Devil in the Deep Blue Sea

by A. J. Markam

  “And I’ll keep summoning it, again and again, if you run away,” Storn said in a jaunty voice. “I might not be able to follow you underwater, but my whale can.”

  “Unh-unh,” I said, not convinced. “You shouldn’t be able to summon your whale if we’re out of range of your magic.”

  “What, my range to cast Leviathan?” He grinned. “I simply need to be near water.”

  Leviathan.

  Of course.

  More Sunday School-inspired bullshit.

  “But once I’ve summoned it, the whale has unlimited range. And it continues to exist on this plane until I release it.”

  A spell. It was all a fuckin’ spell.

  …but spells had cool-downs.

  Especially ones as big as a whale.

  “Let’s test that,” I said, and flung out my arm.

  My lasso of little demons shot through the air and surrounded Storn with Chain of Darkness.

  “GO, GO, GO!” I yelled as I grabbed Stig and rushed into the water.

  Storn managed to hit me with one of his lightning bolts – but it only took off 7.5% of my Health.

  Thank you, Chain of Darkness!

  Alaria grabbed me from behind and flew us across the ocean waves.

  Any second now, I was preparing to hear the thunderclap –

  BOOM.

  There it was.

  And here came the three little Momos diving down at us like raptors.

  “UNDERWATER!” I yelled.

  Alaria plunged us beneath the surface, and we all swam as deep as we could.

  The harpies couldn’t get us, but we were still in relatively shallow waters.

  I looked over my shoulder –

  Yup, here came a pair of black boots running over the waves.

  “Go as deep as you can!” I yelled at Stig and Alaria.

  “That’s what she said,” Stig croaked.

  “NOT THE TIME!”

  We followed the sloping ocean bottom until we were well out of Storn’s reach.

  Well, the reach of his surface attacks, anyway.

  Now all we had to worry about was his damn whale.

  I kept my eye on the game clock to see what kind of cooldown the spell had. We’d spent almost a minute on shore before we bolted, so – if Storn was telling the truth – I was figuring we’d see Monstro or Leviathan or whatever the fuck its name was about eight to nine minutes later.

  Sure enough, exactly eight and a half minutes after I started keeping track, we saw a gigantic black shape looming in the darkness ahead of us.

  Ten-minute cool-down.

  I could work with that.

  I selected the whale as it swam closer.

  Leviathan

  Health: 100,000

  100,000 friggin’ hit points?!

  How the HELL did a Level 37 Priest have a minion with 100,000 hit points?!

  FUCK this fucking game, man!

  We weren’t going to be able to kill it, not outright – but maybe we could evade capture and wait it out.

  “Hide down in the coral beds!” I yelled at Alaria and Stig, and we all dove for the bottom of the sea floor.

  We made it, too, and hid in the crevices between some brain coral.

  Didn’t do us any good, though.

  The whale butted its massive head into the coral beds, cracking the space between them wide open.

  Then it opened its mouth and sucked in, and the rushing water pulled us into the belly of the beast.

  “God DAMN it!” I yelled when we wound up in the cave of rotting fish again.

  But now we had something to fight back against.

  “KILL the fuckin’ thing!” I yelled.

  I hit its innards with Soul Suck, Alaria used her flaming pitchfork to stab it, and Stig lobbed fireballs at its stomach walls. Altogether, we took off almost 27K in hit points before it vomited us back out.

  More on that in a second.

  During our attack – the worst case of cetacean indigestion in history, I’m sure – I realized why the whale had so much Health: because it didn’t inflict any Damage on us, and it had absolutely no defenses. The only thing that kept it alive was its enormous reserves of Health.

  You know how some monsters in video games have a grappling hook that latches onto you and pulls you towards the monster so it can bash in your brains?

  Storn was the monster, and the whale was the grappling hook. That was essentially the idea.

  Interestingly enough, this time the whale didn’t take us all the way back to shore. It just headed straight to the surface and puked us out.

  Right where Storn was waiting for us.

  “So good to see you again!” he said cheerfully as we wiped the rotting fish out of our faces.

  Then he zapped me with more lightning.

  I cast Chain of Darkness and hit him with Doomsday, all while Alaria and Stig tried to fight off his goddamn harpies.

  Didn’t matter.

  Yeah, I took off nearly 10% of Storn’s hit points with Chain of Darkness, and another 7% with Doomsday, but then the bastard went and healed himself.

  The Umbra Priest raised his bone staff into the air, and black magic flowed from its knobby head into his chest.

  Immediately his Health Bar went up to 95%.

  FUCKER!

  Soul Suck was my secret weapon as a Warlock. Not only did it hurt my enemies, but it replenished my Health at the same time.

  I’d never fought anyone whose healing powers so easily canceled out my own.

  Not to mention he was 7 Levels higher than me.

  If we kept trading blows like this – doing Damage then healing, doing more Damage, then healing – he was going to eventually win by attrition.

  “DIVE!” I yelled at Alaria and Stig, and we all plunged underwater until we were out of Storn’s range.

  Well, for ten minutes, anyway.

  Then the goddamn whale showed up again.

