The High-Voltage Catch
In the beginning, everyone was simply amused. Weak as they were, the fishmen had spent weeks lurking beneath the waves waiting to ambush innocent survivors, so nobody held an ounce of sympathy for them. When the very first carcass floated up belly-up, the general consensus across the forum was that the scaly bastard had gotten exactly what was coming to it.
Yet as several more bodies bobbed to the surface in rapid succession, the lighthearted banter began to taper off.
Before long, every single fishman dwelling beneath the lake floated to the top, blanketing the water's surface from bank to bank. A chilling silence descended upon the forum, and a collective shudder crept through the comment section.
The electrical current showed no discrimination. It hunted down the fishmen swimming openly through the depths and eradicated those tucked securely within the crags of underwater boulders. The moment metal touched water, a silent, pervasive bolt of lightning saturated the entire pool, obliterating every living thing it grazed.
Derrick—known online as xXStormMageXx—loosened his grip and let the long pole slip from his trembling fingers.
“Is this... what genuine lightning magic looks like...?”
Whatever his quirks, Derrick was an archmage of lightning. The split second the rod kissed the lake, he had caught it—a faint, unmistakable resonance. It was the presence of raw, high-voltage energy rippling through the water and claiming the depths in an instant. It existed on an entirely different plane from his own spells, which merely burned up exorbitant quantities of mana to imitate the properties of electricity.
“I couldn't sense a trace of mana.”
Was this the true hallmark of an Archmage? He hadn't felt the slightest ripple of magical power. It had behaved as though it were pure, unadulterated electricity itself. The realization struck Derrick like a physical blow, and a dangerously reckless thought flickered across his mind.
Unaware that his contemplative expression had been captured in a screen snippet and posted straight to the board, Derrick let his eyes gleam with feverish excitement.
“The supreme essence of high magic is sealed within this contraption...”
What were mages at their core? They were mad scholars who would gladly trade their lives if it meant catching a glimpse of a higher magical plane. Furthermore, the discipline of lightning magic had long been mocked as an incomplete, defective school of thought. And truth be told, hadn't their art been utterly flawed from inception? All a lightning mage could ever do was spend mana to fashion a cheap mockery of a spark, or stand beneath storm clouds praying to draw down a wild strike from the sky.
“We could never truly command the lightning itself.”
To Derrick's eyes, this modest iron box was nothing short of the holy grail—the pinnacle of everything lightning research ought to be.
A rival fire mage who frequently traded barbs with Derrick on the forum was the first to recognize the signs. It took a lunatic to understand a lunatic.
Dozens of well-meaning forum users joined the fire mage in desperately attempting to dissuade him, but their words fell on deaf ears.
“Perhaps... just perhaps, through this vessel, even I might obtain true enlightenment.”
Derrick had already abandoned half his sanity. Resting before him was a direct manifestation of divine craftsmanship wrought by the Head Moderator—an Archmage, if not a transcendent existence entirely. Trembling with anticipation, Derrick's lips parted into a wide, unhinged grin as he muttered under his breath.
“I can't take it anymore.”
His primal thirst for magical ascension had overwhelmed what little reason remained. He cast his gaze back toward the insulated rod wired into the battery pack—the divine catalyst that had annihilated an entire aquatic ecosystem in the span of two seconds. After a moment of frantic hesitation, Derrick reached out and gripped the exposed terminal.
With his bare hand.
“Guh!”
In that horrific instant, the unbridled, high-voltage current surged directly through his palm and tore into his mortal flesh. An unimaginable shock ripped through every nerve in his body.
“Kgh—AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”
At first, he had no thoughts at all. There was only a blinding, paralyzing abyss threatening to rip his consciousness apart. Then, clinging desperately to his fraying sanity, his second thought surfaced: Oh, fuck, I shouldn't have done that!
And finally, pushing past the agony, Derrick ignited every drop of mana in his body alongside his accumulated knowledge of the elements, straining with everything he had to peer beyond the threshold of his limitations.
“Ugggh... AAAAAHHH!”
Bzzzzzzt... CRACKLE-BOOOOM!
