Markets and Multiverses

Chapter 54: Return to the Deeps

I spent a few days getting my injured bones healed up. During that time, the Outsiders continued searching the area. Two days after my return from the ocean, one of the outsider boats seemed to spot  the fishing boats keeping an eye on them from the skies, confirming that we were in this area. The fishing boat, luckily, was intelligent enough to realize they shouldn’t lead the outsiders back to our islands, and so they had flown in a random direction for several hours before they escaped pursuit and returned. However, despite the attempt at misdirection, the outsiders were getting closer and closer to the islands. A few more paper fish had also appeared near the islands, making many islanders think they were being used as some sort of scout. The islanders eliminated them whenever we saw them, and the fishing boats around the islands also frequently destroyed the paper fish, but if the outsiders had some way to sense where each paper fish was destroyed they would home in on our islands soon.

In the midst of this, information that I had brought back from the ocean started to circulate through the village.

Influence: Play a [Significant] role in helping the islanders understand the deeps of the Ocean

Achievement +200

My Achievement increased from 8,458.06 to 8,658.06 as the islanders started to learn about the dangers of the Ocean. It wasn’t a huge increase, but it was nice to get a little more Achievement while I was resting up. I was getting quite close to 10,000 Achievement, which would let me upgrade every single Stat by one Grade when we got back to the Market. I wasn’t sure how well the great Pearl Heist would go, but if it succeeded, I might get above 10,000 Achievement. I hoped I could get more than 10,000 Achievement in this world. If I could boost every Stat by one grade and then buy a useful Ability or two, the next world would be much easier. Of course, there was also a decent chance I would die during the great pearl heist; after all, I would be potentially pissing off the giant kraken that lived beneath the islands. If it noticed what I was trying to do and swatted me with a tentacle, I would instantly turn into paste. This entire operation was a gamble, but the Outsiders were too dangerous to fight right now. If they found the islands without the black pearl softening them up first, I didn’t think the islands would survive the fight, which meant that we needed to make this operation work. Even if I was a Transmigrator, I still regarded the islands as my home, and I didn’t want it to fall to external invasion.

After three days passed, my ribs and arm were nearly healed. They still felt a little sore, and I suspected that they were still a little fragile as well, but I could work with this level of injury. And we were running out of time, so I didn’t want to wait until my body fully recovered. 

During the time I had been injured, the village chief had assembled a small group of people to work with me on the great pearl heist. This group of people consisted of:

Me, the only person who had ever gone into the ocean and lived to tell the tale (as well as the only person who could see easily underwater, knew what we were looking for, and had an ability set optimized to keep people alive while underwater.)

A hunter named Erik, who could make things touching wood become invisible for a time was the second inclusion in the pearl heist. There were a few different options available for stealth-related abilities in the village, but most of them were centered around making the user invisible, instead of making an object invisible. While Erik’s abilities were definitely a little more specific than I would have liked, as long as we could get a piece of wood to touch the black pearl we would be able to hide it from the great sea monster. Or at least, that was my hope.

Since the black pearl would need to touch wood before we hid it, the underwater group naturally expanded to include Felix. While he only had six runes, he had a general wood manipulation ability that would make touching the black pearl with wood much, much easier. Felix, for his part, began properly training himself to make a variety of wood-related objects that could touch a black pearl, and then help us carry it away. As of now, Felix was able to quickly and effectively turn a block of wood into a wooden net, and then launch it at a specific area without much pause. As long as he kept applying his rune ability to the wood, it would remain as mobile as rope, meaning that as long as he had a rough idea where the target was we could take the pearl and run as fast as possible.

The second to last participant was Olav’s fishing crew. The idea right now was to get the pearl out of the ocean, fly it over the outsiders, and then just throw it at them, and then fly away. If things went well, the pearl would become visible again right as we turned around and started fleeing for our lives, since we would no longer be hiding it at that point, meaning the outsiders would see the black pearl, and so would the sea monster. This also meant that the mission would be far easier if we had an experienced flying  boat to pick us up the moment we exited the ocean, before flying us to where the outsiders were. There, a bunch of flying boats from the other islands would also be waiting. If our mission was successful, depending on the circumstances our village chief and a few other village chiefs planned to launch a follow-up attack on the outsiders and sink as many ships as they could. If they could drop a bunch of enemy soldiers into the insanity-inducing ocean, we might be able to destroy the outsider threat before they even saw our villages. Of course, the plans for a follow-up attack depended heavily on how aggressive the great ocean monster was, and how much damage it inflicted on the outsiders.

To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled about the inclusion of Olav’s fishing crew on this mission. The Hunters were people that danced with death every day anyway, and the village chief and I had explicitly vetted all of the hunters to make sure anyone who participated in this mission was fully aware that it might end in death. Erik, the hunter with the stealth rune ability, hadn’t minded the possibility of death in this mission, and had no living family to take care of. Felix and I also didn’t care if we died; we were transmigrators, so we would return to the Market sooner or later anyway. However, even though I knew my father would also return to the ocean of souls if he died, to be reborn again, the idea that he might die soon as a result of my plan made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving my mother behind. However, my father insisted that if I was willing to take the risk of participating in this plan, I couldn’t stop him from being present to protect his daughter. And I was so critical to the plan that the entire operation would fall apart without me. Claus, Olav, and Edel seemed to share similar sentiments to my father, which touched my heart, but also made me nervous.

The final participant of this operation was the most controversial of them all.

Sallia.

This inclusion had caused another huge argument, because no matter how one looked at it, Sallia was the least essential person on this mission. She had zero rune abilities, meaning that she couldn’t contribute any supernatural abilities to this mission, and her Willpower was only Grade 4. This was hardly an impressive amount.

