Museum Core Chapter 108: Duel in the Void

It was a common refrain that humanity knew more about the surface of the moon than the depths of the Earth’s oceans. Thomas wasn’t entirely certain how true that was, or if there was perhaps a specific viewpoint/framing that was required to make that happen, but looking out across the seemingly infinite vastness of the sea, he could believe it.

Though he had to admit that if he weren’t able to constantly “see” the sea floor via the submarine’s radar, this place would have been outright terrifying. Like outer space, but even worse.

Yeah, sure, distances were actually infinite, up there in the black, but you could see that far. As long as your eyes were good enough to spot and locate planets, you’d have something to navigate by.

Down here, on the other hand? If you couldn’t see the proverbial hand in front of your face, then the nearest solid object might be ten meters away … or ten kilometers. Or ten thousand. Or a hundred thousand or any other number you’d care to name.

And it was freaking empty to boot. He hadn’t seen any nature documentaries since becoming a dungeon core for obvious reasons, but they’d given him a slightly incorrect impression of how populated the deep seas were.

Yes, he’d seen the odd critter, but the overwhelming majority of the time, there was absolutely nothing else present, neither living nor dead, at least if he dismissed the microorganisms that were likely present but not visible to his senses.

That was how it had been for most of the day, and crossing the boundary of the transformation zone barely made a difference. Yes, there was magic around him, but everything there was still either non-existent or dead.

Nothing there save the anchor beast, which he’d only pick a fight with if he had an advantage. Only poke the bear if you have a shotgun in the other hand, and make sure the pole you’re doing the pole with is long, basically.

As the Belfast lowered itself into the crater in the seafloor created by the merge, Thomas began to summon his “critters.” Several hundred catsharks took their places within specially-designed chambers within the hull of the ship that he could release them from as needed, saving the little fish the effort of having to swim alongside the submarine.

But the twin Kronosauruses he summoned as well neither needed nor were able to do so, after all, Titanic Physique had blown them up to a size that very nearly put them into the “kaiju” weight class. They were still smaller than the Belfast, and far smaller than the Hunger had been, but they were merely D-Rank, they’d massively grow once again when they hit C, to the point where they could likely be seen from space, even at a significant depth.

He’d also wound up altering the pattern to add a magical item that served as a self-destruct mechanism that would kill any monster that left his influence, or rather, reached such a distance that he’d no longer be able to send them any directions. Because, while they may not be able to breed, fully released monsters were, well, monsters of the highest order, after all, that was what he’d designed them to do. PR disaster potential aside, that was just plain wrong.

Quite frankly, summoning them anywhere but here would immediately have resulted in them getting shot at, their mere presence was a threat, something that would have been true even if it hadn’t been for their other powers. Well, power, once you discounted how they were able to survive underwater.

No, it was their ability to produce/control the shockwaves their massive bodies sent rippling across the ocean every time they so much as twitched.

Several seconds after they’d manifested, the ground beneath rippled, silt splashing away as the water displaced by their appearance impacted, but nothing happened beyond that, as he’d had them set the power in “emissions control” mode, he didn’t want to slam the guardian with waves of water over and over as they swam forward.

Yes, part of the reason he was here was to potentially pick a fight with the anchor beast, but he didn’t want to have the choice of whether or not to engage to be taken from him due to sheer carelessness.

It was at this point that Thomas sent out a few catsharks to collect samples and return them to the sub. They couldn’t carry much, since they had to carry stuff in their mouths, which they also had to breathe through, but he was still putting away quite a bit of cool stones and exotic plants. Nothing game-changing, perhaps not even worthy of being used for anything other than decoration, but still cool.

But that was still fine.

He spread out everything across several canisters evenly distributed across the ship, designed to be released if the ship was destroyed, at which point they’d begin expanding a balloon that would cause them to rocket upwards. It was a complex system of valves and gas canisters that filled the balloon while making sure that it didn’t explode as it rose through the ocean, but thankfully, he hadn’t had to design any of this.

