This was a fun chapter to write, if only because I worked at the Minnesota SEA LIFE location for a little less than a year. It's a lovely aquarium: if you've got an hour or so and are in Minneapolis, I'd recommend stopping by.
If you do so, I'd also recommend engaging your brain for .001s of a second and looking around for signs before you ask the employees an operational question, because I can almost guarantee there's a sign answering exactly that question a few feet away from where you're standing.
Not that I've had experience with that situation at all. Repeatedly. Extensively. Ahahaha.
Sharks are also chill and innocent babies who have never done anything wrong ever, even though they occasionally maybe once a year manage to rip someone's limb off by accident. #StopSharkSlander2024.
Also, the ISAF is in fact a real database with entries stretching back to the 1500s; however, because it involves confidential information like autopsy reports, anyone who wants full access to it needs to be peer-reviewed by a board of scientists.
April 1st, 2023
Arya's POV:
As promised, we took the entire next week off of Kishin-hunting. No missions, no scanning the mission board, just catching up to our five days' worth of missing work, plus sitting for the makeup Super Written Exam. Rather unsurprisingly on my end, I barely scraped by with a 68% –studying hard was all well and good, but there wasn't much I could do to make up for the fact that I distinctly wasn't a native citizen of this world and a lot of its mechanics and history thusly flew over my head. Even if the exam was given solely based on Phasmology, there was a lot of context I just didn't have naturally.
Eh, whatever.
I managed to sneak in some healing vibes on our head wounds to help us get back in gear faster, even though Blackstar was unwontedly sweet and spent most of his time hanging out with us wincing and readjusting his volume, usually by way of clamping a hand over his mouth with a guilty expression. Stupid as the gesture was, it was appreciated –at least he was trying not to scream at his usual full volume next to two concussion victims.
Rex had also managed to nick my cheek while cutting off the gag, but other than that and the not-entirely-warranted trauma venting that had slipped out while we were sitting on the ambulance, we'd gotten off fairly lightly for our last mission. Rex had even gotten his tenth soul, putting us firmly in the double digits.
Still, when we did go back into the field, I wanted something less… precarious. We could ease up for a bit on the whole serial killer thing, surely.
Thankfully, the next weekend –the first of December– after we'd… well, I'd spent a precarious few hours wobbling around on Soul's motorbike, I managed to find what looked like a good mission.
A word to Rex and thirty minutes to pack, and we were on a plane heading out to California where, allegedly, there was something distinctly unhealthy near the beaches. In a move that was definitely not recklessly-asserting-ourselves-to-bury-trauma-Rex-shut-the-fuck-up, we'd even signed off on the paperwork to be one of the first few teams to –tentatively– begin running individual missions again.
Suspected Monstrous Soul in Pacific Ocean near San Fransisco, California.
Location, USA.
Mission Requirements: Ability to swim –and potentially fight– underwater. Sailing experience recommended.
Mission for 1-Star EATs and up.
Missing individuals have been reported from the coast near San Fransisco, California, USA. Wreckage of small boats have also been washed ashore, bearing suspicious bite marks. Seek out the source and eliminate it!
It sounded like a textbook open-and-shut sea monster case, and thus exactly what I needed to ease myself back into the groove. The supplemental papers named a marine research facility and an aquarist there, so all we'd have to do is go check with her –the documents said she was Inkeri Lovise– and then go whack whatever she told us to hit with six feet of supernatural buster sword. Rex and I had even –tentatively– been working on soul-boosted attacks, although we hadn't managed a proper Resonance yet.
Beautiful. Straightforward. The only thing we'd have to worry about was either this being some sort of scam on her part, or the sea monster trying to chomp/rend/otherwise inconvenience us while I was trying to whack it with Rex.
If only all life could be so simple.
The former option, at least, seemed unlikely as we flashed our DWMA IDs and were ushered into the backstage areas of the facility shortly after we'd stashed our bags at the hotel. Doctor Inkeri seemed brisk, vaguely frazzled, and would have been largely uninterested in what was going on if not for the body count and the fact a lot of samples/evidence were being sent to this facility for analysis.
"When the missing person reports began to reach our attention, we initially thought it was a large shark –perhaps a great white, or more likely, a hammerhead– attacking divers," she said, leading us at a fast clip through the whitewashed hallways. There was a strong scent of saltwater, and the uniquely piercing aroma of fish lingered pungently in the air.
"Why more likely a hammerhead?" I asked, curious.
"More territorial." She sniffed. "Of course, as the disappearances continued, we ruled out shark attacks in no short order."
"How come?" Rex asked, and she favored the both of us with a sidelong raised eyebrow.
"…How much do either of you know about sharks?"
"They're usually the apex predators in their environment?" I offered, and Rex –denizen of the landlocked, bone-dry desert that he was– shrugged helplessly.
"Well, allow me to improve your education. Any shark large enough to do significant damage to a human will have one of three reasons for attacking –mistaken identity, territoriality, and confusion– and none of these reasons bear out for repeated attacks."
"Really?" I asked, fascinated, and she nodded.
"Oh yes. One: mistaken identity. Sharks see something approximately the right size and shape of their usual prey in the churning water of the surf, strike without further assessment as instinct demands, and only then realize their mistake. It's important to get the victim out of the water quickly, of course, but I'd say that in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, the shark will not attempt another bite even on that person, never mind other victims."
"Why not?" Rex asked as the three of us clanged and boomed down an echoing set of hollow metal stairs.
"Even on the unlikely chance that it actually does mean to feed, sharks practice conservation of energy in the same way all predators do," she replied. "When one has to essentially mug to death one's food with every meal, it's much more efficient to cripple or incapacitate their victim with one bite to the tail, and then swim a short distance to wait for the prey to die of blood loss."
"Hmm," I noted. "Efficient, if macabre."
"Nature generally is. Of course, even then, it's unlikely that the shark will attempt to feed –humans may resemble seals on a superficial level, for example, but we couldn't be more different beneath the surface. We have no blubber –making our taste decidedly less pleasant– and our bone-to-tissue ratio is much higher, meaning we are decidedly crunchy. It would be as if you'd bitten into a cockroach when you were expecting a chicken strip."
Rex and I both gagged in unison.
