Ugh. Be me looking back on what I wrote last week on painkillers. I should have just not written anything lol. Well, I'll make what I wrote work I suppose. I'll see it as a challenge. My brain was a little screwy at the time.

Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 64

"I'm still not comfortable with ARC Corp being involved with the Grimm."

"We're not involved with the Grimm, Blake. Salem is no longer a part of ARC Corp however she acts. Most of it is just guilt anyway."

"Guilt that kills thousands of people every year."

"Most of those Grimm are outside her direct control. Remember, it was the Brothers Grimm who created them. Salem just inherited it, and without entirely perfect control. If we have to pick between a pair of deific anomalies who think they have a divine right to create and destroy whatever they want, and a human-turned-anomaly in a bad breakup with one man, then I know what I'd choose. But beyond that, we're not allied or enemies with her."

"Uh-huh."

"I mean, I've spoken to and done jobs to help Ozma." Jaune took his hands off the wheel. "Sure, I hate him, but we've proven capable of working together in the past, and it's not like we've tried to kill him. Does that sound like someone allied with the Grimm?"

Blake sighed. "Jaune…"

"Give me one piece of evidence we're allied."

Blake pointed. Off the prow of the boat they'd hired, thick chains connected to a metal bar clutched in the giant jaws of a Leviathan. A monstrous Grimm that terrorists the seas, measuring some twenty metres long with jaws big enough to swallow her whole. Those jaws were put to use clamping down on the bar so that the thing could tow their boat across the ocean like a horse with a carriage. There was also a Nevermore perched on its head pointing the way, and another two preening their sharp feathers on the metal railing not one foot to Jaune's left.

Jaune winced. "Give me two pieces of evidence…?"

"The one behind the Grimm is trying to set you up with someone."

"Look, that's just her trying to hold onto some small vestige of humanity. It's not easy for people like us."

"You're nothing like her, Jaune."

"I didn't mean in terms of the damage I can do or personality. I meant human-to-anomaly transformations. Salem is one of the few that managed to keep her mind like me, though she thinks that's to do with her transformation being less spontaneous and more… well, she thinks she inherited their anomalous powers, while mine is its own transformation."

"What's the difference?"

"We don't yet know, but, if I had to guess, it's that human transformations are new anomalies. New powers, unseen and unknown effects. Inheritance appears to be a case of the powers passing into a person and staying roughly the same."

"Like Ozma?"

"No. Yes. Well…" Jaune frowned. "We think his is different because his anomalous effect is that he possesses people. A better example might be Light of the Soul and inherited Semblances, like the Schnee Semblance. For my transformation, it's a brand new anomaly. Nothing exists with similar effects in our records."

"Does that mean all anomalies were once human!?"

"It's a theory that existed even back in the old version of ARC Corp, and they did research into it." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "To be honest, they did some pretty horrible research. Tried to incite a transformation in prisoners. Not unlike what the Schnee family did. There are notes of one or two transforming, but it's sporadic and the test methods have been lost to history. I don't think all anomalies can be called transformed humans, though. We have objects that don't have an intelligence, and objects that do and can talk, and creatures and blood-borne pathogens and more. If every anomaly was vaguely humanoid and sapient then I'd agree with the theory, but I personally think humans transforming is a more recent phenomenon."

He shook his head. "That's not the point I was getting at. For me, when I first transformed, I gripped tightly to my humanity by focusing on all the things that made me who I am. My family, my job, my duty. Even if they all hated me for what I'd become, it helped me get my head together. I can't leave ARC Corp now because I genuinely think I'd lose control if I did. And I think that's what Salem – what Rebecca – is doing as well. The idea of meeting with me, of secret handshakes, of setting me up with a girl. Didn't you realise? It was all quite childish."

"I did realise that but I just assumed it was her personality…"

"The personality of a lead researcher for a shadowy government agency that enslaved and tested on inhuman creatures? I'll admit that it's possible she used humour even back then to get through things, but the limited research notes we found with her annotations on painted her as quite the dour woman. Nothing like what she is now. But, then, how much of yourself can you remember after several hundreds of years?"

Blake understood. "She's forgetting who she is…"

"Yes. And with every bit that goes, she's left with more and more of the original anomaly. There's a chance she might completely cease to be, though we've no idea if that's in this lifetime, the next, or several hundred years from now. That's a part of why we don't push her. It's also a part of why we don't step in and try to stop her getting to Ozma."

"Because her motivations for that are at least human," said Blake. "Even if they're petty."

"Exactly. A crime of passion is a very human thing, and we're worried that if she lost that motivation, she might fall back on something else. As for setting me up…" He sighed. "That's a new one. I've not seen her like that before. It was actually quite sad."

