Chapter 9.

Adele was in front of me. We were in the same position right before she kicked me into the water.

“Sheesh. You’re such a pain sometimes, Darling. Just take a dip in the water and relax.”

Her legs lifted up in a similar fashion to before. Without much time to understand the situation, I followed my gut, I instinctively moved to the side and her foot landed on nothing but air. She nearly lost her balance, but I grabbed onto the underside of her calf with my left hand to keep her on her feet.

“What are you doing dodging like that?”

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“Kill you, what are you talking about? Right now I’m not, that’s for the future, Darling.”

I let go of her leg and powerlessly collapsed on my ass in the boat.

“Hah. Hah. Hah…”

My fear from earlier caught up with my body and I was left hyperventilating on the floor.

“Why do you look so exhausted all of a sudden?”

“Maybe you could call it… a near death experience of sorts.”

“It’s just water, what are you…”

Adele seemingly caught on. She rushed to the side of the boat and examined the water closely.

“Darling, sorry. I didn’t notice them. These damn invisible pests of the ocean are trying to get in the way of our relaxing time together. I’ll make sure to give them a good lesson in the future that there are certain things they shouldn’t dare touch.”

“It’s fine. You don’t need to do something dangerous like that. For the most part... I seem to be… just fine… somehow.”

“If you say so. But when did you notice the box jellyfish? They’re very difficult to see, and unless you know they’re there, you’d never be the wiser to check for them. It was carelessness on my part to let my guard down like that. My danger instincts didn’t go off since I wouldn’t be too troubled by them, but it would definitely be another story if it were you.”

“It was… a fluke.”

Yeah, that’s all it was. What I just experienced was… a premonition of sorts. There’s no way any of that was real. If it was real, I wouldn’t be alive and perfectly fine like I was.

“Well, since these little pests showed up, might as well collect some.”

“Collect them? Why would you do something like that?”

Adele pouted a bit and didn’t answer. She reached her hand out over the edge of the boat into the water and whisked one after another out of the water by grabbing them by the bell, the bulging globular sack of a head. When there were a total of twenty of these terrifying beasts piled in a corner of the boat, she stopped collecting them.

She then started to do something that scared the living daylights out of me. She pinched with her fingernails near the pedalium, directly below the body where the tentacles were connected and mutilated them. It was analogous to watching someone’s arms and legs being chopped off.

When I thought about having my own limbs torn off one by one like that as the jellyfish contracted and expanded, I felt slightly nauseous.

“What are you doing Adele? You’ll get stung for no reason if you’re not careful. And you do realize these are the world’s deadliest jellyfish, right? There’s no need to go this far in torturing them just out of spite.”

“Oh? You’re worried I’ll get stung by them? Don’t worry, I’m pretty skilled. Even if I did get stung, I’d be perfectly fine. As for torture, it’s not torture, I’m just preparing them.”

“Preparing them for what?”

She didn’t answer. When she finished pinching off the tentacles with her nails from one of them, she lifted it up over the edge of the boat then dug into it through the bottom and let the guts fall out into the ocean.

I shivered when I imagined my own body being dissected in a similar fashion with my organs thrown away in a similar fashion. However, it was her following action that really left my body tingling all over uncomfortably. She took a sizable bite into the jellyfish without a shred of hesitation.

“You were... just hungry?”

“Yeah. Don’t make a girl say it out loud. It’s a bit embarrassing. Also, can you please not stare at me so passionately when I’m eating.”

She said that while turning her head to the side and chewing on the jellyfish’s raw, uncooked flesh.

I kissed her earlier, didn’t I? What exactly did she eat before this?

She looked back at me and offered, “you want one?”

“No thanks... I’ll… pass for the time being.” Eating it raw straight out of the ocean like that honestly made me want to throw up a bit.

“You know it’s actually perfectly edible even without cooking it.”

She might be comfortable with it after what she’d grown up eating, but I doubted I could handle it outright raw like she had. Cooking it was the minimum requirement for me to ever consider eating it. Unless I was starving with no other choice, I would definitely avoid it at all costs.

Strangely enough, she didn’t toss the tentacles into the ocean like she did with the guts. Instead, she picked them up and stored them in a small cup. I knew that even if the tentacles were detached, they could still sting due to the unexploded nematocyst cells in the tentacles. They only reacted when they came into contact with their prey. Did she plan to use it as a weapon? Maybe to poison or torture me later on if I became out of line?

“Adele, why don’t you just throw the tentacles away?”

“Why would you throw away the most valuable part? That would be a crime and absolute waste to dispose of them.”

“What exactly do you intend to do with them?”

“Didn’t I tell you not to ask such embarrassing things?”

“Embarrassing things? What do you mean?” Was killing me with them later considered embarrassing?