Chapter 956: The Sunken Vessel needs no Guardian
=Huh? What makes you say that?=
=I once came across the term, OOPART, out-of-place artifact. We could use that or some variation.=
=What?=
=Uh…uh oh. There’s interference of the [Chaos] variety going on.=
=Uh…one hundred or so feet give or take. On the plus side, I think our lord is smart enough to realize a shit situation when he sees one so it’s not a big issue.=
=He is known to be clever and cautious in most other situations.=
=Oh fuck.=
=…=
<...>
<=We've been synchronizing too much lately.=>
=I’m going to go listen to murder mystery novels while doing crosswords.=
…
Zhen Liu floated in the water with a completely shocked expression on his face…after having to quickly dodge the shrapnel of his own exploding zakos.
While this wasn’t the first time Zhen Liu had lost zakos in the line of duty during his adventures, this was the first time he had seen them explode in such a violent manner.
‘How the hell did my zakos explode just like that?! And why did I feel that weird surge of…wait a minute…’
Zhen Liu directed his focus back towards the ship as a dreadful feeling began to bubble up in the pits of his stomach.
And it wasn’t just because Hurricroak was about to do something reckless, like trying to figure out what caused the zako to explode by face checking the perimeter.
[What the piano-forte caused them to-]
‘Hey, Whoa!’
Luckily for her, Zhen Liu managed to swim over fast enough to intercept and physically stop her before crossing that same invisible threshold that the zako marbles did.
[Huh? Why’d you stop me from-]
‘Just watch. Blazejudicator?’
[On it.]
One of the unexpected perks of having a spiritual body kaijin attached to his person was that Zhen Liu was now able to access aether channels whenever he wanted, without having to use any of his physical body kaijin, or having to expend [Chaos] everytime. Instead, he just needed to Blazejudicator to just do it for him.
Hence, once Blazejudicator did their thing, Zhen Liu was now able to empower those same shards of wood from earlier with aether as opposed to [Chaos].
‘If what I think is happening is actually happening, then this next part is going to be a massive pain in my ass.’
In his haste to prove his theory, Zhen Liu proceeded to try and simultaneously infuse two shards of driftwood in his hands with the two types of natural energy that were currently flowing through his veins, which was an incredibly bad idea.
[Wait a minute, maestro. I thought you weren’t supposed to do that because of-]
Pop
‘Ah! Balls!’
[That.]
Luckily, the action Zhen Liu was attempting was small enough that instead of his body exploding, he just caused a small pop of energy to occur in front of him.
‘Bleh! Fine!’
Now that his head got rattled into a calmer state, Zhen Liu proceeded to empower one shard of wood with aether before throwing it like a dart as hard as he could towards the sunken ship.
Granted, his hardest caused the aforementioned shard of wood to launch forward with the same velocity of a bullet being fired out of an assault rifle.
Under normal circumstances, this shard of wood would travel forward and impact the sunken ship, possibly damaging it for obvious reasons.
However, that didn’t happen.
Instead, once the aether empowered shard of wood reached that same threshold the zako marbles did, it began to slow down…a lot.
The aether that was empowering the shard of wood was being sapped second by second as it got closer and closer to the sunken galleon, until finally running out of energy completely.
Once the aether was completely drained, the shard of wood began to slow down like normal before falling slowly to the swamp’s bottom, light bonking a small swamp crab hiding in the mud.
‘I think I know what’s gonna happen next, but I might as well confirm it.’
With the other shard of wood, Zhen Liu infused it with enough [Chaos] to empower it and change it into a whole boomerang of all things, but not enough for it to become a zako again.
‘Okay, I need to figure out how to better control [Chaos] in these kinds of situations. I was going for a harpoon!’
[Meh. Results will probably be the same anyways.]
Needless to say, Hurricroak was absolutely correct.
Once Zhen Liu figured out how to propel the boomerang towards the sunken ship, the [Chaos] infused boomerang suddenly stopped mid-flight several dozen feet away from the ship before exploding in a violent fashion.
That’s all Zhen Liu needed to understand that if any of the zakos or the kaijin approached this cursed ass pseudo-pirate ship, they would probably explode into a million and two tiny pieces.
‘Okay, cool. Turns out the magic bullshit ship of the Invulnerable Storm Queen is surrounded by a bullshit barrier of [Chaos]. Great…,’ Zhen Liu griped.
It didn’t actively help his situation, gripping and whining like this, but it did make him feel better emotionally.
Once he was done though, he tried to contact Logos and Pathos to see if they could assist him with this conundrum.
‘Logos, Pathos. Can y’all-‘
<=SOUND EQUIVALENT TO NAILS ON A CHALKBOARD, BUT THE CHALKBOARD IS MADE OF FLESH AND THE NAILS ARE ACTUALLY SENTIENT DUCKS.=>
‘-never mind, I guess there’s interference too…great…’
Unfortunately, he had no way of contacting them due to the current situation.
Meaning his only sound boards were Blazejudicator and Hurricroak.
Not ideal, but not terrible.
Sort of.
‘Blazejudicator, Hurricroak. Any ideas on how to get that ship out of the water? Because my initial plan of using zako power to lift it just went up into smoke.’
[Hmmm…if we technically don’t need the whole ship and only the part that allowed the Storm Queen to get in and out of the Abyssal Lands, we could try and pepper it with long ranged attacks until it breaks.]
‘I’m fairly sure that the aforementioned barrier made of [Chaos] will straight up devour most of our aether arts and any [Chaos] based ones would…actually be hazardous to all of our healths.’
[Worth a shot.]
‘Let’s not.’
[Before I make my suggestion,is it at all possible to contact Princess Jinju Ren? She has dragon blood and can use dragon force, ergo, it could probably destroy this barrier easily,] Blazejudicator pointed out.
‘Not a bad idea, but she is currently undergoing training. Again. Apparently the SATAN monkey proved to be a bit more difficult for her to tame than she had anticipated, so she and Hermit Zhong Wei are actively looking for ways to tame it.’
[How’s that going?]
‘I believe they settled on finding a way to strengthen the sword.’
[Ah. In that case, I say we blast around it and force the ship upward like a geyser made of pain and hate.]
‘I don’t think that would work either.’
[Because it’s possible that this barrier extends beneath the ship as well?]
‘Yup.’
A part of Zhen Liu was tempted to use his [Key to Nowhere] to forcibly teleport the whole vessel back to the library, dirt it was sitting on included, but his intuition told him that was a bad idea.
More specifically, he had seen enough movies and shows where the consequences to opening a literal hole at the bottom of a giant reservoir of water was…bad, to put it mildly.
‘Huh…I feel like there’s some irony that the [Library of Nowhere] is technically already underwater, and this idea of mine would lead it to become flooded with water from another continent…meh, I should bring my focus back on to this current conundrum…’
Technically speaking, it was possible for Zhen Liu to try and lift the ship out of the water by himself, the only issue was that he would have to deactivate the [Chaos] protecting his body in order to do so.
Not only would this expose him to a shit ton of water pressure at this depth, and stop him from being able to breathe, but would also expose his naked body to the entirety of this petri dish of a biome.
Getting literal swamp ass was not on his list of things to do today.
‘Wait, I am in just my underwear right now, so I could just remove…hold up.’
It was in this moment thinking about removing his last two pieces of protection against disgusting swamp water that he realized what he had to do.
‘Welp…this is definitely going to be in my top ten most disgustings things in my lifetime.’
