Museum Core Chapter 116: Deep, Dark, and Grindy

Sergeant Kim felt fat as he descended back down into the ocean, his new wetsuit bulging all over from countless pieces of gear he was now allowed to wield as his mission was now to just kill monsters, rather than going out “into the wilderness” with a knife and hunting down a beast.

Yes, he’d been able to ditch most of his illumination devices since he could now see in the dark, but the sheer amount of new gear bordered on the ridiculous, to the point where his midsection bulged noticeably.

The way the pouches in his wetsuit were set up, they were integrated into the neoprene in a way that streamlined them and somewhat cut down on the extra drag, leaving him far more maneuverable than if he’d jumped into the waves wearing his tactical vest with every available pouch filled to the brim … but it still felt weird.

However, these weapons were fantastic, albeit incredibly dangerous. Especially the explosives. Using grenades always came with a certain risk. Doing so underwater, where all kinds of waves were transmitted much more easily, and at far greater ranges. But if he could engage from a sufficient distance, these would be lethal.

And, of course, he’d been given a harpoon gun. Two, actually.

A pneumatic gun, due to how powerful they could be, and a second that used the far simpler and more resilient rubber band variant to be used in case something broke the other, somewhat delicate, one.

As to how effective either of them would be against the monsters … well, he just had to find out, didn’t he?

Once again, he watched the manometer as he plunged into the ocean, tracking his descent, continuing on until he was seven hundred meters deep, at roughly the same depth he’d exited at the first time.

And once again, the edge of the transformation zone was at an incline. That was normal, the transformation zone was a giant dome that had been known from the start. But the strange part was that when he shoved his left hand through, the inclinometer immediately jerked around, pointing straight at him, away from the center of the transformation zone.

Did the center of gravity shift in there? It was hard to tell, since he floated, or at the very least, was so buoyant that he barely sank, but that was possible …

Kim dragged one of the smaller bombs off his belt and dropped it above the boundary. It fell straight down … and then it hit the edge of the zone and immediately zigged to the side, falling “sideways” from his point of view.

That certainly explained what had happened earlier. But why? What was the point? And, perhaps more importantly, was there any chance of him actually figuring out the cause?

Probably not, sadly, so he tried to put it out of his mind. He’d have to talk about it the next time he emerged, but until then, there was nothing more to do with this entire topic.

Sighing, he grabbed the bomb and stuffed it back into his pocket.

And with that done, Kim plunged into the transformation zone and began to swim around. And swim some more. And keep swimming for what felt like hours, though his wristwatch said it had been a “mere” thirty minutes.

This place was so damn empty … and yet even a single second’s worth of inattention could cost him his life. That disconnect, that desperate need to maintain absolute focus without anything there to occupy his mind … he’d have called it torture, except the problem was the exact opposite. It was the active absence of anything that held his attention that was slowly driving him up the wall.

Even occasionally stopping and examining his weapons did little to change that.

The various bombs had simple, mechanical, timers that he could manually set, as well as several options for automatically detonating them when the pressure increased by a set amount after being set up … that feature seemed like it had been a massive engineering challenge to overcome, but that didn’t make it any less useless, considering this entire zone had a precisely equal pressure throughout its entirety, or at the very least, the explored area.

Even if it did work, it wouldn’t do so reliably.

As for the harpoons, he had simple spears, barbed spears, explosives that would trigger when the line connecting it to the harpoon gun drew taught and ripped away the pin out of the end of the projectile, though he’d have to first remove a safety; that way, he could avoid accidentally blowing himself up.

There was a regular barbed harpoon in the rubber band gun, and an explosive in the pneumatic version. After all, if he had to play with bombs, he wanted to get them as far from him as possible when they blew.

But he’d made those adjustments thirty minutes ago, checking things over was, quite literally, the only stimulation he had left.

Yet could he seriously return to the Yi Sun-Shin and admit that it was boredom that had brought him to his knees?

No, he absolutely could not … so he kept going, and soon enough found an enemy. Finally.

The jellyfish was truly massive, the diameter of its cap larger than the width of a helicopter’s blades, and the water below its cap was stained with a faint purple sheen.

But that wasn’t what caught Kim’s attention as it peeled itself out of the murk.

