The Swimming Saintess
Sloshing ripples fled outward across the face of the water.
"...How much farther must I go?"
Eila turned and looked back along the way she had come. The sun had long since gone down. All around her lay stillness, and a lightless dark. Moonlight and starlight fell from the sky above, and the water took that light in and gave it back in a shivering gleam, weaving a dreamlike hush over the sea.
Walking on like this, she found old memories rising of their own accord. It had been crowded then. Overflowing with life. A journey that had been happy—so happy.
Her steps stopped.
This would not do. The past was only the past. What mattered now was doing what the present required of her. She walked on.
A long while passed.
The sacred art of [Water Walking]. Just as the name promised, it was a blessing that let one walk upon the water—exceedingly convenient, if one set aside a single flaw. The flaw was this: the moment its bearer moved beyond a certain speed, the art came undone at once. And so Eila had no choice but to walk. At a full sprint, she was certain she would have arrived long ago.
"Map."
A translucent map unfolds.
Eila worked it with practiced ease, drawing a line from where she stood now back to the place she had begun to walk.
"...I've drifted to the right."
The sea was vast, and it offered nothing by which to judge direction—nothing, at most, but the occasional reef glimpsed along the way. Had she not been checking the map, she would surely have wandered off in some senseless direction. A leap at full power would have told her which way she needed to go, but then [Water Walking] would have broken.
A sacred art demanded that its blessing prayer be recited in full, line after line. Sacred Magic was different. Like a spell shed of its chant, or a hand seal closed in a single motion, it let her call a sacred art down at once through some specific gesture. [Purification], for instance, did not require its prayer. Snap one's fingers, speak the name, and it answered.
For [Water Walking], the gesture was a tap of the toes against the ground. If the art came undone, she could not rise to the surface again until she dove and struck the seafloor. Reciting the prayer would have served just as well—but she had forgotten the prayer for [Water Walking] long ago. Those prayers were absurdly long, and letting go of the ones she was unlikely to need was kinder to one's peace of mind.
If the restriction had never existed, she would not have been fretting over any of this. Why was there a restriction like that in the first place?
Eila sighed and set off toward the left. She would walk on at an angle, check her position again, and correct her course from there.
Every step brought a slosh. Through her shoes came a strange sensation, as though she were treading solid rock that nonetheless yielded, soft and sinking, beneath her weight. She turned her head to look back the way she had come. There was no point in it. She simply wanted to.
A black sky, and a sea just as black. Stars crowded the heavens and gave off light, and across the water the swells broke and glittered in answer. Where did the sky end, and where did the sea begin? The darkened horizon smeared the boundary between them until it nearly vanished.
"Ah."
She looked up. A single moon, cloven in half. So it was not only the sun. There was only one moon here as well.
Her chest went cold. It was cold. It hurt. Why? Night, the sea, beneath the moonlight—he had taken both her hands and cried out, his face flushed scarlet. It was such a happy memory. Why, then, did her chest ache like this?
She lifted a hand. The motion was unconscious. Perhaps—perhaps someone would take it—
"...As if that could ever happen."
Her hand only parted empty air. She turned and walked on. Water sloshed at her feet, and now and then a wave rolled and broke. Because of those sounds, she was not lonely. She wanted to believe that.
She kept walking.
Far ahead, something came into view. Darkness, wavering. Clouds, most likely. And clouds meant—
"There is land."
To think the useless scraps of common knowledge Leo had taught her would prove helpful like this. Eila smiled bitterly. Leo, the youngest of the party—the last member the Hero had taken in, over everyone else's objections. What did a party even need a thief for? That was what they had said, back then.
"I really shouldn't keep doing this."
A laugh escaped her. Memories of the old days were bound up in one another, and they surfaced together. The more she turned those happy recollections over, the lonelier this walk became.
She let out a sigh and was just about to step forward when—
"Ngh?!"
A wet sensation closed around her ankle. Startled, she looked down. Something was wound about her left ankle. Seaweed, she thought—and in that same instant—
"Kh—ugh!!"
A sudden force hauled at her body. Eila planted both feet hard against the surface. Slowly, she was being drawn down beneath the water. More precisely, her left ankle was. Whatever had bound it was writhing.