  Thus we entered an unfortunate and never-ending loop:

  We couldn’t reach shore and evade Storn on land, because he could run as fast across the water as we could swim.

  Swimming the 50-odd miles back to Fathmos would be excruciatingly slow, because the damn whale kept gobbling us up every 10 minutes and erasing 90% of our progress.

  And killing Storn was proving to be a near impossibility. Anytime I knocked a sizable amount off his hit points, he would just go and heal himself.

  We must have repeated the damn cycle at least 20 times and were a good three or four miles out to sea before I called a timeout.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” I said to my demons as we swam out of Storn’s range. “We need a new plan.”

  “Ya think?” Alaria said sarcastically.

  “What do you wanna do, boss?” Stig asked.

  “I want to KILL the motherfucker, but…”

  “So why don’t we, then?” Alaria asked.

  “Because we can’t inflict damage on him fast enough. He can heal too quickly.”

  “Kick ‘im in the nuts, boss,” Stig suggested.

  I laughed in spite of myself. “As painful as that might be, he’ll still heal himself.”

  “Can’t you hurt him in a way he can’t heal from?” Alaria asked.

  “No,” I said impatiently, “the only thing that can do that is – ”

  My eyes widened.

  Oh shit… that was it!

  “Boss’s got a plan,” Stig said.

  “Yes, I do,” I grinned. “And here’s how we’re going to do it.”

  33

  By the time I finished explaining, we had six minutes until the whale reappeared.

  It was probably enough time… but I wanted to make sure we definitely had as much as we needed, so I let us get captured by Leviathan again.

  This time we didn’t even attack it. No point.

  We let it puke us out onto the surface, at which point we ignored Storn and dove back down into the water.

  As soon as we were deep enough, Alaria swam away
from me as fast as she could, staying 40 feet below the waves.

  I immediately started to count. “One… two… three… four…”

  Meanwhile, I hung out just inside the Umbra Priest’s range of attack. I fired Soul Suck up at him, and he returned the favor with some more of his black lightning.

  When Alaria got around 200 feet away from me, she headed for the surface and blasted up into the air.

  “…21… 22…”

  I knew Storn was going to call his harpies on Alaria. She wasn’t going to be able to completely fight them off; she just needed to be able to complete her objective.

  Which meant we needed to distract the Umbra Priest.

  “Now,” I said to Stig.

  He disappeared in a cloud of smoky water.

  “…30… 31…”

  Up above, I could see blots of dark smoke appearing around the bounty hunter’s head. Stig was teleporting and getting all up in Storn’s face, trying to mess with him.

  “…37… 38…”

  I checked Alaria’s hit points on my Action Bar.

  She was down to 48%. The harpies must be doing a number on her.

  But she had more than enough Health to seal the deal.

  I was still firing Soul Suck up at Storn, and he was still blasting lightning at me. Between that and Stig bitch-slapping him, I was pretty sure the Priest wasn’t expecting what came next.

  “…43…”

  I started swimming up towards Storn’s black soles on the water’s surface.

  “…44…”

  Then I cast Chain of Darkness. My lasso of tiny demons zoomed up through the water and into the air.

  “…45.”

  SPLASH!

  Alaria and Storn burst through the water’s surface in a cloud of bubbles.

  She’d followed the plan to a ‘T’: she’d divebombed him and slammed into him at 40 miles per hour.

  Just because Priests can walk on water, doesn’t mean they can’t go underwater.

  That’s when I joined in.

  I grabbed Storn around the neck and started swimming down into the depths.

  He fought back, obviously – thrashing around and trying to wriggle out of my grasp – but I held on with all my might.

  And Storn wasn’t just fighting against me. Alaria latched onto his robes and helped me pull him down. Between the two of us, there was no way he was making it back to the surface.

  Hell, Stig even joined in. He teleported down into the water and hung on to Storn’s knee like a toddler.

  The Umbra Priest blasted me with black lightning – but because of Chain of Darkness, his attacks were only doing 75% of their normal damage.

  And I was giving it right back to him with Soul Suck, which was replenishing my own hit points.

  Down, down, down we went.

  Ten seconds elapsed and Chain of Darkness went away. Storn’s attacks on me went back up to full strength.

  Now it was just a race to see who could survive the longest.

  After 30 seconds, though, it finally happened: Storn’s Health bar began to drop precipitously, faster than from any attack I could deliver.

  He had run out of air and was starting to drown.

  His eyes bugged out and he struggled even harder.

  I didn’t let go.

  He stopped casting black lightning and self-healed for an extra 20% Health –

  But I Soul-Sucked it right out of him.

  Suddenly his Health Meter went into the red.

  I knew the fucker wanted to summon his whale. If he could just do that, it would solve all his problems.

  But if I was right, his spell had another eight minutes on the cool-down.

  I was right. Leviathan never appeared.

  Storn kept trying to heal himself, and I kept slicing off his hit points with Soul Suck.

  When he was just seconds away from dying, he summoned Dark Trinity in a fit of desperation – but the three ugly Momos just thrashed about in the water, unable to follow us.

  Storn looked at me, his eyes wide with terror.

  He screamed, and silvery air bubbles spilled out of his mouth like his soul departing.

