Electrofishing Gallery (Part 1)

Demonic beasts had raided a village.

On the surface, it was just another mundane occurrence in this ruined fantasy world. The catch, however, was that beasts emerging straight out of open water had never been documented before.

In terms of raw strength, fishmen were feeble critters, ranked in the same gutter tier as basic zombies. Mindlessly aggressive and hopelessly dim-witted, their physical power and durability were practically indistinguishable from an ordinary human's. Any halfway able-bodied villager with a club or pitchfork could easily bash one to death in a straight brawl.

The real issue lay beneath the surface — the rift spawning them was stationed underwater.

Subsequent investigation revealed that the rift hadn't just materialized overnight. It had formed quietly beneath the pond long ago, festering undetected until the accumulated charge finally erupted.

“Why isn't the water draining, though?” I muttered.

If the rift had simply acted like an open drain and sucked up all the liquid, draining the pond dry, dealing with it would have been trivial. Instead, the rift rested calmly in the deep mud, submerged and humming without pulling in so much as a drop. That made it far more treacherous. It was nothing short of a live time bomb resting on the village pond floor, liable to detonate whenever it pleased.

Worse still, an even more immediate disaster soon emerged.

Ordinary fish swimming nearby had been sucked right through the fissure. After gestating within the extradimensional rift, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠they were spat back out during the wave — warped into mutant, bipedal fishmen.

Naturally, that dealt a catastrophic blow to the local economy.

The fishermen found themselves facing utter ruin. Unable to catch and sell edible fish, their breadwinning was extinguished in an instant.

Above all else, a rift had opened beneath the water. That stoked an icy wave of paranoia across the continent — if it could happen in this pond, it could happen anywhere standing water gathered.

Since armored knights were utterly useless beneath the waves, popular expectation naturally pivoted toward the magic towers. Surely, the esteemed practitioners of the arcane arts could conjure an elegant solution. The reality, unfortunately, was just as dismal.

Magic was broadly split into two distinct branches: combat and non-combat. Even within combat magic, disciplines branched into fire, water, earth, lightning, and countless obscure variations. Lightning, in particular, belonged to the realm of high-tier, advanced arcana. Screaming “Thunderbolt!” at an apprentice mage wasn't going to produce a single spark.

Fortunately, one did.

An eccentric off-meta lightning archmage — and a powerhouse prominent enough to erect an entire Magic Tower of his own.

“Wait a minute. Can't Ji-pok-beop handle this on his own?”

Creatures crawling out of water? Discharge an electric current into the pond, and they would turn into grilled fish fillets before taking a single step onto dry land. I figured the problem had found an easy solution, but reality proved far more disappointing.

Fitting for an advanced spell, the chant took an eternity. Yet even after gathering mana toward the sky for ages, an even worse problem surfaced.

“Unbelievable.”

The strike point wasn't even adjustable.

“So it could literally come crashing down onto his own skull?”

To put the icing on the cake, Ji-pok-beop collapsed right into the dirt, entirely drained of mana after a single cast. It was an impossibly spoiled, bratty spell.

“Guess relying on mages is out of the question.”

Still, giving up was premature. Back on modern Earth before my transmigration, there had been thousands of niche imageboards covering every subject imaginable. Having haunted forums for years, my head was crammed with trivial, useless knowledge.

“Including the Fishing Gallery.”

And on that Fishing Gallery, one legendary troll post had etched itself into forum history. It had been wiped within minutes under an avalanche of downvotes and reports, but I had caught it with my own two eyes.

“Thank you, my dear troll teacher…”

It was a clip demonstrating battery fishing — an outlawed poaching method strictly banned in Korea.

The memory of that battery fishing footage remained vivid. Although the post had vanished almost immediately under a barrage of reports, my chronic board addiction had ensured I caught every second of it. The moment an electrified rod touched the water, entire schools of fish surfaced belly-up in droves. All the man in the video had to do was scoop them into the hull with a landing net.

“It's straight-up cheating.”

A technique so absurd it felt like toggling developer cheats on a private server. In modern society, it had been heavily outlawed due to the catastrophic risk of water contamination and total ecological collapse. But this was another world — a lawless frontier where brute force and basic survival trumped the penal code.

“Just you wait, fish freaks.”

Fishing ethics? Who gives a damn.

I browsed the system store and ordered a heavy-duty, high-voltage battery tailored for battery fishing.

“Normally, people just wire up a regular car battery, but…”

Out here, the fish were the size of full-grown men. Accordingly, I bought an industrial-grade high-voltage battery pack packing hundreds of times more punch. A dedicated, insulated pole to attach the terminals completed the set.

With the purchases squared away, I tracked down Ji-pok-beop, who was still lingering near the troubled pond.

“These guys are still at each other's throats?”

Ji-pok-beop was still locked in a fiery flame war with an anonymous fire mage poster.

There was no need to draft an exhaustive technical manual on what a battery was. Having previously supplied generators to the Fron territory, the concept seemed broadly understood among high-ranking users.

To be completely honest, I was a humanities major, so I don't really know the engineering details either.

A feral warrior against ordinary commenters, yet bizarrely obedient and reverent toward me — such was our resident fixed-handle eccentric, Ji-pok-beop. In no time at all, he marched back to the pond edge and proudly posted an update thread.

Barely three minutes had passed since Ji-pok-beop left his euphoric post.

Before long, a thread drenched in sheer, unadulterated panic appeared on the forum boards.