Although we didn’t have the greatest sense of where everything was, it was still pretty easy to find the main gate since it was such an important piece of the whole since. We turned on to one street and found that it easily led to the beginning of the city, so we followed it until we came up on the main gate. We scanned around for a little bit, searching for the gate that was labeled as Gaias.

After a few minutes, I heard Julian shout from my left for all of us to come over. We swam over and were met with another massive gate. On the front of it, carved in glowing brown was the crest that I could only guess represented the city of Gaias. It wasn’t very ornate or anything, just a simple earth sigil surrounded by a semi-circle with crystals on each side.

Julian placed his hand on the door and closed his eyes before a mass of brown essence shot across the whole door. It opened and revealed a dimly lit passageway leading off in to the distance. “In total, this should take around six hours to get to Gaias from here, so we have plenty of time. I would strap in for the long haul on this one.”

I sighed. I really wanted to just launch us along down the tunnel as quickly as I could, but without my ability to slow down my vision properly, I would most likely just smash us all in to a wall and get us killed, something that probably wouldn’t be too productive to the mission we had ahead of us. I hoped it wouldn’t be too awkward and that we wouldn’t just be silently swimming along for six hours. I would welcome the peace and quiet though after all the excitement we’d had on this leg of the trip.

“Let’s go,” I said as I swam inside the tunnel.

Lilith was the last one in, so once she joined us, the door shut and we were all alone except for the tons of creatures swimming along with us. While I didn’t really like anything about the underwater setting, I did have to concede the point that it had been absolutely gorgeous in many different ways. The buildings, the animals, the plants. I really did have to marvel at how beautiful of a place it was. I looked back as the door faded in to the distance, the rest of the City of Waves following with it.

“What’re you so mopey about, my little green kitten? You hated that place!”

I frowned. “Just because a lot of bad things happened there doesn’t mean that I hate the entire place. I thought it was quite beautiful.”

She laughed. “You are such an interesting creature. It’s hard to believe that the majority of my personality is derived from you.”

I shrugged. “It’s hard to believe every part of your existence.”

I looked back and saw that the group was giving me weird looks, except for Viktor who was laughing. I gave him an inquisitive look.

He smiled. “I just find it very funny every time you’re talking to the guys and... girls in your head.”

I chuckled. Even if you knew who I was talking to and the whole situation, any conversation where you could only hear one side of it was probably pretty amusing. I then realized that Julian seemed to be frowning. He was paying very little attention to where he was going, but still maintained a proper course somehow. It was impressive, but his expression was worrying. I slowed my swimming and fell back in to the middle of the group.

“Are you okay?”

Julian looked at me a little confused at first. “Oh uh... yeah. I’m fine.”

I frowned at him. I wasn’t buying it. “Are you sure? You’re going back to the place with the people who basically disowned you so you could invent something who you are now going back to to gloat about your achievement.”

He just shrugged. “Why should I care about who I’m meeting where?”

I glared at him. “Maybe because they’re your family and I refuse to believe that you don’t give half a damn about what they did to you and what it’s going to be like seeing them again.”

He turned and stared right in to my eyes. “So what if I do care? What does that change? What does it matter? They kicked me out because of some stupid family tradition that I didn’t even want to participate in. I’m going to tell them how I feel and that’s that. Any more stupid questions?”

I could see tears welling up in his eyes. He turned around and wiped his eyes up before turning back, slowly returning to his usual stern expression.

“Actually, I do have one.” We all turned to look at Viktor.

“What is it?”

“Well, you haven’t said that much about your family themselves. Specifically, you’re grandfather, Charlie Alderin, the commander of Camp IV. He’s the dude we actually have to convince to help us. At this point, the Masters themselves aren’t really a concern since they should all understand the risk of what is coming. But the thing we do have to worry about is the people that are leading the camps whose help we also need. So, what kinda dude is your grandpa?”

I smiled at Viktor and he smiled back before we turned to Julian.

He frowned at us. “I will be perfectly honest with you, I think that my grandfather is easily one of the least caring and most heartless pieces of shit I’ve met next to the members of the Death Trinity...”

I sighed loudly.

“However, he isn’t impractical and, if he truly believes what we tell him, he will almost definitely help us. And, considering the severity of the information we are delivering, he will most likely believe us. Despite his personality, I don’t think he’ll give us any trouble with this matter.”

I smiled. “Thanks for the info.”

He nodded and we continued to swim on. I thought about what he’d said and how, the way he described Charlie was similar to how I might describe Strataros. It was the kind of feeling where the thought of even questioning their redemption was an absurd thought. They were bad people. It was just a gut feeling. I was a bit nervous to meet him, but hopefully, he wasn’t as bad to us as he had been to Julian.

The silence was cut short by a low rumbling in the distance. We continued on and it only seemed to get louder and louder with every inch we swam. Every few seconds it would stop and then immediately start back up again. I stopped and turned back, signaling for the rest of the group to stop as well.

I closed my eyes, placing a seal over the right and opening them to a multitude of auras. I looked down the tunnel in to the distance for anything large that was coming in this direction. It wasn’t too hard to spot since the thing coming towards us had an absolutely massive aura comprised mostly of blue, but that color was slowly being consumed by what looked almost like a grey fire. A very familiar shifting dark flame. I narrowed my eyes, a burning sensation swelling in my right eye.