Granted, retrieving the buoys could be tricky, but there was an entire fleet up there, and he could easy as someone on in the UK to pass along the message that there was loot in need of pickup. And he knew for a fact that some had the ships that could operate in the low-tech zone.

Of course, he’d like to avoid anything like that being necessary, but it was better to make plans for disaster that never wound up being used than getting caught with his pants down when shit did hit the fan.

A mental nudge caused the Belfast to begin moving forward in earnest, both massive pliosaurs accompanying it like massive guard dogs, and an entire shoal of sharks swanning around the whole affair, endlessly picking up and dropping off anything that looked even remotely “interesting.”

And slowly, ever so slowly, the sunken city began peeling itself out of the gloom in the distance, drifting radar range.

It was a pretty big place, a metropolis even by modern standards, but weirdly uniform, far more so than any place designed by humans was ever likely to be. Even American cities, ones designed from the ground up and laid out in a perfect grid pattern, had more variation than this, especially since the uniformity seemed to extend well beyond merely the layout, the buildings themselves looked extremely similar to one another, at least as far as he could tell beneath the curtains of greenery.

But what he couldn’t see was the anchor beast. Even if the crab claw the size of a modern destroyer was all there was to it, and there was no body beyond that, it should still have shown up on radar. And even if it was set into the ground somewhere, there should have been a space clear of buildings where it could “land” and rest.

Sure,  it could have buried itself somewhere, but with how large this thing had to be, it should have been obvious even beneath a layer of silt.

Huh … oh, fuck!

Things went to hell in a handbasket in a nanosecond as, from one moment to the next, a vast wave of silt blasted through the water, choking any catsharks currently outside the Belfast’s hull, temporarily blinding his Kronosauruses, and rendering even his vision useless.

But his radar showed him exactly what was going on, in far greater detail than he was presently comfortable with.

Thomas had been wrong.

The monster had, in fact, been able to bury itself in the ground in a way that wasn’t obvious. Right under the city. The enter damn thing had lifted off the ground as one, like the lid of some primordial titan’s cooking pot being cocked up to release steam, except what was coming out wasn’t steam, or lava, or some other substance he could neither think off nor name.

No, what was coming slithering out was something entirely different, and incomparably worse.

And, as someone had already mentioned within his hearing range, if that thing wasn’t the anchor beast … Everyone. Was. Fucked.

It was difficult to describe just how fucked up the monster was with words alone.

At its most basic, it was some kind of “snake” or other slithering, creepy-crawly larger than, well, just about anything it could possibly be compared to. There was absolutely no reasonable metaphor that could be made, it was simply utterly titanic, a couple of hundred meters wide and at least seven kilometers long, a barrel-shaped body that flattened towards the tail, where it gained a long fin-like fringe on both its top and bottom akin to what one might have seen on a moray eel.

The fin may or may not have run the entirety of the body, but it was presently impossible to say one way or the other, as he could barely see the torso directly.

Because the beast was wrapped in writhing limbs and tentacles of all sorts, some thing like garrotes and apparently made from metal of some sort, others entirely biological and thick as sewer pipes, put there were nine especially massive ones, split up into groups of three, evenly spaced across the monster’s body, each of which holding a massive crab’s claw at its end, lookin gcapable of crushing the Belfast like a tin can if they made contact.

But it was the head that was the most bizarre part of the body. Because it did. Not. Exist. At least not in the traditional sense.

Where a normal creature would have had, you know, a skull or other covering for the brain, a collection of sensory organs, and whatever passed for a mouth on even the most absurdly exotic of animals, this beast merely had a thick metal disk with a single light in the center, vast, blue, and incredibly harsh, its iridescent ray cutting through the water, starkly contrasting the silt that surrounded it the only thing Thomas could actually perceive visiually, everything else … yeah, there was no way that could just be a radar glitch, right? Pretty please, let the easy way out be possible to take?

Fuck.

Fucking fuckity fuck.

This thing was obviously, at the barest minimum, the biggest monster that he’d ever seen with power to match, and some kind of mechanical enhancement to boot that … well, according to the information Abrams had collected during her dive, the monster he was looking at was the city guardian, and something like that was all but guaranteed to have been given as many enhancements as it could possibly carry.