"I thought you walked about because you were embarrassed. It was because you were sad, wasn't it?"

Jaune nodded. "I… I won't say I respected her, but I felt closer to her. We both had the same issues, and she was, to me, an example that you could overcome those issues with enough cold logic and hard work. Now, I see she's losing the battle worse than I imagined." He laughed. "They always do say to never meet your heroes. Not that she was mine, but she was an inspiration of a sort. You know what I mean?"

Blake nodded. There wasn't much to admire about the woman, but she had managed to stick to her humanity and not go on an all-out rampage for hundreds of years now. Maybe Blake had only met her at the end when her sanity was waning. Maybe if they'd met two hundred years ago, Blake would have been impressed by such a calm, analytical, and regal woman. Even now, she was smart enough to piece together the location of BTF, so there was something that remained in there, but it was buried so deep behind forced extroversion and childishness that it was hard to find.

"What happens when she loses the plot entirely?"

Jaune looked out over the ocean. "That's when we get involved."

The leviathan brought them to a seemingly empty patch of open ocean that didn't look different from any other within a hundred miles. There wasn't any landmass in any direction, and Blake felt very alone out on the ocean with Jaune and a bunch of relaxed Grimm. The fact the Leviathan was swimming gentle circles ahead of them didn't make her feel much better, as it reminded her of every shark movie she'd ever seen.

Which, come to think of it, she now wondered why those movies used sharks instead of Grimm.

"We're pretty much equidistant between Atlas and Vale right now, but closer to Mistral than Vacuo," said Jaune, checking over a map and using the boat's CCT Signaller to locate themselves on it. "There's pretty much nothing out here, but it is along one of the many major shipping routes between Atlas and Vale, so I could see fishing vessels coming this way."

"Or a vessel sinking with Blood that Feeds on it," said Blake.

"Or that. Yes. There's a good chance BTF might have manifested on a ship – maybe in seafood eaten by a sailor or passenger. It would have cleared the ship out quickly, but that doesn't explain why it would sink. We'd expect more of a ghost ship in harbour scenario."

"And no BTF have ever come off one and wiped out a town?"

"No. I mean ghost ship literally. The BTF clears everyone off, devours them all, then usually just walks overboard in search of the nearest source of blood. Ocean mammals, I imagine. Good luck with them catching one in th water, though. They'd never be able to keep up with them. I guess they just roam the ocean floor until the current throws them ashore, or the mammal they're chasing brings them close enough to human civilisation that it locks onto that source of blood instead."

It was more likely the current in Blake's theory. A creature made up of blood vessels couldn't weigh much and would be whipped around by the harsh currents like a jellyfish. It wouldn't be hard to imagine one coughed up on the shore like seaweed, then pulling itself up and heading for the closest human settlement.

"Then if fish are eating the BTF down here, it's trapped in some way. Right?"

Jaune grinned at her. "That's Salem's theory. And it fits, doesn't it? The whole reason something like this hasn't happened before is because BTF hunts people down and we respond. We've never had a case of it spreading this bad because they don't have survival instincts necessary to hide. This one must be trapped somehow, maybe in a sunken ship, and it can't get out. That's good news for us as well because it should mean we'll be safer. But, just in case, we have these."

He gestured to the wetsuits and diving gear, but also to two motor-powered things that looked like a small jet engine with handles. Blake had seen them in ocean documentaries, where a diver would hold them in front by the handles and use the propellor to move them through the water faster than they could swim.

"They're called sea scooters," said Jaune. It was an odd name. "These ones are sports models, so they're pretty nippy. They won't let us outrun any real fish, but they'll be more than good enough for a terrestrial anomaly trying to make its way through the water. Also, you have an emergency ascension balloon." He tapped another thing on the wrist of the wetsuit. "Avoid using this unless you're in real danger though, as it'll bring you up fast and you've got a good chance of catching decompression sickness."

"Better that than becoming a new carrier of Blood that Feeds," said Blake.

"Definitely. I'm just saying don't freak and hit this because you saw a scary fish or big crab. Or a shark."

Blake shuddered.

"What are you looking afraid for?" Jaune all but yelled. "I'm the one without aura down there." He shook his head and looked at the rest of the equipment. "Okay, we have harpoon guns and some spare harpoons, ropes, waterproof digital writing boards so we can communicate, spare tanks, sea scooters, spears." He tossed one to her. He called it a spear, but it was more like a five-foot long steel bar with a jagged spike on the end. "This is to poke away any big fish that get close. We also have an underwater cutter for any shipwreck we have to get into, head-mounted torches, head-mounted cameras below the torches…" He looked through the pile. "I think that's it. Oh, and we have some underwater flares for if we really need light or want to tell something to leave us alone in a hurry."

