Storm Strider

Between the undulating fleshy walls, the swallowed wreckage all around, and the ground of shallow blue digestive acids, Marisol didn’t feel like standing still.

Can I just skate out of its mouth, Archive?

[Well, it is, indeed, right there,] the Archive replied. [You can try.]

She needed no telling twice. Before the giant remipede could decide to swallow another huge gulp of water, she made a break for its mouth two hundred metres in front, sour air whipping past her face.

The alien walls blurred as she passed by, bioluminescent purples and blues streaking together like she was travelling through an ultra-long wormhole. She dodged and weaved, brittle branches snapping under her glaives as she skated past clusters of corals and shipwrecks lay scattered around like fallen giants. Trying to navigate through the fallen masts and twisted hulls was a challenge, but the first hundred metres were easy enough to bypass—and she was just about to get her hopes up when she neared the giant remipede’s head, where she immediately spotted hundreds of giant shells glued to the walls and ceiling.

Her face blanched.

Oh.

Those are–

The shells were shaped like tiny volcanos, and the moment she crossed the final hundred-metre mark towards the remipede’s mouth, they started firing. A sharp hiss escaped her throat as she dodged past a spiny projectile shot at her neck, but there were dozens more, hundreds more where they came from—the half-flesh, half-shell bugs lay down a hailstorm of bony spines at her, forcing her to skate into a broken ship for cover.

They don’t even look like bugs! What are they–

[Barnacles are arthropods that are ‘sessile’, meaning they lack means of self-locomotion,] the Archive explained, and she let out an embarrassing shriek as a hundred spines stabbed into the rotten wooden hull around her with a series of thunderous thuds; the ship she was hiding within wouldn’t last as cover for much longer. [While most barnacles are suspension feeders, some are specialised parasites that survive by extending thread-like stems into their hosts’ bodies, feeding on their hosts’ biomass. Fun fact: the most common predators of barnacles are actually carnivorous sea snails, which you would think unlikely because of how slow snails usually are, but because barnacles are quite literally immobile–]

What’s so fun about that? she snapped, peeking out from the edge of the hull to see if the coast was clear. She immediately whirled back in with a wince as a hundred spines shot at her, slicing off a few strands of hair. Focus, Archive! What the hell are they doing inside the remipede?

[I believe those barnacles are specialised parasites of the remipede. In return for allowing the barnacles to feed on its biomass, the remipede can spit out the barnacles and attach them to surface ships, keeping the ships ‘pushed back’ and stuck in place until it feels like destroying its prey,] the Archive said casually, [in addition to having barnacles that can fire spines on anything trying to escape from its mouth, I suppose. They serve as automatic inside turrets for the remipede.]

She blinked incredulously, trying once more—unsuccessfully—to peek out the hull.

Why would the remipede have barnacles inside it for… what? This is ridiculous. What’s the point of evolving such a specific function–

[It is a common misconception that living beings ‘evolve’ to adapt to certain changes in the environment, when, in fact, it is simply that living beings with certain ‘mutations’ are able to survive certain changes in the environment,] the Archive said. [The remipede controls nothing. It and its ilk were simply born with the mutation to allow for barnacles inside its mouth, and they were the only ones who survived the Worm God and his crusade against giant sea worms. Evidently, these barnacles are quite helpful in helping the remipede digest any still-living prey inside its body—case-in-point, that prey being you.]

… You’re very good at raising the mood.

[You asked, but I apologise–]

Is there a way past those barnacles, then?

The Archive thought for a moment, and in that time, another volley of a hundred spines slammed into the hull all around her. Some of the rotten wooden boards were shot in and she hissed in pain; she felt like she was being slowly crushed in a giant’s hand.