No, that was what his new sight was showing him, how it was showing him the things that lay beneath the surface, in more ways than one, considering that it was mostly see-through.

Tons and tons of venom cells in the tentacles that trailed beneath it, no venom on top of the cap, no real vital organs as he understood it, no real weakpoints but also no strong points either … and absolutely no information on what was behind that purple light.

But the monster didn’t seem to be too powerful, if he could avoid the toxic thicket beneath it, and that power wasn’t too nasty.

And he really couldn’t afford to keep swimming around until he found something.

Kim pulled a smaller bomb out of his vest with his left hand while drawing his bayonet with his right, and slowly began to swim towards the jellyfish by kicking his feet, the fins on them catching huge sheets of water and hurling him forward.

And then he was there, stopping himself practically in an instant as the water absorbed his momentum, whipping around his bayonet in a single, smooth motion and plunging it into the monster’s body.

Now, what he’d been expecting to happen was for the knife to rip straight through, tearing the clear flesh like cheap linen and allowing him to plunge the knife straight back into its sheath … but instead, it felt like trying to cut tough plastic.

The knife went in, punching through the outer layer after a brief instant of resistance, then jerked to the side for a couple of centimeters, then stuck firm.

Perhaps if he’d had the chance to do so, he’d have started to saw the weapon back and forth to enlarge the opening, but that was when the purple field below the jellyfish started to surge upwards.

Kim jerked the knife back out and stuffed it in the sheath while shoving the bomb into the hole with his other hand, then held it there, halfway in, while he janked out the pin with what had previously been his knife hand.

And then, he kicked himself off the plastic-y feeling top with both feet and launched himself away … yet it suddenly felt as though he were swimming through concrete, rather than water.

His head jerked down, staring at the purple field as it crawled up his torso, a distant part of his mind noting that he’d actually failed to sheathe the knife and accidentally just swung it past his body and then dropped it in his panic.

But his only concern was that little metal cylinder mashed into the rip in the monster’s skin, barely five meters from him, innocently sitting there as though it weren’t seconds from exploding with enough force to rupture most of his internal organs and turn his skeleton into a loose collection of bony pebbles.

Is this it … no!

Cursing internally, Kim did the only thing he could. Mentally grab the sliders for boost distribution and mash them all down to the very bottom. All save the one for Resilience, which automatically jumped to one hundred percent.

And now, he had to pray this would work out the way he hoped …

Blam!

The shockwave hammered into him a split-second later, battering him around like a leaf in a typhoon, and yet, when he managed to stabilize his wild spin a few seconds later, all he could really tell was wrong was that damn ringing in his ears.  And feeling oddly reminded of the time he’d walked into a glass door he hadn’t realized was closed. A full-body impact into an invisible and solid wall that left him both shocked and unsteady.

Holy hell … that had been close. Way too close. Only the fact that the jellyfish had died first, pouring all the advancement he’d gotten from the act into his toughness, increasing it … well, his status window failed to give concrete numbers on how durable he’d become relative to a normal human, but at a bare minimum, he was tough enough to survive one of his smaller bombs blowing five meters from him, underwater.

He’d already modified the distribution once, based on advice he’d gotten up top, initially focusing on Resilience to make playing with explosives safe, and Brawn to make swimming quickly easier.

Yes, he had an actual speed stat in the form of Celerity, but the issue there was the medium he was moving through. Water made him too darn slow, which was why he needed more physical strength. At some point, he’d be able to shift his focus again, splitting the lion’s share of the boost between Resilience for survivability in case he took a hit, and Celerity so that he could run rings around his titanic foes.

Overall, though?

Planning his build was a very, very long-term strategy. He’d get progressively stronger, so any initial variance in stats could be corrected later on.

Right now, he had a monster body to check out.

Abyssal Quagmire (F-Rank)

The body of a timeless jellyfish, larger than any mundane example of this type of animal, but still one that primarily feeds on whatever drifts into its tentacles.

Its cap and main body are interesting as curiosities, yet otherwise largely use- and worthless. The stings, on the other hand, are valuable as alchemy ingredients but exceedingly dangerous to harvest.

You can eat this thing. You really shouldn’t. Yuck.

Kim glared at the thing. He hadn’t been looking forward to touching that thing, and that description wasn’t making him want to get anywhere near that mess … actually, was it even safe to be in the area? What, with all those stinging cells spread throughout the water by the detonation?

