Wizard of the Deep Sea

TL/ED – Miso

“What is this?”

I fiddled with the tentacle growing beside the Anglerfish’s fin, then tore off the tip of it.

[…!]

The Anglerfish immediately twisted its body as if in pain.

As if that were truly a part of its own body.

I went ahead and crushed the Anglerfish.

-Crunch!

“Feels about the same to squish…”

It didn’t seem capable of resisting Water Pressure at all.

However, there was no doubt that Jellyfish tentacles had been growing on it.

After a moment of thought, I swam out once more, gathered up a large number of Anglerfish, and experimented on them one by one.

[Gweeegh…]

“Huh.”

The results were surprising.

The ones that had eaten twenty, thirty or more Jellyfish polyps had each taken on one of the Jellyfish’s traits.

Not all of them had grown tentacles. Some spewed mucus from their mouths, some had skin that turned slightly translucent, and some had sprouted tentacles from their fins.

None of it looked like particularly useful evolution, but.

One thing was certain.

“So that’s why they look so messed up…”

I scanned over the Deep Sea Creatures and nodded to myself in understanding.

Eels with steel teeth.

Sharks with the lower halves of Octopuses.

Eyeless Anglerfish, and so on.

Now I understood why these things looked so different from real-world deep sea creatures, and why even members of the same species looked nothing alike.

It all came down to differences in diet.

You grow into what you eat. I had no idea what kind of logic that was, like the old saying that eating walnuts makes you smarter, but it was actually happening, so there wasn’t much I could say.

It was a strange thing. Yes, truly strange.

…But.

‘Completely useless, though.’

I frowned as I looked at the school of Anglerfish, their corpses filling the area around me.

They had all died in more or less the same way. I had tried force-feeding one over fifty Jellyfish polyps until it turned translucent, grew tentacles, and could spit mucus from its mouth, creating some kind of abomination Anglerfish, then compressed it. If anything, it burst even more easily than the normal ones. The only difference was that it splattered mucus everywhere when it popped.

Naturally, none of this helped with enduring the Burden in the slightest. The Octopus had tricked me.

What was worse, it was actually dangerous. If I ate Jellyfish and tentacles grew from my body, those would become part of me, meaning they could be injured and I would feel pain. It would only create a new weak point.

Obviously, I had zero desire to eat Anglerfish polyps and sprout some creepy, glowing antenna inside my head either.

As I sighed over the useless results of the experiment, I could visibly see the Water Barrier distorting.

I immediately crammed a handful of the World-Sealing Pills I had brought into my mouth.

-Crack…

The rate at which the Water Barrier was shrinking slowed down, just slightly.

Given the number of World-Sealing Pills I had on me, I could hold out for a day at most.

If I really pushed it, maybe two days, but then I would be crushed to death by the Deep Sea even after getting out.

‘Should I just leave?’

It might actually be better to go back and save the remaining World-Sealing Pills for survival in the Real World.

There was no chance of suddenly discovering something incredible in this vast Deep Sea with the time I had left. It would be more realistic to just hope Dersia came back with a solution…

…My train of thought stopped there, and I let out a hollow laugh at how absurd it was.

Since when had I started putting reliance on others among my options?

The anxiety was making me think weak thoughts. If nothing else worked, then just like last time, I would squeeze out the Jellyfish, coat my body with it, and endure the Deep Sea that way.

I had to bring back results on my own, no matter what.

-Slap! I smacked both cheeks to pull myself together, then swam with everything I had toward the opposite end of the Canyon.

There was no way this vast ocean held nothing besides that Octopus. As I moved along the Canyon, searching with all my strength, a question suddenly crossed my mind.

‘What did that Octopus mix with, anyway?’

I had only seen its legs, but aside from being enormous, it just looked like a regular octopus.

Living in this Deep Sea, eating whatever it could find, it should have been a hodgepodge of all sorts of things by now… yet existing as nothing more than giant octopus legs was a little odd.

“Could it be…”

I tried to imagine the Octopus’s head, the part I hadn’t seen.

