The System Seas

Chapter 17: The Hidden Sea

Criminal WindsThe winds themselves assist with your chicanery. By expending your magic power, you can cajole your ship’s sailing speed faster in short bursts. Whether you are breaking blockades, outrunning the guards, or spiriting away a beautiful young lady, you will find yourself with an unpredictable increase in speed that will leave your pursuers scratching their heads.

Each activation of the skill comes with a short delay during which your magical power builds. You will be greatly weakened after each activation, forced to pause any further uses of magic for several minutes until your stores have recharged.

Take caution! You have forced this skill to develop before it was otherwise truly ready. As such, it is currently fragile and should be used sparingly. Any uses of the skill beyond a certain very conservative level will result in negative alterations to the skill, damaging penalties to your physical body, or both.

As a forced skill, you have a leveling penalty to Criminal Winds until you reach the point at which you would have otherwise received it under normal circumstances. Each level you gain in the skill from negative five back to level one will only serve to return it to its baseline.

Marco whooped weakly as his legs gave out and the ship whipped forward in the water, almost knocking Riv and Elisa over in the process. Marco hit the deck and watched as the guard’s ship grew more and more distant. In one move, he had created almost twice as much gap as any of the previous bursts did.

“Marco! Are you okay?”

“It’s okaaay,” Marco slurred. His body was so numb he could barely feel his mouth, but he could feel it getting better second by second as the magic poured back into him. “Really. Better soon.”

“Riv, help me get him up.”

Riv looped his arms under Marco’s as Elisa put his hands back on the wheel, steering for him with his own appendages until he regained partial control of his body.

“You got the skill, I presume?” Elisa asked.

“I did. But quiet. Something’s happening, I think. The boat feels heavy, somehow.”

Over the next several seconds, the boat slowed almost to a stop. Marco looked behind him, sure the guards would be on them any second.

“This isn’t a normal place,” Elisa said.

“But they’re gone,” Marco said. “The whole ship.”

“And the island with it,” Riv said. “You were right, Elisa. This is not normal.”

“It’s more that… I mean, look.” Elisa pointed up. “Since when is the sun red?”

The redness intensified as she spoke, dyeing the ship and then the sea a soft, pinkish hue. Marco was distracted from the transformation when his pocket began to heat where the system’s treasure map sat. He ripped it out before it burned a hole in him, then watched as it burned to ash on the ground.

From the burned letter rose a notification, one that sent his friends into such an immediate distraction that Marco could have no doubt that they were all seeing the same thing.

The Hidden Sea

Most dungeons are of humble proportions. As representations, most are spiritually mirroring a part of a mountain, an individual island, or an unusual geographic feature. Some are even born from particular accomplishments of human civilization, honoring something built rather than something that just is.

This sea is different. To the extent it mirrors something, it mirrors the vastness of the world. More particularly, it mirrors the vastness of the sea.

Each member of your party hails from a controlled part of the world, one where much of the wildness has been beat out, hunted, and tamed. Among you, the greatest danger anyone has known was gaining a secret kind of unique class, one that was predicted by certain authorities to be hostile to their aims. Here, every danger is at least as large, if in different ways.

In the water beyond the safe zones of your youths, danger still reigns king. It is much the same here. Every stop you can make, every island, and every unusual feature of the scene all promise danger and deliver on that promise.

They also promise strength. From here, you are in a race to grasp that strength soon enough to face the danger. The line between becoming lost and forgotten or a legend is thin. It is up to you which side you land on.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Huh. A whole world in here. That’s something,” Marco said.

“It will still be limited. All dungeons are. And you are missing the point, Marco. Burying the lede.”

“What could be more important than that?” Marco scanned the message again. “I’m sorry, Elisa. I’m not seeing it.”

“Your unique class, Marco.” Elisa paced around the ship’s wheel. “And that even the system thinks your class is hostile to the government. I thought we could go and travel for a few years, then return and say sorry. They’d see that we didn’t do anyone harm and maybe that would matter. Now, we’re going to have to be on the run for a long time. Maybe even our whole lives.”

“Well, huh.” Riv threw up his hands. “That’s not great. But don’t we have more urgent things to worry about?”

“Like?” Elisa almost yelled, then caught herself. “Sorry, Riv. Like what?”

“Well, we know there’s land, somewhere, but there’s none here. And you know what else there isn’t? Wind.”

Marco snapped back to reality quick on hearing that. Riv was right. They’d been here several minutes now, and there hadn’t been anything much stronger than a breeze. Nothing anywhere near powerful enough to move the ship had blown at all.

“” The word dropped from Marco’s mouth like a stone. “How much water do we have?”

