NOVEL NEXT Chapter 14
If you swim about 470 km north from the Bering Strait, you’ll hit the Chukchi Sea. From here, it’s all Arctic Ocean; only four months a year can you navigate without ice covering the surface.
Of course, that’s irrelevant to Oceanos, who is happily swimming below the icy surface.
Like the Bering Strait, the Chukchi Sea is quite different from Earth’s oceans. Normally, oceans less than 50m deep occupy about 56% of the area, but in this world, the entire Chukchi Sea is over 10 km deep.
Considering that the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, is 11 km deep, this is outrageous!
And down at 5 km beneath the surface, there lies an endless abyss.
──────……
Before six mutant bowhead whales gliding slowly—well, almost at a standstill due to their enormous size—came Oceanos’s six companions.
“Haah… Hah…!”
Vertea, the slowpoke.
“Did you all use up every ounce of energy just swimming? I’m seriously bored.”
“Huh… I really don’t want to hear the words of a loser, you know? Phew…”
“Just breathe while you talk. You and Vertea were only a few seconds apart, you know?”
Russell smirked at Elvira, who was struggling to catch her breath.
“Let’s hurry up and go home~ I’m getting tired.”
Parang stretched, visibly bored.
“I was already planning to wrap it up quickly. I’m outta here!”
It seemed Russell couldn’t hold back any longer and bolted forward. When Parang glanced beside them, Diego was quietly heading towards his whale as well.
“The first one to finish can clock out.”
Elvira, having recovered her breath, darted toward a whale.
Parang turned to Xiao this time.
“Oh, Parang.”
“What?”
“Are you planning to swim all the way to Hong Kong?”
“Yup. Of course.”
“What do you mean ‘of course’… If you’re swimming there, can you please deal with those things on the way?”
“Oh, those?”
Referring to the three special objects on the way from Pohang to Hong Kong, Parang found themselves saddled with unexpected work. Then again, given the situation, they wouldn’t be asking for someone to handle it barehanded. Maybe they should just turn on a broadcast.
Splish-splash—
While Parang was lost in thought, Xiao charged towards the whales.
Vertea seemed to have vanished without a trace.
They just wanted to finish this and head home for a nap. Parang swam toward the biggest whale.
#
Russell Bright.
“Wahahaha!! How long has it been since I’ve seen a bowhead whale!! Nice to see you, buddy!!”
He felt great. After so long, he was face-to-face with his favorite prey, the bowhead whale.
The moment he got Elvira’s call, he zoomed over, thinking, ‘Could it be a bowhead whale?’
It was a shame it was only a 300m one, but rules are rules.
Despite his shouts, the 300m whale remained silent.
The Empire State Building stands at 381m tall.
It was like a human trying to fight a building.
It felt like there was a giant wall right in front of him.
Besides, the strength of the mutated bowhead whale didn’t come from its size.
But none of that mattered to Russell.
“Let’s have a wild time today! You whale brat!”
His eyes glimmered yellow, creating a shimmering aura.
Suddenly, his teeth transformed into sharp triangular shark teeth, while a real shark tail sprouted from his tailbone, and a triangular dorsal fin grew on his back.
He charged at the whale and took a massive bite out of it.
Crunch!
A piece of whale flesh was caught in his mouth, squirming and trying to reattach itself to the original body, but—
Swallow—
Russell ignored it and chewed and swallowed. He felt a slight squirming in his stomach for a moment, but it soon faded away.
For the 300m whale, it was just a mere bite mark of about 5cm.
The whale just continued swimming leisurely, seemingly unaware of what had happened.
However,
Crunch!
Right where Russell had bitten, an invisible force seemed to take a bite, leaving a U-shaped bite mark.
Crunch!
And again. More and more. One becomes two, two become four, four becomes eight, doubling each time until there were 16, 32, 64, 128.
──────!!!!
Noticing something was wrong, the whale tried to reattach the pieces that had come off, but it was futile.
In essence, Russell was the whale’s nemesis.
As the bite marks grew to 1024, then 2048, countless sharks attached themselves to the whale and attacked: fins, tails, brain, eyes, lungs, ribs, intestines, heart.
A hungry swarm of transparent sharks tore into it from every angle, feasting indiscriminately.
Before long, half of the whale’s body was left completely devoured, not even bones remaining.
Now the whale’s body was riddled with holes, resembling a zombie, spraying blood everywhere.
Then came the final bite.
Crunch!!!
