Here we go.


Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 65


Blake signalled Jaune with frantic scribbles and misspelt words that probably translated to gibberish in his ear. That gibberish was enough to make him worry about her and come swimming back own the corridor, at which point he saw the bioluminescent orbs on their long plant-like stalks. They were wrapped wholly around the ship now, like eyes looking in every nook and cranny. Bubbles escaped Jaune's mask in what was probably a string of curses. He yanked out his tablet and began writing furiously, and the computerised voice spoke into her ear.

"It's an unknown anomaly. No idea what it does, but we're at the disadvantage in water." He looked around quickly and pointed, floating inside the hull. Blake looked where he was aiming but only saw fish. There were shoals of them, predator and prey alike huddled together with their fins toward them and their faces toward the metal wall. A small shark, likely a juvenile, had its snout forcefully pushed into a corner. Jaune must have started writing after because the voice continued. "They know the anomaly. They know how it works. Do what they're doing. Hide. Cover your eyes. Don't look. Assume they know best!"

They were going to place their lives in the expertise of fish.

Seriously?

Blake took one look back to where more lights were appearing, bathing the ship in an ethereal glow, and decided that yes. Yes, she was going to place her life in the hands of fish. Blake swam urgently to the closest corner, right above the shark, and let herself float to the top corner of the cargo bay. Fish brushed against her wetsuit and mask, but they were just trying to hide as she was. Blake checked her dive watch to see how much air she had left, a good half yet, and then closed her eyes, scrunching them shut.

"Don't look no matter what," the computerised voice said. "Trust in the fish to tell you when it's safe."

This was hell, but an almost familiar hell at this point. Blake had placed her blind trust in Jaune so many times before and got away with it that she just did the same here. Blake kept her eyes shut, as she felt warm light on her back, and as a low, humming buzz began to play in her ears. It was strange because her faunus ears were pinned flat by her wetsuit, and that had made all other noise muffled, but this was clear. It was like television static, but less sharp. Softer, slower, less grating and even a little comforting.

"Oh. False alarm," said Jaune. "It's safe. I know this one."

Blake heaved a sigh. For fuck's sake, Jau—

"Don't open your eyes."

"It's fine to open your eyes."

The messages came one after another, too quickly for them both to have been written and transmitted with the short delay the tablets had. A shiver ran through Blake's body as she realised what was happening. The anomaly was communicating with her. The fish huddled closer to her, using Blake's body as shelter and brushing up under her chin and against her chest. They were burying themselves in her wetsuit and diving gear.

"It's okay, Blake. It's friendly. Even cute. Take a look."

Blake took deep, forced breaths to stay calm. Something brushed against the back of her leg and she tensed up. That… That hadn't been a fish. It was something unnaturally warm and squishy, and, as it went by, she felt something stroke her back. Something long and sinuous. Warmth came over her right shoulder, heat seeping into her chin. A new voice came from that side, from right next to her face, and it whispered into her ear.

"Why did you leave me, Blake?"

Adam's voice. Blake shuddered.

"Isn't this what you wanted me to do? We talked so much of showing the world our pain; I'm just doing what you wanted me to. Why is it that I'm the monster now? You're the one who supported me. You were always there for me; you were my right hand woman. If you hated it so much, why did you never say anything to me? I could have changed for you. I would have."

It wasn't Adam, not down here under the ocean, so she refused to put any thought into the words. They were just there to make her open her eyes. Blake swallowed, feeling the anomaly move from her right shoulder to her left, brushing over her neck as it did. The new voice was softer, quieter, with an emotionless edge to it.

"I gave you that anomaly because you were meant to save me with it," said Coral Arc, the woman who had turned to dust in the hands of the Schnee family's anomaly. "You didn't. You let me die so that you could get closer to my brother." Coral sighed heavily. "I didn't like him like that, you realise. I said what I did before to impress on you the importance of maintaining his mental health. You didn't need to see me as competition for him." She chuckled. "And you didn't need to push me into the anomaly."

Air rushed out Blake's mouth as she tried to say she hadn't. The bubbles reminded her of her predicament and she bit down on the mouthpiece giving her oxygen, scrunching her eyes even tighter shut.

"Blake, it's me, Ilia. Why did you leave me here? You know, I only joined the White Fang because of you. You were so cool and amazing and… and… I guess what I'm saying is that I wanted to get closer to you." Ilia Amitola took a shallow breath. "But now you're gone and… and I'm stuck here on my own. I'm a terrorist now, while you're living free and being paid huge amounts of money. How is that fair? You recruited so many people, Blake. There are so many of us in the White Fang thanks to you, but you're the one who gets to go free while we're left here to take the fall? How is that fair?"