"Precisely," she said, unlocking and opening the door at the bottom of the stairs. "Bites born from mistaken identity are considerably risky –the shark, after all, will have attacked with the intent to cause injury and even death– but they almost never result in consumption. Still, they are predators, and even crunchy-cockroach-tasting humans can become a meal if the shark is starving or if the meal in question looks sufficiently easy to get, such as freshly dead bodies from a shipwreck."
She waved a hand as though brushing it aside.
"The second reason: curiosity. Sharks are inquisitive creatures, and much like a toddler, they'll frequently test objects by biting them. Buoys, docks, boats, cameras, surfboards, research equipment –anything that's in the water and they want to know more about, they'll use their mouth to figure out, since it's their most sensitive touch organ. Unfortunately, some species are large enough that a single test bite can be injurious –even fatal if wrongly-placed– despite them not meaning to actually cause harm."
"Oof." I cringed sympathetically.
"In any case, once a test bite is concluded, the shark in question will have no need or urge to repeat the experiment; doubly so, when it finds out how disagreeable we taste," Doctor Inkeri continued. "Which then leads to the final reason: territoriality. Very, very few creatures in nature are familiar with the concept of inter-species cooperation, and though sharks do not claim territory as land-based predators might, they do have a hierarchy."
"Winner takes all?" I guessed.
"More or less. Maintaining ownership of the best hunting grounds takes constant vigilance and aggressive defense. Size is important. Smaller sharks will hide or flee from humans if they intrude into a feeding area: if the shark is large enough to consider us competition for its place in the food chain, it may preemptively attack to drive off what it percieves as an imminent threat –sometimes with unfortunate results. And of course, although not all shark species raise their young, those that do will react to an intrusion upon their nursery with extreme prejudice."
"I mean, fair enough," I said as Rex nodded.
"As far as sharks being the culprit for these disappearances, we ruled out great whites immediately, of course," she finished. "They don't travel in groups, they aren't territorial; and although we don't know anything about how they breed or give birth, we do know it's not around here. One lone swimmer gone missing, maybe, but there is no way on heaven or earth that a great white could be the shark responsible for this many attacks."
"So, hammerheads?" Rex asked, and she made an unhappy face.
"Hammerheads can be extremely territorial, and they do swim in groups, so it would be theoretically possible for a shiver –a school, if you're being less technical– to have wandered across a beach in search of food, and become responsible for multiple unprovoked attacks," she explained. "But not likely. Some hammerhead species get to be fairly large, but there's not been a single record of a fatal hammerhead attack. Ever."
"Any other likely culprits?" I asked, and she shook her head.
"We have blue sharks, oceanic whitetips, and shortfin makos, all of which have entries in the ISAF-"
"The what now?" I asked as we strode down a hallway with windows on either side, showing rooms with opaque circular tanks, like recreational swimming pools, under covers in the center.
"The International Shark Attack File," she elaborated. "It's a global database of shark attacks stretching back nearly five hundred years. If possible, it divides by provoked and unprovoked, as well as fatal and –as comprehensively as we can– which shark species was responsible. In any case, all of the species I just mentioned are local and have entries –and so do bull sharks, although they're rare for these waters– but as I said, none of them can account for repeated attacks."
"So you've ruled out sharks, then?" I asked as she opened the steel-plated doors to what looked like a steel kitchen. Everything –drying racks, cupboards, sinks, fridge and freezer units, countertops– all of it was made of sheets of stainless steel. The only things that weren't grey gleaming metal was the floor –linoleum, with wainscoting that went up to my shoulders– and the walls and ceiling –some variety of plastic sheets bolted to what I presumed was the plaster beneath. It all also stank of fish, and I grimaced and rubbed my nose.
"Ordinary sharks, yes," she said, leading us over to a long steel table in the center of the room –I had to assume that all this metal was for ease of cleaning. Taking the edge of the sheet atop it, she peeled the covering back. "Something like a shark, however…"
Atop this table was a chunk of what was probably a boat, given the curvature of the partially-shattered wooden planks. On the upper third was what even I could tell was a jagged bite mark: a half-circle of gaping space marked by a few ragged scratches that had been viciously cut out of the wood.
I whistled. Rex, holding up his hands and squinting for a moment as he eyeballed the measurements on that bite mark, winced and shivered as he lowered them.
"This is a fragment from one of the lost boats that the Coast Guard managed to retrieve," Doctor Inkeri said, tapping it. "Now, as I've said: sharks will bite human constructions out of curiosity, but it's nowhere near at attack force; more nibbling, really. They'll also bite to defend their territory or their young –the latter of which being what makes bull sharks score so high in the ISAF, as they mate and have nurseries in the warm shallow coastal water that humans like to make beaches of– but what they don't do is rip chunks out of a boat. They're also not this big."
She stepped off, beckoning us to another table near the steel cabinets. She rummaged around inside for a moment, before retrieving a printout full of grainy black-and-white photographs and weird measuring graphs.
"The largest existent shark is the whale shark, which get up to 18.8 meters long, followed by the basking shark, which average at 7.9 meters," she said briskly, tossing it down on the table. "But they're both filter-feeders, and neither have teeth bigger than 10 millimeters –less than half an inch. The largest carnivorous shark species are the tiger shark and the great white, with unconfirmed reports of specimens getting to be as large as 7 or 7.3 meters long. On average, though, they're both generally about 4.7 or 4.8 meters."
"What's that in American?" I asked as she spread the photos and papers out in front of us.
"Whale sharks, 61 feet; basking sharks, 26 feet; tiger sharks, alleged up to 23 and averaging 15; great white sharks, alleged up to 24 and averaging 16."
"That's a bit of a…" Rex began, and then trailed off.
"Downgrade?" I suggested and he seesawed his head, humming.
"I mean… disparity, maybe?" he tried. "How come whale sharks and basking sharks are so much bigger than the other two?
"They can afford it," Doctor Inkeri replied with a slight shrug. "Broadly speaking, filter-feeders occupy the same evolutionary niche as herbivores: they don't need to allocate resources to chasing down their food, so they don't have to worry about being out-competed for prey on a species level –which is what happened between the megalodon and the ancestor to the great white– or on an individual level. They can just… cruise and feed."
"That sounds almost relaxing," I said. "We were taking about size and why it's relevant to this?"
I jerked my thumb at the gaping hole in the ship boards on the other table. She nodded.
"For all that twenty-or-so-feet of apex predator sounds intimidating-"
"-terrifying-" Rex cut in.
