Chapter 352: Chapter 336 – A Dip in the Ocean

“For those who dared to brave its embrace, the oceans offered plenty of bounty in every form and shape, so much that there was easily enough for one to never go hungry again.” - Old tribal saying.

“No need to be shy, not like anyone would really care about it here anyway,” said Aideen towards Andromarche, who blushed like a shy girl at the remark. Both women were only clad in their loincloths, with the rest of their body bare as they sat atop a narrow boat made from a hollowed-out log. One of the Greyscale locals rowed the boat with a short and broad oar as they went out into the sea.

 

They were out there to gather food from the oceans, something the locals did on a daily basis, and Aideen had practically dragged the undecided Andromarche with her. Fortunately, the former knight knew how to swim, having been born in her family’s estate which was built by the lakeside. She had learnt to swim from an early age before she left to become a knight.

 

As for their clothing - or lack thereof - it was done that way because excessive clothing would just hinder them in the activity they planned to do. The foodstuffs usually gathered took the form of several kinds of seaweed, crustaceans, and various shellfish, as well as some fishes if they were lucky to run into some. Most of those had to be harvested from the ocean floor.

 

While the harvesting was done at a relatively shallow place, it was still several meters beneath the surface, and the harvesters had to dive into the depth, gather as much as they could as fast as they could, before they swam back up to the surface to catch a breath and deposit their catch. Of course, the merfolk members of the clan had no such limitations, and stayed beneath the water as long as they liked, while they simultaneously acted as lifeguards in case one of their non-merfolk brethren miscalculated how long they could hold their breath for.

 

Once their guide rowed the boat to the area where they planned to harvest, he dropped an anchor - just a heavy rock tied to the boat by a sturdy rope woven from fibers extracted out of dried seaweed stems - to keep the boat in place, before he gestured invitingly to the women on board and jumped into the ocean with a splash.

 

AIdeen followed the orcish man into the water with a clean dive that barely caused the water to splash, while Andromarche hesitated a bit longer before she finally took a deep breath and jumped off the boat, feet first into the water. As the former knight fell beneath the water she opened her eyes, and saw the magnificent underwater landscape before her, the blue water around her almost as clear as crystal.

 

Fish as small as the nail of her pinky finger swam in large schools through the corals that dotted the ocean floor below, with slightly larger fish, each probably just as large as one of her fingers, swooping in to prey on the smaller ones. A few starfish and crabs crawled on the sandy floor of the ocean, while some anemones attached themselves to rocks and at times to the corals as well.

 

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As she swam deeper into the sea Andromarche noticed that there were more people in the water. Many were orcs both from the Greyscales and the Bloodfangs, all clad just in loincloth like her, along with a few merfolk and hybrid members of the former who seemed even more at home in the water. It was no surprise, since she had heard that they were capable of breathing underwater, and was indeed at home down there.

 

After she spent a moment to take in the sights around her - she noticed Aideen swimming nearby, her motions through the water graceful and practiced, as she swam with almost as much ease as the merfolk, a stark contrast to the more brutish way the orcs swam - Andromarche followed their orcish guide down. There she noticed the man digging through the sandy ocean floor and collected things like clams and crabs which he then placed into a net he carried.

 

Andromarche followed what he did, which the orcish man noticed and nodded at. Generally things like clams and crabs were not poisonous, which was probably one reason why the man showed how to harvest them in particular to her. After all, the former knight had very little knowledge about the local marine wildlife she saw in the first time of her life.

 

After a few minutes, they swam back up to the surface, emerging near where the boat was anchored, and took a deep breath. Attached to the boat was another fine new that was left to soak in the water, and both the orcish man and Andromarche emptied their nets into it, where they deposited their catch so far. She noticed that there was no sign of Aideen surfacing and worried for a moment, but then recalled that the other woman was unliving and thus lacked the need to breathe.

 

Their catch deposited, they dove back down into the waters. By then a school of barracudas had swam into the relatively shallow waters, a rarity, but not unheard of. Fortunately, the school was mostly of a smaller kind, ones that only grew about as long as Andromarche’s arms at most, and they seemed wary of the divers in the water, only preying on smaller fishes instead.

 

The feeling was not reciprocated however, as some of the orcs and merfolk divers went and caught some of the predatory fish. A few of the merfolk carried many-tined barbed fish spears and gleefully pierced some of the fish with them. The orcs had not carried any with them, but some daring youngsters instead went and caught some of the fish with their bare hands.

 

It resulted in more than a few comical failures and a lot of nips and bites to their hands and arms, but some managed to catch a few of the fish nonetheless. The slippery scales of the fish no match for the grip force the young orcs could muster, which meant that any of the fish that fell into their hands could forget about escaping.

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