The water felt slimy, and amazingly frigid. The floating bits and chunks of giant centipede might as well have been shards and slabs of ice, while the amorphous blobs of expended phosphor gel and scolovian blood could be mistaken for half melted slush. I managed to keep my cool, no pun intented, as I waded into the soupy water, but had a short moment of frozen agony as the depth increased from thigh to hip.

  My body made yet another undignified noise without my permission as I felt everything below my belt contract and flee from the chilly depths, leaving me frozen on the spot for a moment. I ventured a cautious glance at the ceiling, hoping I had not disturbed however many hidden monsters happened to be hanging invisibly off the ceiling above me. The threat of the beasts dropping down on me if I lingered was, at the very least, a strong motivational force that kept me advancing deeper and deeper into the water.

  Passing around the bend that had blocked my sight from the shoreline, the water had crept up to my chest and I could see the wavy lines of my topographical wire-frame darkvision bending down below the shadowy water line. I kept my glow-goo covered gauntlet above the water, unsure how the coating would hold up underwater after I had accidentally crushed the surface-tension contained bulb. I’d be fine, I only had to do a little solo cave freediving. No big deal.

  The next test of my perseverance came soon after, when I found myself up to my shoulders in the chilly water. I began to hyperventilate, and felt the panic and fear rise through the mix of calming chemicals Max was still pumping through my system. I had no fucking clue how to swim, and my mind raced with options and ideas and a whole lot of second-guessing and hesitation. Do I just flap my arms and legs around like I’d seen in movies and TV? Was I going to sink to the bottom so I could just walk along the floor, or would I float along the top of the flooded tunnel? A honking chat-alert chimed again and instead of the message scrolling along next to Max’s streamer cam, the chat transcription moved to the center of my vision.

  Rin: I think he’d have better luck carrying something heavy enough for him to walk along the bottom since he doesn't know how to swim. That’s just a guess though, I have no idea how to swim either.

  Ali: We did a few swimming drills at the academy. He might be dense enough to sink without any extra weight, some of the guys from my unit had that issue. Have you seen him without a shirt on lately? Whatever that AI is doing to him burned all of his body fat off.

  Rin: Have you checked his preview window? His natural stats have yet to be updated, his avatar still has his body from a month ago.

  Ali: Seriously? I thought it updated live with every login.

  Rin: You thought wrong. A full scan and reassessment only happens during a payment session, which Nick has not undergone for 35 days. If he has lungs full of air it is unlikely he will sink on his own.

  The messages shrunk back down and moved over to the corner, and Max pulled up some kind of blurry chart in his streamer cam with a rough outline of a human shape that he pointed to with a stick that for some inexplicable reason had a tiny penguin figurine with an extended flipper on the end of it. He pulled out a graduation cap from off screen and began lecturing. I stopped paying attention as my teeth started to chatter.

  I shook my head and tried to focus on the problem at hand. I couldn’t just stand here. There was a whole team of both peers and rivals waiting for me to do one simple thing, swim through the damn tunnel. They’d even done the hard part and cleared it of enemies for me. Another rubber chicken honk went off and I saw a second message from Jozoic announce itself before shrinking down into the tab icon after I acknowledged it with a glance.

  I debated opening it for a moment, distracting myself with all of the possibilities of what the message might say. Subconsciously I knew that I could daydream as long as I liked about what it could be, but would be forced to accept reality and continue my mission once I opened it. Like an animal in a box with a vial of poison, you could speculate on its status all day until you changed the situation by looking inside.

  With a clenched jaw, I tried to force myself to focus and my rebellious mind turned the snippet of Ali and Rin’s conversation over for a moment. The comments on my body or the payment scan were not news to me, but carrying something and walking along the bottom seemed like a thing I could try. My guess is that is why Max had highlighted the exchange.

  As I had that particular thought, the outline of Max’s screen shimmered and flashed like a quest marker while he gave the camera a cheesy grin and an inflated thumbs-up before continuing to speak animatedly to the camera. Taking that as his approval, I nodded to myself and opened up my inventory. I thought I still had a few heavy objects that might work as weights.

  After some more dithering and procrastination, I selected a cracked stone basin that weighed nearly a hundred pounds and pulled it out of my inventory. The bowl appeared in my hands, nearly two feet across and as thick as my palm was wide. Its burden was somehow comforting, a familiar task to occupy my hands with while I took a few more deep breaths and began to move without letting myself think about it.

  I stomped forward, trying to rile my anger back up with scornful thoughts and internal smack-talk about the centipede stew I was about to submerge myself in. I might have grumbled and cursed about it aloud, but opening my mouth while submerging into the gross mix was the last thing I wanted to do.