"-the actual bite diameter of a great white or a tiger shark is less than a foot," she continued, unperturbed. "Not by much –they're usually about eight or ten inches wide– but even so. It's enough to scissor off a hefty chunk of someone's torso, sever a limb if they're unlucky, and cut some frankly underwhelming semicircles into surfboards –but that's all."
I was tempted to question her definition of underwhelming, but looking at those photos, I couldn't entirely bring myself to disagree. From my memory of Hollywood movies, any suitably aggressive shark could take out a good half of someone's torso with a single snap of their jaws; from the photos on the table and several pairs of taxidermied jaws on the shelves inside the cabinet, even the largest real-life specimens would probably struggle mightily to fit a basketball in their mouth.
In a moment of morbid whimsy, I carefully lifted a pair of tiger shark jaws –splayed as close to 180 degrees as nature could manage– from the open cabinet and lowered them down over my head like a crown –or a choker, since they barely managed to slide down over my ears and settle around my neck like a chemical-smelling, slightly-greasy-feeling wreath. And that was under the most extreme circumstances, too –with aforementioned jaws stripped of all skin, flesh, and ligaments and forced at an unnaturally wide angle that no actual animal could take.
Well, except maybe some snakes…
"I can see what you mean," I said, carefully extracting myself as Rex side-eyed me. A few teeth scratched my forehead on the way up, but I mostly made it out unscathed. "So we think this is, what? Some kind of super-duper-mega-shark?"
"Possibly," she said, scooping the papers back into order as I set the jaws aside and returned Rex's deadpan sidelong glance with the stink-eye of the century. "What we've been able to piece together thus far is that something predatory has laid claim to a stretch of water some thirty miles from the Bay, near the Farallon Islands. Boats have been lost and, when found, are half-wrecked and with the crew missing, presumed dead. What wreckage we've managed to retrieve shows tooth marks similar to what a large carnivorous shark species would inflict; except, as you can see, the size of the jaws are much larger than any living species, and the frequency and aggression of the attacks are simply not possible for ordinary sharks."
"So, something with shark-like teeth at the very least," Rex said meditatively, cupping his chin. "Maybe a Witch's experiment, or a normal shark that's been overtaken by magic?"
"Ugh." I made a face, remembering the crying otter-thing we'd fought in Mexico. "Why do we keep running into aquatic Monsters?"
"Easier for high magic concentrations to spread through water," Rex answered, absentminded. His focus was more on Doctor Inkeri. "If we're fairly sure of what and where this thing is, what would you like us to do?"
"We're not at all sure," she replied unhappily. "There have been no survivors when this creature attacks, and the boats we've recovered haven't given us a clear picture of its anatomy beyond the jaws and its likely size."
"Which is?" I pressed, keen to know just how intimidated we should be.
"Assuming it's built at all similar to a shark, we're guesstimating something in the range of 30 to 35 feet."
Oh, goody.
"So… what would you like us to do?" I asked after a few nervous moments. "Because I'll tell you what, I do know enough about the ocean to know that trying to look for something in even a small bit of it is like trying to find one needle in a whole hayfield."
"One of the more recent lost ships –a tourist vessel called the Orca– managed to call for help before they vanished, saying that something in the water was attacking them. Since the boat never drifted in to shore, we presume it was fully sunk. We have the sailing log the Orca filed before setting out, so we can pinpoint that location with a fair amount of accuracy: what we can't do is risk sending an expert out to retrieve or investigate the available evidence without protection."
"You do know neither of us are trained for diving, right?" I asked.
"No time like the present to learn," she replied serenely.
***Time Skip***
Insult to not-hypothetical-enough-for-comfort injury, the waters off San Fransisco bay were what might be professionally termed "a real fucking bad idea" for novice divers on their first swim. There were a number of unpleasant factors at play even before one considered the presence of a giant sea monster: strong currents, cold water, and rugged terrain increased the rate of fatigue –and, obviously, hypothermia– and the limited visibility meant that we'd have a difficult time seeing any threats coming in this, the Red Triangle; considered one of the world's deadliest areas for shark attacks.
Because of fucking course it was. Why not?
"This area is known for hosting the fall annual migration of great white sharks," Peter Piątek said, a brown-haired colleague of Doctor Inkeri who was our apparent guide/person of interest to protect on this trip, and who had insisted we call him Peter. "The numbers should have fallen off, since the migration's roughly across September-November, but it's not unlikely that there'll be a few stragglers this early in the month."
"Yay," I said glumly from where Rex and I sat in the bed –I didn't know the appropriate nautical term– of the sturdy research vessel another man had maneuvered expertly out of the harbor. We were both double-layered in our normal swimsuits with full thermal wetsuits atop them, accompanied by diving tanks, masks, weight belts, flippers, and a host of other complex technical equipment whose rapid-fire explanation had breezed right over my head.
"It's actually a good sign if we see any," Peter told us earnestly, though he was busy checking over his much more extensive tool belt and didn't look up. "Doctor Inkeri told you about size and risk aversion, right? If whatever's sinking these boats is nearby, ordinary sharks wouldn't be caught dead in the area… mostly because, well, their instincts tell them they would be dead if another predator of that size caught up to them."
"Sorry, but comforting lecture on how the sharks totally don't mean it if they chomp us aside, I really don't like this whole Red Triangle thing," I said as Rex reached up to tug on his stud earring and missed, because we'd been told to remove all piercings and jewelry in case something toothy down there mistook the metallic shine for fish scales and lunged. Seeing him without his hat and red hairpins was weird: seeing him without all that and his studs and glasses was downright eerie.
"Remind me why it's called that, again?" he asked, and Peter shrugged.
"This area is within a roughly triangular section of the coast that's responsible for something around one third of all great white attacks in the US," he said, like that was going to make either of us feel any calmer. "Don't worry –if we see a shark, treat it like any other predatory encounter; I'm sure you've had plenty. Remain calm, swim smoothly and slowly, and don't move to block its path or turn your back on it. If a shark gets too close, place your hand on its nose and push it down and away to redirect its path while you ascend upwards."
"That's it?" I asked.
"Well, what else should it be? Unless you're actively provoking it or triggering its predatory instincts, you're of no interest to a shark until it gets curious –and in that case, gently but firmly redirecting its curiosity is all you need to do."
