Once Aerion had finished with the modifications, she lowered the sub into the water, sealed the hatch, and took the thing out for some sea trials, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs.
Instead, I went up to the other Siege Launcher and activated the whale call. We’d cleared them out only recently, but I didn’t know how soon they’d be back, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.
It also didn’t hurt that the Aural Siege Bolt we’d slotted was Initialized. If a whale did venture in, I didn’t see why I couldn’t benefit from the kill.
Aerion returned some time later, grumbling about something or the other. She activated the machine that hoisted the sub back up to its dry dock, then disappeared inside the sub, presumably to make some more tweaks.
This cycle repeated a handful of times—with her fixing stuff, then taking it out for a sea trial—before she was satisfied. Say what you want about the elf; she was nothing if not a perfectionist.
The modifications to the other sub went much quicker, thanks to her lessons from the first one. After spending hours watching her work, I couldn’t help but appreciate her unlikely success in jury-rigging the subs. I may not have known anything about subs, but I knew for damn sure I couldn’t have pulled off what she did, even if I had a whole week.
It wasn’t just the way she tackled issues that came up, either. Her learning speed was quite frankly astounding. Even if I’d had her knowledge, I wasn’t sure I could match up in that department.
Honestly? I was glad. It’d have been pointless teaming up with Aerion if she didn’t have strengths that differed from my own. I couldn’t wait to learn how to truly exploit our strengths. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d get the chance to do something like this in real life.
I sat back in the Mobile Siege Launcher’s cushy leather chair, thinking back to when I first arrived. I’d seriously lucked out meeting the elf on the fifth floor. Without her, I’d never have even known about the Trial’s shortcuts, let alone anything about the outside world.
I imagined myself stumbling out of the Trial alone into a foreign fantasy world. I’d have been at a huge disadvantage, even with my general knowledge. That was assuming I even survived without Aerion’s wealth of information. Something that was by no means certain.
In fact, she’d helped out so much that I genuinely couldn’t have asked for a better partner. Couple that with Cosmo’s words about doing him a favor by helping her…
Yeah, I could easily see him having a hand in this. He was the one who stuck me in this dungeon on that exact floor, after all.
A noise from the pool caused me to reach for the actuator lever, but it was just Aerion surfacing in her sub.
She popped the hatch, grinned up at me, and flashed me two thumbs up. I waved back and laughed.
I guess some gestures didn’t change, regardless of the universe.
“Come down!” Aerion shouted. “I’ll teach you how to pilot this thing!”
My smile disappeared without a trace. I shut off the whale call and braced myself for the worst.
The worst wasn’t bad enough, apparently.
“Pitch. Speed. Roll angle,” I said, pointing to the various levers. Why the builders of this place were so enamored with levers, I’d never understand. They weren’t intuitive in the slightest. Worse than that, this sub was unlike any I’d ever seen. I was no expert, but I figured subs used the rudder at the back to turn. Not this one—it had wings on its side that turned to roll the sub, just like a plane.
Which meant I had a dive lever, a roll lever, a pitch lever, and a speed lever. And all of them were oversized, as if built for something distinctly nonhuman. Yeah, it made my head spin, too.
“What about this one?” Aerion asked, pointing to another lever.
“Ballast—but don’t touch that because you’ve re-jiggered it to drop the ballast weights.”
“Right,” Aerion said skeptically. “I think we ought to go over it once again.”
“Please no,” I said. “I got this, trust me.”
“Well, you did learn to operate the Siege Launcher. I suppose this is similar.”
Actually, it wasn’t. It was about ten times harder. Getting a gun to track a target was incomparable to navigating a sub in three dimensions, and I was sure I’d mess something up.
That was what trial runs were for, right?
“Very well,” Aerion said, jumping gracefully out of my sub. “I’ll lead you. Just follow me. We’ll do a simple loop, then come back.”
“Gotcha,” I said, feeling my pulse race. Piloting a sub out of a castle at the bottom of the sea? People from my world would’ve paid a fortune for this experience. Well, maybe without the danger of being eaten by undersea monsters.
I did my best to focus on the thrill of adventure, and not on the gargantuan beasts that lurked in the abyss.
I was only marginally successful.
I closed the hatch and spun the wheel shut, then plopped down in the pilot’s seat, which was situated in front of the array of control levers. A glass bubble that stretched from floor to ceiling gave me excellent forward visibility. There were no portholes on the sides or back to allow me to see my surroundings.
Aerion’s sub dipped beneath the surface, and my sweaty palms pushed on the lever. With a groan and a swoosh, the sub slowly descended. The sub pen gave way to murky, black water.
Shoving another lever caused the sub’s lights to flicker to life, penetrating the darkness with twin cones of light that dissipated fifty feet away.
I saw Aerion’s sub pitch down and clear the sub pen. I didn’t know if all sub pens were this way, but you had to dive below the floor to go in and out.
Nudging the pitch and speed levers, I mirrored her. There was a sound of groaning metal, and after a significant lag, the thing did what it was told… Mostly.
Following Aerion, I slid the sub into a tunnel that led us out of the castle complex and into the open ocean.
Aerion’s sub banked right and started to turn, and I reached for the roll lever to do the same.
This was a bit tricky—the sub turned like a plane, using the little wings on either side to roll slightly. The water did the rest, getting it to turn.
