Chương 12: 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 text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"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.

"Hey, the ribs are starting to show," Mason said from where he was watching the water. Loth perked up at that.

"Ribs?" She mused, looking at her halfway completed ship's ribs, woefully inadequate compared to the sheer scope of the decomposing monster below them. The black kobold then leaned over the edge and peered down at the kaiju-eater whose ribs were slowly revealing themselves through the cloud of miasma that was tainting the air around it. She extended a single ebony claw and pointed at the leviathan beneath them.

"Bring me that skeleton," she said, causing her insect to swarm forward, erupting like a cloud from her oversized barrel.

"And whatever loot is in it." Will added. The next week was uneventful. Loth's bugs weren't able to lift the leviathan at first, but after a day or so, most of the flesh was gone, and they were able to lift the skeleton out of the water. In the meantime, Loth used the cloud of miasma rolling off the decomposing giant to advance her miasmatic insect breeding, the miasma causing horrific mutations at a much higher rate.

The vast majority were monstrous or stillborn, but Loth was working with hundreds of thousands of samples. Alicia spent the time on high alert. Mason had dropped the majority of his Charges in the initial encounter to blunt the shark attack, so the onus was on her to detect problems before they became problems. Jean was also tapped out, and Loth's charge wasn't much better, so it was imperative to avoid another ambush, as they simply couldn't bring the same amount of force to bear a second time.

The Bakers went diving for loot. Their shapeshifting, water-breathing, and disposability made them particularly well-suited for it, but even with all those advantages, they only managed to find a small fraction of the loot drops that thousands of monsters should have had, most of it trapped in a floating ribcage by sheer luck. The rest sank to the bottom of the sea, so deep that even the Bakers, with all their physical advantages couldn't find the bottom. The loot was… disappointing for the most part.

After the heist, Will had come to expect about fifteen stat points and a helpful mutation from most of his gear, but this stuff all hovered around the 6-8 point range. But it wasn't a problem. They could still use the Relics, even if they were now substandard. Will added the loot to his Sourdough barrel, breaking the items down and gradually filling it with Relic Dust.

Everybody else found a way to keep themselves busy while Loth made their new ship, and Will passed the two days by working on ways to track the progress of his various Abilities. Specifically, he wanted to know more about Sourdough and the Phantom Hand's exact specifications.

William Oh Resourceful Climber Level 26 27+ 5 Strength 78 +10 Kinesthetics 81 +27 Resistance 52 +15 Focus 100 +26 Acuity Charges: 58/67 Free Points: 0 Item Abilities: Summon Undead retainer, Heal undead, 35% eidolon potency, 45% rogue Archetype potency, 75% Ranger archetype potency, Aetherhawk, Lightning Pulse, Wet footing, Homefield Advantage(Ice), Malleable Space, 30% Trespass A/V dampening, Swift Earth.

Phantom Hand Slots: (Ring of Accuracy*) (Sickle of Cold Harvest) -(Wand of the Undead Retainer)- (Stormfists) Primary Abilities: Aspect of the Immortal Serpent, Phantom Hand* Secondary Abilities: Sourdough* This is a good opportunity to test Sourdough, Will thought, itching the doubtlessly infected wound on his shoulder. It wasn't a critical wound, but not being injured and fighting off an infection now might save wounds later, so Will felt it was justified to nip it in the bud. Sourdough 58 Charges remaining.

Will drained a Greater Health Potion, repairing the lacerations across his torso before inspecting the remaining liquid with one of Loth's measuring calipers. About 38% of the potion remaining. The baking process doesn't get any faster, only the amount of starter reserved by Sourdough. The original amount reserved by Sourdough was 20%, so I'm getting about… Will scribbled on some of Loth's smudged up math paper.. 175% per Resistance. Wait. Remove that 75 because of my ranger Archetype boosting Relics, and you get…

1% extra consumable reserved per 10 Resistance. Which means at eight hundred Resistance, I could reserve the whole item. With my current Relic boosts to Ranger potency, that would be… only four hundred and fifty-eight Resistance. Right around the corner. … Okay, I might never reach that, but it's always improving. It takes 30 days to recover the remaining 80% of the consumable, I have increased the reserve amount by 18%, sooo… 18/80=22.

5% So I'm cutting nearly a quarter of the time off the baking to regain the full item. 30 times. 225 = 6. 75 days cut off the bake time for Sourdough. Not bad at all. Will could expect these to be done by day 24 rather than day 30. Once Will had figured out Sourdough, he turned his attention to the Dimensional Storage upgrade from the Dimensional Oyster Sacrifice. Will borrowed Loth's calipers again and fished out pieces of wood to make several objects whose volume Will knew exactly.

I think I need to get my own measuring tools and math paper, Will thought as Loth watched him handle the calipers, as if afraid he would drop it into the ocean. Through a long process of trial and error, Will learned that any object that he put in his Dimensional Storage was shrunk to about 22% of it's original size. Will figured this out by calculating his maximum normal storage, which was 226. 8 cubic inches (with Relic boosts) He cut one flotsam pole into two identical poles exactly 226.

8 inches in volume (with Loth's help), then emptied everything out of his dimensional storage. He put the first piece of wood in, filling his dimensional storage entirely. Then Will tried to put the second pole in. It didn't work. He shaved off a tiny bit from the second pole and tried again, repeating the process over and over until the second pole went in. Then Will took both poles out and measured them against each other.

The second pole was missing 22% of it's height when measured against the first, indicating that the first pole was taking up exactly that much space when he tried to put the second in. So, objects were shrunk down to 22% of their original size, but they still took up some space, meaning the size of the item he could put in Dimensional Storage shrank as he put more things in.

This would mean he would have to be more thoughtful and go from large to small when packing the Phantom hand with gear, but it could also hold quite a bit more in total. With the 22% result already known, Loth and Will were able to reverse-engineer the formula to determine how much shrinking occurred. They came up with this: 1/(Acuity*(Relic boosts)/50) 1/(126*1. 8/50) = 0.

2204 They confirmed this by taking off his Relics and the math held true when he had 26 less Acuity, and zero Relic boosts to his Ranger potency, resulting in the objects in his Phantom hand's Dimensional Storage shrinking down to exactly 50% of their original size.

By the end of the first two days, Will had learned a lot about something Loth called 'algebra', Mason's Charges were partially recovered, and the entire party was beginning to come down with the 'raft crazies', a condition where you are forced to live within ten feet of others for extended periods of time, partially wet and buffeted by chilly salt-spray winds.

By the end of the week, they were universally relieved to move into the 'boat-house', the wood, bone, scale, and resin monstrosity that Loth had fashioned, using the leviathan's rib bones for structural integrity, wood and resin for floatation and enormous scales for surfaces, paneling, and defense. The construction was about half the size of the leviathan itself, which meant it was big enough for each of them to have their own room.

It did not matter to them that Loth had most likely trapped every square inch of the construction as long as they got a solid wall between themselves and the elements, and each other, for a few hours a day.