SOM - Chapter 39 - High Tide

Having reached a begrudging acquiescence with Nate’s flatmates, Luke let Ted guide him through the building. Nate’s flat was on the fourth floor, so they had several flights of stairs to reach the basement.

On the way down, Luke walked past an open flat. Ted explained that before Luke smashed through the window, he had been taking his shift watching over their last surviving flatmate. The man, called Nikolai, was practising an external form of cultivation where he had entered a dreamlike state and was feeding the rift below his excess aether.

One of the first things the group learned in the tutorial was the importance of shedding any excess aether before sleeping.

“What happens if you don’t get rid of it?” Luke asked.

Ana gave Luke another suspicious look, and it was Sarah who answered him. “Spontaneous manifestation. It was carnage the first night with wild aetherlings appearing everywhere.”

“And the tutorial taught you how to stop it by flushing out excess aether?” Luke asked.

To his left, Ana’s eyes narrowed even further, and Luke felt a little sheepish, but Ted answered regardless. “Yea, the easiest method is to just send it to your [System Seed], and Gaia gives you credit in return,” the man explained.

“Or you can do a similar thing to send it into a rift, to make them last longer, or even shape them. It’s mentioned in the soul space tutorial as a way of externalising spaces.” Sarah added.

Luke hummed. “Sounds like you spent a lot of time in the tutorial,” he said. In his mind, the group would have been better farming their rift non-stop, like he had thrown himself at the undead.

Sometime must have shown on Luke’s face, because Ana spoke up. “The tutorial is a meta-realm, with a time dilation of three and infused with [Scholar] concepts to speed up learning. It only takes an hour to cover the basics. You didn’t even open it once?”

“I was busy,” Luke said dryly.

Ana clearly wanted to press Luke more, but they reached the door to the basement before she could further expose his ignorance.

“Ok mate, it’s down there at the bottom. The rift stretched out the room so it’s about fifty feet down, then there is a twenty-foot rock pool tunnel in the middle that leads to the Tide Pool rift,” Ted explained. The trio was hanging back, staring at the door with apprehension.

As Luke put his hand on the door handle, Sarah gave a warning. “The eels are [Storm] and [Sea] aspected. They killed Andy and Jess the first time we went into the dungeon. We didn’t know about the tide going in and out back then.”

Sarah took a moment to take a deep breath, and Luke noticed she was shaking. “They use strong currents to pull you back under the water, shock you and tear you apart,” she said, breathing fast as she relived the traumatic memory. “If I hadn’t been holding on to the rail…” Sarah trailed off.

“Are you a good swimmer, mate?” Ted asked.

“No, but I’m pretty good at sinking.”

With that Luke opened the door and jumped over the stair rail, into the salty water below. He took a deep breath before hitting the water and flared his [Brace] and [Singularity].

He sank like a rock.

Though Luke fell quickly, it wasn’t quick enough to escape the notice of the eels; Sarah hadn’t been exaggerating how aggressive the eels were. He felt the tug of a current pulling him, but was heavy enough that it had little effect. With his heat vision flickering, Luke only barely caught the serpentine eel coming towards him in time.

Just as the eel pulled up in front of him, Luke grabbed it with a gauntleted hand.

He squeezed.

Before Luke could crush the eel in his grip, the aetherling discharged a wave of lightning that surged through his body. [Lundheim’s Legacy] was running on dregs, and a [Fire] shield would be ineffective underwater anyway, so Luke had to tank the attack. He had no specific defence against non-physical attacks besides his raw [Will], but that was something he had in abundance.

Once the shock wore off, Luke gripped the eel with his other hand and tore it in two.

[You have killed level 11 Storm Eel. This is a common aetherling found in turbulent waters.]

Just as he killed the first eel, Luke’s heat vision flickered out as the [Water] domain of the basement eroded the [Fire] powering his armour.

Fortunately, the rock pool was hard to miss, and the flashes of lightning given off by the eels illuminated the way. When his feet touched the floor, Luke ran for the rock tunnel, ignoring the eels swarming around him. They weren’t much of a threat to him, and he had a more pressing concern.

Luke was running out of oxygen.

Enhanced attributes were no substitute for gills or scuba gear, and he might have overestimated how long he could hold his breath; taking a dip in Rurik’s quenching tub wasn’t exactly the same as going for a dive.

When Luke reached the rock tunnel, he pulled himself in. Using a combination of breaststroke and his gravity abilities, he went down like a torpedo. It was pitch black, and Luke was getting nervous.

This is way more than twenty feet, he thought, wondering how deep the tunnel went.

Suddenly, the world turned upside down, and Luke shot up into the air. He was so disorientated that he didn’t think to activate [Null] and landed hard on a rocky beach.

Gasping for air, Luke took a moment to regain his bearings before standing up.

The beach he found himself on was about the size of a tennis court. It was just one among many beaches that leaned out into the open air like great big shelves sticking out from the cliff.

This immense cliff towered up into the sky and down to the sea a few hundred feet below. Most of the shelves connected to one another by winding paths that, despite their convenience, looked like natural rock formations. Giant crab creatures and boulder-sized barnacles inhabited the many tide pools along the way.