Peter shrugged, before placing his hands on his knees and shoving himself to his feet.
"Trust me, during almost every dive I've been on, the sharks tend to ignore us."
He waddled off in the particularly duck-footed way you had to do when wearing flippers, heading for the control cabin –presumably to confer with the captain.
There was a moment of silence between me and Rex as we both mutually contemplated just how far familiarity begat contempt and whether or not it was something to worry about. There was something in the air of both Peter and Doctor Inkeri when they talked about sharks that reminded me of blindly fond dog owners smiling and saying that their 100+ pounds of currently-hackling-and-snarling mastiff was "Oh, a sweetie, really, just a big ol' teddy bear, absolutely harmless…"
Still. Hollywood horror movies were never a reputable source for science and ascribing morality to an animal was silly –animals had no concept of right/wrong or good/evil. Sharks were just terrifyingly efficient predators, that was all, and it was hardly their fault that human presences tended to fuck with their programming.
Sharks kinda got the short end of the stick, all things considered. 500 million years of evolution –or however long it was– to streamline and refine an exquisitely well-designed bundle of hunting instincts, and then along came a bunch of gangly apes who coincidentally tended to set off every single one of them when they entered the water, and then got mad at a few accidental chompings and started shark genocide. Poor bastards.
Still, these were all big-picture numbers that mattered a lot less than the immediate fact that Rex and I were about to go in water where sharks may be with absolutely no training and the certain knowledge that there was a sea monster in the general area.
Womp-womp.
At my side, Rex finally exhaled the short breath of someone who, win or lose, had just psyched themselves up to get it over with already, and lifted his head.
"Well," he said. "We're following an experienced diver, and really, the two of us are just here for muscle. What's the worst-"
My hand smacked over his mouth so fast I nearly clotheslined Rex off the edge of the boat.
"Do not," I hissed around a tight-lipped smile, "say those words, in that order. Ever. Again."
He blinked at me over my glove, but shrugged and mumbled something in acquiescence. I took my hand away, and he sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.
"Two words," Rex told me. "Superstitious nonsense."
"Six words," I replied. "When have I ever been wrong?"
"…touché."
***Time Skip***
It took us a little longer to get to the place where Peter was pretty sure the Orca had gone down –a stretch of ocean just barely in sight of one of the islands– and he flopped his way down to join us as we gathered nervously at the dive platform.
"We're using our tanks on rule of thirds: one third to get there and back, one third for exploration, and one third for emergencies," he said, pulling the hood of his wetsuit up. We copied him, muffling all sounds, and continued following his movements to tug up our goggles and don the air masks. He pulled his out briefly to say "Just do as I do, and don't take risks. We have communicators, but I'd prefer not to use them unless there's no helping it. Ready?"
We both grunted affirmation, and he gave a short, sharp nod, and then turned and fell deliberately backwards into the water. We gave him a moment to get clear, exchanged wincing glances, and followed.
It was fucking cold. Bubbles rushed out of my mask as my whole body shuddered, and I gave myself a gnawing few seconds to adjust before I twisted over onto my stomach. I'd been dumped in an icy river in the middle of winter, and this was almost as bad –a numbing, piercing cold that seemed to soak into every patch of exposed skin: which, with a wetsuit, was all of them.
Peter was hovering in the water a few meters away, and dismay bloomed alongside the aching cold as I realized just how murky it was: his outline was blurred even when it would take only a few kicks to reach out and touch him.
That didn't bode well.
He waved to us, though, and almost immediately set off, swimming down at an angle. Absolutely unwilling to be left behind, Rex and I kicked into gear, trailing after him.
We found ourselves forming a rough triangle, with the two of us flanking Peter, who was apparently following something that approximated a high-tech metal detector to scout for the sunken remains of the tourist ship. His head scanned the murky depths in slow, easy motions; looking up to read the water and gauge our direction of travel, looking down at the device, looking over at some of the dials on his wrist.
My skin felt burned and stretched with how cold the water was, but oddly, as I moved, I kept feeling pockets of warmer water slosh inside my wetsuit; presumably the bits that had gotten trapped inside and were heating up in proximity to my body. It was an odd, but eventually not entirely unwelcome sensation, even though I had to fight the whimsical urge to roll my ankles or wrists and let the water rush out.
For a rather nerve-wracking minute or so, we saw precisely jack and shit. The water had that same misty, muddy, perplexing clarity that I remembered from swimming in ponds back home: it seemed perfectly clear for a few feet around me, but then as I looked further –say, a comparatively measly six feet– Peter's body was already shrouded in a dusty haze. Rather than soothing us with a sense of closer boundaries, the lack of anything to see made it seem like we were swimming in a disconcertingly vast bank of fog. Anything could jump out from that, and we wouldn't see until it was right on top of us.
Cold, Rex's thoughts tickled weakly in the back of my brain, showing that our practice with soul-bond-based telepathy was paying off.
Same, I shot back to the best of my abilities. We were both decidedly less relaxed than Peter, though in all fairness this was our first time diving and –threats of sea monsters aside– we hadn't had time to get used to the disturbingly open emptiness of even this shallow part of the ocean.
There was also a sense of my ears popping, a subtle but nonetheless teeth-grating sense of pressure that increased with ever meter we swum downwards, like a gentle first closing around my whole body.
When the first fronds of kelp –or seaweed, I wasn't sure if there was a difference– reared up through the murk on our right side below, Rex and I both jerked back. It felt so sudden, and yet Peter didn't seem to pay it any attention as he continued to swim. We, perforce, paddled after him, with Rex eyeing the rearing pillars of vegetation warily, since he was the closest. Another weird thing –the haze and the tips of the kelp poking up from below skewed my sense of perspective even more. The bottom could be six feet or sixty feet below, and I had no way of telling.
We were swimming across what seemed like a slope, which made sense when I thought about it. Islands didn't stick up out of the water like pillars. Beyond the kelp forest below, nothing else was visible –but Peter seemed to know exactly where he was going, and he was even speeding up a little. Legs churning, we followed after him.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the water quality, we didn't see the ship until we were almost on top of it. Manmade shapes looming through the murk made both me and Rex flinch again –the sudden sense of boundary when before there'd been nothing but void was even more startling than before– and even Peter paused.
Then again, that may have been the shape of the wreck.
