Chapter 6

Ben had never in his life expected to feel like a motorboat, or to think “I feel just like a motorboat right now,” while his chest and stomach impacted against the surface of the ocean for the ten-millionth time.

His body was numb, his eyes were practically burned open, his skin was chafed, he'd lost his shoes over two hours ago and his clothing was shredded to rags. If anyone had asked him, he would have screamed “Woooooo!” with a voice hoarse from saying woooo so much over the last few hours.

He had a system, and it seemed to be working out for him; he would fill up the utility pocket with water in front of him, and eject it out of a utility pocket attached to his feet. He felt he really needed to come up with a less clunky way of thinking about this thing than 'Utility Pocket'.

At first, it had been extremely rough attempting to position the utility pocket at the appropriate angle for his feet and then trying to hold his body rigidly in the right position. It was only out of sheer frustration that he discovered the utility pocket was both extremely flexible, and could stick to anything without a problem.

Right now, his feet were pressed together and the pocket was attached to the outer perimeter; the little purple tendrils would reach out and stick themselves to pretty much anything. It was, Ben reflected, a bit like a pair of toe-shoes, the ones that had been a fad a few years back, except it was one big shoe that held his feet firmly together.

The nice thing was, he could angle his feet this way or that and control how he was being propelled forward. It was shockingly intuitive for him, to the point that he wondered if it really was as easy as it felt or if some sort of magic was involved.

Ben struggled not with steering and controlling himself, but with everything he had to keep track of to make it happen; mana management; how to adjust how fast something was ejected from the utility pocket; how to reshape it and how to form and maintain multiple pockets; watching how much water he had stored away and finally; keeping a slow enough pace that he didn't burn himself out and drown, or tear the flesh from his chest.

Ben had also learned that attempting to make a third pocket was a terrible idea, and his head was still sore from that stunt. Someday, he thought to himself, but not today.

The hardest part about pretending to be a jet ski, silently mourning the loss of his Hawaiian vacation in his own way, was how tired his legs got. The pressure was constant, and though it wasn’t intense, it was tiring.

Ben zoomed across the water, feeling like he was moving fifty miles an hour. In reality he was somewhere between ten and fifteen. Inside of a car that's painfully slow, but skipping across the surface of the ocean?

Still, he was getting exhausted. Adrenaline could only take someone so far, and his adrenal gland had to be puffing out dust by now. He was breathing hard, his eyes were tired and unreliable for finding anything short of a continent, and he was starting to hear music and see flashes of imagery when he blinked. Worse, he was starting to see it even when his eyes were open.

“Hypnagogic imagery,” Ben said, feeling the crash coming all at once, like a toddler stopping in the middle of play and falling asleep. “Shit. I really am going to die out here.” Then Ben laughed, because dying or indeed anything else seemed preferable to staying awake at this point.

“Horrible way to go, unless I manage to sleep through drowning. Oh, God,” Ben said, his adrenal gland teaming up with his amygdala to give him one last jolt of juice, “is that how drowning at sea is? You fall asleep, then drown a little, then wake up and struggle, then repeat that till you're dead?”

Ben's heart would have started pounding, except he didn't have the energy for that, or even to be afraid for more than three seconds before his vision started going dark again.

Ben jolted awake, spluttering, pushing water from out of his nose and splashing around awkwardly, which sent him wildly off course, so he immediately closed the utility pockets and weakly righted himself. His limbs felt like they were made of wood, and his muscles were almost completely numb.

Ben's vision started going dark again, and he knew as his consciousness faded that if he fell asleep he would not wake up. He struggled to keep his eyes open, when he spotted something that made him relax.

Not a ship, not an island, not a convenient raft he could climb onto and sleep.

No, what he saw was a single, tall fin rise from the ocean some distance away from him, and it filled him with relief, because it meant his struggles were over.

It was a damned shark, and a huge one. Ben shut his eyes and mere moments later, he felt the teeth bite into his flesh, and his body plunge into the depths.

[System update]

[You have gained the skill, lesser endurance]

[You have gained the skill, lesser mana manipulation]

[Please visit a town crystal to activate your new skills.]

-

Ben groaned, laying down flat on something wet, but solid. He didn't want to open his eyes, but the moment consciousness returned to him, he felt the cuts over his body from the shark's teeth burning from the saltwater.

Ben groaned again, louder this time, and opened his eyes. The sky was dark, approaching the end of evening and the beginning of night. All around Ben, the ocean was calm, and waves crashed gently. He looked around, expecting to be on an island, but instead finding that he was on top of a sand-bar of some kind, still out in the middle of the ocean, and barely elevated three inches over sea-level.