However, Felix, Sallia and I managed to get her involved in this mission anyway, for a few specific reasons.

The three of us knew each other very well, meaning that we could communicate with each other well, even if we couldn’t see or hear each other. This would be especially important when we got near the outsiders, since the stealth ability user would need to hide our boat and its occupants from the outsiders if we didn’t want to get blasted out of the sky by a hail of rune abilities. This also meant that we would need to keep talking to a minimum where possible, since people with seven or more runes had excellent hearing. The understanding the three of us shared would at least partially help mitigate this problem.

However, the much more important factor was that Sallia apparently had made at least a small name for herself through her skill with weapons. It wasn’t anything impressive in the village, since she didn’t have the runes to back it up. But people did know that if no abilities were used, she would usually win in a fight due to her incredible combat instinct and mastery over weapons. Even if she hadn’t reached the top of the island’s weapon users, she was still known for being pretty good.

This was especially valuable for this mission, where we would need to launch a pearl at an outsider ship without being able to see either each other or the pearl we were throwing. Felix and I managed to argue that Sallia’s skill extended to throwing things as well, making Sallia the ideal candidate for getting the pearl off of our fishing boat and into the best spot to hurt the outsiders. Another factor in Sallia’s inclusion was that, bluntly speaking, her death wouldn’t matter much to the village. In a mission where all of the inhabitants might die, Sallia having the ability to fill a critical role while having minimal importance to the village was probably a major factor in why the village chief eventually agreed to include her.

Of course, in truth, the reason Sallia was included was because Felix and I were desperately trying to find a chance for Sallia to get a keyword ability. Since Sallia’s extreme talent was Absorption Essence, it would be far too much of a waste for Sallia to leave this world without an absorption-related Keyword ability. Felix and I had racked our brains for multiple years, trying to figure out a way to help Sallia get a keyword ability, but neither of us could ever figure out the most important step in our original idea of helping Sallia kill a landbeast on her own. Just giving her credit for something we did wouldn’t work, since Achievement was given based on our actual accomplishments, not the public perception of them. Any steps we took to help Sallia would also dilute her chances of getting something useful out of the occasion, which left Felix and I at a loss. Sallia was just too weak to succeed in getting an absorption keyword ability on her own, but if we helped her, we would get the majority of the Achievement for the event, which would probably remove her chance to get a Keyword Ability. It was a difficult problem to solve.

However, this was a chance. If Sallia was the one that threw the pearl, and managed to damage a lot of the outsiders, she probably wouldn’t get the majority of the credit, since the operation was still based on me. However, she would probably get enough credit and Influence achievement to make her participation worthwhile, and if we were lucky, she would walk out of this with a keyword ability. Felix and I had decided it was worth a shot, and finally explained our thinking to Sallia. After learning about our idea, she looked more excited than I had seen her in years, and her eagerness to participate in this mission had skyrocketed. Her enthusiasm played a huge role in pressuring her parents to accept this, despite their hesitation.

After that, I spent a few days teaching Felix and Erik the hunter a few signals I would be using while we were underwater. Of the three of us, I was the only one who could see in the dark, and since the three of us would be drowning the whole time, nobody would be able to talk. Therefore, I taught them several different ways I could tap on their arms while underwater, which would let us effectively communicate. I also decided that, when we found a black pearl, I would grab Felix’s arm and point his fingers directly towards the orb, and then tap his arm a certain number of times to indicate distance so that he knew where to aim. It wasn’t a perfect method of sharing information, but hopefully it would let us get the black pearl without issue.

Finally, the time had come. Olav’s boat, along with Sallia, began flying closer to the ocean than they would normally even think of, allowing them to receive us the moment the hunter or I returned to the surface. Meanwhile, I grabbed the hand of Felix and the hunter, to make sure they didn’t get lost and to ensure I could heal them easily while they drowned. They seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if wondering what kind of lunacy they had agreed to take part in, before they took in deep breaths to steel their nerves. Then, Felix, Erik, and I all took a step into the ocean. And then another. After the seventh step into the ocean, the water closed over our heads, blocking us from the world of the villagers and plunging us into the deeps of the ocean.

The world beneath the waves was as I remembered it to be. Silent. Dim. Unnerving. I began pouring mana into Felix and the stealth hunter, healing their body as I began to drag the three of us downward. Since I needed to heal three people instead of one, mana would be the limiting factor on how long we could look for a pearl before needing to return. Every second we spent underwater, my mana reserves would decrease. 

However, haste could easily get the three of us killed here. As I pushed the three of us downward using water currents and we kicked our legs awkwardly, I stopped every minute or two to survey our surroundings. I remained cautious, giving myself a few minutes to adjust as the light dimmed, and also waiting to see if either of them signaled that they were drowning. I assumed that my Ability would heal them the same way it healed me, but I had never tested that before, so if something went wrong, I needed to be prepared.

Luckily, while Felix and the hunter both floundered and seemed to shudder once they lost the ability to breathe, it didn’t take long for them to find their bearings. Both of them squeezed my hand, reassuring me that they were fine, if uncomfortable. Since things were going well, I kept swimming downwards, dragging my two companions along.

The first hurdle had been crossed, and the three of us were indeed capable of swimming together and handling the lack of oxygen as a group. Now, all that remained was to locate a black pearl, get Felix to wrap it in wood, and then get the stealth hunter to hide the pearl before getting out of the ocean. If I could still breathe, I would have taken a deep breath to reassure myself. But here, in the darkness of the Ocean, there was nothing but the cold, deathly silence to greet me as I prepared for the next part of our grand pearl heist.

acaswell

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