Six days until the Depth Four Reclamation Mission.

  Stamina exercises, pressure acclimation exercises, strength and toughness exercises—Marisol was doing them all. The Tropical Reefs seemed to stretch and distort around her as she skated in circles around the entire length of Depth Two, keeping her body low and hunched forward, her arms clawing through the water. She getting faster and faster with every cycle, but the improvement was slight. Nigh-insignificant.

  By noon, five hours after she began training at the crack of dawn, she staggered into a clearing in the middle of the Tropical Reefs and fumbled behind her for a piece of skyball coral. She popped the candy into her mouth, flushed out the pressure in her head, and immediately collapsed onto the ground.

  Exhaustion clawed at her. Her back pressed into the soft sand as she stared up at the other side of the whirlpool. Sunlight refracted through water, shimmering in pretty, fractured patterns like shards of stained glass. She’d grown all but used to the beauty of the Tropical Reefs now, and she couldn’t bring herself to just relax and take in the scenery around her, even if hundreds and thousands of Imperators and Guards were still clamouring around her, constructing their outposts and reinforcing their artillery towers.

  She wasn’t anywhere close to reaching Maria’s speed, and after slamming her into the ground yesterday, the Second Lighthouse Imperator had simply left as promptly as she’d been summoned. No amount of poking and prodding at the Archive told Marisol where she could find the girl again, so she was left on her own.

  Her eyes closed, and her chest heaved as she let out a long, heavy. She’d tried everything—different hand strokes, glaive angles, torso postures—but there was just about the way Maria skated, like she was part of the water itself. It wasn’t just a difference in attribute levels or mutations. It was technique. It was instinct, raw and unyielding.

  And Marisol didn’t have it.

  “Then it just proves you never had what it takes to reach the likes of Depth Eight. That vial of healing seawater you yearn for was always going to be out of reach.”

  A cold shadow fell over her face, and she peeled one eye open to see Victor standing over her, peering down at her. His grin tugged at the bandages on the corner of his mouth as he held onto his feathered hat in one hand, poking her stomach with his cane in the other.

  “... Here to make fun of me, old man?” she mumbled, grabbing the tip of his cane.

  “Yep,” he said, pulling out a second cane from inside his flower-pattern cane to continue poking her. “The fishes told me you got your ass handed to you by Maria yesterday. I’m here to see what my dearest disciple is going to do to fix my reputation as a mentor.”

  “Who told you I got beat?”

  He gestured loosely around him, and the Imperators and Guards who’d been watching them in the distance suddenly averted their eyes, hurrying off and resuming their duties. “The satellite moths don’t work underwater, but there are still plenty of loose lips around here,” he said, blocking her cane as she tried to whack his head. He twisted her weapon, whacked her wrist in return, and disarmed her with a pained yelp as he caught his second cane before it could float away. “Maria made you feel like you were skating through molasses, hm? Why do you think that is?”

  Marisol cracked her wrist and clenched her jaw, frustration boiling over her chest again.

  “I… I don’t get it,” she muttered. “Maria didn’t just swim and move fast—she . It was like… like the water just bended around her, but I’m..." Her shoulders slumped as she sighed again, exhaustion keeping her back to the ground. "It’s like I’m fighting the whirlpool all the time. I mean, I the Water Strider Class ain’t exactly fit for underwater movement, but I’ve been getting by all this time skating like I usually do on the surface. Kinda.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It ain’t just a difference in attribute levels. I can tell that much. It ain’t about mutations or biomagic, either. It’s this… it’s this ‘read’ she has on , but I don’t even know what—”

  “She’s got a read on ‘currents’, you mean?”

  Marisol raised an eyebrow, but Victor’s expression didn’t shift. He tapped his cane against the sand, creating a faint ripple next to her.

  “Here’s the thing, lass: you’re a Sand-Dancer,” he said plainly. “You’ve spent your whole life carving paths through the earth above, and you’ve spent your first half a year with the Water Strider Class fighting back. You skate against the winds. You skate against the storms. You go against anything that even remotely offers you resistance, and it’s worked well enough for you so far—it’s made you this strong, at least—but deep underwater? In the whirlpool? Down here, you’re forced into the world of strong currents. They’ll tell you where things will drift if left untouched, they’ll tell you what’s occupying space thousands of metres out of sight, but they don’t bow to brute strength or sharp edges. Currents are the world’s natural railways. You can ride the natural underwater currents and go faster, or you can fight and lose against them, because winning against them down here just ain’t how it works."

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  "Then what am I supposed to do?" Marisol snapped, her frustration bubbling over. "I can’t the… the currents the way you and Maria can. I still don’t know what that is—"

  Victor leaned back and twirled his cane in a slow, deliberate circle, stirring the water around them. "Currents ain’t really something you ‘see’. They’re something you listen to. You feel them. It’s instinctual. Their movements are the rhythm of speed—always moving, always shifting. You try to fight the natural underwater currents head-on, they’ll crush you. You learn to move with them, they’ll carry you to places you can’t reach on your own."

  Marisol frowned, staring at the subtle currents Victor had created. She couldn’t see what he was talking about—not exactly—but she could feel just the pressure brushing against her arms and legs, tugging her attention away from her exhaustion.

  "Maria ain’t faster than you because she has higher attributes or mutations more suited for underwater movement… well, that ain’t exactly true, and most high-rank Imperators with Crustacean Classes have mutations that let them feel flow easier, but Maria's faster than you because she’s spent years reading the flow of all things,” Victor said, barely looking at his cane as he seemingly shifted the temperature of water around her. “She’s learned to ride the currents. She knows where they are, she feels it, and she can slip into them when the moment is right. You lack that perceptivity. You lack that instinct.”