He stood up and stretched, his body still tired, but at least he could move around and keep his eyes open. Ben took in his surroundings again, really looking around to figure out what the hell was going on. The sandbar, or whatever he was standing on, was disappointingly small, ten by ten at best. It extended out underwater for quite a ways before it got too deep to stand on, but compared to the ocean he was in. . .

“Shit,” Ben said, summarizing his whole situation in a single word.

“Ho there!” The voice was masculine and a little deep, but Ben couldn't tell where it came from.

“Hello?” Ben shouted, because the person had sounded pretty far away.

“You're awake,” the voice said again, his tone mildly surprised. “Good. I thought all that effort was going to be for nothing,” he said, and Ben realized that whoever was speaking to him, was doing so by some sort of telepathy. It was odd, because Ben could figure out their rough location just like if he'd heard them, but he definitely wasn't using his ears to do so.

“You saved me?” Ben said, feeling like he was stating the obvious.

“Oh yes. Lost my arms doing it, but I managed to kill that enormous shark and drag you to safety,” suddenly the voice changed pitch, becoming higher and feminine. “Oh my, my telepathy was acting up! This is how I really sound. I'm one of the sea folk, a beautiful woman,” he, she(?) said, sounding playful.

“Oh,” Ben said, frowning and doing his best not to insult the apparently beautiful woman who had saved his life, “ok, well, thank you. Wait, did you say you lost your arms?” Ben blurted out, eyebrows rising, “oh my God, I'm so sorry! Your arms, both of them? Oh, that's terrible? Wait, how did you drag-” Ben started to ask, but the voice started talking again.

“Oh, it's so terrible. My precious arms, how could I live without them, and their ability to grasp things without shredding them to pieces,” the voice said, then abruptly changed back to masculine, and deep, “as for how I carried you. . .”

The light was almost all gone now, the sun had vanished over the horizon, and the sky was only lit by dim embers, and the water was like black glass. Ben saw the fin rise from the ocean, gray and dangerous looking. The shark came close enough to the surface so Ben could look him in his beady, black eye.

“I carried you in my mouth, little lord human. How else?”

Then, under the gaze of a completely speechless Ben, the shark submerged again, chuckling.

“I think I could have gotten you to believe I was an attractive female, ha ha ha,” he said, clearly pleased with himself and enunciating every word with clear relish.

“I think I'd prefer it if you were,” Ben said without thinking, his eyes frantically scanning the increasingly dark water for the huge, telepathic shark that had. . .saved him?

“Wait, you dragged me to this little. . . spit of land? Why'd you save me?”

“Aside from us both being Earthlings? You are human, the next stage of development for our species. It's only natural for me to be looking out for you.”

“Our species?” Ben could only have realistically picked one thing to focus on, and his brain had latched onto that.

“Yes, our species. A world without sharks and dangerous monsters could never produce a human being. But we aren't on Earth anymore, are we? I spoke with The System, and I, along with most all of the other animals, chose The Bright Spark as our Plus perk. Finally, we can speak to one another, human. Tell me, are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Ben said, all hesitation at making friends with a telepathic great white shark vanishing, “I'm starving. Do you have anything? Or water, freshwater?”

“Wait there,” the shark said, then chuckled some more, because, where the hell was Ben going to get off to? It was over fifteen hours before the shark came back, though the evening light hadn't faded much at all, so Ben admitted to himself that it was more like fifteen minutes.

“Raaaaahhhhhhhh!” The shark telepathically roared at Ben, who unfortunately pissed his shredded, unserviceable pants and dove away from it as it charged the beach.

People, in general, don't know shit about sharks, and if they did, they only knew what they looked like through a screen, or the numbers attached to them, how big and how heavy, how many teeth, how much food they had to eat per day; all sorts of stuff.

Here's something no youtube video can convey:

The shark powered through the water and his body was exposed, and the only thing Ben could think was that he was being attacked by a creature the size of the short bus everybody liked to make fun of so much. It was so fucking enormous, all thoughts of fighting became hilarious and suddenly Ben was hearing the theme song from Jaws;

“Dun-dun,” the shark whispered, turning around faster than any creature that size had any right to, and going back into the ocean, swimming around lazily, “Dun-dun,” he whispered again, then started chuckling darkly to himself.

On the beach was a weakly flopping fish that didn't look like anything Ben had ever seen. First off, it was longer than Ben was tall, and colored a green so bright it was vibrant even in the dark; it helped that it seemed to be faintly luminescent. It had a horn coming off of its head, and blades on its fins, making it look like something bred for battle first, and living second. Its fins were really cool too, all long and flexible looking like blades of grass and....