Combine that with the fact that he also knew the local system was tech-based, and yeah, apparently the city had cyborg-megakaiju as a guardian that had apparently decided that he looked like enough of a threat to attack without hesitation.

Mercy … mercy was unlikely to forthcome, but neither was victory.

Thomas began to summon everything he could, the power of his main dungeon pouring into the mechanical champion that served as another core, another anchor of his being, another, well, him.

And then, he gunned the engines, hurling Belfast forward while shedding monsters like a cropduster did pesticides, only stopping as he reached the point where he’d stop being able to reinforce his home in the Natural History Museum.

A distant part of his mind reminded him of the fact that this could get dangerous, that the fact that the subcore integrated into the Belfast drew on his main core’s resources could easily leave him vulnerable, but practically the entirety of his focus was drawn in by the beast that lay ahead.

Something rippled through the water. He didn’t know what it was, he couldn’t tell exactly, it was invisible to his senses, and all his monsters could tell was that their instincts were screaming at them that they’d barely avoided death …

Whatever it had been, it had barely affected the water, but it had obviously occurred.

So you’ve fired first, then, Thomas thought. What do you think about this?

And with that, he flushed the Belfast’s torpedo tubes.

Half were the most expensive variant he’d been able to make, from a mixture of E- and D-Rank materials, with a handful of C sprinkled in where possible, enchanted to the nines, and driven by a machine spirit.

The other half were modified and improved versions of the Imperial Japanese Kaiten manned torpedoes that were made “self-steering” by the addition of any kind of compatible summons, which was a purpose for which he used unranked monkeys. They were obviously far less capable than those driven by spirits that literally merged with their weapons, but were also a hell of a lot cheaper, and the burden on his command limit was a mere fraction of what the spirits demanded.

Fifty torpedoes sounded like a lot, especially from a single submarine, but against the vastness of the monster, they practically disappeared.

Of course, the Belfast had one major advantage over regular subs. The cycle time on its torpedoes was a fraction of what a normal submarine would have had. One minute instead of, you know, ten-plus. Though that mostly came down to the fact that he could keep the entire section around the tubes underwater, entirely circumventing the issue of de- and re-pressurizing them every time he wanted to open the hatch to shove in the next weapon.

But that only applied when his ability to manifest matter in the Belfast was being interfered with by a “foreign” presence.

Right now? Right now, it was merely a question of respawning the torpedoes in the tubes.

In the distance, the ocean flashed briefly, the rumbling detonations of the torpedoes likely being audible all the way back by the NATO flotilla.

And he fired once more.

It was at this point that his power to summon shut off, the monster’s zone of interference being far, far greater than he’d expected.

That … well, it wasn’t great, he had four spares for each tube, for a grand total of two hundred, and breaking contact for the briefest of moments would be enough to fill his magazines back up, but the situation was hardly great as the distances involved meant he couldn’t simultaneously reload and control any monsters currently engaged with the guardian.

The Belfast bucked, sending another fifty torpedoes towards the monster.

Another wave of weirdness washed out from the guardian, but this time, it wasn’t weird, just deadly.

It was only now that Thomas realized that the initial feeling turned out to have been how the sensation of electricity crackling through the water was picked up on by the machine spirits merged with the Belfast’s hull.

As for how he’d figured that out … well, countless of his sharks had wound up dying horribly as they spasmed and contorted and tore their own bodies apart as their nerves burned.

The fucker had an electrical attack.

Thankfully, some of the insulation in the torpedoes served to keep out electricity as well, but he still lost several.

One-ish minute interval between waves?

Thomas manifested several large stopwatches in his core room, back in London, and set several monkeys to managing those, as well as the blackboard he’d actually had up there for a while.

He wouldn’t necessarily be able to time his attacks, as well as coordinate the positioning of his creatures, to avoid that attack every time, but nailing down the exact timing and/or cooldown of the electricity wave should still be invaluable.

And then he was already far too close; the monster was bearing down on him, practically ignoring his smaller monsters in its attempt to bodily smash into the sub.

