59
Chapter 59
After Oceanus exchanged glances, Parang stood up from her seat.
She was going to fetch what was needed to find Titan.
"......I'll bring it. Just wait a moment."
Parang quietly headed to the innermost room on the first floor.
Opening the door revealed a long flight of stairs leading to the basement, and at the end of the stairs was another door.
Parang went down and grabbed the doorknob.
From beyond, the gurgling sound of flowing water could be heard.
As she opened the door, a strong fishy smell of water wafted out from the dark basement room.
At the same time, the gurgling sound of the water grew louder.
She fumbled along the wall and click- turned on the switch, revealing a massive water tank.
It was structured to continuously draw in and circulate seawater.
Parang performed purification on all the other water tanks in the house herself, but not this one.
Parang hated this space. Just having such an area in her house made her uncomfortable, so she had shoved it into the most secluded, inconspicuous corner where she would never usually set eyes on it.
She jumped into the water tank with a splash.
Inside, eight human-sized statues, with their heads, arms, and legs broken off leaving only the torsos, were tightly held in binding.
Parang hoisted one of them onto her shoulder and came out.
By the time she returned to the living room, all of Oceanus had finished preparing to enter the water.
They went outside and stood side by side on the pier right in front of Parang's house.
"......Let's go."
The six of them dove into the sea simultaneously, with exactly the same movements, not an inch out of place.
It was a perfect dive, barely kicking up a few bubbles.
Today of all days, the face of a precious comrade who always dove beside them flickered before her eyes.
#
Splash-! Swoosh......
The cool touch of the seawater wrapped around Parang's entire body.
This feeling of a body that had been walking in the air sinking into the water.
A refreshing and cool rush of invigoration.
This was the reason Parang liked diving.
However, right now, she couldn't fully enjoy this sensation.
This was partly for the very ordinary reason that she was carrying a person-sized statue on her back, and also because of the complex emotions currently clouding her mind.
Parang blankly watched as Diego's entire body was covered by a decompression diving suit.
Just like a nano suit from a movie. A black mass formed out of nothing in the water, morphing into the shape of a thick diving suit that covered his entire body.
After about 30 seconds, Diego's usual underwater appearance appeared before her eyes.
"......Let's go."
"Yeah."
They dove down, further down.
Their destination was the toothpaste tube objet where Parang had first spotted Titan.
Given the gravity of the situation, they simply swam downwards in silence.
"Ah, there it is."
Before long, the toothpaste tube objet revealed itself before them.
Current depth, 2.1 kilometers below sea level.
A fierce, glowing light emanated from inside.
Probably some mediocre monster fish had made its nest there.
With a snap of Elvira's fingers, a grand explosion erupted inside the objet.
Inside, along with gunpowder, pieces of flesh from the monster fish were probably splattering everywhere.
That was none of Oceanus's concern.
They went down, further down.
If there was a difference from before, it was only that they were now looking straight down and descending vertically.
2.7 kilometers below sea level.
The deep blue void that had filled their vision faded, replaced by pure blackness.
It was the floor. The floor of the East Sea.
Footprints were imprinted there.
Footprints carved by something unimaginably massive and heavy, crushing the bedrock floor itself.
Centered around the largest footprints were distinctly smaller footprints belonging to four others.
This was all that could be seen from above.
If they went down further and looked closely, they would probably see even smaller footprints, and smaller human-sized footprints clustered tightly together.
That was right.
The statues travel in packs.
Usually, a 'Magnus' with a height of about 100 meters acts as the leader, and under it, 10-meter 'Medius' and human-sized 'Parvum' form a group.
And a Titan, standing about 1 kilometer tall, commands three or four Magnus.
This meant that beneath the Titan Parang saw that day, there must have been hundreds of smaller statues.
Looking at the direction of the prints, they went west.
The Titan was there.
Oceanus moved again.
#
How much time had passed?
The footprints that continued westward came to an end.
Instead of the footprints that should be there, there were only round, bizarre patterns. It was reminiscent of a crop circle.
It meant they had arrived.
Parang placed the headless statue she had been carrying on her back down onto the floor.
Thud, crack.
The floor cracked slightly.
As one might expect, it was an incapacitated 'Parvum' entity.
Calling it incapacitated was an understatement; its limbs and head had simply been chopped off before being brutally bound.
