historical

None of us were water mages, so breathing underwater was impossible. The only other option was to push the water away from us. I honestly thought this would probably be the best option.

“Celeste!”

“Y-yes!” She snapped to attention.

“Can you please create a bubble of air around us. Definitely give us a lot of air for a while.”

“Ah.. I can do that.”

For a wind fairy, gathering air and creating a bubble was simple. Our time would be limited. We might only have an hour or two. I had actually already checked my dp. I did have an underwater breathing ability that was only 5 points. There was also an underwater breathing spell that cost 10. I could use that and cast it on everyone, but the mana to cast it on six people would be a lot. It required continuous use, and I didn’t want to risk taking only some of the girls, even if I could portal the rest in later.

We went down the stairway, moving slowly as the water was pushed back by Celeste’s air barrier. This wasn’t done with a particular skill, but with pure wind control. That had some advantages, but just as many disadvantages.

We headed down into the depths. Although the dungeon still kept the format of hallways, they were much wider now, and even her bubble wasn’t enough to reach the ends. At my recommendation, the bubble sat above our feet. We were actually trudging through water which came to about our hips, with an expanse of about ten feet above out heads reserved for air. We were going to get wet eventually anyway, so I decided it would be safer if we kept ourselves half submerged.

I continuously used sense life as we moved, keeping my eye out for any enemies. If we were lucky, the dungeon considered just the challenge of traveling through an underwater maze sufficient enough that it wouldn’t launch much more at us. I really feared that this was only the first of the underwater levels though, and later ones might be even more challenging. Then I wondered, if this is what we experienced before level 20, what would a mega-dungeon’s lower levels be like? Supposedly, no one has really made it down much farther than level 60.

Any dungeon over fifty years old is considered unbeatable, and one over 100 years, it was called a mega-dungeon. There might be cases where it wasn’t a corridor of water you had to walk through, but a corridor of lava. Maybe an area filled with noxious poisonous gas. As those kinds of thoughts came into my mind, I realized that I was only scratching the surface of what dungeons were capable of.

We continued on with a steady pace, moving efficiently thanks to my Map. Without the Map, the murky water around us that only allowed us to see ten to fifteen feet ahead would have been devastating. Death would have almost been certain.

We noticed a few traps. I was afraid the air bubble would be enough to trigger the traps, so we went out of our way to avoid them. The one or two we got close enough to see appeared to be water mines not unlike what people used to bring down submarines. I was pretty sure if our bubble hit one of those, it’d probably fall down and then blow up.

There were enemies in the end, but they were not aggressive to those outside of the water. One was a plant that tried to grab you and pull you down. The other was a fish that looked a bit like a big barracuda. It was scary the first time I saw when jetting towards us, but as soon as it hit the open air, it fell straight down. Celeste lowered the bubble down to our knees. At this point, we had used some air and it could afford to be lower.

The result was that the fish couldn’t get to us at all. The grabbers could trip us, but their vines were almost useless out of the water. There was simply no way to get tangled in them with the depth at only a few feet. In that way, Celeste’s air bubble had nullified their attack completely. We killed the barracudas that we encountered since they dropped a fish fillet and fish teeth.

It was nearly six hours before we finally reached the end of the maze. The stairway went back up to land and then back down to the seventeenth floor. In the end, we left the water level with very little difficulty. However, our air bubble probably only had another hour of air left in it. Had we not found the exit soon, I would have started to get worried, and had we encountered many more challenges, this could have truly been a scary level. This level wasn’t hard, but it gave me an imperceptible dread for the potential of the levels to come.