A stormy sea raged below with some waves towering metres tall. The grey skies above flashed with lightning at an alarming frequency. While Luke could shrug off the electric eel attacks, he was less confident about the forked lightning dancing in the clouds.

When she had given a quick description of the rift, Sarah described the barnacles as easy to kill when feeding. This happened whenever the tide rose to submerge them. As a result, the group developed a strategy of going from rock pool to rock pool with the rising tide, avoiding crabs where possible. They would kill barnacles until the tidewater was too deep to continue before moving up the cliff.

It was a more tactical approach than Luke would have taken.

The torrential rain made it difficult for Luke to discern details on other beaches. However, Ted had mentioned that their group had been slowly clearing their way toward an outcropping where Nate had spotted a cave with several large [Storm Crystals] was located.

Nate and his fiancée, Surya, had taken this rotation of the tide, and the group’s plan had been for Nikolai and Ted to go next, while Nate and Surya slept and fed the rift.

Knowing which direction to head was helpful, but when Luke went to the edge of his little shelf, he couldn’t see any sign of his brother. To get a better view, Luke used [Null] to jump out towards the sea. 

Doing so was a mistake. 

If the wind on the beaches was bad, then the gale out in the open was ten times worse. He used [Brace], but the ability was far less effective against the gale than with solid objects. It was a close thing, but by summoning Fenn, and hitting himself in the foot, he was just barely able to store enough momentum to push himself back to the cliff. Luke was getting better at holding momentum for longer, but he needed a better way to generate it.

His foot hurt. 

Luke sighed in relief as he hobbled back to his feet. Instead of flying around like a superhero, he limped along the winding cliff path in the direction Ted had indicated he would find Nate. Once he got moving, it was relatively easy to tell which direction the group had taken, by the dead barnacles lying open along the way. All Luke needed to do was follow the trail of destruction.

As Luke walked past a dead barnacle, he gave the shell a smack with Fenn. He guessed that killing the barnacles with brute force would take a minute or two, using his full power blows. Fenn pulsed angrily in his hand. Luke could tell that the weapon was annoyed with him for tearing apart the eels without it. 

It wanted to kill something. 

[Level 2 Stone Shell - An aetherling that passively feeds on the tide. Core Domains: Sea, Shell.]

Luke considered killing the [Stone Shell] just to pacify Fenn, but felt like it was a bit of a waste of time. He already had a bunch of shell related loot in his garage that he had purchased from Nate, and a low level trash monster would give him no experience either. 

After looking around for a bit, he found a slightly more interesting opponent.

[Level 9 Rock Crab - An aetherling that is commonly found at the edges of the Leviathan Sea. Core Domains: Earth, Sea.]

Luke found it kind of cute, compared to the larger, and more intimidating crab shaped [Bone Golems] he had fought in the dungeon. He didn’t expect to get much out of it, but for the sake of appeasing his hammer he walked over to it. 

Loud cracks fill the air, even louder than the lightning above, as the crab snapped its giant claws at Luke. In contrast to the golems, which wanted to kill everything they saw, the crab appeared merely territorial. Luke almost felt sorry for it as he ran forwards at it. 

When Luke dodged the first giant pincer, he thought he was safe to go in for the kill, but the crab had a trick up its shell. It blasted him with boiling hot saltwater. From dozens of tiny holes covering the carapace, the streams emerged. 

They carried a punch, and lesser armour might have given way under the pressure, but even drained of aether [Lundheim’s Legacy] was made of stronger stuff. The boiling water even gave it a source of heat, that it converted into a trickle of [Fire] aether. 

Laughing, Luke recovered from his surprise and swung Fenn once, twice, thrice. The last blow was a [Kinetic Strike] that crashed through the rocky shell and splattered the gooey innards. 

[You have killed a Level 9 Rock Crab. Loot generated from death echo.]

Silver coins clinked on the rocks, which were slick with water from the storm above, but they didn’t stay there for long, as Fenn sucked them up like a powerful magnet. Luke didn’t contest the hammer for the spoils. Feeding off blood and coin seemed to strengthen the hammer, so keeping it topped up was in his own best interest. 

Besides, Fenn hadn’t taken all the loot.

[Pincer Grip - Uncommon (Mortal) - A glove that increases grip strength when worn.]

The glove wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but wouldn’t hurt Luke to equip it, so he took a moment to remove a gauntlet, and put the glove on underneath it. As he flexed his fingers he was pleased with the new strength the glove gave, and did a brief experiment. Between his exceptional [Strength], his power armour, and the glove he crushed one of the [Rock Crab’s] legs with just his grip strength.

With a smile on his face, Luke continued down the rocky cliff path, following the trail of dead barnacles. After a few minutes, he heard a nearby lightning bolt crash to the ground, but it didn’t come from the sky above.

On the beach shelf ahead, he saw the familiar lanky form of his brother fighting a giant blue starfish alongside a woman he assumed was Nate’s fiance. 

Nate, what the fuck are you wearing?