[The antennae of adult barnacles are ‘vestigial’, meaning they do not function and are only there because they have yet to be erased by natural selection,] the Archive said quickly. [They detect changes in the environment by extending their hyper-sensitive cirri, which are eight pairs of long and wiry hairs they use to filter food—however, as these barnacles feed on the remipede instead, those hairs are probably embedded inside the remipede’s flesh, connecting its senses to theirs. That means–]

As long as I’m skating on the ground, they can detect me.

[Precisely.]

Through the gaps in the hull, she peeked outside and ‘traced’ an escape route where she could continuously jump off of wreckages, theoretically allowing her to never come in contact with the ground—but what if the Archive was wrong and these barnacles weren’t just blind the moment she wasn’t touching the ground?

If she went back out there, there was a very good chance she’d be impaled on all sides by a hundred spines.

[And if you do not go back out there, there is a one hundred percent chance you will die either way.]

[What is the Sand-Dancer’s way, Marisol Vellamira?]

…

She wiped blood off her cheek where she’d been grazed by a spine, forcing a smile onto her face.

We live on the edge of our feet.

The second the next volley of spines slammed into the hull around her, she sped out from under the ship with her nails dragging along the ground, doing a full one-eighty turn as she skated straight towards a broken mast raised like a ramp. There were a few seconds of delay before the barnacles recharged their spines, and they fired just as she skated off the ground, launching into the air with a flourishing spin—miraculously, the hundred spines missed her. They shattered each other mid-air, and the barnacles warbled around as they seemingly panicked; they had no idea where she’d gone.

Yes!

They don’t see me!

She was a swirl of motion as she jumped across one wreckage to another, maintaining her momentum, dodging the spines as the barnacles fired blindly in her general direction. It seemed they weren’t completely stupid—they could guess where she was by the sounds she was making—but their accuracy was no match for her speed. The giant remipede’s fangs and mandibles were just sixty metres ahead, and even if she couldn’t figure out how to get it to open its mouth, just being able to get there had to be good enough progress.

But, whether it was because the giant remipede could feel her kicking up a storm inside it, or because it could feel the barnacles missing their target and stabbing its insides with their spines instead, the Sand-Dancer’s misfortune struck again.

The giant remipede shuddered as its giant mouth pried open, just thirty metres in front of her, and a fifty-metre-tall wall of seawater started rushing in to shove the wreckage deeper into its body.

… This ain’t fun at all–

[Down! Find some wreckage and take cover!]

Panicking, she lost balance and slipped off the ship railing she was skating across, and thankfully she fell through a hole to land inside the lower deck of the broken ship instead of outside the ship—the wall of water slammed into everything outside in the next second with a tremendous roar.

She managed to grip onto the edge of a splintered wooden beam, her knuckles white with tension as the entire ship buckled inwards. The world became a chaotic blur. Her wooden beam snapped. She was thrown violently into the walls, colliding with jagged edges and rusted metal. Pain and cold exploded across her body as seawater flooded the ship through the gunports and the holes in the ceiling, and the taste of blood and salt made her stomach churn—getting tossed around like a ragdoll for a second time within ten minutes was about to make her brain explode.

Just as she started thinking, once again, that the tossing and turning would never end, the wave quelled. The water receded and drained from the ship. The ship itself lurched a few more times, then settled with a groaning thud against the ground.

She lay flat on her stomach, face down in the stinging acid, and… for a second, she tried and failed to move her body.

In the next second, the Archive injected some sort of compound into her and made her jolt upright with a gasp, taking a deep breath of the foul, thick air inside the ship. Quickly, she pushed herself onto her glaives and stumbled into a wall—the rotten wall collapsed and she stumbled outside as a result, slamming her head against a giant coral that’d been swept back alongside the rest of the wreckage.

O… kay.

I need… a minute.

Breathing hard and haggard, she trudged over to a nearby chunk of coral and plopped herself down, her whole body aching and groaning for rest. She didn’t even want to look at the cuts and scrapes and bruises across her skin; she’d just freak herself out even more. She did glance to her side to see the rest of the wave sweeping deeper into the remipede’s body—it could’ve swept her a lot deeper in, but the ship must’ve been heavy enough to escape the force before that could happen—and yet the sight of the wave moving away didn’t fill her with a single bit of relief whatsoever.

