Between the undulating fleshy walls, the swallowed wreckage all around, and the ground of shallow blue digestive acids, Marisol didn’t feel like standing still.

  the Archive replied.

  She needed no telling twice. Before the giant remipede could decide to swallow another huge gulp of water, she made a break for its mouth two hundred meters in front, sour air whipping past her face.

  The alien walls blurred as she passed by, bioluminescent purples and blues streaking together like she was travelling through an ultra-long wormhole. She dodged and weaved, brittle branches snapping under her glaives as she skated past clusters of corals and shipwrecks scattered around like fallen giants. Trying to navigate through the fallen masts and twisted hulls was a challenge, but the first hundred meters were easy enough to bypass. She almost got her hopes up when she neared the giant remipede’s head, where she immediately spotted hundreds of giant shells attached to the walls and ceiling.

  Her face blanched.

  The shells were shaped like tiny volcanos, and the moment she crossed the final hundred-meter mark towards the remipede’s mouth, they started firing. A sharp hiss escaped her throat as she dodged past a spiny projectile that missed her neck, but there were dozens more, more where they came from. The half-flesh, half-shell bugs lay down a hailstorm of bony spines at her, forcing her to skate into a broken ship for cover.

  the Archive explained, and she let out an embarrassing shriek as a hundred spines stabbed into the rotten wooden hull around her with a series of thunderous . The ship she was hiding within wouldn’t last as cover for much longer.

  she snapped, peeking out from the edge of the hull to see if the coast was clear. She immediately whirled back in with a wince as a hundred spines shot at her, slicing off a few strands of hair.

  the Archive said casually.

  She blinked incredulously, trying once more—unsuccessfully—to peek out the hull.

  the Archive said.

  The Archive thought for a moment, and in that time, another volley of a hundred spines slammed into the hull all around her. Some of the rotten wooden boards were shot in and she hissed in pain; she felt like she was being slowly crushed in a giant’s hand.

  the Archive said quickly.

  Through the gaps in the hull, she peeked outside and ‘traced’ an escape route where she could continuously jump off of wreckages, theoretically allowing her to never come in contact with the ground—but what if the Archive was wrong and these barnacles just blind the moment she wasn’t touching the ground?

  If she went back out there, there was a very good chance she’d be impaled on all sides by a hundred spines.

  She wiped blood off her cheek where she’d been grazed by a spine, forcing a smile onto her face.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The second the next volley of spines slammed into the hull around her, she sped out from under the ship with her nails dragging along the ground, skating straight towards a broken mast raised like a ramp. There were a few seconds of delay before the barnacles recharged their spines, and they fired just as she skated off the ground, launching into the air with a flourishing spin.

  Miraculously, the hundred spines missed her. They shattered each other mid-air, and the barnacles warbled around as they seemingly panicked; they had no idea where she’d gone.

  She was a swirl of motion as she jumped across one wreckage to another, maintaining her momentum, dodging the spines as the barnacles fired blindly in her general direction. It seemed they weren’t stupid—they could guess where she was by the sounds she was making—but their accuracy was no match for her speed. The giant remipede’s mouth was just sixty meters ahead, and even if she couldn’t figure out how to get it to open its mouth, just being able to get there had to be good enough progress.

  But, whether it was because the giant remipede could feel her kicking up a storm inside it, or because it could feel the barnacles missing their target and stabbing its insides with their spines instead, the Sand-Dancer’s misfortune struck again.

  The giant remipede as its giant mouth pried open, just thirty meters in front of her, and a fifty-meter-tall wall of seawater started rushing in to shove the wreckage deeper into its body.

  Panicking, she lost balance and slipped off the ship railing she was skating across. Thankfully, she fell through a hole to land inside the lower deck of the broken ship instead of outside the ship. A wall of water slammed into everything outside in the next second with a tremendous roar.