"I can't believe we've been on two underwater jobs," whined Blake.

"Ha. You must be joking. Over two thirds of Remnant is covered in water, Blake. I can't believe we've only been on two. There are more anomalies down there then they are on land. We just don't have to deal with them so much because they don't run into humans all too often, or, when they do, they kill the humans so there aren't any witnesses."

Blake stared at him.

Jaune stared back, then winced. "I probably shouldn't have mentioned that, should I?"

"You should not have…"

"We'll be fine. The Grimm will act as an alarm system." Jaune pointed to the Leviathan. "We have this big guy here who will scare off most creatures. Even if they don't hunt other fish, most sea life is just going to sense a shadow passing over it and dart into cover. As long as this guy is around, we'll be absolutely fine."

/-/

Blake couldn't believe how much calmer she was for having a gargantuan ocean monsters swimming down alongside her. It was big, and scary, and quicker in the water than she would ever be, with teeth sharp enough to rend her in two, but it was on their side – and it felt good to know that. It was like being escorted through a city by an armed police escort. Fish got out their way even though the Grimm didn't hunt them. They were just fish, with limited intelligence driven by instinct, and every instinct told them the Leviathan was an apex predator.

The first few minutes underwater were spent using their sea scooters to take them deeper and deeper, until the beams of light from the sun piercing through the water became weaker, and until they had to activate the torches on their heads. Were they just going to keep going? How deep was this thing? Blake's nerves almost got the best of her, and then she saw the faint splotches of coral on the ocean floor.

Her little diving watch told her they were about 150 feet deep. It had a red section marked 350 in big, angry letters. The maximum point at which she could go a little deeper, but really shouldn't. The floor itself looked to be only 200 feet below the water, which was actually a bit of a shock. Jaune began typing on his digital board but didn't show it to her. Instead, it translated it and played the sound in her ear in a robotic voice.

"I think this is a plateau. This is very shallow for the open ocean. Might be an underwater mountain. The ocean around this area is meant to be over four kilometres deep."

They couldn't survive those depths in gear like this. It explained why Salem had sent him a message that he wouldn't need anything as bulky as a submarine. She'd known it was in this area. Blake followed Jaune deeper, bringing them both down onto the sandy floor. The coral was bright here, in numerous tropical colours. Some sunlight must have been making its way down to enable all the different life, like the thick clouds of algae and plants. It wasn't so shallow that a ship would have run into anything, though.

Water whooshes as the Leviathan swam placidly past them both, off in a certain direction. Jaune looked to her, shrugged, then activated his sea scooter to follow, and Blake did the same. It was moving slowly enough to let them keep up, and it kept going until it performed a steep dive at ninety-degrees, going straight down.

There was a cliff.

It was sudden and sheer, diving down and down and down into the bottomless abyss. In truth, it wasn't a trench or a drop at all. They were on a steep rise, and everywhere around them was the deeper ocean. This would have made for an incredible tourist spot, but she supposed the Grimm made that a poor idea. No huntsman wanted to have to fight in the water, and the usual response to a ship being attacked was to shoot at the Grimm and make a run for it. Cut all nets and anything that might drag you down.

Sometimes even that wasn't enough. Back home in Menagerie, there had been a ship trawling with their nets deep in the water, and the nets had caught a Grimm. Or the Grimm had caught them. The thing had dived down, tangled in the nets, and the sheer size of it meant the whole fishing vessel had been dragged under the water in one go, never to be seen again. At least, everyone back home assumed it was a Grimm that did it.

Knowing what she did now, it could have been something far bigger.

"It wants us to go down there." Jaune wrote, and the earpiece translated his words on the tablet. "We'll follow, but slowly. I don't want us going deeper than 250 feet."

Blake made an okay sign with her fingers rather than write a response, and they slowly buzzed their way down the cliff. 200, 210, 220, 230 – Blake saw a dark shape loom ahead of them, but it wasn't moving. It was trapped against the side of the cliff, propped up upon jagged rock and stone that it had slotted into.

Or, more likely, that it had been caught on when it sank and tumbled down the cliff. It was a ship, just as she'd suspected. Jaune stopped and she did the same, the two of them hovering in the water. The leviathan was swimming beside the ship to mark it.

"It looks to be 260 feet below water." said Jaune, writing. "That's still within our safety window."

Blake brought out her own tablet and began typing. "Is it stable? What if it falls?"