Thomas gunned it, ordering the machine spirits in the engine room to push the vessel as fast as it could possibly move, irrespective of the damage that might do to its internals, using the additional propellers spaced around the vessel adding to its forward momentum while partially causing the Belfast to “slide” sideways somewhat, in a desperate attempt to avoid the crushing mass of the guardian of Atlantis.

With an impact that likely showed up the nearest seismographs, the monster slammed down into the ocean floor, missing the nearest buildings by mere meters … and the Belfast had been clear by only a slightly greater margin, though not unscathed.

The sound of metal pieces from burst machinery pinging through the engine room was utterly deafening, so Thomas swiftly withdrew his awareness from that area of the vessel. Even without physical ears that could take damage that had been … loud. Really loud.

As his ship continued onwards, he began to wince as more and more machines began to show signs of strain. And underwater, “maintaining momentum” wasn’t a thing unless you were sinking, so he needed to keep them on to open up the distance again.

Overhead, the rear of the monster’s body undulated, rear end sweeping through the water as though pushed along by an invisible hand to crush the Belfast, to turn this tin can of a submarine into sheet metal.

A mental thought hurled the entirety of his “kamikaze” sharks at the point in its body where it was bending the most, the fulcrum for the motion, and set them to detonate amidst the forest of tendrils.

Ice bloomed there, trapping limbs and causing solidified flesh to shatter like glass, clouds of blood blooming into the ocean as veins and arteries were exposed beneath.

Yet even the fucking crater that had left in the monster’s body was barely more than a paper cut on its immense bulk. What it did achieve, however, was slow its movement barely long enough to dodge.

The monster continued to spin through the ocean, twisting to chase him directly, the blue spotlight that functioned as his head bearing down straight on him, almost accidentally splattering one of his two Kronosauruses by smashing into it.

And then another wave of electricity washed out, killing every creature he had left in an instant.

Then, suddenly, the spotlight changed, the beam narrowing and focusing down on the Belfast as the tentacles around the beast’s body began to stir properly, doing more than swatting at any nearby creatures. Well, their corpses, at any rate.

What. The. Hell.

Thomas fired the stern torpedo tubes, which he’d filled with something special.

After all, the general expectation had been that if he ever found himself moving away with a monster behind him, chances were that he’d be in the process of fleeing from said monster.

These were enchanted devices charged in the extreme with his energy, and imbued with a power based on the hagfish. A small-ish, worm-like, incredibly primitive fish that had a defensive response of spraying certain proteins into the surrounding area, which would rapidly expand and interact with the water that would inevitably be there, given that it was an aquatic animal, and form ludicrous volumes of a tough slime that would block the gills of any fish trying to eat them.

A perfectly mundane half-meter-long fish could produce up to twenty liters of that crap.

The torpedoes Thomas had fired were considerably bigger … and detonated as one, evenly spaced around the circumference of a circle before the monster, blooming into vast blobs of goop that connected and formed an immense sheet of mucus that barely showed up on his radar, merely being a “smudge” in his supernatural sight even as the monster fell back far enough to become functionally invisble in the darkness of the ocean depths.

What happened next wasn’t entirely obvious, given the limitations of his vision at this distance, but the monster was clearly doing something, causing the slime curtail to baloon from the inside, being pushed away from where it had wrapped around the anchor beast’s head, rapidly clearing the “barrier” that seemed to be more of an annoyance than anything else … except apparently, it had been annoying enough to actually impede the monster’s process. Not for long, mind you, but for some time at least.

It had worked anyway. Old parts were torn out by machine spirits, new ones manifested in place as he reformed everything he’d lost, likewise refilling the torpedo magazines, and emptying his rear tubes all throughout the process, dumping as many hagfish missiles as he could, even as he turned the Belfast around.

He probably wouldn’t win this, but there were still a couple of things he had to do before he let the ship be destroyed so he could reform it in London.

Three Kronosaurs manifested around him, each with a certain object in their mouths, and he ordered one to move ahead, one to stick by his side, and the third to stay back until ordered otherwise. That was all he had the energy left to do.