She’d been pushed back four hundred metres—two hundred metres deeper into the remipede than where she’d started off.

[... While remipedes the size of critters may absorb water through their chitin in a process called ‘osmosis’, at its current size, this giant remipede has to periodically open its mouth and hydrate itself manually,] the Archive answered, plucking the question from her head as she put her face in her hands, grimacing in silence. [Considering the barnacles that would appreciate the lubrication of saltwater, the wreckages that constantly need pushing in, and the fact that such massive waves of water could also help to kill off anything that might have survived the initial swallowing… I estimate the giant remipede will rehydrate every thirty minutes or so.]

She tried her hardest not to sigh.

Thirty minutes, you say.

Every thirty minutes, I’ll have to survive that wall of water?

[...]

She really, really, really had to keep it in her.

At least there weren’t barnacles this deep into the remipede, but even if she could, theoretically, get past the barnacles near the front, she’d still have to figure out a way to get the remipede to open its mouth on command—without getting smashed by a tidal wave of water that could absolutely crush her skull by sheer weight and speed.

Right now, she needed to let her body rest, but could she even survive the next wave of water? There wasn’t a rat’s chance in hell the rotten and broken ship could protect her from the next wave. She’d have to find something else, and she had to keep doing it over and over, until…

What?

Until she ran out of things to hide behind?

Until her body gave out from exhaustion?

Was this the end of her ‘impossible’ journey to the Whirlpool City?

[... As–]

If, she finished, gritting her teeth as she pushed herself off the coral, glaring at the wreckage around her. So it’ll be tough for me to get out through its mouth. Big deal. What about cutting my way through the walls? How’d the Worm God and the Thousand-Tongue kill their giant remipede from the inside?

[They had firepower in quite the literal sense that you do not currently possess, but they did, in fact, carve their way out by attacking the walls.] The little water strider on her shoulder gestured randomly around her, pointing its legs wherever which way. [Search the nearby wreckage for any explosives. You may not have dealt any damage to the remipede when it swallowed that first round of explosions, but a second, third, and fourth round on a concentrated spot might just blow out a hole in its walls.]

Got it.

With a heavy, thumping heart, she started slow-skating through the wreckage, keeping her weary eyes peeled for anything that might resemble cannons or barrels of dry gunpowder. Her hopes weren’t high given everything was soaking wet with saltwater and digestive acids, but the fact was, some of the wreckage looked to be at least a month old—the digestive acids must not work very fast, so if she could just survive the endless waves of water, she could, theoretically, last up to a month inside the remipede.

Even if she couldn’t find any explosives, she could probably irritate the living daylights out of the remipede by repeatedly carving its walls with her glaives.

[Please refrain from doing anything that would sap your energy inefficiently.]

It’s an option.

[A terrible one.]

It’s better than sitting here and doing nothing if I don’t… find anything…

…

Her ears perked as she heard the soft, jumbled chorus of nocturnal life nearby.

Voices.

Chatter.

The sounds pulled her from the ground and onto the surrounding wreckage. The Archive warned her to be careful, and she was, of course—skating slowly and quietly up the hull of a ship turned sideways before peeking down at the source of the commotion, scrunching her brows.

From above, they looked like a group of about thirty normal human men, sitting around a bonfire with opened barrels of soggy mushrooms serving as chairs and stools. Using the sideways ship as a cover from the water, they roasted their mushrooms on sticks and skewers over the fire, chatting heartily as though they weren’t deep in the belly of a giant remipede—so when the rotten wood snapped under Marisol’s weight and she plummeted ten metres to land right in the middle of their group, she felt nothing but pain and a horrible, horrible sinking sensation in her chest.

The men stopped their chatter to stare blankly at her, and they had spiky black ant heads.