Marisol definitely tried to land on her glaives, but the swirling winds made it so she couldn’t reorient herself mid-air. She slammed painfully down onto the whirlpool on her back, and then the strong current sucked her underwater, her hydrospines doing nothing to keep her on the surface.

  the Archive said.

  True to the Archive’s words, she didn’t immediately feel like she needed to kick back up to the surface. It was like her lungs just didn’t need air anymore, so she let the violent currents pull her down, down, and down until she eventually came to a gentle halt—and she forced herself to open her eyes, vibrating her hydrospines over her irises to help her see better underwater.

  The first thing she did was gulp, looking straight down. She glimpsed the maw of the seemingly endless abyss below her, stretching farther than her eyes could see. If she remembered her textbooks correctly, the whirlpool at the centre of the city was nine kilometres deep, one kilometre wide, and the Lower Depths were almost impossible to reach without specialised mutations and diving equipment.

  Now, she was no stranger to seeing an abyss below her—she’d already fallen into the great blue once—but what she expect was the fact that the walls of the giant whirlpool weren’t barren rocks.

  Not at all.

  As she started sinking slowly, she noted the dense underwater forest growing horizontally on the circular walls, absolutely teeming with life. Giant seaweeds swayed gracefully in the gentle deepwater currents, reflecting bright sunlight in watery, mirage-like shimmers. Vibrant moss and kelps sprouted from the rocks like fields of grass, and fish of every shape and size darted through the undergrowth, scales shimmering like multi-colored gemstones.

  It was an aquatic ecosystem.

  the Archive explained, as she twirled around and marvelled at the strange creatures swimming around her; she recognised a few of them as clusters of jellyfishes and schools of serpentine eels, but many more she didn’t recognise.

  The Archive appeared over the gemstone on her chest, tapping its little legs, so she obliged—almost in a daze—and felt her personal gravity shift.

  If she was sinking slowly towards the bottom of the whirlpool before, she was falling fast towards the closest wall of the whirlpool now. Falling felt weightless here. It was smooth, it was gentle. Within ten seconds, she landed glaive-first on the mossy ‘ground’ of the whirlpool, and she didn’t even need to consciously stick to it with her setae. The humming and whirring gemstone on her chest did all the hard work for her.

  the Archive said, and she stood up straight, tugging on the straps as she whirled around to gawk at the seaweed forest. Ignoring the fact that she could look straight up and see the exact same seaweed forest a thousand metres away on the opposite end of the whirlpool—and the fact that she was underwater—it almost looked as though she were standing in any normal forest.

  the Archive said plainly.

  The moment the Archive pointed up was when she saw the three Imperators stabbing through the surface, descending rapidly towards her. Now, the surface was technically two hundred metres ‘up’, but the Imperators were in front of her as long as she was standing on the wall—and quickly, she saw them tapping their harnesses as well, orienting themselves to the Seagrass Meadow’s gravity.

  She gritted her teeth, looking around the dense seaweeds as she tried to focus on her senses. The whirlpool’s currents weren’t as strong down here as they were on the surface, but they still took up a significant portion of her senses, making it impossible for her to locate the Imperators.

  A status screen popped up next to her head.

  [Objective #12: Defeat the Harbour Imperators]

  [Time Limit: 22 minutes]

  [Reward: Induction into the Harbour Imperators]

  [Failure: Possible suffocation]

  She scoffed, contemplating swatting the Archive off her shoulder, but then she felt a tingle to her left.

  A shadow dashed past a clump of seaweeds and neared her.

  She reacted on instinct, skating a few metres back to narrowly dodge what like a ripple flying at her chest—and she frowned immediately as the three Imperators waded out from the forest, clutching their giant shrimp claws with their normal human hands.

  All three of them were young, their hair tied in braids so they couldn’t whack their own faces. They were two men, one woman, and all three seemed to have the same Shrimp Class with only one visible and evident mutation manifesting on their body: all of their right hands were giant orange claws, disproportionately large even compared to the crab claws she’d seen on the Blackclaw Marauders. They were almost like cannons strapped to their arms, and she couldn’t help but shiver when they pointed their claws at her again, their free hands clutching the back of their claws as though to brace themselves for recoil.

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  “... It ain’t personal, kid,” the man on the far left said, narrowing his deep blue eyes at her. His voice was somehow louder underwater, making her wince. “We respect what you did to keep the lower city safe from that Mutant-Class. Really. We’ve all got family who live down there, and it would’ve been a real big mess if you hadn’t been there… but we ain’t about to let a no-name stranger with no official training show us up.”