  She managed to grip onto the edge of a splintered wooden beam, her knuckles white with tension as the entire ship buckled inwards. The world became a chaotic blur. Her wooden beam snapped. She was thrown violently into the walls, colliding with jagged edges and rusted metal. Pain and cold exploded across her body as seawater flooded the ship through the gunports and the holes in the ceiling. The taste of blood and salt made her stomach churn—getting tossed around like a ragdoll for a second time within ten minutes was about to make her brain explode.

  Just as her head threatened to burst, the wave quelled. The water receded and drained from the ship. The ship itself lurched a few more times, then settled with a groaning thud against the ground.

  She lay flat on her stomach, face down in the slightly stinging acid, and… for a second, she tried and failed to move her body.

  In the next second, the Archive stimulated adrenaline in her veins and made her jolt upright with a gasp, taking a deep breath of the foul, thick air inside the ship. Quickly, she pushed herself onto her glaives and stumbled into a wall—the rotten wall collapsed and she stumbled outside as a result, slamming her head against a giant coral that’d been swept back alongside the rest of the wreckage.

  Breathing hard and heavy, she trudged over to a nearby chunk of coral and plopped herself down, her whole body aching and groaning for rest. She didn’t even want to look at the cuts and scrapes and bruises across her skin; she’d just freak herself out even more. She glance to her side to see the rest of the wave sweeping deeper into the remipede’s body—it could’ve swept her a deeper in, but the ship must’ve been heavy enough to escape the force before that could happen—and yet the sight of the wave moving away didn’t fill her with a single bit of relief whatsoever.

  She’d been pushed back four hundred meters—two hundred meters deeper into the remipede than where she’d started off.

  the Archive answered, plucking the question from her head as she put her face in her hands, grimacing in silence.

  She tried her hardest not to sigh.

  She really, really, had to keep her scream of frustration in her.

  At least there weren’t barnacles this deep into the remipede. If she could, theoretically, get past the barnacles near the front, she’d still have to figure out a way to get the remipede to open its mouth on command—getting smashed by a tidal wave of water that could crush her skull by sheer weight and speed.

  Right now, she needed to let her body rest, but could she even survive the next wave of water? There wasn’t a rat’s chance in hell the rotten and broken ship could protect her from the next wave. She’d have to find something else, and she had to keep doing it over and over, until…

  What?

  Until she ran out of things to hide behind?

  Until her body gave out from exhaustion?

  Was this the end of her ‘impossible’ journey to the Whirlpool City?

  she finished, gritting her teeth as she pushed herself off the coral, glaring at the wreckage around her.

  The little water strider on her shoulder gestured randomly around her, pointing its legs every which way.

  With a heavy, thumping heart, she started slow-skating through the wreckage, keeping her weary eyes peeled for anything that might resemble cannons or barrels of dry gunpowder. Her hopes weren’t high given was soaking wet with saltwater and digestive acids, but the fact was, some of the wreckage looked to be at least a month old—the digestive acids must not work very fast, so if she could just survive the endless waves of water, she could, theoretically, last up to a month inside the remipede.

  Even if she couldn’t find any explosives, she could probably irritate the living daylights out of the remipede by repeatedly carving its stomach walls with her glaives.

  Her ears perked as she heard the soft, jumbled chorus of nocturnal life nearby.

  Voices.

  Chatter.

  The sounds pulled her from the ground and onto the surrounding wreckage. The Archive warned her to be careful, and she was, of course—skating slowly and quietly up the hull of a ship turned sideways before peeking down at the source of the commotion, scrunching her brows.

  From above, they looked like a group of about thirty normal human men, sitting around a bonfire with opened barrels of soggy mushrooms serving as chairs and stools. Using the sideways ship as a cover from the water, they roasted their mushrooms on sticks and skewers over the fire, chatting heartily as though they weren’t deep in the belly of a giant remipede. So, when the rotten wood snapped under Marisol’s weight and she plummeted ten meters to land in the middle of their group, she felt nothing but pain and a horrible, horrible sinking sensation in her chest.

  The men stopped their chatter to stare blankly at her, and they had spiky black ant heads.