Chapter 20: Chapter 20 – SEEK

“…So I guess I’ll keep on talking. Really running out of things to say, here. At least it’s quiet up top…”

I shook my head, suddenly aware that Huang was faintly speaking to me. I was deep underwater, at home in my element. My patrol had been uneventful, but… exactly how long had I been down here?

“I feel like I’m leaving a really long, annoying message on your answering machine, hoping you’ll pick up the phone before I hang up. Anyway. I’m assuming you’re not dead, so anytime you want to respond…”

I snorted, bubbles flying up from my nose. “Bored?”

“Uh, yeah, I’ve had radio silence for a good forty-five minutes up here,” he said, somewhat sharply.

“Oh. Sorry,” I said. My Leviathan instincts urged me to keep patrolling, so I acquiesced, for once in agreement with them. “I… I think I blanked out for a while there. This thing runs on autopilot, you know.”

“Well, watch it. That’s dangerous,” Huang cautioned, as if I didn’t know. “Have things been quiet down there? I haven’t seen anything up here.”

“Very quiet,” I confirmed. The Leviathan didn’t seem to have a concept of being happy or relaxed, but it sure was content with the water being still for this long. As a suspicious human, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being lulled into a false sense of security. “…All right, now that I’m back, I think I’m going to go check out the currents and see if I can find anything out.”

“I’ll keep watch at the surface,” Huang said. “The further down you go, the fainter your voice seems to get, so we might not be able to hear each other much longer.”

“Not all the currents are all that deep in the water,” I informed him, spreading out my senses. The Leviathan’s version of the spatial sense was several times more potent than my own. It was easy enough to find the thread of a current nearby.

I approached it slowly. I kept referring to them as “currents”, but I wasn’t sure that was the best name for them. While they were narrow areas where the water flowed in a certain direction, water flow almost seemed like a side effect to whatever these things really were.

They were full of ideas and feelings that pressed on my brain when I got anywhere near them. This one was an endless stream of bleak-stone-brown-protection-shell-ashes and a hundred other flashes of ideas that, while making sense independently, didn’t quite come together in any way I understood.

“All right, uh… I guess I’m going to touch it.”

Huang didn’t immediately tell me that was a terrible idea, so I tentatively reached out a clawed hand. It just seemed like a current of water rushing past; there was nothing special beyond the data I was already receiving.

“Results?” Huang asked.

“Feels like a current,” I reported. Acting on a stupid impulse, I plunged my claws in deeper, but there was still no change. “This is so weird. I was watching demons claw their way out of these things like they were a portal, but there’s nothing to them.”

“Maybe certain currents are different? How many are there?”

I started to swim towards the next nearest current. “I can’t sense them all at once, but I would guess a hundred or more. Some of them might be the same ones folded on top of each other. The spatial layout doesn’t make much sense.”

“As ever in the Grey City,” Huang pointed out.

I soon glided to a stop in front of another current. This one brought sensations of bright-crystalline-sharp-clear-perception-sight. I touched it, but again there was nothing substantial to it.

“These are important somehow,” I muttered. My Leviathan instincts were telling me that it was pointless to stay in one place, but I managed to balance that with my need to learn more about what I was protecting. “Maybe I can… follow them.”

“Careful,” Huang said. I hesitantly moved into the current, letting it pull me along. It was barely enough to cause me to drift slowly; I could easily escape its pull with a twitch.

I swam with the current effortlessly, doing a few loops around it and gaining speed to wherever it led. Around me, the density and colour of the water started to change, like I was moving into a different region of the Waterfront.

“Alright, it’s definitely leading me somewhere,” I reported.

“… go too far…?” Huang’s voice barely reached me. I paused, wondering if I should go back.

Nah. I was in my element here. The Leviathan’s instincts were clear on that, and I couldn’t rationalize turning around. I needed to see what was here anyway.

I kept swimming, almost starting to enjoy myself. I was cutting through the water with ease, the cool water rushing through the gill slits down my neck. I was in complete control of my movements; raising and lowering the fin on the back of my neck let me make minute adjustments to each turn, my tail powered me forward with almost no physical exertion.

So, what was my top speed? I started to really swim, streamlining my body and pushing through the water. I could move like a bullet when I wanted to. The current boosted me, and I kept pushing myself to go even faster. I just kept gaining and gaining, still barely using a portion of all the energy at my disposal. The water around me grew clearer, colder, and—

I forced myself to stop as I started to notice just how much my surroundings had changed. Breaking out of the current, I drifted into a strange underwater world filled with pillars of ice.

The water was less dark; dim light reflected through the ice in glittering patterns. The pillars were of all different shapes and sizes: thin, wide, and hourglass-shaped, extending too far above and below me to sense where they ended.

“Camilo to Huang, do you read me?” I asked, but there was no response. I’d travelled far.

Was I… still at the waterfront? I started to swim toward the surface, following the pillars as they lead endlessly upward. I could feel intense cold pressing against me, even though it didn’t cause any discomfort: the water itself felt almost hard, even though I was swimming as easily as ever.

Something shifted in the water below and to my left. I was instantly alert and focused, the Leviathan’s instincts roaring back into clarity. Something had disturbed the water—and this was still my territory. I made a wide turn and began a slow approach.

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It struck without warning. Something shot through the water and pierced my tail. I twisted away, managing to break free, a cloud of dark greenish blood in my wake.

A spiral-shelled demon, just like the one I had fought last time in the Waterfront, drifted into view. Its many legs trailed beneath it, and one of its harpoons was retreating back towards it; that was what had hit me.

Anger almost blinded me. I darted through the water towards the demon, twisting to the left as another harpoon stinger shot at me. It started to raise all of its legs and tentacles around its face defensively as I neared.