"It's not a sheer cliff. I think it's safe. But we can swim under it and take a look if you like?"

Blake signalled again for the okay, and they both swam down. Her dive watch said they were at 264 feet when she touched the bottom of its hull. Deep, but at safe levels yet. Under the ship, she was relieved to see a lot of rock holding it in place. Some had even pierced though the hull and had probably been a big part of why it stopped. There were fish inside, who were hovering in various openings watching the leviathan nervously. They'd probably made the ship their home, with it being a safe haven from predators.

"Looks to be stable," said Jaune. "It's not a fishing vessel, though. Looks like a research vessel."

"ARC Corp?" she sent back.

"No. Maritime research. Maybe they were studying the fish in this shallow area. They might have taken samples on board, and one of them must have been infected with BTF." The software garbled the acronym into a single word that sounded like gibberish. "I don't know why it sank, but maybe they had something explosive on board. Dust for the engines. Someone might have tried to kill the anomaly with it and blown a hole in the hull."

Blake pointed to the one the rock had stabbed into. "You think there?"

"Maybe. It might have existed before it landed here and the rock just slotted in." Jaune paused for a long moment, and then wrote, "We're going to have to go in and take a look around."

"Joy," she wrote back.

"It should be safe. The fish would be reacting more if there was an active creature in there, and if it COULD move around then it would have left the wreck in search of blood long ago. It must be trapped in there. We should be safe."

Should. Blake hated that word.

Still, they swam slowly up to the entrance, leaving their sea scooters off for now. The fish hovering in the water darted inside and scattered as Blake's torch swam over them. Eels ducked back into little alcoves and bright rainbow fish scurried through an open doorway and deeper into the wreck. Other fish stuck to the corners, going with the logic that she might not notice them if they stayed still enough.

Having everything be afraid of her for once was nice.

Jaune floated in beside her and stored his sea scooter down in the corner, using a weight to keep it in place. Blake did the same. Jaune then struck a flare and tossed it into the room, sending the fish into a frenzy. Many darted past them and out, and some went deeper into the ship. Blake shot him a look, but he shook his head and pointed two fingers to the doorway.

They were in what looked to have been the cargo hold, and the doorway ahead would be the main corridor running through the ship. They were in the front half, beneath the deck, and there were open doors left and right inside. Those were probably bunkrooms, toilets, eating areas and the like. As the one with aura, Blake went first.

It was oddly peaceful, and less panic-inducing than she expected. The open doors meant there couldn't be BTF inside, and sure enough the rooms were empty. There were no skeletons or bodies, those presumably having been killed by the anomaly and then picked apart by fish and ocean parasites. Maybe that was how BTF spread so fast. Blake poked her way into someone's quarters. There was a small TV, obviously long ruined by now, and several books that had turned to mush. There was a bottle of alcohol, still stoppered, and some framed photos that she felt bad leaving behind but also didn't want to look at.

Most of the rooms were like that. The team must have been small, because rather than have a single room with a series of bunks in them, every room seemed to be dedicated to a single person. Or a couple. It was hard to tell. Either way, there was evidence of former habitation in most of the rooms, along with belongings and clothing and suitcases. As they searched, Blake began typing away on her tablet.

"What do we do if we find it by the way? Do we call in the task force? We don't let it loose, do we?"

"We're not fighting Blood that Feeds underwater, no," agreed Jaune. "We locate it, we mark it, we surface, we tell the experts to deal with it. Our job is to find. They will contain it for us. But we should also try and make sure it's locked away first."

Blake paused in the water. "Isn't it already?"

"The anomaly is but fish are obviously getting in if they can nibble on it. Probably a small hole." Blake nodded, catching onto what he was saying. "We should try and seal that hole before we send the others down. Make sure no more escape into fish between now and then."

They kept searching the ship, with panicked fish whooshing by their masks being the only real threat. There were a few eels that she was sure would take a bite of her if she got close, but that would be self-defence at best. Blake wasn't sure anything in here could actually harm her. They'd turned the shipwreck into a coral reef of sorts.

CLANG!

The sound echoed through the ship. For a moment, she thought something outside had smashed into the hull, but then it came again.

CLANG!

And it was coming from within.

Jaune pointed and typed. "It's sensed us."

It knew they were near, and it wanted their blood. Blake's heartrate jumped, but she didn't panic. The fact it was banging against something confirmed their theory of it being trapped. If it wasn't, then it'd be less banging around and more attacking them right now.