Something clicked in Ben's brain, and his body started moving without him telling it too. He was consciously aware of what he was doing as he walked up to the fish and started prodding it with his hands.

No tools around. Ben's hands were covered in sand, but luckily the tide was coming in, so he was quickly able to wash them in the ocean. The water just barely went up to his toenails, and didn't seem like it would get much higher.

He started grabbing at the fish, pulling at the fins, gently at first, then with greater and greater force, trying to find a way to. . . his stomach growled, and his hunger exploded into pure energy, because in front of him was food.

He had not eaten at the airport. The time from when he woke up in The System until now had been at least forty eight hours worth of intense, life or death struggles of physical activity. Ben had not been aware of what real hunger was, nor was he aware of just how intense real hunger could be. He had never felt anything in his life as intense as what he was feeling right now, and his consciousness was just a passenger in his body being swept along for the ride.

Ben started attacking the enormous fish, clawing at it with his dull, human fingers and finding no way through the armor-like scales. Then Ben's stomach, because let's be real here his brain wasn't in charge anymore, found the obvious solution of going for where the enormous shark had already injured the fish.

Ben dug in like a hungry wolf pup being fed by its parents. Which is to say he got covered in gore, his ratty clothing actually resembled slick, bloody fur, and he was panting on the ground, exhausted, with a potbelly full of meat.

It had, to Ben at least, all happened in a flash; one moment he was starving on the sand bar, the next he was doing an impression of a werewolf the morning after a full moon. In reality, he’d killed several parasites living in the fish that looked like pill bugs crossed with centipedes in his fight for food. They had crawled out of the guts and tried to attack Ben, but he had grabbed them and whipped them around by the head, their bodies going limp and then quickly discarded before Ben went back to tearing chunks of meat out by the handful.

He was laying on the wet sand, the water tickling his ears, but he could stand it for a bit longer.

“I love sushi,” Ben said, staring up at the stars, “but I think I don't love it so much anymore.”

He didn't know if he should feel ashamed of himself, or if he should feel. . . he stared up at the black night sky and truly appreciated that he was in a different world.

The stars were not stars here, they were a grid of distant white lights, spread out equidistant from one another, like how the tiles in the Plus player starter area had been. There was beauty in them, but not like the Earth's night sky held.

“So strange,” Ben heard the voice of the shark, and saw his fin slowly circling the sandbar, “to be swimming in a foreign ocean, to have taken my stars for granted.”

Ben was no longer afraid of the shark, at least not in the way a civilized person was afraid of an animal. Ben rolled around in the water for a bit to clean up, then tried to lay down again, but whatever spell he was under had been broken, and he couldn't get comfortable with his head even slightly submerged. Ben stood up and looked around, his eyes landing on the thick fish.

“Well, this is going to get gross,” he said, then scrunched his face as he tried to press his reluctant body against the giant dead fish. It was a bit like sitting down in a metal chair without a shirt on; the moment of contact, the cold, was intense for a moment or two, then immediately became bearable. Except instead of it being cold, it was just really gross.

Then, Ben was able to mentally shrug, and rested his head against it without reservation. Aside from being the single most “what the fuck” pillow he'd ever used, it was surprisingly comfortable. The shark, for his part, had waited for Ben to finish, and Ben got the sense that the shark thought it was an interesting scene.

“I swam in my ocean,” he continued, “and it never occurred to me it had a name,” he said. “I would come to the surface to catch a glimpse of the lights. Like the lights of the creatures of the deep, but more. . . I thought they were creatures as well. I would dive deep, wondering what could possibly be that large and not wanting to attract its attention.”

“Mmm,” Ben hummed, knowing that somehow, the shark could hear him as long as he meant to talk with him, “Don't feel too bad about that, we thought the same thing. A bunch of people liked to imagine there were gigantic, tentacled monstrosities up there that could drive us mad with a single glance.”

“Ha! They should have tried going deep and lingering in the black and cold for weeks; they would have met their fears in the flesh, I guarantee it.”

“Did you ever see stuff like that?”

“Certainly. Down in the dark, I'm food if I'm not careful. I wouldn't say no to seeing a giant squid around here,” Ben got the impression the shark was attempting to grin, “I'd like to try talking with one before I ate it.”

“That's rude,” Ben said, still staring at the stars, his stomach weighing him down, “you shouldn't eat anything that can talk to you.”

“Why?” The shark asked.

