NOVEL NEXT Chapter 59 – Under The Lake
After resting for half an hour, we were ready to enter the lake, Nethy still looked quite nervous but was obviously trying to hide it, so I didn’t say anything. We all got into the water until it went up to our waists before Hele cast her spell causing a wave of magical energy to engulf everyone. At first, I couldn’t tell that anything was happening to me but after a few seconds my neck got warm and started shifting, forming gills.
Having gills was incredibly strange to me, I could still breathe naturally but it felt like the air was skipping half of my throat and basically entering straight into my lungs. Once everyone confirmed that the spell had taken hold we fully submerged under the water, although I noticed that Nethy was the last one to dip her head below the water.
The strangeness continued as I was half expecting to drown which caused me to panic as I felt water filling my lungs as I took my first breath. The panic went as quickly as it came though as I realised that I was still able to breathe properly. As I was getting used to this new sensation, I noticed that the water was moving erratically, looking around I quickly saw that Nethy’s nervousness had blown up into a full panic attack and she was thrashing around.
It looked like Taren had already noticed as he was already swimming over to her, as soon as he got to her, he held Nethy and started saying calming words to her. It looked like it was working but I was more surprised that we could talk underwater now, although after thinking for a few seconds it made sense that we could.
I was curious about this, so I decided to test it while I waited. It turned out that due to the density of the water I had to use much more energy than I would above water to get my voice to be the same volume, but it also made my voice travel much faster than it would in air. While I was experimenting, a few minutes passed until Nethy had managed to calm down and we started swimming across the lake again.
At first our destination was just the other side of the lake as we assumed that that was the goal. After swimming for a few minutes our path was blocked by a ton of seaweed, but we pushed through anyway. Unfortunately, this was a poor decision as four sharks managed to use the seaweed to sneak up on us. I didn’t notice this until a set of sharp teeth were sinking into my abdomen, dying the water around me red with my blood.
Before I had even realised what I was doing I had already cast a spell at the shark that had bitten me. Since I didn’t consciously cast the spell, it automatically used a random element, luckily it was a death spell that caused the shark’s mouth to start decaying into a black ichor, including its teeth and jaw as it was cartilage instead of actual bone. This let me escape from its jaw, but I wasn’t out of danger.
Before the shark could recover, I sent another spell out at it, I tried to send an earth spear into its skull to end the fight quickly. Unfortunately, my spell went awry and turned into a bullet of air that was deflected by its hard scales, doing minimal damage. Before I could send another spell, the shark had managed to shake off its confusion and charge me. I didn’t manage to get out of the way in time, so the shark managed to headbutt my arm.
Clearly not realising yet that it had lost its jaw so it couldn’t rip my arm off, it still hurt but not as nearly as much as it would have if it still had its jaw. Before it could retreat and ram me again, I grabbed its head and sent another wave of death energy into its head. I watched as its skull dissolved into the water around me until even its brain was just mush and it stopped moving.
Now that I was no longer in immediate danger I looked around to see if anyone else needed help. I saw another shark corpse behind Taren, who was blocking another shark from biting Hele, so I assumed he must have dealt with it. Other than that there were two more sharks, one was currently angrily chewing on Taren’s shield and another one was swimming circles around Nethy while dodging shots from Baerwyn.
It was weird seeing Nethy being outmanoeuvred since she was usually so nimble that almost nothing could keep up with her. Taren had already taken care of one shark, so I trusted him to take care of a second with Hele’s help and went to the aid of Nethy. I was planning on shooting the shark while I had the element of surprise but unfortunately my spell was imbued with light mana which would only buff the shark, so I had to quickly modify my spell so that it targeted Nethy instead.
As she was surrounded by a layer of white light she suddenly gained enough speed to land a strike on the shark, causing one of its fins to be sheared off. My buffs were different to Hele’s due to my chaotic magic making it so that I cannot concentrate on the spell for more than ten seconds, but that limitation also made it so that my buffs were stronger than hers.
The Shark losing its fin caused it to slow down enough that it couldn’t dodge Baer’s next shot which hit its skull, finishing it off. With the third shark killed I turned to where Taren had been to find that he had already taken care of it. With the fight finished Hele cast some minor healing spells to top us off and we moved on. Ten minutes later we came out the other side of the seaweed forest.
In that time we only came across one more pod of sharks but since we were prepared for them we easily dispatched them. On the other side of the underwater forest we saw a huge, ruined building made from the same strange material the buildings on the fifth and fourth floor were. We all instantly realised it was the goal of the floor so we started to swim towards it. We had to fight off two more pods of sharks before reaching it but once we got there we quickly found the door and entered the strange building.
The interior of the ruin was just as dilapidated as the exterior, the hallway on the other side of the entrance was completely flooded with water. There were a few weird tiles on the ceiling that gave off light via a mechanism that I didn’t recognise. But there were many more tiles that I could easily tell that there should have also been emitting light, but they were no longer working, either smashed by the intense pressure of the water or had broken due to years of disrepair.
There was only one way to go so we started to swim down the hallway while prepared to start a fight at any second. We swam past many doors, half of which were locked shut so tight that not even Taren and Nethy together could force them open. The other half were bent in such a way that we could filter into the room behind it one by one, these ones Nethy would scout out the room in case they contained any enemies.
After about fifteen minutes and five of these rooms Nethy had yet to find anything, either treasure or monster, and we were about to start ignoring them until, on the sixth room, she finally came across a pod of five sharks, although these were about twice the size of the sharks we had fought previously and their skin was purple instead of the usual blue that they should have been.