  “Raise your arms and yield,” the lady in the middle said, tilting her chin back. “I don’t know how you’re breathing underwater—or if the Water Strider Class even has any mutations for underwater breathing—but you can’t be doing this for much longer. I estimate… ten? Maybe fifteen more minutes? We can breathe underwater for longer than six hours, but that's because we have classes with specialised respiratory mutations. I don’t doubt your underwater stamina is much lower than ours.”

  “What the two of them said,” the man on the far right said, putting zero effort into the conversation.

  Well, she supposed it wasn’t a conversation, and she didn’t think they’d hear her out anyways.

  Truth be told, she wasn’t particularly keen on fighting humans—not after what she did to the Whitewhale Marauders—but she to bottle a vial of healing seawater, and there was doubt there'd be plenty of obstacles standing between her and Depth Eight.

  The three of them were but the first of many.

  So she parted her lips and tried to say ‘no’, but they must have some sort of speech-assisting mutation or something, because all she ended up doing was panic-swallowing a mouthful of seawater the moment she tried to talk.

  the Archive muttered.

  While she coughed and doubled over and tried not to gag, the three Imperators simply stared at her weirdly—and that was her opportunity to bolt.

  Dashing back, she skated behind a clump of seaweeds as they ‘clicked’ their giant claws in unison, firing a ripple wave that tore up the ground she’d been standing on.

  Her eyes widened as she looked briefly behind her.

  As she skated further and further back into the seagrass meadow, the three of them fanned out to pursue. She wasn’t skating as fast as she wanted to—water resistance slowed her significantly—but that didn’t mean the Imperators were slow to begin with. They leapt onto swaying seaweeds, kicked off the leaves, and bounced around overhead as they fired from three separate directions. She ducked and bobbed and weaved, narrowly evading each shot, but…

  A few ripples ‘grazed’ her, and she winced every single time, feeling her bones rattling under her skin.

  the Archive commented idly, completely nonplussed as she yelped, barely evading another ripple that would’ve slammed right into her head.

  She clenched her jaw, skating up a seaweed as the two men converged on her from opposite directions, both trying to grab her collar with their bare human hands.

  the Archive explained.

  [Identification Complete]

  [Identities: Harbour Imperator Recruits]

  [Grades: A-Rank Giant-Class]

  [Classes: Pistol Shrimp]

  [Swarmblood Art: Snapstrike]

  [Auras: ~1,800]

  [Strength: ~5, Speed: ~5, Toughness: ~6, Dexterity: ~5, Perception: ~6]

  , you

  she recalled

  the Archive explained.

  Whips. Chainwhips. She was about to backflip off the seaweed she was skating up when she suddenly found her arms bound to her sides, a metal chain with a small anchor at the end twirling around her torso at a blurry speed. The lady who’d flicked the anchor at her immediately jerked her down, yanking on the chain with both hand and pincer as she was slammed into the ground a good thirty metres away—kicking up a foggy cloud of moss and stone dust as she did.

  As she groaned and lay there on the ground, all trussed up, the three Imperators banded together in the distance and approached her slowly.

  “Stay there and yield,” the lady called out again. “A civilian should not be interfering with Imperator duty. You are unfit for the job. We have had training as Harbour Guards since we were children, and then we trained several more years just to be initiated into the Imperators. A girl who merely picked up a system cannot compare to us.”

  “It ain’t all about individual strength and speed down here, either,” one of the men said. “No Imperator dives alone. Not even the Lighthouse Imperators and the Imperatrix himself. Things can go very wrong fast even if you’re with a full team, and the deeper you go, the worse your decision making because of Corpsetaker’s aura. It clouds your judgement. It instills the fear of death in your heart. How do you think you would react when you are inevitably confronted with the fact that the bugs of the Whirlpool City are far, far more powerful than you could ever imagine?”

  “What the two of them said,” the other man said, putting zero effect into the lecture.

  And Marisol clicked her tongue in irritation, extending her apiclaws with a loud to sever the chains binding her arms.

  The lady who’d been holding the other end of the chain took a step back, startled, and the other two stepped forward to guard her. For her part, Marisol simply climbed onto her glaives and stretched her shoulders, arms, waist, and legs—popping every joint she could pop and making sure she was in tip-top condition to dance.

  she thought.

  Sharpening her eyes, dragging her right glaive back with a loud screech, she leaned dangerously forward and prepared to charge headfirst at the Imperator man on the left.

  Then she tapped the top of her gemstone three times and immediately felt herself falling ‘forward’.