Illegal Fishing Gallery (Part 3)

Mermen came in all varieties. Virtually every mundane fish known to man could manifest as an amphibious abomination, though regardless of which species they mirrored, their individual combat strength remained uniformly pathetic.

Because they were so weak, their predatory instinct revolved around pack tactics.

They operated on a different wavelength compared to mindless demonic beasts. The mermen possessed a cunning, slippery arrogance that rubbed the forum users raw with infuriating helplessness.

Bet you can't catch us, can you?

The knights burned with the urge to bash their scaly skulls in, but entering deep water in heavy armor was suicidal. The mermen exploited that territorial advantage to the absolute fullest, and by all rights, they should have enjoyed that supremacy indefinitely.

“Glub?”

“Gurgle?”

“Knight to meet you.”

Right until human knights strapped with bizarre metal cylinders marched out along the lakebed.

I had purchased complete scuba diving gear sets through the marketplace. Air tanks, regulators, diving masks, neoprene boots, flippers—an exhaustive list of modern nautical supplies.

“Can someone actually fight while wearing all this?” I had mumbled aloud while browsing the inventory.

Humans had virtually no reason to dive into the abyss for melee combat in the first place, which meant the gear was tailored strictly for delicate civilian exploration. If a tank ruptured or a breathing hose was severed during a brawl, it would trigger an instant catastrophe. It looked entirely unsuited for military deployment.

...Or so I had thought back then.

“Right, I forgot. These are the lunatics who treat mortal lacerations by pouring milk directly into the wound.”

In a post-apocalyptic medieval world, the frail—hell, even the average—had long since perished under the merciless claws of demonic beasts.

Only absolute genetic freaks built like brick outhouses remained alive in this era. Consequently, out of the mountain of specialized diving equipment I had supplied, the only components that survived their practical selection were the air tanks and the breathing regulators. For everything else, they simply strapped on their usual full suits of plate armor over their thick padded gambesons.

No, their madness didn't stop there.

To fortify their sole apparent weaknesses, they forged solid iron cages to encase the air cylinders and fashioned heavy armored cowls to protect the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠regulators. Instead of graceful scuba diving, they had invented the brutal, clanking monstrosity known as Scuba Walking.

Clank, clank.

Thus, the lakebed bore witness to the bizarre spectacle of human knights clad in hundreds of pounds of solid steel casually strolling across the silty bottom like siege towers taking a stroll in the park.

“This is deviating quite a bit from what I had envisioned,” I muttered, staring at the screen.

Of course, the fishmen weren't entirely helpless. They were agile swimmers, darting between underwater boulders and wedging themselves deep into rocky crevices. Knights stomping heavily across the muck had zero hope of pursuing them with raw foot speed.

Thunk!

Skrrrreeeech!

A steel harpoon, however, possessed more than enough reach.

Conventional firearms suffered catastrophic velocity loss underwater, and lobbing fragmentation grenades was out of the question since the resulting concussive shockwaves would rupture the internal organs of my own armored users. In that case, a water-gun—specifically, a pneumatic speargun firing steel-tipped harpoons, an engineering concept refined over centuries—was the ideal solution.

The fishmen were cheap and cowardly. All we needed to do was render their cowardice entirely obsolete. Because the harpoons were affordably priced, I mass-distributed them to every armored knight marching beneath the waves.

“I didn't design the damn thing!”

Strictly speaking, it was modern Earth equipment developed across centuries of marine hunting. In my eyes, it ranked among the most mundane survival tools available in the catalog, but to the desperate survivors of this fantasy realm, it appeared to be the brainchild of an eldritch torturer.

Above all, the air tanks didn't possess infinite capacity. Naturally, instead of taking their sweet time butchering fishmen along the murky lake bottom, it proved vastly faster for the knights to spear their quarry and winch them up by the braided towline.

Walking deliberately out of the shallows while dragging writhing, skewered mermen, the knights watched the thrashing creatures collapse into unconsciousness from sheer shock.

Regardless of what anyone thought my intentions were, the campaign succeeded brilliantly in sowing raw terror among the fishmen. The creatures, previously so smug and brazen, were paralyzed with dread after watching their kin hauled onto dry land like prize catches.

Consequently, shoreline incursions plummeted to near zero, and subjugating them transitioned into routine pest extermination.

With the sudden abundance of amphibian monsters, a brand-new economic profession emerged overnight: Merman Hunters.

It bore little resemblance to ordinary commercial fishing. Beyond the cultural prestige of holding an officially recognized Gallery vocation, hunters directly acquired premium beast meat and pure Mana Dumplings. Considering that the average forum user barely scraped together 1,000 dango a month, it represented an astronomical fortune.

Naturally, that economic tidal wave reached my own ledger.

“Wait, my personal earnings are shooting up too?”

Mermen possessed a drop rate of Mana Dumplings that far outstripped their pathetic combat rating. Hunters paid reasonable access fees to local lakeside settlements, swept the waters clean, and funneled surplus currency directly back into my marketplace. Furthermore, because mermen were culled the moment they spawned, natural freshwater ecosystems avoided any catastrophic collapses.

“At this rate, the marketplace will level up again in no time.”

With every level the Marketplace gained, my passive point production increased by substantial multipliers. Items that had once made my fingers tremble at their exorbitant price tags might soon be purchased on a casual whim.

Chime!

A priority alert chimed from the administrator chat console. The sender was Full-Health Elf.

“That's unusual,” I murmured, somewhat surprised by the notification.

Ever since Felici had been instated as an Assistant Moderator, Full-Health Elf had found herself answering to two terrifying disciplinarians, keeping her remarkably quiet and obedient. On top of that, she had attached an image file.

An unsolicited image alert?

Intrigued, I clicked into the private console.

Framed in the chaotic photo was a merman. Or rather, a creature of such staggering, monolithic mass that calling it a 'merman' felt like a violent insult to language itself.

I blinked hard at the monitor.

“...That's a fucking whale.”

It was a whale—a creature that belonged exclusively to the deep, uncharted oceans.

If she uploaded that candid shot to the Gallery right now, it would smash through the Hall of Fame upvote threshold in ten seconds flat.

A leviathan whale had made landfall in El-Ladh.