the object of their hunt earlier. Deciding to just keep it vague, I introduced myself.

“My name is—” I choked for a moment as I slipped up and tried to use my old name. “—Kosimar. And I have no idea where we are. The last I saw, we fell into some kind of lake or something after the explosions.”

He grunted at this. “The others?”

Shaking my head before I realized he still couldn’t see me, I continued.

“Dead. Something big came up from below and got them all in one bite.”

He blanched. “One bite!? And it got the whole crew? How big was it??”

“I couldn’t see very well, it moved too fast. Must have been over a hundred meters.”

A look of horrified comprehension slowly came over his features. “Something that large couldn’t survive in a lake… Oh gods, we fell into the undersea!” Shivering now, he curled up and cradled his head in his hands—mumbling incoherently about how we were all going to die for a few minutes before he passed out again.

Well, that’s encouraging.

Risking the tiniest use of my aura, I scanned the man over to make sure he wasn’t dying on me. There was a surprising amount of resistance to my domain’s intrusion on his body, the man’s mana fighting off my senses subconsciously. Pushing through, I couldn’t help but wince at the state of the poor guy.

Cuts and bruises covered his body but he wasn’t bleeding excessively. The worst injury by far was that almost every single rib on his right side was broken at least once. No bone shards poked into his lungs, luckily, but he must have taken a hell of an impact.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be swimming too well with that either .

Content that he wasn’t going to die on me, I shifted back into formless goo as fast as I possibly could to rid myself of the skin-crawling voice. Now I had some decisions to make.

I obviously couldn’t just float paralyzed with fear forever. The hunt was still on for me, and while I wasn’t sure exactly how they were tracking me the fact remained that they’d been hot on my trail for three days straight, even getting ahead of me despite tunneling through the floor. Most of the people after me hadn’t been too impressive, but the moment someone on Veris’s level found me I was screwed.

Somehow, I had to take control of the situation and stop being purely reactive. So, with that in mind I set myself some new short-term goals.

Get the hell out of the “undersea”. Evade pursuit. Find the Achorai/a way past their wards. Have fun exploring a magical universe.

Ok so maybe not entirely short term goals, but better than nothing.

Now I had to figure out a way to move around in this murk without getting immediately eaten. I knew sound travels better through water than air, so maybe I could use my bat-form to echo-locate. The only problem was that I’d have to leave the worm to do it.

Slowly opening one of the armored ridges, I had the minions keep the water out as I separated myself from them. The few seconds before I could transform fully were nerve wracking. In ‘blob’ form my senses were so limited I could barely make out the huge bulk of the worm just a couple meters away, the water around me just inky blackness stretching into infinity.

In record time I’d transformed into the bat monster that had been my first nemesis on this world, but I encountered a problem. Vocal cords need air. I tried to facepalm at the wasted time (and the risk of being out here) but the motion of waving my winged arm sent me tumbling through the water. Frantically waving my arms about I managed to stabilize, but had to immediately freeze afterwards. It was back.

The sensation of instinctual dread locked me in place, the [Blight Pit]’s subconscious senses picking up something my rational mind didn’t. My ears swivelled slowly, trying to pick up the slightest sounds, but I was still almost blind out here. The [Blightlings] immediately clamoured through the link to come rescue me but I hurriedly ordered them to stay still. Whatever had killed those people would absolutely tear the worm apart, and if we survived that our situation would be even worse.

I felt a tug of current pull me to the side, spinning me around and bringing me face-to-face with an enormous eye.

Oh my god… how did it get so close!?

The immense orb was a cloudy yellow, big enough that I knew I’d barely be a snack for this thing. Frantically I scrambled for a course of action that would let me survive the next few seconds.

Big eyes, very sensitive to light, attracted to noise and movement… And the barest framework of a plan came to me. Acting quickly I reached for my [Law] magic and pushed it as wide as I dared without going unconscious, nearly a hundred meters. I felt threads of megalomania grip my mind and was almost relieved by the calm it brought to my frayed nerves.

We are Cosmos. Our Will is [Law]. Our will is... Light.

And oh boy, there was light.

Like a miniature sun had risen in the depths, blinding light blasted out from my domain in a wave that boiled the water around me. A deafening screech came for not just one, but seven monstrous creatures as they writhed in agony—lidless eyes offering them no protection from radiance their kind likely hadn’t known for millennia.

I had to cut the magic after just a few seconds before I was completely drained, but the monsters didn’t stick around to test me. Their screeching continued off into the distance for several minutes as they fled with incredible speed. In an instant, my minions swam the worm over to me and scooped me back up.

That was… way too close.

A mental nod came through the link as all of them agreed. I let out an exhausted chuckle as I came down from yet another near-death experience.

Ok, we’ll just repeat that as needed to keep things away and—

A wave of sound hit us like an enormous fist, slamming us aside and sending the worm reeling through the water. It went on and on, a roar of impossible volume that felt like it was vibrating us to pieces. When it tapered off we started to slowly recover our bearings.

What the hell was that!?

Unfortunately, my answer came all too quickly. The sound was first, a dull rush like a distant waterfall that grew in volume every second. Then from the depths below us I saw four huge balls of light growing steadily larger. The closer they got, the clearer the water became as they illuminated the once-opaque depths. It looked for a minute like the entire ocean floor was rising to meet us, with rocky outcroppings and choral growths spread at random. I stared in startled incomprehension until it finally clicked.

That’s a freaking Kaiju!

Like a mobile island, the biggest monster I’d ever seen was rising from the depths to check out my recent light show. The head was wedge shaped like an enormous snapping turtle, lined with bony ridges the size of houses. The four glowing lights I’d seen were its eyes, lit from within and shining like a quartet of lighthouses piercing the dark. Stretching behind it kilometers into the distance was its body, only visible because it was covered in bioluminescent growths. Spires of bone jutted like skyscrapers from an elongated shell, with four powerful limbs tucked against it. Vanishing far into the distance behind it was a tail like a crocodile, propelling the massive entity forward. Towards me.

Ohgodohcrapoh—

Another roar shook us and the lights along the creature’s body flared even brighter as the water thrummed with power. We did our best impression of a floating stick while the monstrous—turtle-crocodile? Croco-turtle? Screw it, Dragon-Turtle—continued to search for whatever had dared to challenge its domain. And that’s when I got an idea that was almost as suicidal as it was brilliant.

There’s no way we’ll make it through this place swimming on our own, not with the kind of beasts I’ve seen so far. But… if I were to take a page out of the remora fish’s book and hitch a ride…

Waiting patiently now, I watched the dragon-turtle as it powered through the water. The wake of its movements was so strong that we were yanked along towards it, and when we were just a few meters away from the back of its shell, I gave the order. Twisting like a corkscrew we powered our way through the small remaining distance and latched on to one of the spires, curling around the base of it to hold on.

I couldn’t suppress a grin as the beast began to pick up speed, the lights along it growing dim as it grew confident it had chased off the intruder.

Ha! Look out Achorai, Kosimar, rider of Kaijus is coming!