Maybe, like those shark-octopus hybrids, it had something other than an octopus head attached up there.

It wasn’t that important. After swimming above the Canyon for about thirty minutes, with no end in sight, I realized that the pressure bearing down on the Water Barrier was gradually intensifying.

“Damn.”

I stopped in a hurry. It was so long that I hadn’t noticed, but this Canyon appeared to be structured with a gentle downward slope into deeper waters.

In other words, continuing to follow along above the Canyon meant descending even further. If I didn’t want to go deep enough to suffer Decompression Sickness, I had to turn back now.

I was thinking about doubling back and maybe exploring to the left this time, cycling through Current Sense as I did, when it happened.

-Click.

“?”

From very far away, on the opposite side of the Canyon, a wave of Current flowed toward me. Accompanied by the sound of something hard being struck.

If that were all, given how little I knew about the Deep Sea, I would have just thought, oh, so that happens too, and moved on without a second thought. But.

-Clatter-clatter-clatter!

The clams that heard what sounded like ultrasound snapped their shells shut in a frenzy.

It was quite a spectacle. The clams closed their mouths the instant the ultrasound reached them, and the motion cascaded all the way down the line. It was reminiscent of a stadium wave at a sports event.

Except that they would never, ever open their shells again.

“…”

I watched the sight and hesitated.

These clams were remarkably good at sensing danger. Even when the Octopus had triggered a tsunami, they had been chattering long before it reached them. Unable to move from their spots, their mastery of Current Sense seemed to far surpass that of other Deep Sea Creatures.

Yet these same creatures had attacked Anglerfish far larger than themselves without a moment’s hesitation. And they had babbled away without a trace of fear even at the sight of shark subspecies bigger still than those Anglerfish.

Those very clams had reacted this violently to a single burst of ultrasound.

I checked the Water Barrier briefly and made light preparations.

“…Should I go for it?”

If something had lived long enough down there, communication might be possible. Just like with that Octopus.

And if communication was possible, perhaps a deal could be struck. I readied the Anglerfish polyps I had brought along just in case, and ran above the Canyon once more, enduring the ever-deepening Water Pressure.

The deeper I went, the darker the already-dark Deep Sea became. Water Pressure rose exponentially, and the number of clams filling the Canyon gradually dwindled until, at a certain point, not a single one remained.

“Ack, no, what the…”

It took only about ten more minutes of travel before I felt that going any further was genuinely dangerous, and I stopped, gritting my teeth.

The level of Water Pressure I had used to crush Anglerfish was a constant, ambient force in this place.

Naturally, there were almost no Deep Sea Creatures in sight.

The few that were visible, though.

[…]

[…–,. —….]

They were enormous.

Not as large as the Octopus, but a Whale with eyes twice the size of mine let out a spine-chillingly massive cry as it swam past.

It was not, of course, a normal whale.

-Riiip. The moment it opened its mouth, a mass of grotesque things spilled out.

Deep Sea Creatures of countless varieties. The difference was that all of them were nothing but bone, and they were bound by white threads connected to the Whale’s gums.

Those hundreds of skeletons, which by all rights should have been unable to move, swept the area around them as if they were alive, gathering scraps left on the Canyon floor and shoving them down the Whale’s throat.

It was the most bizarre sight I had witnessed since coming to the Deep Sea, and I was so speechless that I just stood there, dumbfounded. Then a skeleton in the shape of a marlin drifted over and eyed my Anglerfish polyps greedily.

[…?]

It couldn’t actually sense me, of course. Still, the sight of bones constantly crowding in around me was unnerving, so I tossed one out to make it eat and leave.

That was when it happened.

-Click.

“-!”

The ultrasound that had lured me here rang out once more.

This time it was far louder. So close it sounded like it was coming from right beside me.

[…Ooooo….]

Where?

I quickly narrowed the range of my Current Sense and spread it out in finer detail.

But it was no use at all. Detecting the source of the ultrasound was next to impossible.

I tried changing my approach and examining where the ultrasound had originated, but that too was difficult. Wondering if maybe the Whale had produced it, I turned my head.