It probably wasn't, she reflected, but then no one was keeping those people in the White Fang either. Maybe it was her time in ARC Corp making her see the world in much blunter terms, but there really wasn't much point in her holding herself responsible for all the mistakes she'd made. Sure, she had brought people into the group, but she had left, and they could too if they really wanted. Blake was just beginning to feel like she was in control when something wrapped suddenly around her waist.

She was ripped away from her corner and sent rushing through the water. It had her right around her middle, and it dragged her in, but even as her brain demanded she open her eyes, she refused. She felt her motion slow, and then felt the heat and light all over her body. There were tentacles stroking her, from her feet to her head, and there was something in front of her. Something that felt alive and oppressive, and heavy like the static that was getting louder and louder in her ears. Hands – actual, humanoid hands – cupped her face and tilted it upward.

"Won't you open your eyes and look at me, Blake Belladonna?" The voice was powerful, slamming into her mind and stunning her, like how she'd heard whales could do with sonar to small fish. It rattled every bone in her body and left her limbs falling slack. But she kept her eyes closed. "I'm so lonely down here on my own. Open your eyes. Look at me. Look upon me. Know me. Perceive me. Let me in, Blake! LET ME—"

Water rushed by suddenly and there was a horrific crunching sound that she felt deep in her body. The psychic pressure vanished, though the static turned high pitched and pained at the end, like a final scream. The tentacles around her body slackened and were yanked away, and Blake was suddenly left drifting in the water. The warmth and the light went with it. She tumbled through the water, lost and blind. She had no idea where the ship was or where she was going, so, with what might be a final breath, she opened her eyes.

There was a mountain face in front of her. To her left, the ship remained moored on its rocky plateau, with fish daring to peek at the entrance to the hull again. That, more than anything, told her it was safe. Blake kicked her flippers and began to swim back, glancing around nervously. The anomaly hadn't departed by choice, that much she was sure of.

Something else had taken it.

Hunted it.

It's a whole ecosystem down here. And we're in the middle of it.

Blake swam back in and touched Jaune's back. She made sure he could feel her fingers tapping his mask, and she wrote on her tablet. "It's gone. Something else got it. I had my eyes closed and didn't see what."

Slowly, Jaune opened his eye. He saw her, then the fish being more active, and sagged. His fingers tapped over his own device. "It spoke to me. You as well?" Blake nodded. "Terrifying. You said it was taken by something? I really doubt it could have been any of Salem's Grimm that did it. Though it makes sense it might be on the bottom of the food chain if it's hunting regular fish and the occasional diver. The question is what exactly ate it, and is it satisfied with just it. If we go out there and start to ascend, we might become the only food source out in the open."

Blake checked her tank again. They had about fifteen minutes remaining, which was a lot of time in the life of a big fish. If it kept going at speed, it would be a long way away after ten minutes, giving them time to ascend in peace.

If it wasn't hanging around purposefully. The first anomaly had come from the deep, and this one as well presumably. It made sense they'd all be hiding down there, since the shallows that most of humanity had mapped were only a tiny fraction of the ocean's true volume. Down there, in the dark, it would be easier to hide from other dangerous anomalies and sea creatures. Down there was where all the biggest prey would be, including whales diving deep.

Blake tapped her finger on the ascension balloon device on their arm and raised an eyebrow.

Jaune shook his head and started writing. "We'd ascend quickly, but we'd be really obvious doing so. The best thing we can do is sneak out and slowly make our way to the shallows again, then to the boat." He lazily swam to the breach in the hull and looked outward. The inky depths didn't offer much in the way of vision. "If we feel it's clear to do so," he wrote.

They didn't have much of a way of knowing one way or the other.

Or did they…?

Blake held up a finger asking for a moment and then swam back into the cargo bay. She took hold of the shark, mumbling a silent apology as it thrashed in her grip. Pushing it, she forced the thing to swim out the gap and into the open water. It twisted around on a dime and shot back inside in a hurry.

That was telling, and Jaune wisely floated away from the opening. They'd trusted the fish once to good results, so it might be best to keep that trust for a little longer. Blake wondered if she'd been lucky to be able to swim back in peace, or if whatever-it-was hadn't simply been too busy eating the first anomaly.

They waited for two minutes, a painful fraction of their oxygen reserves, before Jaune came up with another idea that he transmitted to her through her earpiece. He held his left arm out, and Blake worked to unlatch the ascension device from him. Once it was off, he held it outside the ship's hull and flipped open the release catch, then pulled it. The balloon expanded instantly and Jaune was almost yanked out before he could let go. Bubbles rushed out as the thing show upwards like a missile, shooting toward the surface.

It didn't make it.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a huge shape blurred past the sunken ship, streaming upward for so long that it had to be over two hundred metres in length. The biggest whales in the world could reach thirty metres, and this was almost seven times that length, rushing past the broken hull for a full twenty seconds before its tail flapped by.