And just like that, the whale vanished.
Russell patted his belly in satisfaction and returned to his home in Hawaii.
#
“……”
Diego Lopez Martin stared at the whale in front of him.
The iron cage-shaped visor covered in his diving suit gazed at a whale that was utterly massive.
A living being measuring 300m.
This wasn’t even a size permitted for living beings.
It was more like a battleship. It felt as if he was gazing at a battleship sailing through the waters.
But Diego decided to accept it.
The size forbidden to a living being—it struck him as slightly amusing that he was even considering it.
“……”
Diego briefly shrank his body, then stretched out.
Sssss—
And then his body and diving suit began to grow. From the original 1.8 meters to 5 meters, 10 meters, 50 meters, 100 meters…
“………!!!!!”
He screamed beneath the gigantic mass of metal. What words he shouted were inaudible, but it was clear that he was bellowing.
“….”
His growth halted, finally finishing at an immense height of 500m.
Now, to Diego, the 300m whale was like a 120cm fish.
He spread his arms and grabbed the whale at both ends.
━━━━━!!!!!!!
Then with a crack.
He snapped the bowhead whale in half. The front and back halves of the bowhead flailed desperately to reattach.
If there had been a wall or floor nearby, they would have buried the pieces right away, but unfortunately, from what he had seen, there was nothing around.
With no other choice, Diego carried the two halves of the whale to a spot where the bottom was visible, dug up the ground to bury one half, and then trekked about 100 km further to bury the remaining half before making his way back home to Mexico.
#
“Aahhh….”
Elvira Petrov stared at the 450m whale with her eyes half-open.
She couldn’t see the entire whale. It was like trying to see the whole view of a mountain from the entrance of a hiking trail.
The size was absurdly huge, and if even a piece of flesh fell off, it would automatically gather to reattach; it was like a dog.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a fish, but it had a dog-like quality to it that Elvira detested.
Still, business was business.
As she stood in the water, she extended her hand, and countless mines emerged around the whale.
These were mines filled with an absurd amount of explosives and skills. One could easily obliterate a decent battleship in one go.
There were dozens of such mines.
Each was the size of a large sea urchin, with a radius of about 7m, densely packed around the bowhead whale.
Then one went kaboom! blowing off half of the whale’s right flipper.
As a result, the nearby mines went kaboom! This time, it was the abdomen that exploded, ripping off chunks of flesh.
Kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom.
Before long, the bowhead whale was shredded to pieces, its original form unrecognizable due to the explosions occurring all over its body.
Only pink chunks of flesh and red blood spread underwater, bearing witness to the fact that a life form existed here.
And the pieces of meat began to squirm and come together.
They were reassembling the whale once again.
This was the reason Elvira detested the bowhead whale so much.
While it would be easy with help from other Oceanos members, she absolutely didn’t want to do that.
So she simply detonated a small nuclear mine at the center of the pile of meat.
“No one would be there to chastise her for ‘But radiation is so dangerous!’”
Water contamination? Ocean ecosystem? Such trivial matters had long become a mockery.
She wasn’t exactly wandering through a desert, but still.
As the radiation spread through the water, it began to destroy the meat chunks down to the cellular level.
Shortly thereafter, those pieces of meat squirmed, forming into a pink mass that sank deep into the ocean.
They would probably soon become food for other monster fish.
Elvira returned home to her residence in Siberia.
#
Vertea Pavron. She was having an untroubled day.
Different things aside, she had a surefire way to take care of a bowhead whale. She wanted to wrap things up quickly and head home.
She swam at alarming speeds towards the lower front part of the whale, where her hand landed.
Chiiiii—
There was the sound of cooking meat, and bubbles began to rise from the point where Vertea’s hand rested.
It was boiling.
━━━━━!!!!!!
The bowhead whale thrashed in agony but couldn’t shake her off.
━━━━━!!!!!!
Realizing what was below, it tried to suck in water, but it was already too late.
The whale’s skull is located between the eyes, meaning the brain is essentially located in its jaw.
And five minutes later, the whale’s eyes lost their light, and it sank, motionless.
Due to the extreme heat, all the essential organs in its head had melted or burned away.
Regen was useless in this case. This wasn’t just tissue loss.
Vertea yawned widely and returned to her home in France. She was the fastest of all.
#
“Ah, come on!! Why does it have to be a whale!!”
Xiao vented her frustration while looking at the whale. Not that the whale would just up and die, but still.