“…What’s this thing doing?”

The Whale was standing perfectly still like an idiot.

No, it was more than just standing still.

Both the horde of corpses it had released from its mouth, that Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, and the Whale itself were frozen without producing even the faintest ripple of current.

It wasn’t dead. It simply seemed to be doing so of its own will.

…Why?

Tilting my head in puzzlement, I took one of the World-Sealing Pills from my pocket and tossed it at the Whale.

Carried by the Current, the pill drifted gently through the water before lightly tapping against the Whale’s massive body.

The next moment.

[…….!!!!!!!!….!!, ….!!!!!!!!!!]

The Whale screamed.

Because the spot where the pill had touched had been gouged out in a massive chunk, as if scooped by an excavator.

It took one second to form the theory that maybe the World-Sealing Pill’s components were lethal to Deep Sea Creatures.

It took two seconds to successfully detect, through the haze, a life form chewing on something within the Whale’s violet blood using Current Sense.

[….]

Black exoskeleton, no eyes. About the size of a shark. By Deep Sea standards, moderately large.

Without a single word, the thing was busily tearing away at the Whale’s flesh. At first glance, it looked like some kind of lobster.

But its pincers were about a million years removed from an ordinary lobster’s.

Like a Phillips-head screwdriver, or the claw of an arcade crane machine, the pincers were composed of four prongs, grotesquely curved, and clearly an organ built for the sole purpose of slicing flesh.

Its legs were uniformly spindly, but each was thicker than a human foot. Anchored firmly to the Canyon wall by those legs, the creature devoured all that flesh in an instant, then “looked” at the Whale.

It had no eyes. Yet almost instinctively, I could tell that its Current Sense was directed at the Whale.

I wasn’t the only one who knew.

[…!! –, ——!!!!]

The Whale, writhing in agony, snapped its mouth shut in fury. The Deep Sea Creature corpses that had been outside were all swept back in.

Normally, a wound that large would mean being crushed to death by Water Pressure, but the Whale was so massive it seemed able to endure it.

-Click, click-click.

The Crayfish clacked its pincers and slowly advanced.

Toward that colossus, without a shred of fear, it moved forward, and then stopped.

[Ji, ji…! Ji…!!!!]

The Whale was shrieking something and deploying its Water Pressure.

Its size had not been for nothing, it seemed, because the force was staggering.

“…Ack.”

Even I, who was not the target of the Water Pressure, could feel my body being squeezed. It was brutally powerful.

An overwhelming pressure that could reduce even a massive mountain to a fist-sized clump of dirt. The power that came from ages of experience was on an entirely different level from mine.

In the face of that, the Crayfish…

Could not hold out.

-Crack, crack-crack…

Cracks began to spider across the flinching Crayfish’s exoskeleton.

It was only natural. No matter how hard something was, or rather, precisely because it was hard, it was all the more vulnerable to Water Pressure. I couldn’t even understand how this Crayfish functioned with an exoskeleton at these depths.

Its ambush had certainly been threatening, but its failure to finish things then, getting absorbed in feeding instead, was the stupidity that decided the outcome.

The Crayfish was gradually curled into a ball, crumpling and being crushed apart.

-Click.

[…..!?]

The next moment.

Every crack on the Crayfish’s exoskeleton was healed.

That much I could understand. It wouldn’t have survived without some kind of recovery ability.

But then the Crayfish shrugged off the Water Pressure entirely.

“??”

I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my Current Sense.

The Whale was still applying Water Pressure, yet at some point the Crayfish rose as though it simply didn’t matter anymore and charged at the Whale again.

[…!!!!!!!]

The Whale screamed silently, but without Water Pressure in play, it meant nothing.

One chunk, two chunks, three chunks.

Piece by piece, the Whale was devoured, and in the end, it was defeated by the Deep Sea.

-Crrrrunch…

I swallowed hard as I watched the Crayfish wait for that enormous Whale to be compressed into a single ball, then casually swallow it and vanish into the darkness.

Because I had realized.

-Click, click-click.

…If I had to eat something.

That was the only option.