It was relatively normal in shape, looking like a long eel or particularly eel-like shark. Its tail was a fin, however, and the force of its final kick slammed pressure into the sunken ship and made it groan as it listed sideways. Blake's heart leapt into her throat, but the ship somehow managed to stay in its position. If it had gone tumbling into the depths then they really would have had to abandon it and brave the open water.

"That's not good," wrote Jaune. "But our tanks won't last forever. We're going to have to make a break for it. We should be safe if we reach the shallows again."

"We'll never out-swim it," wrote Blake on her own tablet.

"We won't have to. Let's release the second balloon and swim out while it's distracted. We're going to have to hide and try to sneak our way up the rocks."

As plans went, it was about the best they had. The only other one Blake could think of was releasing Blood that Feeds and hoping it and the anomaly fought one another, but there was a greater chance BTF would just come after them and make things worse. Jaune worked to get her ascension device off her arm and then set it off above. The thing hadn't come back down, but he wasn't taking any chances, and the rush of water above, along with its gargantuan shadow falling over them, was proof that it had hung around.

Jaune kicked out the breach first and Blake followed, both kicking their legs and propelling themselves toward the rock. They didn't use the sea scooters, too afraid to let the engines and bubbles they caused draw the thing to them. Blake rolled onto her back as she swam, to get a better look at the thing chasing after the balloon. She'd likened it before to an eel, and that wasn't a terrible descriptor, but it wasn't as thin and narrow as she'd first thought. They just hadn't been able to see it all.

In truth, it was closer to a hideous, misshapen dolphin, but without the bottle nose. Its face was blunter, like a flat vertical surface with wide opening jaws that seemed to work more on suction than biting. Blake had watched documentaries before that talked about them, fish like angler fish, who would open their mouths so fast that it created something of a vacuum, making water rush in and taking any prey with it. It sounded slow, but the force was so fast that fish would be sucked into their mouths in what looked to be a fraction of a second.

Blake's tank touched the rock with a dull clink and she rolled over, clinging to the surface like a crab. Jaune was ahead of her, or above, and he was using handholds on the rock to propel himself to the right, away from the ship. Blake followed, the two of them putting as much distance between themselves and it without taking to swimming in the open water.

Jaune froze suddenly and pulled himself tight against the rock, and Blake did the same. A shadow fell over them, and a huge body came down. Blake tensed, expecting death, only for the rocky wall to shudder as the thing seemingly laid down next to them. Looking back, she realised it hadn't seen them. Instead, it had placed itself back in a position where it could watch the sunken ship in search of its human prey, without realising they were right next to its body, only forty or fifty metres from its head. Its silvery scales were close enough that she could have reached out and touched them.

If she wanted to die.

Jaune motioned to her with his hand and then ever so slowly began to pull himself higher. He didn't kick, and he was exceptionally careful with his hand holds, and Blake mimicked him. So much as a piece of coral pulled loose might alert the creature, and kicking her legs would set off little currents that it might notice. Like Jaune, she took to testing every rock with her fingers to make sure it was stable, and then using it as a lever to pull herself up. It was easier than mountain climbing since they were underwater, but the awareness that they had limited oxygen didn't help much.

They made it about halfway back up when the creature began to move, and they both pressed flat again, like crabs hiding among the rocks. The creature slammed into the ship, apparently tired of waiting for them. It drove into it twice, sending fish streaming out into the water. Its mouth opened like a snap, and hundreds of fish were sucked in instantly. That would have been us if we'd waited, thought Blake, her blood as cold as ice.

The ship itself tumbled and rolled down the cliff into the depths, taking the Blood that Feeds with it. Its echoing clangs on every rock it hit carried on until they became too distant to hear, but she was sure they didn't stop. Blake could almost imagine it carrying on forever.

The huge anomaly didn't seem to be done, though. It swam around the cliff a few times, forcing them to hold still. Its eyesight obviously wasn't the best, no doubt being superfluous in the deep dark. It must have had other ways to hunt. Smell, maybe. That would explain why it hung around even after knocking the ship into the depths.

It slammed its body against the rock a few times, dislodging boulders that boomed downward. It suspected they were there, or it knew they must be hiding on the rocks. It kept thrashing, flattening chunks of rock to try and knock them loose. It was missing where they were by a fair margin, but if it continued like that then it'd reach them eventually.

That was when the rockface Blake was clinging to began to rumble. The sediment beneath her cracked and splintered, and the rock in her hand shook. Without warning, Blake was swept upward as the very rock she was holding onto jumped, dragging her with it. It went up and sent her smashing into Jaune, though they both held on. Then, just as quick, it went down again, throwing them that way, and then up another time.