It was… still recognizable as a boat, mostly. Maybe. Kind of. I could tell where the front and back parts were –mostly because the middle was ragged line of broken boards and fiberglass. More gaps were splintered through the hull in numerous places, and there was a troubling amount of, well, stuff around.
Life vests still tied to the sides. Flotation devices strapped on the outside. Brightly colored plastic cloth boxes with straps on scattered about the ruined deck or the mud below. Nautical equipment.
It looked like a perfectly normal tourist boat, except for the fact that it was half-destroyed and at the bottom of the ocean and there weren't any people on it. Not even skeletons.
My admittedly Hollywood-based knowledge of shipwrecks insisted that the ship should be clean from stem to stern and only have one conveniently person-accessible hole staved into its hull so we could go and explore inside. This was… hollow, but in the way that a kindergarten classroom would be if you waved a wand and vanished the kids mid-art session. A suspended and uneasy kind of absence that was still oh-so-very-present in the things it left behind.
"Right," Peter's voice crackled into my ear, slightly fuzzy with static and water. It was commendably steady, given that he was a civilian and there were a lot of people who should've been either corpses on this boat or safe back in the harbor, and were very much neither. "I want the two of you to keep a sharp lookout while I take a look at this."
"Thoughts?" I asked.
He cast me a look as he clipped the metal detector onto his belt, but between the respirator bubbles and the mask, his expression was a bit hard to parse. I was leaning towards exasperated.
"Without actually examining it, nothing much," he replied, beginning to gently swim downwards as the two of us hovered nervously where we were. "Something very large… yes, rammed into it from below. The deck splintered upwards; definitely hit from below…"
I risked a glance downwards, seeing his kicking fin and the silvery stream of bubbles from his respirator flick behind the far side of the boat.
"Mmm, yes… tremendous force, concentrated to one point…"
I was seized by the sudden, desperate terror that we might have to figure out a way to hunt a kraken. Their mantle was measured in miles! I was too young to fight a kaiju! And if it was the smaller kind, I was too young to get tentacle hentai'd!
If I saw anything even remotely resembling a tendril, I was blasting it with the biggest fireball I could conjure and damn to my cover. Pervy anime logic or not, there were some lines you had to draw with hard ordnance.
"So what does that mean?" Rex asked as Peter continued to mumble to himself, swimming slowly back and forth across the shattered hulk beneath us.
"Many of the larger marine animals will use their force and bulk to stun or kill their target when attacking," Peter eventually replied, distractedly. "Assuming this is a non-human Kishin Egg obeying something that approximates its former instincts, it likely swam to build up speed and then rammed the boat from below, roughly around the middle. This would probably have been enough to cause catastrophic damage to the hull, resulting in this central lateral split, which would've sunk the boat with extreme swiftness."
"Which also probably accounts for how we only got a short message about how something was attacking them before the radio went dead," I said glumly.
"…quite probably. My assumption at this point is that whatever hit them destabilized or destroyed the boat, and then came around on several further runs to, er, consume the passengers as they struggled to swim or repair the ship, causing further damage when it bit or struck at the hull along the way."
I thought on that.
"Bit smarter than you'd usually think an animal could be, right?" I asked.
"Unless it's a damn octopus," Peter grumbled, making me shiver on top of the natural ice-water judders. "But yes, you're generally right. Unless humans have trained them, most animals find the traditional if-then process of problem solving quite difficult. Conceptualizing a boat as an obstacle between it and feeding is several steps above what nearly any marine animal could achieve."
"Oh, goody," I said, and kicked one fin to swirl a little in the water, squinting off into the distant murk –for all the good it did me. Although me and Rex were facing opposite directions for greater vigilance, even the faintest visibility was barely good for fifty feet. We wouldn't see any threat until it was practically on top of us…
Such thoughts were not good to have while hovering in teeth-chatteringly cold water a scant dozen yards from the open ocean.
I folded my arms and tucked my numbing hands under my armpits, trying to warm feeling back into them. A few swaying, drifting shapes in the kelp forests nearby made me twitch, even when they only turned out to be slab-sided fish nosing through the fronds. Huge fish, admittedly, quite a bit larger than your typical metaphorical dinner platter, but just plain fish all the same. They didn't even have any patterns.
An eventful five minutes or so of absolute nothing passed by, save for Peter's concerning mumbles about bite radius and impact force and intelligent angles of attack as he swam all over and around the sunken tourist ship. I shivered inside my wetsuit, trying to imagine that the shell of water trapped inside was warmer than it actually was. Rex and I occasionally changed position, twisting in a quarter-turn every so often just to make sure nothing had snuck up on us.
"Hmm," Peter said, and the sudden flattened quality of his voice had my head snapping down from where I was currently staring out at the open ocean. I couldn't see him anymore, but the strings of bubbles rising from the hulk below gave me a rough approximation of his location.
"Hmm, what?" I asked warily.
"There is- well- hmm," he replied vaguely, half-talking to himself. "Concerning…"
"Is it something we should be concerned with?" Rex asked.
"Yeah," I added. "Care to share with the class?"
"You're aware that we can approximate the size of various creatures via their teeth?" Peter asked, and I winced, already able to tell where this was heading.
"You found a tooth?"
"I found a tooth wedged into a splintered crack around an interior bite mark," he confirmed. "Serrated, triangular, and broad, which corresponds to most Lamniformes. The problem is, it's quite a bit bigger than it should be."
"Do I want to know what a Lamniform is?" Rex asked warily.
"My Ancient Greek tells me lamna- is either throat/gullet or something to do with the Lamia monster, and my Latin says -iformes means the form of something," I chipped in.
"It's the mackerel sharks," Peter said. "Great whites, goblin sharks, megamouths, and so on."
"…so considering great whites are already one of the biggest carnivorous shark species out there, how much bigger is this tooth?" I asked, resigned.
"The average great white shark tooth is about three inches long. This is about seven inches. If this Kishin Egg is anything like a shark in general body shape…"
I mentally readjusted my aquatic proportions.
"It's really fucking big?" I guessed, glumly and without much hope.
"Well-"
"LOOK OUT!"
Rex's sense of alarm abruptly sizzled my nerves a heartbeat before his shout, which gave me the fraction of a second I needed to whirl and slam up my barrier.