“What is it?” Lilith asked, now beside me. I turned to look at her and her expression turned grim. I realized I was still glaring quite fiercely. “Are you okay?”

I shook it off and looked ahead. “I’m fine. There’s something coming towards us pretty fast. It seems to be some form of corrupted sea creature from the look of its aura.”

She nodded. “So, do we just wait for it to come at us?”

I shook my head. “No. We’re going to meet this thing halfway. Let’s go.” Without another word, I shot off down the tunnel, the rumbling growing even louder.

I didn’t really know why the sight of that corrupting black fire made me so angry. Maybe it was because I knew what it did to a creature. I hated the idea that something was taking away the free will of a creature and changing it in an unnatural way.

We turned around a curve in the tunnel and came face to face with the beast that was causing all the trouble. Floating in front of us was an octopus bigger than anything I would have imagined. It filled up almost the entire cavern. Compared to the Current Reaper, it was still pretty moderate in size, but that wasn’t the most fair comparison. It had eight massive tentacles that stretched out all over the tunnel. The tentacles were each covered in spiky rock-like bits of red crystal. It blended in to the creature’s black body to make it look somewhat like a volcano, but I doubted it had any incendiary capabilities.

The four of us just floated there, staring at the octopus for a bit before it seemed to realize what was happening and it began thrashing about. It let out a high-pitched screech that cause me to cover my ears in pain. I had been able to deal with the noise earlier since we were underwater and the noise was so far away, but now that it was closer, it was almost impossible to deal with.

The ceiling and walls of the tunnel began to crumble around the octopus. That was when I realized that behind it there was a massive wall of stone and rubble that had probably been the rumbling we’d heard earlier. I had thought maybe we could just wall it off and then make our escape down the tunnel, but apparently it had already been destroying the tunnel. Hopefully, Julian and Viktor could move them and we could make our escape after we dealt with the octopus.

I turned to look at the group who had already realized the situation as well. I opened a rift and pulled out Dextrus. Hopefully, I wouldn’t break this one. We charged the creature and began wailing on it, dodging attacks and hitting the creature with as much force as we could muster, but the underwater environment wasn’t helping at all.

I dodged an attack and then was quickly swiped in to a wall by another tentacle. I couldn’t use my wind arrow right now. It would take too much time and concentration to set up in this situation. However, thinking back to the fight with the Current Reaper and the plethora of monsters we’d fought just before entering the city, I had an idea of what we might be able to do to take this stupid octopus down.

I swam over to Julian. “I’m going to need you and Viktor to restrain this thing somehow while Lilith and I set something up.”

He nodded and swam over to Viktor. I watched seals form behind the octopus and then marveled as vines, tree branches, and black wiring shot forth to contain the tentacles and body of the octopus. It was already struggling to get free though, so we didn’t have much time.

I swam over to Lilith. “You want me to get out of the way then?”

I frowned. “No, I need your help.”

She chuckled. “That’s funny, but in case you hadn’t noticed, I can’t really do much here because of the water, you know?”

I frowned. “I don’t know why you’re doubting yourself, but you can help. I need you to place combustion seals all over that thing’s body. Detonate them when I tell you.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, but I smirked at her and she gave me a confused look before giving up and swimming over to the octopus to start placing the seals.

Once they were all placed, it was my turn. Everyone had done their job fantastically, but the clock was ticking and I really needed to do this right. I bolted over to the octopus and, on each of Lilith’s seal, I placed my own seal. Each of the seals created a bubble of air around the combustion seal and then pushed the air directly in to the octopus’s body.

“Lilith, now!” I shouted and the octopus lit up. Each of the combustion seals detonated and the resulting fire was funneled right back to the octopus causing massive red burns to pop up all over its body once the smoke had cleared. I released my seals and the others did to the same. The burns steamed as the octopus collapsed to the floor of the cavern. I watched as the aura of the creature slowly faded and the octopus dissolved in to blue and grey glowing mist.

I let out a sigh of relief and exhaustion. Creating those bubbles in that way had been super draining. I swam over to the wall of collapsed stone and pressed my hand to it. Julian, Viktor, and Liltih followed close behind. I looked over to Julian and Viktor. “Can you guys move this?”

They pressed their hands to the wall and then turned back and shook their heads. “Sorry, dude, but there’s just way too many rocks and they aren’t densely packed enough that we could move them all together.”

“What do we do then?”

Julian looked up and then swam to the ceiling. He touched his hand to it before swimming back down. “This tunnel has been curving upwards slowly as we’ve been going, so we’re actually not super far from the surface at this point. Even though we’ve both used a good bit of essence already, Viktor and I should have enough to make us a hole out of here.”

I nodded and they swam up to the ceiling. Lilith and I backed up as they placed two earth seals on the ceiling. It began to rumble a bit. The rumbling grew louder and louder until finally, the ceiling gave way and collapsed in to the tunnel. There was now a large opening in the cavern that we all swam up to. Julian made a staircase in the side for us to walk up, but I was too excited to be back in the open air. The moment my head hit the surface, I forced my vision to slow down. A veil of teal enveloped my sight as I formed a seal on my hand and shot up in to the sky, the world moving in slow motion around me. It was good to be back to normal finally.