Driven by pure survival, he managed to channel the dense, agonizing voltage through his core and vent it outward through his opposite palm. The current erupting from his left hand fused seamlessly with his circulating mana, growing blindingly bright and terrifyingly sharp. It burst through the air like a miniature bolt of heaven's wrath, violently striking the earth precisely where he willed it to fall.
It was no third-rate parlor trick that merely imitated thunder. It was authentic, living lightning.
Sizzzzzle...
“Hah... haah... haaah...”
Surrounded by the acrid stench of scorched ozone and singing flesh, Derrick collapsed gracelessly onto the dirt, completely spent. Yet even as he sprawled face-down in the mud, his face was painted in pure, unadulterated ecstasy.
“Aah... is this... is this supreme magic...?”
He felt as though he had brushed the hem of the omnipotent grace wielded by his revered idol, the Head Moderator. And on an instinctual level, he knew: through this terrifying revelation, the stubborn, invisible circle that had shackled his progress for decades had finally shattered.
“Is this the absolute omnipotence that our Archmage, Lord Judddak, experiences every single day?!”
Meanwhile, across the gallery, countless users bore witness to a mortal mage breaking through his limits. Amid the stunned silence, the Head Moderator left a single comment, as if acknowledging the man's profound growth with deep, fatherly grace...
It was Judddak's nth profanity of the day, past the point where anyone bothered keeping count.
Our resident celebrity Fixed Nickname, xXStormMageXx.
That absolute madman had actually grabbed a live car battery with his bare hands. And whether the shock had permanently fried his synapses or not, he was now spamming my notifications with tearful proclamations of lifelong devotion.
At first, I made an honest attempt to clear up the misunderstanding. Naturally, it didn't work. When I switched to throwing curses at him, he merely wept harder, crying about how profoundly grateful he was for the harsh discipline of his new master.
“DeeplyOffendedElf.png.”
Had my brain overheated? I was blurting out forum image tags out loud in reality. Then again, how many agitators had I dealt with since becoming the Head Moderator? Surprise messiah worship was just another flavor of forum trolling, familiar even from my days back in modern Korea. I drew a deep breath and surveyed the broader picture.
“Well, does this mean the fishman problem is sorted out?”
The electrofishing rig had exceeded all expectations. It turned the pests into boiled seafood before they could even crawl ashore.
The gallery had transformed into an outright carnival. Just as I was beginning to let my guard down, assuming the aquatic mutant crisis had reached a tidy conclusion, a discordant post popped up on the board.
The buzzkill thread was met with immediate, chilly hostility. Unfazed by the backlash, the original poster stubbornly pressed forward with their point.
The electrofishing method had an obvious limitation. It was fine to zap a contaminated farm pond into oblivion, but what were we supposed to do about massive freshwater lakes or the open sea? Wiping out vast aquatic ecosystems with industrial-grade voltage would just accomplish the Rift's goal for it.
“He's spitting facts.”
The logic was sound. But to a forum currently drunk on celebration, it was an unwelcome dose of reality.
It was true. Shark-headed mutants were already crawling onto beaches, and massive carp and catfish fishmen continued to haul themselves out of the Great Lakes.
The community wasn't ready to let reality sink in. And honestly, it made sense. These survivors had spent half their lives as broken underdogs in a ruined world. They didn't want to let go of the intoxicating taste of victory so soon.
Even so, turning a blind eye couldn't change the truth. Neither steel-clad knights nor brilliant mages possessed the means to dive hundreds of meters into freezing depths to hunt down hordes of amphibious abominations.
The festive atmosphere evaporated almost instantly, plunging the thread back into grim despair. Mortals—living beings—couldn't breathe underwater. It was an immutable law of nature.
Which meant the solution was blindingly simple.
“If we need to go underwater, we just go underwater.”
Can't breathe down there?
“Then you just bring your own breath with you.”
Items have been safely delivered to your inventory!
Submarine shock troops? Underwater knights? Now that was an aesthetic I couldn't possibly pass up.
Grinning to myself, I immediately raided the system shop, snapping up diving cylinders, regulators, masks, and a full suite of deep-sea expedition gear.