The whale was her worst match.
It wasn’t the regenerative abilities that bothered others; that wasn’t a problem.
It was purely the overwhelming size that was an issue.
Xiao wasn’t cut out for hunting giant fish; if it was a war of numbers, maybe.
Still, she sighed and thought, ‘I guess I’ll just have to try.’
“Hrraaaaahhh!!!”
She shouted, and from her eyes erupted a faint teal aura.
Then from the very bottom, a rumble echoed up.
After a moment, the source of that rumbling was revealed.
The ground.
A piece of land that looked to be about the size of a soccer field rose up to where Xiao was.
It had an unnatural appearance, like someone grabbed it and pulled it up.
And then CRUNCH, CRUNCH—
The ground began to crack open, and an ominous, faint teal light flowed out.
“Kekeke-!”
Clatter, clatter.
Bones began to emerge from the opened ground. They didn’t resemble human shape. They were little more than a straight body with four elongated bones serving as limbs.
Xiao didn’t know much about human anatomy or bone structure. She didn’t particularly want to know either.
The bones that crawled out from the opened ground began to swim toward the bowhead whale in droves. Their numbers reached into the hundreds, even thousands.
Then, they began to scrape, nibble, and stab at the whale, each grabbing a handful of flesh and pulling it back into the opened earth.
Every time one bone went in, another one would emerge to snatch a piece from the bowhead whale.
Despite the whale thrashing and shouting in agony, that was obviously not going to stop.
After a considerable amount of time, the bowhead whale was left with nothing but bones.
“Get in there.”
And the whale’s bones swam, diving into the opened ground.
With a rumble—
Once the ground closed up, what had risen was pulled back into the endless abyss.
Xiao returned home to her residence in Hong Kong. She was the last to arrive.
#
──────!!
Parang stared at the bowhead whale.
She just stared quietly.
Then she reached out.
“Kraken.”
Suddenly, Parang’s blue hair transformed into the tentacles of an octopus. Her ears became claw-like, and vertical pupils appeared in her eyes.
Parang was reluctant to use this ability.
It constantly reminded her of that time.
“Parang, Parang!!!”
What if she had just been a bit stronger back then?
Parang shook her head to dispel the memories. She wanted to wrap things up quickly and go to bed.
Suddenly, huge blue tentacles began to manifest beside her. Parang couldn’t tell them where they’d come from; it was as if they had appeared right there.
The tentacles looked bizarre, splitting into two, three, or four, and some even branched further after splitting.
A spear suddenly emerged before the five other members of Oceanos.
[Skill: “Waterproof Sanity” is now activated.]
That was the very reason Parang would never call upon the Kraken in a broadcast.
With a blank expression, Parang reached out.
The tentacles shot forth, all lunging at the 600m bowhead whale, wrapping it up tight.
━━━━━!!!━━━━━━━!!!!!
The bowhead whale thrashed as if in pain.
Whether it wanted to or not, the enveloping tentacles only kept multiplying.
And it wasn’t long before the tentacles fully covered the bowhead whale.
━━━━━…….
Then the whale’s cries ceased.
It was no longer a bowhead whale.
What had been transformed into tentacles vanished with the other tentacles.
Tentacles that seemed to have sprouted with even more splits and extensions than when they first appeared.
The Kraken. A monster fish that can turn a being it touches into ‘itself.’
Parang’s skill, “Daughter of Kraken,” uses the authority of the Kraken’s tentacles.
Whether the absorbed beings help enhance Kraken’s powers is unknown.
To begin with, Parang had never seen or met a Kraken. She had no clue where it was or if it even existed.
What it truly was or why it imbued her with power remained a mystery to her.
Whether she was truly its daughter, as her skill’s name suggested, or if there were some other purpose was still unknown.
But just because she was ignorant didn’t mean she wouldn’t use the power. If she didn’t capture the whale right in front of her, they would reproduce. Even if just one individual remained.
And then they would drift in the sea as an undying disaster.
She had no intention of hesitating in exterminating their spawn.
So, what if it’s an unknown monster fish? She would just have to ask for help.
And indeed, that creature proved to be of considerable assistance.
Every living creature with cells in the ocean now existed beneath Parang’s authority.
The whale vanished. As if it had never existed in that spot to begin with.
Parang returned home in South Korea.
“Wait!! You bastards!! Alice!!!! Aaaah!!!!”
That night, Parang had a dream.
When she woke up, she felt absolutely miserable.