  “... So there are natural underwater currents all over, and I just have to find them and skate along them?”

  “Yep.”

  “And how am I supposed to learn how to sense them in six days?”

  With a sudden motion, he whipped his cane through the water, sending a sharp current spiraling toward her. Marisol jerked away instinctively, her skin tingling as the current slammed into the ground next to her.

  "Feel that?" Victor asked.

  "Barely,” she said sarcastically, scowling up at him.

  "That’s a start."

  Marisol remained on her back, her arms crossed as she watched Victor twirl and create another swirling currents with his cane. His movements were subtle, but the frothy white was growing in strength, twisting and shifting, curling around him like a living serpent.

  “If I stop twirling all of a sudden, where do you think these currents will shoot out to?” he asked, smirking as he spun his cane in a slow circle.

  Marisol squinted, trying to ‘feel’ the flow of the currents as they twirled around his cane. “That way?” she said hesitantly, tilting her head to the right.

  Victor gripped his cane tight to stop twirling it, and the current veered sharply off to the left instead, slamming into a giant coral and making the Guards standing under it scramble away in fright.

  “Not even close. Try again.”

  She huffed, clapping her own cheeks and willing herself to focus. This time, she paid closer attention, watching the way the next current curved and bent as Victor twirled his cane.

  “Left,” she said.

  The current shot to the right, slamming into an artillery cannon and making the Imperators shake angry fists at them.

  “Right.”

  Left.

  “Up.”

  Down.

  “Into my face.”

  She jerked her head to the left and narrowly dodged the current punching into the ground next to her. A small stream of blood trickled out of her ear where she’d been cut by the edges of the current, and seeing that made Victor laugh—he clasped both hands on his cane as he bent forward, peering down at her with a wide grin.

  “You suck. If you can’t even predict where I’m going to throw my currents, how are you going to notice natural underwater currents to jump on and skate along in the heat of battle to make yourself go even faster?”

  Her fists clenched and her brows knitted together. “Because there ain’t no logic to it. No pattern. I’m supposed to be down in Depth Four in less than a week, so—”

  Before she could finish, though, Victor reached into his cloak and dropped a small, heavy notebook on her chest, knocking the air out of her lungs.

  She glanced down, staring at the faintly worn cover and the thick, hand-drawn lines scrawled across its surface.

  “What’s this?”

  “A cheat sheet,” Victor said, shrugging lightly. “All the natural underwater currents in every Depth of the whirlpool, completely mapped out for you and your Archive to memorise. With this, you won’t have to look or feel for the currents yourself. Just memorise where they are and ride the closest ones whenever you need them for now.”

  Frowning, Marisol opened the book, flipping through the pages. It was filled with sketches of the whirlpool, each layer drawn with meticulous detail: arrows, notes, and annotations filled every inch of the paper, marking the paths and dynamics of every current in Depth Two and beyond.

  “... You think learning to read and perceive currents is instinct?” Victor said, shaking his head in dismay. “Nah. The world’s too big for that. The winds, the seas—too many goddamn currents. Even I'd have trouble finding currents to ride on if you just plucked me out the Deepwater Legion Front and planted me in your desert, but down , in the whirlpool, it’s all a stage. The currents don't change. They haven't changed. Depths One to Eight are the same now as they’ve been for decades, and I’ve spent my entire life studying and perceiving the currents down here. So, I drew them all out myself and put them in this notebook decades ago.”

  She remained silent. She didn’t blink. She didn’t respond. Marisol ran her fingers over the pages, her eyes shimmering as she scanned the precise, almost obsessive attention to detail. The arrows, the diagrams, the annotations… they almost reminded her of her mama’s hand-drawn technique book, every move and step laid out with the exact same level of care.

  With this notebook, she wouldn’t have to struggle finding any currents to ride on. All she had to do was memorise their locations, and not even, really, since her Archive could memorise them for her.

  And, knowing he’d helped her reach the starting point of a breakthrough, Victor turned to walk away dramatically.

  “Study my decades-old notes. Memorise them. Know which currents go where, how they shift, and how strong they are. A true speed demon doesn’t fight the world when they move—they make the currents of the natural world theirs, and they the world to their will,” he said, waving an absentminded farewell back at her. “Down there, speed ain’t got nothing to do with whether you have a Crustacean Class or a Water Strider Class. I’ll have you know Maria’s Whirligig Beetle Class is also a surface aquatic-type class, just like yours. For the sake of my reputation, don’t be a drag on her when you’re reclaiming Depth Four, yeah?”

  Marisol snorted and picked up a pebble, tossing it at the back of his head. He whacked it away with his cane without even looking.

  “For the record, I didn’t get my ass handed to me!” she shouted, still lying on her back. “I fought back! A little bit!”

  Victor paused, throwing a smirk over his shoulder. “Sure you did, lass.”

  She couldn’t quite tell if he believed her or not, but she didn’t really care either way.

  She knew he wasn’t telling the truth when he said he’d written everything in this notebook decades ago, either.

  she mused, holding his notebook over her face as she brushed her fingers across the page. She’d know it was fresh, considering she’d watched her mama write that technique book with the same ink colour.

  the Archive said, tilting its head.

  Six days to memorise every current in the notebook.

  She sat up straight, popped another skyball coral into her mouth, and got to reading with a small smile.

  Next chapter on Saturday!

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