“Because it's rude,” Ben said, then yawned.

“If you say so,” the shark replied, not sounding convinced. “Your kind is fond of naming everything, isn't it? What's yours?”

“Ben. How about you?”

“I'm a shark,” he said, saying it like Ben was a little stupid, “and this is the first opportunity I've had to speak with anyone about anything. I don't have a name, and from what I understand naming yourself is considered to be bad form. What would you call me, lord human?”

“What's with this lord human stuff,” Ben said, his voice obscured and distorted by a huge yawn.

“You're a human, and your species ruled Earth completely. Every animal and plant was under your law. Further, you are a Human,” he said, giving the word special emphasis, “the royal heir of the animals, destined to rule every world you emerge from, destined to rule all worlds, everywhere. The purpose of life on Earth was to produce your kind, just as your kind has the purpose to grow in strength and power,” the shark said, and a flood of black emotion surged across whatever link was between them. Suddenly changing topics, “caged, like animals, confined to a single world and murdered in your crib over and over again, forced to arise from nothing endlessly. The System would not tell me who, but I am so curious who did this to us, to you. I would like to kill them, drag them deep and watch them drown.”

“Yeah, I've been trying not to think about it,” Ben said, frowning, “but The System dropped some really disturbing hints. Can you believe we're over sixty billion years old, possibly much older? The universe isn't even that old.”

“Speak for yourself, I'm only twenty-nine,” the shark said.

“No shit? So am I. What's your birthday?”

“I'm a shark, Ben.”

“Right, right. Sorry. Wouldn't it be cool if we had the same birthday though?”

“If you say so,” the shark said, sounding subdued, “I bet you got a name on your birthday, didn't you?” he asked, bringing up the name thing again.

“I did at that,” Ben said, coughing a little and feeling his face turn a little red, “and I can tell you want me to give you a name, and I've got one, but. . . how much do you understand about human culture, like the context of what our words mean?”

“I understand quite well, Ben.”

“Short Bus,” Ben blurted, and with way more conviction than he'd realized he felt. The night was silent in the space between Ben's naming and Short Bus's reply. Then, Short Bus started laughing, deep, hearty and powerful.

“Oh,” he said in between his mirth, “because I'm the size of. . . that is a fantastic name.”

“It really is,” Ben said, “Short Bus, the great white shark,” then he yawned again, because somehow the shark was way less scary than he'd been not even a minute ago, and he felt tired.

“Get some sleep, Ben,” Short Bus said, still circling the island, “you'll be safe for the night.”

Ben shut his eyes and found sleep waiting for him. In those last moments before oblivion, he heard Short Bus humming that same, iconic song.

'Dun-dun,' but only the slow part, and sung in a way divorced from danger.

What a strange turn of events to have a lullaby-like that.

Short Bus swam through the dark ocean, patrolling around, falling into the moving sleep unique to sharks and fish, hearing a voice in his mind that did not wake him.

[System Update]

[You have been given the name Short Bus]

[You have gained the skill Aquatic Agility]

[You have gained the skill Deft Jaws]

[Please visit a town crystal to activate your new skills.]

--

[System Announcement]

[Good morning, my honored residents. Now that most of them have been inducted, I am pleased to announce yet another species has been added to our community, though not for the first time.

Some of your civilizations do have records reaching this far back, but for those who aren't aware, there is a way out of The World, and only one species has ever left.

They're back. The Humans are back, and as is custom, I've put together an event to celebrate! The Humans will likely remember this little holiday from their own homeworld.]

[Global Event Initiated!]

[The Apocalypse]

[Eight Passages to the bottom cavern layer have opened.]

[Sixty-four violet dungeon cores have formed.]

[Five hundred and twelve citadel class monsters have been born.]

[Four-thousand and ninety-six demons have been released.]

[Thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight raid class elite monsters have been promoted.]

[Two hundred sixty-two thousand one hundred and forty-four dark fairies have joined forces to form “The Bad Cloud”]

[Two million ninety-seven thousand one hundred and fifty-two monsters have been promoted to elites]

[Sixteen million seven hundred seventy-seven thousand two hundred and sixteen void-soul humans have entered The World]

[As always, these welcome events are well calculated to match the potential power of our new neighbors.]

[Additionally, some new monster classes have been introduced, courtesy of the Human Imagination. I won't ruin the surprise, but start checking under your beds and inside your closets daily, and that's just one of many.]

[As always, feel free to share your suggestions with me by sending a message through your nearest town crystal, and as usual, I will provide a detailed response. Have a great apocalypse, everyone.]