The noise continued, dull and echoey in the way most things underwater were. It wasn't hard to follow it to one of the few locked doors. It was one of those nautical doors made of solid steel, with a hatch that locked it shut with a wheel that could be turned. It was not only locked in place, but someone had wound a metal bar through the wheel and twisted it at the ends, making sure it couldn't be opened.

The sailors had trapped it.

But they couldn't have overpowered it. The only way they could have gotten it in that room was if one of them agreed to serve as bait, and stepped into the room, giving up their life in the process. Blake couldn't imagine how hard that decision would have been for the crew, or how they'd decided who it would be.

But given that there had been no news of this to reach the mainland, she didn't think they'd survived. Most people would have written their story off as nonsense, but ARC Corp had ears everywhere and it just wasn't possible that they hadn't reacted to a story like that before. Either the sailors had agreed not to tell anyone for some reason, or they had gone down when the ship sank. Or maybe they'd taken to lifeboats and been killed by Grimm, sharks, or dehydration. There was no way to know.

What they did know, because they could see it, was that the fish were getting in via a small crack in the viewing port into the room. It really was tiny, not even enough for a creature made of veins and arteries to fit out of, but a small fish about the size of her finger with bright blue stripes on its sides darted through the crack and inside while they stood there.

Jaune started typing. "I have some sealant. I'll block up the viewport. You head back and get our sea scooters. We'll doom a perimeter of the ship to make sure there isn't another hold on the outside, and if there isn't then we'll head back up."

"Sure. This was easy."

"It's easy because we don't have to fight it," he said. "Dragging this whole vessel out the ocean is going to be a nightmare, but, luckily for us, it's not a nightmare we have to deal with."

True. Blake felt bad for the teams who would be given this task. They'd probably have to get massive ships out here with cranes on the side, then dive down and latch those into place. It would take forever, and probably a lot of very clever engineering that she didn't need to know. They might be able to cut the room out and take that, but she didn't think they'd dare take the risk of making it fall, and having the rocks nearby punch a hole in the side for the anomaly to escape.

Either way, the ship must have weighed a lot, so she didn't envy them the task. At least they were paid well, and it should be relatively safe in the shallows. Once they had the ship out, they could cut it down and isolate the quarter with the anomaly in, and deal with that however they tended to. She wondered if they'd try and cull the fish in the area too, or if they'd just target small ones that might have gotten through. Those small ones might have been food for other fish, though. There was a whole ecosystem down here, and the anomaly had become an unwitting part of it.

Blake reached the place they'd entered through to find it was, once again, teeming with fish. They'd flooded back in the moment she and Jaune went through the corridor, it seemed. They reacted to her again, some rushing past her deeper in and some swimming to the far edge of the room. Most hid, however. They borrowed under and into things left behind by the former sailors, hiding from her instead of braving the deep water outside.

When Blake picked up her sea scooter, she found a few fish hiding under that as well, but they didn't flee from her. It was odd, especially when she reached for Jaune's scooter and her hand came so close to them she could have touched them. They could have darted outside easily, but they stayed where they were. Few of them moved at all, and the broken edge of the hull leading outside was morbidly still.

Come to think of it, where was their pet leviathan? Blake peered outside, to where it had been doing lazy circles in the water, but it was gone. There was just empty water as far as the eye could see. Had it left them? Maybe Salem considered its work to be done and let it go away.

"I've got our scooters," wrote Blake, transmitting the message to Jaune. "But our leviathan has disappeared."

"What?" Jaune's first word came quickly, but it took him time to write down and transmit the rest. "Salem said she would have it stand guard while we did the extraction, and that it would keep other Grimm away from us until we were back on the surface and a good distance away. It's supposed to drag us most of the way back to Vale."

"Well, it's not here," she wrote, poking her head out the ship and looking up. Then down. There was inky blackness below, and slightly less inky turquoise above. "Not above or below either. We're on our own."

That was when the glowing blue, yellow, and green lights began to emanate from below, as long, plant-like stalks rose up outside the ship, topped by glowing glass-like orbs that seemed to flash in slow, pulsating bursts of colour. The fish drew back, many hiding, even alongside their own predators. Fish and eels were side by side, drawn as far under cover as they could get.

A few panicked bubbles escaped Blake's mask.

They were not alone.

And their leviathan had been killed by something much bigger. Something coming up out the depths below them at that very moment.

I imagine, in this story, the ocean is just packed full of anomalies. But anomalous instances are either not reported because people vanish and it's assumed in storms, etc, or they were seen by sailors and dismissed as folklore. Sirens, mermaids, etc, all being anomalies which might look vaguely humanoid under the water, but which might be something far more alien.

Next Chapter: 7th August

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