Something entirely too big slammed into the glowing yellow wall stretching in a curve for twenty yards around us, though I didn't catch much more than a sense of a dark body and the outline of a gigantic fin or a tail amongst all the churning water and frothing bubbles before it was gone. I grabbed Rex and dove, flapping my fins as hard as I could to drive us down into the relative cover of the wreck before A) Peter could see the very-much-not-DWMA-standard glowing wall and B) before whatever had hit said wall came back.
Rex didn't transform, perhaps concerned about what that would do to his diving equipment, and we quickly swarmed in and hunkered down beside Peter, who looked both alarmed and perplexed behind all the bubbles.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I saw movement, and then suddenly-"
Rex waved his hands before himself in what I assumed was a gesture meant to convey just how fast the sea monster had got up in our mutual faces.
"I bounced it off an attack," I lied, "but it'll be back, right?"
"Almost certainly," Peter replied, looking grim. "The pattern of attack on this boat and the local disappearances indicates territoriality, aggression, and persistence. Oh dear. I do hope it's focused on humans and not any of the marine population –it could do terrible damage to the local ecosystem…"
"I'm more concerned about the damage it could do to us and/or our getaway boat," I said flatly.
There was a huge, grinding crunch overhead as whatever-it-was crashed into the wreckage of the boat, which creaked and, in places, bent alarmingly inwards. We flinched.
"R-right. How confident are the two of you in underwater combat?" Peter asked, his voice catching a little in nervousness for the first time.
"Not."
"Then I would suggest fleeing to a better position –ah, by which I mean returning to our boat. Yes. Um –the two of you can temporarily drive it away by injuring it, and we can swim up to the surface."
I did not like that idea. I really, really, really did not like that idea. But, crucially, I didn't have a better one.
"Sure," I said, and then "Stay here."
Cautiously, I swum a little closer to the open part of the wreck with Rex a length behind me, my mind buzzing with all I could remember about how various underwater critters could sense other animals. Vibration was a biggie, and so was movement. Scent was surprisingly common, and sharks could do that thing where they sensed the subtle electrical currents generated by living creatures.
So, whatever-it-was had probably smelled or sensed us a long time ago, and came swimming in for feeding time. It definitely knew we were still here, but I wasn't sure of how exact that was. If it tracked by scent and sight, it might not be able to tell where we were in the wreck; only that we hadn't left.
If it tracked by vibration or electrical signals, it knew exactly where we were at this very moment, and that thought was not comforting.
I held out a hand that felt scoured into numbness by the raw cold, and Rex stopped. Grasping hands, he transformed into the not-so-heavy weight of his sword form.
Very, very carefully, I began to inch forward, looking in as many directions as I could at once to try and catch that first deadly flicker of movement. My head slowly drifted out into the shattered middle of the wreck like a particularly paranoid balloon, my whole body coiled and tensed for a sudden rush backwards.
Huh.
I'd been expecting something a bit more –eh, exotic. Thoughts of sea monsters had been merrily dancing through my head, and the phrasing the jaws, at least, were sharklike had been preparing me for some sort of Frankenbeast that looked like the the spikier versions of some Loch Ness Monster concept drawings.
Instead, swimming in a slow circle several dozen meters off was just… a shark.
A really, really big shark, admittedly, with mottled darker and lighter markings like it had half-shed its skin in rough, diseased patches, but still. One thing did concern me, though, especially when I compared it mentally to the bitten piece of flotsam and the condition of the wreck around us.
Bigger, I thought at Rex worriedly.
? he queried back.
I flashed my snapshot memory of the sunken Orca and added Still growing.
! rattled through my brain like a five-am-alarm.
Yup, I agreed, watching it circle.
Forget the 25-footer in Jaws; this thing was huge. For comparison's sake, Rex and I (in human form) could've held hands and stretched out our arms to the max, and still been able to comfortably walk down that tooth-lined gullet without even brushing the walls of its throat. My heart jumped and began to race again like a track horse, and my throat suddenly felt dry.
"That is a really big shark," I rasped dumbly, reminded that Peter couldn't share our telepathy.
There was a stir in Rex's mental presence. "Technically, it's a Kishin Egg," he corrected me meekly.
"Do I look like I give a shit? It looks like a shark, it moves like a shark, and by fucking god it's going to eat us like a shark if it gets the chance. It'll do as a vicious example of a not-fish species for me."
"Sharks aren't fish?"
"Wh- no, they're not fish. It's the whole cartilage-bone-structure thing, it makes them a different genus and they're in the same family as manta rays and can we perhaps discuss this at a later date!?"
There was a ripple of consternation through our soul link. "Oh, right, sorry!" Rex chirped apologetically. I caught the stray end of a thought –swims like a fish looks like a fish should be a fish– sulkily echoing from the back of his brain, but as I'd mentioned, we didn't have time to discuss that.
"I might also add that sharks don't eat people," Peter reminded us, and bubbles fountained out of my respirator as I made a highly distressed noise of frustration.
"Who cares, okay?! Teeth! Big! Chompy! Death!" I shouted. "Let's just get this over with and then we can discuss the environmentalism stuff after!"
I kicked out with Rex, keeping a wary eye on the shadowy bulk of the Kishin Egg as it drifted menacingly above us. It jagged in our direction the moment we broke cover, transitioning from a swift cruise to an abrupt explosion of movement, and I tightened my grip, reached out with my soul, and swung Rex edge-first like a baseball bat.
Using soul energy to enhance attacks was an intermediate concept at the DWMA. Meisters who were powerful and flexible enough to use their soul directly without the medium of a Weapon –see Stein and Blackstar– were rare, but relying on the resonance of energies created by a partner bond was the very foundation of EAT combat. I passed my Soul Wavelength to my Weapon, Rex, who magnified and returned it, and this cycle continued until we had energy worth dealing with.
In expert hands, the rate of exchange could be amplified and controlled until the partners created a Resonance attack, like Maka's Witch Hunter or Blackstar's Enchanted Sword Mode or Kid's Death Cannon(s). It was a razor-fine, extremely powerful demonstration of synergy, and being able to use a Soul Resonance attack reliably was both the epitome of the Weapon-meister bond and basically the first step up to an entire new tier of combat ability.
Rex and I were not that good –not by a long shot. We had enough synergy to create a rate of exchange with our Soul Wavelengths, but it wasn't strong or stable. I could use soul-boosted attacks, but they were sloppy, bleeding far more energy than they needed to, and they were certainly nowhere near the power or control of a Resonance attack.