Only problem was that if I wasn’t careful, I could roll the whole sub upside down. Actually, there was another issue. The sub began to dive as it turned, forcing me to counteract with the rudder.
There weren’t any seatbelts or anything, so flipping over would be bad. Very very bad. Aerion had stressed several times just how difficult it’d be to recover from that situation, but I could easily imagine. From how animated she got talking about it, I was pretty sure she’d learned that lesson the hard way, but I wasn’t mean enough to call her out on that.
Anyway, even if I could recover, I didn’t want to subject our sensitive cargo to such jostling. I’d done some basic tests lobbing rocks at a bolt to see if it’d go off. Only the strongest of my swings triggered it, so it had some protection against manhandling, but the fact that I’d been able to get it to detonate meant it wasn’t all that great.
Which was to say—don’t roll all the way over. Simple, right? Wrong. The roll lever was sensitive as fuck, responding to the gentlest input. God forbid I sneeze when pushing it.
Not willing to risk it, I just ignored that lever and used the rudder to turn instead.
With lots of stress, I got the sub to turn, following after Aerion. She then banked left, putting us into a lazy circle counterclockwise, and I followed her lead.
After a few loops, I started to get the hang of things, and the motions came more easily. Aerion picked up speed, and so did I. Soon, I wasn’t even thinking about the control. My hands slid to the proper levers, and it all turned into one seamless motion.
Aerion even had her sub ascend and descend, throwing a third dimension into our exercise. That one was easy, at least, and soon, we were racing around our little underwater circuit.
It was surreal. It was alien. And it was… fun.
Congratulations! Grace has increased to 10.
That was a welcome surprise. Looked like anything that required hand-eye coordination improved my Grace. My overall stat sum was now 68, up from 60 when I’d first arrived. I imagined that would leap considerably once I got to town and was able to Initialize better gear.
Working the levers was no longer a chore, and the act itself became enjoyable as we darted through the ocean. A right followed by another left had us pointed straight back at the undersea castle, giving us a clear view of its grandeur.
Aerion’s sub came to a stop, and I pulled up next to her, forgetting about our little race.
The castle we’d been trapped in loomed above us like a giant organism, glowing brightly with thousands of points of light.
We’d seen it on the way in with the cog carts, but we’d been traveling so fast… I just hadn’t had the opportunity to appreciate it.
Now, with only a bubble of glass separating me from the ocean, I could only gawk at the structure’s incredible grandeur.
It only vaguely resembled a fantasy castle. There were walls and crenellations and ramparts, sure, but there were far too many spiral spires, each stretching up into the abyss. Like a collection of cylindrical skyscrapers with buttresses and tunnels joining them. It was closer to a miniature city than a castle.
And there were eight of these things, each bigger than the last?
Yeah. We were making the right call, bypassing all that.
We returned to the sub pen, and when I opened the hatch, it was with a giant grin.
Aerion wore the same expression, which only made our stupid grins grow even larger. I was glad. That was the first time she’d been happy since Emma passed.
“Y’know? It’s too bad we can’t keep these things,” I said. “I’d love to go sub racing during my free time.”
Aerion laughed. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to come back and visit, won’t you?”
We distributed the gear 50/50, in case something happened or we got split up, dumping my sword, pet rock, armor, and everything else into our subs.
“All set?” I asked. We stood on the pier in front of our subs, which floated on the water of the castle’s sub pen. We’d raided the safe room and grabbed all the supplies we could hold, and together, we made another waterskin to replace the one that’d broken. That put my Essence Utilization at 86/100, just over my 15% safety margin, but I figured the benefit of a healing waterskin outweighed the cost in this case.
I’d also transferred my Initialized bolt from the Siege Launcher to the sub and loaded it. No whales had taken the call, which was a good sign. The area was clear.
“How about you?” Aerion asked. “There is no telling what we may find on the seventh floor.”
“Can’t say I’m feeling prepared, to be honest,” I replied. “We’re going up there with a lot of explosives and one trashed sword. I’d have loved to be decked out with a few brand new blades and armor I’ve enchanted and leveled.”
“We discussed this,” Aerion said. “Goblin weapons shatter when we kill them. I know of no place we can acquire weapons. Perhaps a castle armory, but I don’t know where that is.”
“Right. Yeah, I know,” I said, scratching my head. “Plus, we’d have to fight our way there and back, and that’ll only deteriorate our gear even further.”
“Besides, what good would a sword do against a Trial Guardian?” Aerion asked. “The bolts are a far more suitable weapon. I’d genuinely never have thought to bring them with us. That was a stroke of brilliance.”
“Why, thank you,” I said, taking a bow. Aerion shook her head.
“Shall we?”
I drew in a long breath and let it go.
“Hey,” Aerion said, looking at me with worry. “It’ll be fine. There are no whales in the area.”
It was one mile to the surface. Maybe Aerion had stars in her eyes, but I certainly didn’t. I’d have been a moron to assume nothing would go wrong. Still, we had armored subs. We had torpedoes loaded with weapons that we knew could kill those things.
“Let’s do this.”
We nodded at each other and climbed onto our subs. I watched Aerion disappear into her sub and seal her hatch.
Who knew? Maybe, just maybe, luck would be on our side for once.
