Marisol thought the Seagrass Meadow was pretty enough already—she’d never been bored of the calm and quiet forest of seaweeds that swayed gently with the underwater currents—but if she ever wondered what the dried-up coral forest under the horseshoe crab island would look like if it were submerged underwater, she didn’t have to look any further.

  Somehow, two thousand metres deep into the whirlpool, sunlight still shone brightly down onto Depth Two, the Tropical Reef. A forest of orange, violet, and electric blue coral formations rose like twisted sculptures around her, winding and curving in mesmerising patterns. The sand beneath her feet was soft and cool, dotted with scattered shells. Above her, fan-like sea anemones unfurled like great, colourful banners, billowing in the soft underwater currents. Ribbon-like kelp fronds stretched from the ground towards the diving bell she’d dropped down from, and… as she kept vibrating her hydrospines to keep water out of her eyes, she noticed the four of them weren’t the only inhabitants of the Tropical Reef.

  She backed into Helena, who grabbed her shoulder and laughed as she recoiled from a colony of tiny, vibrant shrimps swimming past her face. The shrimps weren’t the only inhabitants. Among the reef, crabs with iridescent blue and emerald shells clung to the corals, picking off algae with their delicate pincers. Metre-long lobsters with shimmering gold armour crawled along the ground here and there, antennae waving lazily about as schools of bright-scaled fish hitched rides on their backs. There were even eight-limbed, jelly-like creatures darting between coral branches, their bodies shifting colours with each coral they jumped onto—she’d no idea what those things were even called, but for the amount of crustaceans she was being surrounded by, there was only one real question on her mind.

  The Archive was a mind-reader, but the Imperator siblings who patted her back and started walking forward were mind-readers, too.

  “Haven’t you been told the ecosystem in the whirlpool ain’t like anything you can find outside the city?” Aidan said, his voice warbling and slightly distorted as he glanced back at her, arms folded behind his head. “Down here, there are just as many docile Critter-Class crustaceans as there are hostile Critter-Class and Giant-Class crustaceans. We’ll never get any rest if we try to wipe all of the Critter-Classes out, so we identify and classify everything in the Deepwater Legion Almanac—that’s the notebook we’d pinned in our diving bell with information about every crustacean in every Depth, and it’s up to the orienteer in every dive team to regularly update it by collecting research samples.”

  Helena slapped Aidan on his head, making him wince. “Then get going with the sample collection already,” she grumbled. “The patrol formation is simple: in a team of four, the orienteer is the only one who gets to stray particularly far away while collecting research samples. The other three are always close by, no further than twenty metres away from each other at all times, and they observe the crustaceans in the area they’re assigned to patrol to see if anything’s out of place. Simple, right?”

  Then Bruno slapped both of his younger siblings’ heads, grunting as he waded forward and took the lead. “Simple, but still. Keep your senses peeled. Just because anomalies have only been happening in the Lower Depths doesn’t mean anomalies can’t pop up here.”

  Helena and Aidan gave their older brother a mock salute as Marisol followed closely behind, the four of them patrolling the reef at a slow, meandering pace. All the better for Marisol, she supposed. She had more time to gawk at the dozens of giant diving bells still descending overhead, the bells themselves looking like shooting stars while the chains looked like their starry trails. A few of the bells came to a halt in Depth Two as well, with a few more teams of Imperators dropping out to patrol different sections of the reef, but most bells shot past them to reach the Lower Depths.

  She couldn’t help but shudder as she realised, eventually, it would be her in one of those bells, descending to Depths where even sunlight couldn’t reach.

  The Archive hopped off her shoulder and paddled in front of her face, swimming lazily around her head.

  the Archive said, pointing at a nearby coral they were walking by.

  She turned and looked, ignoring Aidan bouncing around the corals scraping algae into glass tubes.

  Apart from the four of them, there were groups of heavily armoured divers trudging around the corals, all of them bearing different crests on their one-shoulder pauldrons. Some wore weighted boots with tubes snaking from their diving helmets to their oxygen backpacks, cutting small branches off glowing corals before sliding them into metal boxes. Others were swimming and floating around the fan-like sea anemones, cutting off ribbons of kelps with sickles and then tying them around the oxygen tanks. She spotted even a group of children squirming between two tightly-packed corals, extracting crystalline pearls from the bed of a large anemone-like plant.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  There were delicate, practised processes everywhere she looked, and for their part, the Imperator siblings weren’t paying any mind to the divers at all.