  With a few paces forward and one last deep exhale and inhale, I closed my eyes tightly and fully sunk under the water. Left to the cold dark silence, I kept my focus on the minimap in the corner, using it to navigate as I clomped along toting my big stone bowl like a 10 year old with a bowling ball.

  My heartbeat kept me company in the muffled depths. It no longer threatened to hammer its way out of my chest, Max’s chemical guidance combined with the cold water almost jarringly slowed its rhythm. Instead of drumming out the energetic thumps you’d expect at a dance club overseen by a pair of robot-headed cyborg beat-keepers, it had slowed to a steady slow-motion head-banging half-time.

  As I kept moving forward, other noises made themselves apparent. Dull rippling thrums, occasional low grinding rumbles, and distant twanging cracks reached me through the water from indeterminable distances all throughout the complex. The close feeling and slow beating of my heart, my rhythmic steps, and the unsettling noises morphed together into a discordant soundtrack that only added to the barely suppressed horror I had—rather than diving headfirst into—decided to haul a half of a boulder along for.

  My toes squelched around something squishy, and I made that damn noise again without being able to stop myself. I felt the bubbles of my released breath roll up my face and tousle my hair as they sought the ceiling, but did not let the gross feeling whatever-it-was that had lodged between my toes slow me down. I bumped into more floating objects as I followed the submerged tunnel forward, supremely grateful that I had decided to shell out for the subscription to the mini-map that made it easy to stay in the center of the path. Most of the debris on the water seemed to be floating near the ceiling, so I tilted my head forward and hunched down to keep from repeatedly bonking my face into bits of bugs and globs of goop.

  On my next step, I shook my foot out in an effort to dislodge whatever I’d stepped in. With a bit of a stumble and a course correction, I continued on. I could see on my map where the three dwarves were waiting for me on the far side of the water line, and I was about halfway through this horror show.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Just as I was getting back into my rhythm, my foot once again found something unexpected in the dark. This time something hard that I stubbed my bare foot against. I almost dropped my bowl and tripped, but managed to recover. I was starting to feel the burning need to exhale and take another breath, but was able to resist for now as I tentatively reached out with my foot again.

  Whatever it was, felt solid and hard yet lightweight at the same time. I couldn’t really tell what it was with my eyes closed without spending some time to feel it out, but I got the thing settled against the floor and tested trying to step over it. It might have been only a foot and a half tall but was too wide for me to simply step over, so I high-stepped on top of the curved obstacle with one foot.

  The object flexed but held as I began to put my weight onto it, so I pushed off with my rear foot to fully step onto the thing. I guessed that it was an empty section of shell from one of the creatures by its smooth feeling and the way it bent under my weight. These things were tough, so if I was right I doubted it would break under my weight.

  I mentally prepared myself for a short fall if the thing cracked under the combined bulk of myself and the carved out half of a boulder I was carrying, which led to me being completely unprepared for the outcropping from the ceiling. My forehead and face bashed straight against a rough stone that jutted down just enough from the ceiling to clip me, and caused me to fall backwards as the thing I was standing on slid out from under me. The unpolished stone basin scraped down my shin like sandpaper, and caused me to yelp yet again and release another stream of bubbles as I reflexively brought one hand up to my forehead.

  The stone landed on my foot and caused me to blast another burst of bubbles upwards as my lower back crashed down against the object I’d been standing on. The fall itself didn't hurt, as I’d dropped the stone, but as soon as it rolled off of my foot the natural buoyancy of my body caused me to float off of the floor. I found myself suspended in the middle of the tunnel, with most of my breath gone and what I suspected was a broken nose.

  A quick glance at my status bar showed me that I had indeed broken my nose, or at least I had a red framed debuff with a picture of a fractured nose. A moment later and I bumped face up and flat against the rough ceiling amongst a debris field of bug parts and amorphous blobs of congealed blood and expended glow goop that parted around me.

  It took about a half a second for me to go from surprised to absolute panic. My muscles ached from the cold as I thrashed around wildly until I managed to get a grip against the ceiling. I scrambled along, sort of climbing with my hands and scraping the crap out of my knees against the jagged ceiling. For a moment or two, there was no thought, no reasoning. I went full flail mode and pulled myself along in my panic to escape.

  A blinding ball of blue light flared in my vision, at the same time as what felt like an electric jolt ripped through me. The sudden intensity of it all stunned me out of my panic. “Hey! Listen! Woah there. You’re moving backwards!” Max yelled at me, his voice amazingly loud and coming from everywhere at once like a stadium announcer.

  I scrambled against the stone, as I essentially laid face first and floating against the ceiling. It felt like I’d lost most of my air and I could feel my body trying to sink down to the floor again if not for my white-knuckled grip against the jagged roof.