It had struggled so much the whole way here that Parang's shoulder was aching.
As Oceanus had discovered through much trial and error, when a Statue is destroyed, it calls out to other nearby Statues.
To put it more accurately, you could say it awakens them.
"......I'll begin."
"......Okay."
Parang had already activated her Personal and transformed.
Summing the Kraken would be useless, but the power of her other skills would also increase significantly.
She gathered water in her hand to create a Bubble Bomb, then placed it against the Parvum's solar plexus.
Kaa-boooom!!!!
Soon, about ten explosions occurred in succession within less than a second.
The Parvum's body instantly shattered and scattered everywhere.
Pieces of flesh, no, it would be more accurate to call them shards of pottery.
The sharp fragments flew in all directions, raining down on Oceanus, but they just kept looking at Parang without even blinking.
Clang- clank- thwack-
The shards, which seemed like they could instantly slice and pierce human flesh into pieces of meat, simply bounced off powerlessly as if hitting firm, elastic rubber, far from harming their bodies.
And then, boom.
With the final explosion, a red energy wave erupted from the Parvum.
Before she knew it, a blood-red magic stone was resting in Parang's hand.
The surrounding fragments had long since disappeared with a whoosh.
As Parang casually tossed the magic stone onto the ground, a Skeleton doll crawled out from beneath it, grabbed the stone, and disappeared somewhere.
And as soon as it vanished with the magic stone, the ground began to rumble.
Rumble. Tremble.
Of course, it wasn't an earthquake.
It was the sound of them crawling up.
From way down below.
From the depths beneath the deep sea.
Parang's expression hardened.
Everyone's expressions hardened.
The Titan they were about to destroy was the ninth Titan they had hunted.
They had already felt the futility with their entire bodies while destroying eight Titans previously.
They had tried shattering them, crushing them, and melting them.
However, they couldn't even find a shadow of their precious comrade who had been grabbed by a Titan's hand and dragged to the bottom of the sea.
One, and then another.
Every time a Titan fell, a terrible pain washed over them.
Emptiness, disappointment, futility, despondency, sorrow.
And a longing that pierced them to the bone.
They also knew that hoping was meaningless.
So they carefully disguised their hopes with anger.
"Even if we destroy this Titan, Alice won't return."
'I came down here for revenge.'
'The emotions making my heart race right now are anger and fighting spirit.'
But no matter how much they tried to disguise their emotions, no matter how deep they buried and tightly sealed them away in their hearts.
Standing on this trembling ground, there was a single sentence that stubbornly crawled up from the base of their consciousness to finally reveal itself.
'This time, maybe.'
Might we be able to find a trace of her?
And so, they would strike down a Titan again this time.
They would likely writhe in the emptiness and longing that would visit them once more.
And if the next Titan appeared, they would dive into the sea to chase after it.
None of them were unaware that this was a meaningless action.
Everyone knew it was an act with no reward, only pain to follow.
However, the option of giving up had long been erased from their minds.
From the moment Alice left their side like that, they only had one choice left from the very beginning.
To scour this damnably vast sea while weeping mournfully.
This was the reason none of them hesitated to dive into this perilous sea,
and also the reason everyone in Oceanus could be so tightly knit together.
So this time as well, shedding invisible tears, they dove into the sea.
If they smashed that monster again, maybe this time.
Wouldn't a trace of their dearly missed comrade appear?
Because they couldn't erase such hopes.
Crackle- crack-
Smash!!
Behind Parang, a white arm pierced through the ground and shot up.
Smooth, hard, and heavy white rock.
Like in the prologue of a zombie movie, it pushed off the ground and crawled up.
The fact that an expressionless plaster Statue was rising with such savage movements was truly bizarre.
Parang placed her hand on the chest of the Parvum, which had only its upper body sticking out of the ground and was trying to pull its lower half out.
Kaa-boooom!!!
It exploded in the exact same way, turning into light and disappearing.
The ground began to vibrate with a much fiercer momentum than before.
This was just the beginning.
Crumble, crunch, crack, crackle.
Countless Statues began crawling up from underground.
Some were big, some were small, and some were so massive they couldn't be taken in at a single glance.
Oceanus silently glared at the cursed things.
They couldn't see each other's eyes, but they knew.
The look in the eyes of the comrade standing beside them right now would be exactly the same as their own.
......The battle had begun.