Still, what they could do was boost my range and power far more than Rex's blade could extend, and teal light flashed in the wake of my sword as I swung. The slash carved into the Kishin Egg's side several dozen meters in front of us, and with a jerk and a roar of rushing bubbles it was gone, leaving spreading plumes of blood that trailed off into the distance.
"Follow me!" Peter called, and I craned my head to see that he was already above us, swimming with commendable control up towards the surface. If it were me, I'd be paddling as fast as my legs could take me; his pace was steady, if a bit fast. "And stay on guard!"
I took his advice, holding Rex at a slightly awkward angle to avoid bumping into my legs as I churned through the water after our guide. Peter grabbed my elbow when I made to swim faster than him, dragging me back down as I fought the urge to scream.
"Decompression sickness," he said, and at my blank and maybe ever-so-slightly panicked look, added "The bends. Ascend too quickly, and you'll get gas bubbles in your blood, which are disorienting at best and excruciating at worst. Slow and steady."
"Slow and steady and also shark-bait!"
"I don't like it any more than you do, but we can't afford to go any faster than this if we want to be conscious by the time we surface!" he snapped, showing a hint of his own terror. He squeezed my arm, and then let go when I showed no further signs of rushing past him. "You're DWMA, right? You can do this."
Stay calm, Rex agreed through our bond, and sent a pulse of reassurance through me at the same moment. We hit it once. We can hit it again as long as we stay on guard.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, I was letting the fear get to me. I couldn't afford to close my eyes right now, but I did hood them and take several long, slow, deep breaths, concentrating on my body and the way it felt in the water. Nothing was chewing me up. Nothing was coming at me. The Kishin Egg could attack in three dimensions thanks to us being underwater, yes, but between me and Rex we should be able to spot it in time to avoid or attack.
We could do this.
"Sorry," I said to them both, and while I didn't exactly relax, I did force my body to ease up, turning my head to watch on high alert. The worst hadn't happened yet, and I needed to be ready for it when it came. That was what I should focus on, and not let the panic of being underwater with a magic-mutated apex predator get to me.
We kept swimming as the ocean began to slowly brighten around us, and I craned my neck to look up at the reassuring shadow of our boat several times –because thanks to the icy temperatures and the currents crisscrossing the area, there was no way we'd be able to get home without it.
"Below right!" Rex warned, and my head snapped down to see a whole fucking lot of teeth accelerating directly towards us at speed. I whipped Rex down and across with a panicked splash of soul energy, kicking to the side at the same time as I clumsily bodychecked Peter out of the way.
The problem with the Monster being so fucking big was that even when Rex and I connected, slashing another long wound across its mouth and snout, it was already moving with way too much momentum to be turned aside, and we tumbled in the wake of its bloodied passage as the side of its head scraped past my flippers, nearly wrenching my legs out of their sockets as I swirled headlong in the disorienting rush of bubbles and movement.
A few dizzy seconds later, and I could finally tell which was was up again, and kicked frantically towards Peter, who was looping away from the impact splash of the Kishin Egg bursting out of the water and then landing back down several dozen meters away. Wasn't that something great whites did –breach, I think it was called? Accelerate up from below so fast that them hitting a seal half-killed it even before the teeth got to work, often launching both predator and prey right out of the water…
"The two of you okay?" Peter gasped, angling for the boat and moving more rapidly now that the bends were becoming less of a concern.
"Clipped us, but we're good," Rex assured him.
I hummed distractedly, trying to keep an eye on where the Kishin Egg was going as it shook off the impact of the injury and flashed into the murky distance with a flick of its fin. What was it going to try and do now –head for us, or the boat? Either option presented a number of tactical concerns, but I was more worried about it possibly being smart enough to know we needed the boat to get home.
There was a dull, echoing clang as Peter hit the dive platform, and I glanced up, seeing him scramble out of the water. I gave him an agonizing few seconds to get clear, then shifted to hold Rex one-handed and hauled myself up in a rush born from a sudden crest of panic at being the only one left in the water.
I climbed into the boat after Peter and ripped off my respirator, slapping past him in an awkward run for a few seconds before I went fuck it and angled Rex downwards, slicing off most of the forward part of my flippers with the very tip.
Thus freed, I moved with a lot more speed towards the pilot house of the ship as Peter stumbled towards what I dearly hoped was some sort of sonar or radar.
"We found it, and we made it mad!" I called, tossing Rex up to the higher deck before starting to climb up the second ladder. "Hit the throttle!"
The engine hummed and churned beneath us as the boat vibrated gently, and I felt myself relax a little as we immediately started to pick up speed. The captain must have seen the Kishin Egg breach and put two and two together.
"Uh-oh," Peter said, and I jolted as I picked up Rex again.
"Wha-oh?" I asked, leaning back over the rails to look down at him and his nest of equipment.
Peter turned several dials and peered at a green glass screen. Then he twisted to look at the wake of foaming water trailing behind us, and I followed his gaze.
Stereotypical and deadly, there was a triangular fin slicing through the water in the distance, far larger than life and with a distinctly mottled, peeling appearance.
"Uh-oh," I said.
Though my status as a movie buff was debatable, the temptation was nevertheless just as overwhelming as the opportunity was golden.
"Captain, take us into shore, please," I twisted my head a little to call, before turning back to get a better view of the ominous shape powering after us.
"Why?" the man asked, though he was already spinning the wheel. He knew to trust a DWMA student's judgment, I figured, then dismissed the thought from mind.
Running my tongue over my lips, I felt a tingle of trepidation run down my spine, watching the large dorsal fin cut smoothly through the water. As golden an opportunity as this was, it was still a really, really dangerous situation.
Hence my orders, explanation, and reference mingling in the next sentence.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat."
***Time Skip***
The Kishin Egg kept pace with us even as the boat raced through the water fast enough to send up a spray against the back of my neck, which was both encouraging and worrying. On the one hand, it wasn't catching up to us –but on the other hand, it wasn't falling behind, either, and if this continued, we'd be leading it straight into a populated harbor.
I made some calculations, then set Rex down with a clink and started shedding my tank and diving harness.
"Hey, Peter?" I called as I continued disentangling myself, and he looked up. "Can you c'mere?"