  “Move quick or I’m taking over, and we all know how much we both hate that. You need to push off and swim like you’ve never swam before. Here, like this.” Max’s voice was urgent, and his streamer camera had switched over to a “We will be right back,” splash screen.

  A moving image appeared in my view, and a painful throb in my temples hinted that Max might be messing with my perception of time again. Somehow, my terror had grown to such a state that it nearly disappeared. It was as if I were being piloted by Max like he had threatened as I drifted still and unmoving, like I was but a witness to my situation and somehow removed from it.

  A sudden lack of sensation and distance from my fear allowed me to focus on the image of some guy in a speedo swimming in crystal clear pool water. He had both arms held up on either side of his head, with his hands together and flattened into a knife's edge to cut the water ahead of himself. I wasn't sure how I knew that was what the purpose was, but I knew it. The swimmer undulated his body like a ribbon in the wind, a rippling snake-like sine wave of smooth motion that flowed from his shoulders all the way down to his pointed feet.

  With a second twinge of pain in my temples, sensation roared back through my nerves and I found myself no longer stuck and witnessing the situation from a distance. I was right back in it, my lungs burning and demanding I take a breath.

  My hands scraped along the ceiling as I flailed for a second longer, but I managed to get myself turned around and facing the right way. I pushed my hands forward and attempted to slither through the water like the image Max had shown me. Only then did I notice I had opened my eyes and whatever was in the murky water burned. Splotchy and blurry light blue shapes drifting around me in the dark. I blinked a couple of times and shut my eyes tightly again, returning my focus to my map.

  The swimming stroke worked, sort of. I began to move forward while doing my best impression of a scuba-snake. What felt like invisible hands pressed against me at one point, prodding my form and seeming to nudge and guide me with small corrections until I was moving at a pretty good clip. The minimap showed I had crossed the halfway point, and might have had 20 feet or so left as my lungs threatened open revolt.

  Only 15 more feet, then only 10. My mind was blank, and I had one goal. One more breath. One more kick. My lungs burned, my shoulders scraped along the rough ceiling for a moment and I lost some speed as my harness caught against some stone outcropping. The contact knocked my form out from level and disoriented me for a moment, and an overwhelming urge to fill my lungs nearly caused me to suck in a breath full of water.

  I bumped against the wall, then the ceiling again. Just as my body forced me to finish my exhale and demanded I take a breath of anything at all, something hooked onto the strapping across my back and pulled me off course. My lungs filled with water and I felt my chest lock tightly as I immediately choked on it. I threw a weak punch and thrashed away, but it had caught me from both sides and I had no leverage against the water. My knee scraped against something, and I tried to cough which only led me to taking in more water as my conflicting reflexes locked me up.

  Despite my struggles, I was hauled upwards and felt more points of pressure against my numbed body as whatever had grabbed me wrapped me up and hauled me forward. I kept trying to cough, to breathe, to do anything to dampen the electric spasms of painful coughing and choking as I drowned. I forgot everything. I saw nothing. My world clenched and curled in on itself, the blazing pain capturing my full attention as my chest felt as if it would implode.

  The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt up until that point. Worse than anything I had experienced even in real life. I had broken and cracked a number of bones. I had been beaten badly enough to wake up in the hospital a time or two. Just yesterday I’d been shot in the fucking face and shrugged it off like it had barely mattered. I’d take any of that over this every time.

  All I could do was cough and fight to stay conscious as I felt a certain delirium and stupor settle over me. I didn’t know it at the time, all I could think about in the moment was the pain in my chest and my burning need to breathe.

  I had a vague sense of being slammed against something hard, and was almost looking forward to being bitten and stung as it might offer some sensation other than the one I was too wracked with to experience anything else. I could feel it crushing me, and I fluttered my eyes open and was almost blinded by light. I tried to fight it off, to fight them off. I pushed myself up to my hands and knees and something hit me hard, right across my cheek.

  My head rocked to the side and I coughed. My ears felt like they popped and somehow turned the volume of the world back on. I hadn’t even noticed how muffled my hearing had been, and now there were loud noises. Voices, and the sound of water splattering against the cold stone floor as I coughed another gout of it onto the floor.

  “Sand and gravel,” Hodak cursed. “Quit fighting and get it out.”

  Jozoic leaned down and looked me in the face, a trace of concern hiding behind his stern features. “Gah-rah… or as I’ve been informed you humans might say, fuckin-a. Looks like the rumors are true.”

  I was too busy coughing up the next batch of water all over the floor and finally getting an amazingly glorious yet painful next breath to reply.