  The red bar turned black, and he stopped moving.

  Above us, the three harpies disappeared.

  The Umbra Priest was dead.

  I stared at his slack face in shock, then let go of him.

  He drifted down into the water, his arms stretched out like he was reaching for me, his dead eyes staring into my own.

  His black robes gradually disappeared against the midnight blue depths…

  His white skin became a fuzzy, indistinct blur…

  And then he was gone.

  ‘30,000 XP’ appeared in the water, followed by a muted trumpet blast and the words ‘Level 31.’

  But I wasn’t exactly celebrating.

  It’s one thing to kill someone at a distance with blue lightning.

  It’s quite another to drown him with your own hands, staring into his eyes as he dies.

  I just looked down into the dark waters beneath us.

  “Are you okay?” Alaria asked gently.

  “…I… yeah,” I murmured, not really sure if I was telling the truth. “Yeah, I’m fine. You did AWESOME.”

  “He didn’t even see me coming,” she said proudly.

  “Hey, I did good, too,” Stig sulked.

  “You did great. You both did. Thank you – I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Can I have booze, then?” Stig asked.

  “…sure.” I pulled out a bottle of wine from my bag and handed it over.

  Stig uncorked it and began to chug from the bottle.

  “Um… could you…?” Alaria asked as she flapped her tattered, ripped wings.

  “What? Oh – oh, yeah, sorry,” I said as I pumped Health back into her with Self-Sacrifice.

  As I did, the thin black skin of her wings sealed up until she was as good as new.

  “Alright, we should get going,” I said. “We’ve got a long way to swim back to shore.”

  “Aren’t we going to go get his staff?” Alaria asked. “Maybe you could use it.”

  I thought of the human bones bound together with iron bands and grimaced in disgust. “No… no, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you could sell it, at least.”

  She was right. The staff would be worth something – and besides, he might have some gold.

  Being spooked by drowning him was no reason not to get his loot.

  “Okay,” I said, and dove deeper into the ocean depths. “Let’s go.”

  34

  I don’t know if was the normal physics falling through water, or if the game was helping Storn’s corpse along, but we had to swim a long way down until we reached his body, which had come to rest on a barren shelf of rock.

  I picked up his staff, which had fallen a few feet away from his final resting place.

  Staff of Suffering +75 Intellect, +55 Stamina, +12 Critical Strike, +10 Haste

  It was better than anything I currently had – but I couldn’t bring myself to switch it out for my Wand of the Dark Spiral. I didn’t want to think about Storn’s death every time I used it.

  The staff was worth 10 gold, though, and that was enough for me. I would sell it as soon as we got back to the mainland.

  The chain and symbol around his neck had a good number of stats on it, too, but wasn’t any better than my Necklace of Ra’Nath, so I just pocketed it for resell.

  In his robes I found a coin purse with 7 gold and 3 silver.

  All in all, not a bad haul.

  As I was finishing up, Alaria whispered, “Ian… does that look familiar to you?”

  I glanced at where she was pointing.

  A giant rock formation stood 80 feet away from us. With the two cave-like indentions halfway up, and the pile of smaller boulders at its base, it looked like a skull.

  “It’s creepy,” I said, “but we’ve never been here before, so – ”


  “What about the skull on your map, though?”

  The skull on my –

  THE TREASURE MAP!

  I pulled it out hurriedly from my bag, praying that the parchment and ink would hold up under water. It did.

  Sure enough, there was the skull, and in exactly the right place – several miles off the coast of Vixil.

  “Holy shit,” I murmured. “Good eye, Alaria.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  I looked at the dotted line on the map, then raised my head.

  There was a jagged ravine in the rocky seafloor that zigzagged off into the distance, disappearing into the gloom.

  “Let’s go check it out,” I said.

  We followed the ravine for at least another three miles. Just when I was about to give up hope, a series of shapes loomed up in the distance.

  Ships’ masts.

  Just like the map said!

  Except I’d thought the map was talking about ships sailing the surface of the waves. Instead, it had meant shipwrecks.

  We swam far above the ocean floor, wary of traps. There were three schooners half-buried in the sand, their hulls stove in and their surfaces covered with slime. The sails had long since rotted away.

  Despite our caution, there was no sign of anything – living or undead – on or below the decks.

  We drifted down to the center of the circle, where the sand was raised in a slightly suspicious manner. Alaria and I began digging with our hands as Stig kept a lookout.

  After about two minutes, we hit something hard.

  It was the curved top of an iron chest.

  “Holy shit,” I murmured as I brushed sand away from the top.

  “Open it!” Alaria said excitedly.

  I put my fingertips beneath the edge and tried to lift. It wouldn’t budge.

  I looked closer. An ornate iron lock was built into the chest itself, just underneath the lid.

  “Dammit,” I groaned. Only a friggin’ Rogue would have the skills to open this without a key.

  My eyes widened.

  WAIT –

  I pulled out the key I’d found around the neck of the unfortunate Captain Darrow and placed it into the hole.

  It fit perfectly.

  I turned the key –

  CLICK.

  The lid of the chest sprang open, and both Alaria and I gasped.