He made it to the side of the upper deck just as I finished unbuckling the last set of straps, and I nudged the tangled mess aside with one foot, leaning over the rails.
"We can't let that thing get too close to shore, so we're gonna have to kill it here," I began, trying to project a demeanor of authority. "I want you to tell the captain to slow down a bit, and then, when I call, veer as hard and fast as he can to the left. Can you do that?"
"Yes…" he said, looking at me worriedly.
It was a simple plan: Rex and I were going to stand at the back of the ship, then use it as a launching point to jump off and hit the Kishin Egg as hard as we could– and I'd accounted for both eventualities of the aftermath as best as possible.
If we successfully killed it, the boat could loop back around and pick us up.
If we failed to kill it, then my hitting from its left side would made it turn to our right, giving us time to be recovered –or, if things went badly enough, for Peter and the captain to get out of here.
"Cool," I said, and scooped Rex up again. "Let us know when you're ready."
I vaulted over the rail as Peter reluctantly climbed the ladder, heading back down the length of the ship to stand just before the backwards wall. Despite my apparent air of command, my heart was pounding so hard I could actually feel it beating in my chest; a rapid, distressed tattoo of pulses hammering steadily beneath my ribcage.
"Your hands are shaking," Rex commented warily. I realized he was right and inhaled slowly, trying to firm my grip.
"It's one thing to watch a shark movie," I replied hoarsely after a few moments, my eyes locked on the water foaming behind us in a vee. "But if we fuck this up, we're about to be in a very, very bad one very, very quickly."
"Oh." I heard Rex gulp. "You're, um. That's right…"
"I swear to god if you start fucking shaking, we're done here," I muttered under my breath. I couldn't really help the profanity –my nerves were stretched to the breaking point. "It's hard enough to hold you already, never mind when the six-foot-long buster sword is vibrating."
"S-sorry."
"Don't be sorry; don't do it," I snapped a little harshly. As we fell into watchful silence, though, I realized that the brief moment of our usual banter had helped to center me a little bit, give my jangling nerves a distraction to help smooth over the distress signals firing in my brain.
"Hey, Rex?"
"Yeah?"
"Sorry about that. I'm just a little jumpy right now."
"No problem. I mean; fair enough."
"Yeah…"
"Ready!" Peter called, and I took another deep breath and rolled my shoulders.
"Rex?"
"I'm good," he answered promptly as I felt his soul energies twine faintly with mine, like fingers brushing together. "Ready when you are."
"Slow up!" I called back to Peter, and then lifted a foot and braced it against the rim of the boat. We shuddered faintly, decelerating, and I had to take another moment to readjust my balance as the distant fin seemed to jerk, zooming closer. This had to be timed right; I had to account for everything. Less agility from wearing mutilated flippers instead of proper shoes, the speed the Kishin Egg was going at versus our own speed, Rex and I's soul-bond and the levels of our resonating energies, how hard to hit, where to hit, when to call it…
I tensed, then shoved myself up with one foot and leapt with all the energy in me, soaring far higher than I'd ever been able to manage naturally.
"NOW!" I shouted, and put the boat from my mind as I focused on the vaguely oblong silhouette rushing so menacingly through the water below. The body was marred by several darkened, bloody streaks where we'd hit it before, and I let the vision of it fill my world as I tightened my grip on Rex. Tail, back, fin, spine, head; and the jaws, of course.
Right…
…there!
Clasping Rex in both hands, I whipped him down over my head in a streak of pale blue light that flashed out almost like a downwards-facing wing.
It hit the Kishin Egg in a burst of foam, and then we hit the surface a moment later amongst all the confusion. I shook the water from my face as I came up and then crabbed sideways as best I could, edging awkwardly to the left as I tread –treaded?– water with one hand and both feet.
"Oh, please be dead, please be dead, please be dead, please be dead…" I chanted fervently, my body swaying a little in the aftercurrents beneath the surface as little waves lapped my neck and shoulders.
"It's dead," Rex reported, and then transformed out of my hands, presumably swimming off to retrieve the soul.
Which did beg the question –were souls affected by water currents? Were they affected by the wind? I couldn't quite remember either scenario having had the opportunity to occur…
The boat honked, and I turned –swimming easier now that I had both hands free– and raised one arm to wave that yes, we were alive.
"We got it!" I called, and Peters anxious expression transformed as he let out a short whoop, leaning back from the side. His excitement was catching enough that Rex and I exchanged a high-five when he resurfaced a few feet away and swam back to me, soul either in his other hand or already consumed.
"That's the eleventh, right?" I asked as we bobbed in the slow swell, and he nodded, then shivered.
"Let's have our next assignment somewhere warm," Rex replied fervently. "Or at least, not cold."
"I'll drink to that," I said as the boat continued wheeling around to pick us up. "Let's see if they've got hot chocolate or something at the hotel."
11.35 AM, USA Central Time
11-Jaws:
…I'm not sure who doesn't know this, but Jaws is a movie about a shark attacking people, and one of the first monster movies of its type. In Jaws, a monstrously large –albeit natural and non-mutated– great white shark starts attacking swimmers off the shores of a tiny island resort town called Amity. The mayor starts out by attempting to explain away the deaths as swimmers meeting boat propellers, due to the town "needing summer dollars," but is eventually forced to confront the facts when the shark rips apart a kid on a public beach, and posts a reward. The town's one and only police officer, coincidentally Our Hero, then teams up with an oceanographer and a bitter old fisherman to kill the shark and save the town.
This is played against the lack of shark knowledge at the time –as Chief Brody, the protagonist, points out "we hardly know anything about them, we just don't know"– and the innate suspense geared by almost never actually showing the shark and the incredibly infamous theme music. On the off chance you've never heard or identified it before, Google "Jaws theme" and within the first few bars I can guarantee you you'll recognize something.
It's also the origin of such famous lines as "Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water" (this was an advertisement tagline rather than something from the movie), "Smile you son of a bitch!" and of course the legendary "You're gonna need a bigger boat," spoken by Brody to the bitter fisherman when he realizes the man-eating shark is at least twenty-five feet long and nearly as big as the boat they're hunting it on.
Conservationist note, Jaws and its terrifying portrayal of sharks became the motivation behind the bulk of most fear-related shark killings, so much so that it horrified the author (it was originally a book) and motivated him to speak out against such actions for the rest of his life, even to the point of publicly regretting having written the book at all.