Grimacing, he began to kick away from the area, swearing internally.

In hindsight, an explosive harpoon would have been perfect, but he’d expected the jellyfish to be too soft for it to stick … and that reminded him, why hadn’t his power warned him?

Now at a safe distance, he flipped through the water once again and glared back down at the pulpy mess for a few seconds before he realized what had happened.

Studious Hunter’s Awareness didn’t show him the absolute durability of anything, just the weakest portions of an enemy’s body, and by the process of deduction, the strong points of an enemy’s defense as well.

With a generally uniform mass of clear flesh, he’d made an assumption about its toughness, and as a result, it hadn’t exactly gone well …

But he’d remember this for the future. His knowledge of vulnerability was relative,  and his ability to adequately assess durability was flawed, to say the least.

All that being said, however, this fight had been worth it. More so than he’d even realized, at first.

Yes, he’d taken a bit of a whallop and lost a bayonet, but the damage wasn’t serious, and he’d been able to replace the knife with one of his backups.

But he’d learned, he’d grown in several ways, and most importantly, the fighting had attracted more monsters.

A few more of the big fishes, the xiphactinus, which was apparently some kind of prehistoric creature.

These were actually pretty perfect for practicing on, since he’d figured out their weakness.

Well, not so much a weakness as an exploit, but still a viable strategy.

He waited until one attacked him … and he kicked it in the face, his bracelet removing the water resistance from the attack. And when he hit the monster and it began to push him back, the artifact that made this whole insanity possible took away the water resistance from him.

Kim wound up hurled through the ocean, spinning like a tire that had just leaped off a Formula One car going at its maximum speed, until he eventually stabilized his movement and looked back at the now very confused fish.

Then, he pulled out a bomb and took on the best approximation of a matador’s stance he could manage underwater, waiting for the fish to take its best shot.

It charged, and once again, Kim found himself hurled through the ocean, now somewhat dizzy … but five seconds after the collision, a muffled boom rang out in the distance, and his durability went even further beyond human limits.

Heh.

Chew on that.

And while doing that until he ran out of either fish or bombs, he felt like he should be focusing more on using his knife or harpoon guns.

So he slipped his bayonet out of its sheath and went off in search of another fish to charge at him.

That … that didn’t go too well, not at first.

He went spinning several times, lost the knife, accidentally cut himself with his third and last one when he was thrown away at a particularly unfortunate angle … until eventually, he managed to land a nasty cut to the fish’s gills. Not instantly lethal, but it wasn’t as though this scaled bastard could seek medical attention.

He kept going, bit by bit, learning how to better land his blows.

The fish had quite a few weaknesses, but the gills were and would always continue to be the biggest. Of course, the eyes were also good to hit; there was a spot just behind the pectoral fins that was a good target, and any damage to the tail would cost the monster its ludicrous speed despite the fact that it was at least partially born of a power.

Bit by bit, his hand grew steadier, and he grew tougher.

Pretty soon, he ran out of fish and had to switch to something else, the octopi and squid, and weird undersea crocodiles.

Then, finally, he began to start using explosive harpoons. He practiced with a couple of inert ones, then switched to explosives, lodging them anywhere that looked vulnerable enough to be pierced.

And that was where the closest thing to an exploit that had been found came into play. Yanking on the harpoon’s line counted as an “attack” for the purposes of the Boon of Prometheus’ Grace, and therefore triggered the artifacs ability to remove water resistance for such actions, allowing Kim to pull extremely hard on a line that was similarly unrestrained by their surroundings, while his enemy was still subject to these forces, and incredibly unlikely to get pulled along by the motion, practically guaranteeing that the line would get yanked out of the harpoon’s base.

The harpoon that was, usually, stuck somewhere that was already a major weak point and promptly exploded, which was normally enough to kill his target.

Until he eventually ran out, had to surface, and got yelled at by the Yi Sun-Shin’s doctor due to swimming around with what was apparently a not inconsiderable amount of damage, though it was still mild enough to be healed with a heavily diluted healing potion, bought at great cost from the British, according to him.

And then he went right back to fighting in the deep, albeit in a different spot, since he’d likely cleared out many of the monsters in the area.

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One more underwater chapter after this