Blake was dizzy by that point, but the ride had thankfully stopped. Looking down, she screamed bubbles out as she saw a huge, domed eye looking out ahead beneath them. The rock in her hand swept down over it again and then up, yanking her with it, and it was at that point she realised what she was holding onto.

Its eyelid.

The rock had crusted over the eyelid of some creature and she was holding onto it along with Jaune.

The gargantuan eye swivelled, but not to look at them. They were as small as a microscopic creature living on a human's eyelashes. It focused instead on the other huge anomaly bashing against what she realised was its body. The rock had grown over it to form a mountain, but this was a living creature, and it had been disturbed.

Below, she saw something rise up. A huge, shadowy shape that the giant sea monster didn't see coming. It was slow, ponderous even, but as the shadow came closer she realised it was a pincer. A huge, dark black pincer the likes of which a crab or lobster might have.

The sea monster didn't notice it until it was too late. The pincer opened and closed on its body, and by that point it was far too late to escape. Scales as big as a person cracked and dented inward as the merciless claw bit down. A second came out the mist far to the other side, closing around the monster's head. Slowly, it was dragged down beneath their current position, down to where the mouth would no doubt be. That was just out of view, but that didn't stop fragments of scale and huge clouds of dark blood pouring upward like mist telling her what had happened.

Jaune tapped her head with his hand and pointed to himself. He then took off his dive belt, with heavy weights around it to keep them from floating away and tossed it out into the water. He spread his arms and legs and let go of the rock, floating upward with all the blood and scales acting as cover. Blake was quick to mimic him, looking down one last time into the gargantuan eyeball. It was looking downward at its meal, and not paying any attention to them. Blake set her belt down and let go and floated away from it.

She floated up into the water, toward the distant sunlight, and she could see the creature begin to move, the entire mountain groaning and crunching as it began to shift, like some great tectonic plate. Maybe it was a tectonic plate all of its own. Maybe tectonic plates were anomalies. It was so big that she couldn't process the size of it, but she quickly realised that the entire coral-coated plateau she and Jaune had parked their boat above was just another part of this creature, a layer of rock, dirt and coral that had formed over its carapace as it slumbered.

Blake's tank broke the surface of the water and she rolled over, tossed off her mask and took a breath of air. It felt so much fresher than anything she'd had from her tank. In fact, to hell with that at all. Blake shucked her way out of it and let it fall back into the water. The thing sank, being designed to be negatively buoyant so that scuba divers weren't dragged back up by their own oxygen supply. It took a lot of her rigging with it, which let her swim much more freely for their moored ship. That, at least, was where they'd left it, but it wouldn't be for long. Once the anchor set among the now moving anomaly was pulled tight, it would be slowly drawn away from them.

Luckily, that didn't happen. It was too slow or too focused on eating, so they made it to the boat with time to clamber up and aboard. Jaune tossed off his scuba gear on the wooden decking and moved quickly to ignite the engine and begin pulling the anchor up. The machine whirred, and water splashed, as the chain and weight began spooling back into the boat's hangar.

"I can't believe we survived that!" gasped Blake. "Three anomalies, Jaune! Four if you could Blood that Feeds. For crying out loud, we are not going into the ocean again." Blake slumped over the railing, hands dangling near the water and eyes staring down. "I refuse to even go near— erk!"

There was a face looking up at her from the water.

It was a fish-like face, but with human proportions, and wide, black eyes. Blake was frozen, looking down into it, and the thing broke the surface of the water, pushing something yellow up at her. Her scuba tank. Swallowing, Blake took the straps and hauled the tank and her rigging out the water. By the time she had, the thing had vanished, swimming off downward and away, leaving her quietly terrified and more than a little shaken.

"What?" asked Jaune. "What's up?"

"J-Just saying how I'm never going in the ocean again. Never. I'll stick to lakes and rivers."

"Hmm. Plenty of anomalies in those as well."

"Then I'll never swim again in my life! I'll stick to land!" Blake dragged herself back and sat on the decking, her back to the wall. Here, at least, she couldn't possible see anything in the water. "And I know there are just as many on land, but damn it Jaune, I can run away from or fight those! I've never felt so helpless before!"

"You know, most of them might not even be anomalies." Jaune pushed the lever forward and sent the motor at the back into action, propelling them across the water's surface. "They could be perfectly native and normal parts of our oceans that we just never discovered. Aside from the one that talked to us and wanted to be seen. It was able to mimic my mother's voice, and I assume it did the same for you. At least that thing is dead." He just had to ruin it by adding, "Assuming it's a one-off anomaly and that there aren't hundreds of them down there."

"Jaune, please," groaned Blake. "I can't right now. I just can't."

She just wanted off this damn ocean.


Next Chapter: 14th August

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