I wouldn’t be able to reach the weak point in its shell. I pushed at the water and shot past it at full speed, slashing at its legs as I passed.

I looped around and went for a second pass, noting with satisfaction the ink clouding the water from the creature’s wounds. Two harpoons shot towards me, piercing through the water in the blink of an eye. I twisted around one, but the second caught the top of my shoulder and hooked in deep.

I snarled, chomping down on the harpoon as I swam, severing it from its tentacle. The tentacle writhed and withdrew back to the creature, but the harpoon remained embedded in my flesh.

I slashed at the spiral-shell again as I went past, but this time, with the harpoon in my shoulder slowing me down, it reacted in time to reach out and snatch me.

I struggled like mad, trying to get my claws and teeth wherever it would hurt. This thing seriously thought it could defeat me in my own element? I was a hundred times faster and stronger than a giant snail.

More harpoons hidden in its mass of legs pierced into my skin with every movement, but I continued my struggle, trying to get my jaws close enough to its shell to bite down. If I ignored the pain, it couldn’t quite hold me still enough to stop me.

Through the streams of Leviathan’s blood that were beginning to darken the water, I reached my target and sunk my teeth into the soft area between the spiral-shell’s body and shell. I dug deep and the creature’s grip loosened, leaving me free to tear through the limbs that were holding me and finish it off with a headbutt.

My senses warned me a moment too late of the second spiral-shell descending from above.

I wriggled my way free of the dead one and shot through the water, barely avoiding several harpoons. The one embedded in my shoulder stayed right in there; I caught a glimpse of the hooked tip of one of the harpoons as it shot past. Those were designed to not come out easily.

The Leviathan expected to keep on fighting, despite the wounds now covering its body. My human thoughts started to take on a nagging urgency from inside their little box, thoughts I had previously been ignoring: this was stupid. I could get myself killed down here.

But this was my territory, and I wasn’t about to give it up to these ugly things. As the spiral-shell began to retract its harpoons, I made a pass at them, slashing each tentacle in half and leaving the severed harpoons to drift away.

It shot all its remaining harpoons at me at the same time, a wide spread of eight. I couldn’t hope to avoid them all, especially with the one still sticking out of my shoulder.

I was struck three times: once in the chest, once on the foreleg, and once along the tail. Only the harpoon in my chest bit deep enough to stick, and I was quick to sever the leg attached to it. I was quickly becoming handicapped, and losing my speed advantage on this thing would spell disaster.

I spun around to try and sever all the harpoons that had missed me, but only caught a couple of them, the rest retracting too fast for me to catch. I started to swim in a wide circle around the spiral-shell, waiting for another opening. I knew the weak point, all I had to do was wait for an opportunity…

My senses found a third spiral-shell. This one was slowly approaching through the pillars to my left, past the dissolving body of the one I’d just killed. I tried to think of another strategy; what could I do when I was outnumbered and wounded like this?

Retreat, I thought. The Leviathan’s instincts hated the idea and I felt a blackout coming on, but I had to cling to consciousness. If I die here, the Waterfront will be overrun. This area isn’t even really a part of the Waterfront. I have to retreat, it’s the only smart thing to do.

Both spiral-shells shot at me at once. I twisted and rolled, managing to avoid the harpoons out of pure desperation, only getting a nick or two on the tail.

TIME TO GO, I thought at myself and, through some miracle, managed to push through the rage and bloodlust. I dove deep, seeking the current that would take me back to where Huang was patrolling. Maybe these things would follow me, but if I could get back to solid land, they couldn’t—

Another spiral-shell, rising from below. And another. As slow as they moved, they had range on those harpoons, and if I got caught between all four of them, they would tear me apart. I spread out my senses and found the only path I could take to stay clear of them: it led up toward the surface.

I didn’t have much of a choice and pivoted in the water, starting my ascent. A few harpoons shot in my direction, but I was just outside of their range. The harpoons sticking out of my shoulder and chest made it painful and difficult to gain speed, but I was still faster than the spiral-shells, and quickly rose out of sight of them.

The water around me grew even brighter, and my senses told me the surface, and the apex of the ice pillars, weren’t far. In fact, the ‘ice pillars’ seemed less icy the further up I rose: they had the distinct texture of glass.

I breached the surface and immediately started swimming toward the nearest patch of land I could see. Everything here was made of glass, even the ground beneath my feet as I finally limped back onto dry land and took a good look around.

Wait a second. I’d been in a world made of glass before. This was the Glass District. I looked behind me at the water where I’d surfaced; it was an ocean that extended past the glass district, icebergs dotting its surface in the distance.

The current had led me here. When I’d brushed against it in the waterfront, it had given me thoughts of cold, refractions, crystalline structures…  that all seemed to match up with this district pretty well.

I waited by the surface, warm blood dripping down my scales, but nothing followed me. The spiral-shells probably couldn’t do much on land, or they were simply too slow to know where I had gone.

I bit down on the harpoon sticking out of my chest and tried to work it out of my skin, but the hooked edges made it impossible. I growled under my breath and tried to think of what to do.

Shifting back into a human seemed like the only option. With the Leviathan being so much larger than my real body, surely the harpoons would have nowhere to go. Or, possibly, they would stay embedded in me and kill me because I was a tiny, frail human, and giant spears piercing the chest spelled bad news for those.

I was tired and I didn’t want to wait for Huang to help. I just did it. I shrank back to my own size in an instant, feeling the pain vanish from my body.

The harpoons clattered down on either side of me, wet with Leviathan’s blood, but harmless to me now.

I hesitantly went and picked one up—it was a good few inches thick and the tip was almost the size of my head. I shuddered and dropped it, leaving in in a pool of dark green-blue blood as I started to make my way back to the Waterfront on foot.

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