  Bruno and Helena were starting to stray too far ahead, so she skated quickly forward to keep up.

  “... The Whirlpool City is, for the most part, capable of sustaining itself with the resources we harvest from the whirlpool,” Helena said, glancing and gesturing around as Marisol caught up with her. “All a company needs to do is register for a commercial diving licence with Lighthouse Five, which is responsible for dealing with governing affairs, and then they can dive down to Depth Three depending on what resources they’re trying to harvest.”

  “There are about two hundred commercial diving companies in the city,” Bruno added, nodding at one of the divers as they passed by. “There are ecological rules they have to follow while they’re down here, of course, so it’s part of the patrolling Imperators’ duties to recognise them by their crests and shoo companies who aren’t supposed to be here away. We don’t want them messing with the natural regenerative cycles of the reef too much. There’s a delicate balance we Imperators need to preserve if we don’t want bugs acting up—”

  “Hungry, Marisol?” Aidan interrupted, darting in front of her and making all of them screech to a halt. “That’s the company, who harvests and sells the best rainbow fish in the lower city. I know the boss over there, and he said you can go and have a taste of their freshest catch if you want—you ain’t gonna turn free food down, are you?”

  His older brother and younger sister immediately slapped him over the head for suggesting such a thing, but Marisol hungry, and though she couldn't talk underwater, her stomach could growl.

  “... Just don't stray too far.” Bruno sighed, waving her off to the distant group of divers waving at her to come over. “You can't differentiate between crustaceans that are and aren't supposed to be here, anyways, so familiarise yourself with the local fauna. You'll make yourself more useful that way.”

  Marisol paused. The excitement she'd been trying to suppress showed on her face, and she thanked the Imperators with a small bow before darting off to the divers sitting hunched over a coral.

  They were supposed to patrol for only two hours, but Marisol spent the next hour bouncing from coral to coral, group after group, greeting the divers as they handed her all kinds of gifts: luminescent seaweeds that had bouncy, jelly-like textures, translucent sea grapes that looked like water-filled pearls, and pulsing pinkish-bluish petals from an underwater flower that resembled a five-pointed star. One group even offered her an entire coral lump, the lady in charge cracking a small piece off the branch before handing it to her with a knowing grin. That one was just pure, crystallised salt, though—she coughed and hacked and made the divers laugh as the Imperators shook their heads behind her, shouting at her to keep up as she visited each group one by one.

  the Archive remarked, as she skated over to her next group ten metres in front of the Imperators. These were two children who held their hands at her, telling her to wait as they squirmed inside a coral to yank something out.

  She scowled, popping a third skyball coral candy into her mouth as she exhaled bubbles through her nose.

  the Archive said pointedly.

  The Archive rubbed its legs together to make a snapping sound. Then the Archive paused for a moment as the children in front of her pulled out of the coral, holding up strange, bulbous red fruits with bright smiles on their faces.

  She had no idea what to think about that.

  To begin with, she hadn’t been planning on staying in the Whirlpool City for long, but the more she learned about the city and the more people she ran into, the more interested she was in the place.

  Dipping her head in a show of gratitude, she accepted one of the fruits and bit into it on the spot, savouring the sweet yet mostly salty tangs that came out of the flesh. It wasn’t like any fruit she’d ever had on the surface, that was for sure, but it was nourishing all the same.

  She grinned at the children, and the children grinned back—but then a status screen popped up next to her head, making her flinch and look down at the half-eaten fruit in her hand.

  [Points: 1 → 2]

  The children looked just as surprised to see a little shrimp-like creature wriggling across the reddish flesh, two glowing antennae wagging left and right.

  …

  Her body moved on instinct. She grabbed the boys by their waists and kicked off the ground, the explosive burst of speed kicking up a cloud of sand and shattered shells as her senses flared all over—and the Imperators behind her immediately snapped their heads over, Bruno catching her before she could slam into another coral.

  While Helena and Aidan shouted at the nearby divers to run away, Marisol flung the children back as hard as possible, glaring at the cloud of sand that was beginning to warp around the coral they’d just been standing in front of.

  the Archive muttered, pulling up a status screen next to her head.

  [Objective #13: Defeat the B-Rank Critter-Class Copepod Brood]

  [Time Limit: Undefined]

  [Reward: ~300 points]

  [Failure: Death]