"This is..."
A tentacle.
"Hrgh!!"
The strength behind it was tremendous. Eila found herself locked in a tug-of-war she had never asked for. In raw power, they were evenly matched.
This might be dangerous.
If the contest of strength dragged on, she would be the one to lose. Cold sweat broke on her skin.
[Water Walking] had one more weakness, and it was structural. The art worked by driving buoyancy to its extreme. The water did not turn solid; one merely floated upon it and walked. That principle carried a quiet threat: under a sudden, enormous weight, the walker could sink, even while the blessing still held. And sinking would mean being pinned beneath water pressing in from every side—water the sacred art made feel impossibly hard.
What do I do about this?
Eila pinched her nose between finger and thumb and breathed out through her mouth. A bluish light wrapped her face.
[Underwater Breathing]
"One moment."
Eila kicked her right foot high and brought it down with all her strength—through the surface, and through the tentacle coiled around her ankle. A tremendous shockwave burst outward, and her body shot into the sky.
The art has come undone.
"I'll come to you."
The body that had leapt toward the sky plunged straight down into the sea. It was time to start swimming.
"Emergency! Emergency!!"
Busan. The Fourteenth Naval Base. Alarms shrieked without number, and lights flashed and flared.
"Report!"
"Yes, sir! One Kraken has been sighted in the nearby waters. At its current speed, it should reach the shore around seven o'clock."
"Damn it. How big?"
"Fortunately, it isn't that large. Estimated class: killer-whale."
Killer-whale class. It did not mean the beast was the size of a killer whale. It meant the beast was large enough to take killer whales as prey.
"Small mercies. We rip it out by the roots before it finishes growing. How many torpedoes do we have left?"
"All of them are loaded, sir."
"Good. Get them ready to depart."
Dungeons appeared without regard for place. Plenty of them, naturally, had been born in the deep sea, and so long as those dungeons endured, the ocean was no longer a domain humankind could call its own. Monsters spilled from them and roamed the water as if it were home. Megalodon. Charybdis. Scylla. And the Kraken—a predator of the abyss, a massive body trailed by a forest of tentacles, gliding through the dark below.
Even now, word still came around often enough of a single Kraken smashing an entire fleet to pieces. That, however, was a fully grown Kraken. From what the satellites had confirmed, this one had only just left its dungeon: a juvenile. It would be smaller, and it would have fewer tentacles to bring to bear. Pour enough torpedoes into it, and it could be killed.
Even so, a Kraken was dangerous. They could not let the thing leave the sea. If they meant to keep the damage small, they had to finish it before it reached the shore.
The ships set out, making for the red dot that marked where the Kraken was thought to be. Soldiers formed ranks across the decks, rifles in hand. A Kraken meant a Gate somewhere in the nearby sea, and that meant other monsters might be down there as well—fishmen, for one. Keeping such things off the ships was what the soldiers were there to do.
Little by little, the ships slowed. Everyone went tense. A voice came over the speakers: they were about to close on the Kraken. The vessels, slowing by degrees, came at last to a dead stop—and in that moment—
BOOM!!!
"Whoa?!"
"Wh-what was that?!"
A column of water blasted upward with the blast, thick and stark, tall enough to see even in the black of night. The column sank, lower and lower, and then—
CRASH!!!
The ship rocked. It was an enormous wave.
"What the fuck was that?!"
"Did a bomb go off?"
Uneasy muttering spread across the deck. In the wheelhouse, the opposite happened: a heavy silence settled in. The great column of water had erupted at the very spot where the Kraken was estimated to be.
"The signature... it's gone?"
The column was not the only reason for the silence. The instant it vanished, the Kraken's signature vanished with it. The reading meant one of two things: the Kraken was dead, or in the brief span between the column's rise and its fall, it had fled beyond the range of detection. Everyone held their breath. A thing that could send a Kraken running with its tail tucked—or a thing that could kill one. Whichever it was, it was worse than the Kraken.
"Damn it, anything on the radar?"
"Nothing on radar, si— huh?"
"What?!"
"Something's moving at high speed! Projected destination is... here?!"
"What?!"
Bang.
The ship shook.