“A few jugs and some canteens. Just what we got from the dungeon. Why?”

“Because we have no idea how long the doldrums will hold.” Marcos let go of the wheel and moved towards the stairs belowdecks to make sure the water was still safe, after everything. “There’s a chance we end up needing every drop.”

—

A few windless hours passed. The ship moved so slowly that only Elisa could track it. She swore some sort of current was dragging them onward. Marco didn’t see it, but he decided to trust her. It was much more comforting than the alternative.

Marco and his crew spent the first several minutes of their becalm checking to make sure the ship hadn’t taken any significant damage in the chase. There was some, but only of the sort Marco could see through his captain-specific system screens.

Ship Integrity

Major Structural: Intact

Propulsion: Intact

Overall Health: 98%

“What do you think hurt us?” Elisa asked. “I don’t think we hit anything. Ships are supposed to sail through water.”

“I have a couple of ideas. The first is that ships just take wear and tear over time. I know that whenever any ship came to dock, they always looked for repairs unless they were in a huge hurry to leave,” Marco said.

“Maybe, but it was just an afternoon’s sailing, right? Not much more than that.”

“Yeah, I wish I knew more about this so I could say for sure. The other option I can think of is that something about me overdriving the ship does it. That it puts strain on the vessel, somehow.”

“You think that could be?” Elisa asked.

“I mean, it put strain on me.” Marco rolled his sore shoulders and popped up on his toes to try and stretch out his aching legs a little. “The ship isn’t that much different. There’s a speed it’s supposed to go, then there’s the speed it goes with a real captain at the helm, and then there’s a speed beyond that I can push it to. It might just be more than it’s made to handle, or else the system just wants it to cost something. Like you said before, back on the island.”

“Balance.” Elisa smiled. “You remembered.”

“I can remember some things, you know. But let's go back to keeping an eye out. I can’t imagine that this place is very safe for us to be just hanging out in long-term. If something’s coming to threaten us, I want to know about it sooner rather than later.”

For the next few hours, nothing did come. There was an occasional soft shifting of the air you would have hardly called wind that wasn’t anywhere near what they needed to move. The water lapped gently at the ship, as if it was floating in a bathtub. Nothing else happened.

“Something is approaching us.” Finally, after Marco nerves were just about fried from all the waiting, Riv ran from the rear of the ship up to the wheel to pull both him and Elisa back to see what he had spotted. “See it? It’s like a bump. A brown bump.”

“Yeah. Like a walnut, or something. Just floating out there.”

“It’s not a bump.” Marco ran up towards the wheel again. “It’s a capsized ship. We have to get to it?”

“Can we?” Elisa trotted after him as he put his hands on the wheel and started to pump in magical power. “Should we? This is supposed to be a dangerous place, Marco.”

“It’s a capsized ship.” Marco cranked the wheel as far to the side as he could. “We have to get to it. It’s a law. If we sank it ourselves, that might be different. You don’t have to save enemies if it’s not a good idea for you. But some ship you have nothing to do with? It’s an obligation.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Because you’d want that rule very much if it was you in the water.” Marco poured as much magic as he could into the wheel, but the ship was barely taking any. “I've heard enough stories to know you’d want that very much.”

The overdriving of the ship turned out to be an almost complete bust. It seemed it worked with whatever conditions the ship was already in, making more of the wind and water or something. When there wasn’t anything to work with, it did next to nothing at all. Minutes passed and Marco did little beyond getting the ship partially turned around.

“It’s not working, guys,” Marco admitted.

“Could have fooled me,” Riv said. “Look.”

Marco finally did look back at the ship, and it really was substantially closer. He didn’t see any people bobbing near it yet, but he could make out individual planks near the keel and even see some of the damage that probably helped it capsize in the first place. His mind worked on the problem for a bit before he came to the only possible conclusion as to what was happening.

“We’re drifting. There’s a current or something.”

“That’s a thing?” Riv asked. “I mean, it must be. We are getting closer.”

“It’s a thing. Usually closer to shore, but the ocean is a big weird place. I’m guessing ocean is even weirder. Get ready, though. It should only be about five minutes before we get there. If we crash into it hard, I don’t want you two going overboard.”

Marco was expecting a collision, but at a distance, he didn’t expect it to be much of a hit. The ship was barely moving, after all. When Elisa tensed up, he got his first clue that he guessed wrong on what was going to happen. A few seconds later, he saw why. The ship was much larger than he had supposed it was, and out on a context-less sea, it became clear that they were about to bash into a much bigger object much faster than they had guessed when they got very close to it indeed.

“Brace!” Marco yelled. “Brace hard!”