Now, the question was as follows: would the next electric wave happen the moment it was “ready,” based on the “historic data set” he’d created, or once Kronosaurus got within frying range.

The ocean crackled with energy once more, right in that moment, slightly later than the earliest possible moment, but still too soon to instantly fry the dinosaur.

Something was off with it, Thomas realized. Not enough to make this an easy fight, let alone an easy win, but the creature was still fucking up the use of powers even though their application should have been instinctive.

He fired, unleashing another spread of torpedoes, a mixture of ice, slime, and regular explosive loads, then reloaded immediately and followed it up with “magnesium” rounds that would burn their way into the beast’s flesh once they hit. And then his ability to respawn projectiles cut off.

Electricity flashed in certain places on the anchor beast’s tentacles, flash-boiling the water directly into vapor, creating a short-lived bubble in the ocean that instantly collapsed, sending a shockwave rippling out.

So it had no idea how to properly use its strongest AOE, but that trick it could pull off?

It had certainly done a number on the Kronosaurus that had presently been far too close to the anchor beast, but not close enough to get swatted.

Then, currents began to flow off the monster, powerful streams of water pushing away both the dying dinosaur and the Belfast, slowly but inexorably. Thomas fired anyway, torpedoes automatically beginning to adjust, but he still needed to get at least a little close … and then he realized that the effect was also blowing away the gore and ragged strand of flesh he’d torn off its body.

He sent his surviving minions after those, then moved towards the monster, continuing to fire torpedoes in a piecemeal fashion at targets of opportunity.

That was when the artificial current suddenly cut off, just at the same time as the monster surged forward, one of the massive crab claws swung around to try and snap the ship in half.

An ice torpedo slammed into the joint, forcing the monster to halt or potentially lose the limb, allowing the Belfast to dive aside, but another burst of energy created a massive cavitation bubble and the vessel jumped like a kicked puppy.

Alarms began to blare, entirely superfluous considering that he didn’t currently have a crew.

Goddamnit.

The tail came down and glanced against the stern of the sub at that point, causing the entire vessel to rock as water started pouring inside, but Thomas didn’t care.

Because a Kronosaurus had managed to scoop up a piece of flesh with the buoy he’d stuck in its mouth, and then bitten down to lock it closed.

Then, the ‘saur swam off, as ordered. And it would continue to do so, until it got far enough to trigger the failsafe, die, and thereby release the buoy, which would sink, triggering a secondary failsafe on the device that would then release the balloon. He was already in the process of relaying that information to the flotilla via London, so that someone could grab it once it breached the surface.

And then he was past, the heavily damaged Belfast limping away in a wide arc, in the hope of being able to reload.

But the monster was surging after him, the silt curtains that had previously made seeing hard now replaced by vast slicks of blood.

Alarms he was now seriously regretting having built into the ship, howling in an incessant cacophony, water having flooded far too many places aboard the ship that were decidedly meant to remain dry, Thomas finally came to a decision: it was time to end this. And then, he yanked the ship right back around.

He drove the Belfast straight into the largest wound on the guardian’s body that he could reach, and began pouring arcane energies into the artifact sitting at the heart of the warship.

Thomas had considered oh so many different weapons to put in there, ranging from nukes to some kind of anti-matter-based bomb that would have been his very first time experimenting with the substance due to its danger, but in the end, he’d settled on something less volatile and more “controllable.” And less likely to cause a cataclysmic tsunami.

Namely, an eminently uncontrollable dimensional rift that would tear apart all surrounding matter and draw it into a short-lived void dimension that would release all the things it had absorbed as what, in effect, boiled down to molecular soup, shredded about as thoroughly as something could possibly be.

He only caught the initial part of the effect, however, as the Belfast was reduced to powder about two seconds in. Spacetime twisted and the void pocket expanded, tearing the submarine’s superstructure apart and beginning to bite into the monster’s flesh … and then the feed cut off.

But even with how badly he’d hopefully injured this thing, Thomas had to admit that he’d lost that fight, and the monster was most likely quite ticked off at the moment.

Yeah … that could have gone better.