Every sane instinct screamed at him that going into a monster was the exact opposite of survival.
His bones thrummed agreement… and did not stop him.
He tucked, streamlined himself, and shot past the teeth, past the crushing plates, into the hot, reeking dark of its throat.
This is stupid, he thought, as the muscles convulsed around him.
It tried to swallow.
He buried the dive-axe in whatever it could reach.
Meat tore. Cartilage snapped. The shark jerked violently, trying to cough him back out, but Gin hooked an arm through a knot of tissue and hung on, hacking in short, vicious strokes. His world narrowed to resistance and spray and vibration, to the pounding of his heart and the roar of his own blood in his ears.
His leg throbbed.
That cut, still open, pressed against the slick interior. The shark's blood surged up against his wound.
The Hemovore colony went wild.
Instead of his blood spilling out, the flow reversed. Dark, rich fluid from the long-neck's torn vessels slammed into the cut, pulled inside by an invisible suction. Heat rushed up his spine, flooding his bones with feral strength.
For a terrifying moment, everything felt easy.
He could feel exactly where the arteries ran, where the tissue was softest, the perfect places to cut and tear. It would have been simple to keep going, to reduce the beast to strings and chunks and red fog, to ride that power until nothing in reach still moved.
He chose not to.
He took the strength, kept his mind, and turned the excess into one last, brutal heave. With a final wrench of the axe, he ripped sideways.
The shark's belly split.
The sea punched back in, a cold, green fist slamming into his face and dragging him out through a cloud of viscera and blood.
He tumbled into open water, lungs burning so hard they felt like they might detonate. Above him, the long-neck convulsed in slow motion, its serpentine body writhing before going slack, leaking a red fog into the wreck field.
Gin hovered, chest heaving, unable to draw a real breath and yet somehow still moving, still conscious.
The world blurred at the edges.
He forced his gaze downward.
The copper bag lay where Tamsin had dropped it, half-wedged in a gap between beams. No small figure clung to it now.
Good.
She'd gone up. She was alive. The humming in his bones settled from frenzy to a deep, satisfied throb.
The edges of his vision dimmed further, black creeping inward.
He kicked once, twice, trying to chase the faint smear of light that meant surface. His body felt distant. Heavy. The miracle breath was failing. Oxygenated blood or not, humans only got so many bad ideas per hour.
Shapes moved above him. And then, everything turned black.
-
Currentscroll Fragment — "On Teeth and Those Who Chase Them"
To whoever finds this,
If you're close enough to read this, you've seen them.
The teeth.
Some are the size of your thumb. Some are the size of your leg. All of them want the same thing: your soft, convenient body.
On a Hull, people think the harpoon cannons are what keep us safe. Big guns on rails, ropes and barbs and pressure chambers, crews cranking until their shoulders scream. They're loud. Impressive. They make Hydrarchy officials feel brave.
But cannons only work before the beast reaches you.
Once it's too close—once it's under the hull, between the plates, among the props—
that's when they send us.
Beast-hunters.
We carry Leviathaneer Pike-Cannons on deck, long-barreled brutes that fire bolts thicker than your wrist. Hit true, and the barbs anchor deep in hide and bone. Then the winches sing, and the Hull wins tug-of-war against something that shouldn't exist.
In the water, guns don't help. Slashing is slow. Fancy swords just look pretty while you drown.
So we use surgetip spears: lean, tri-flanged spikes meant to slip between plates and gill-covers. You don't wrestle a monster. You out-think it. You get close enough to smell its breath and then you put steel where it never expected.
Our job isn't glory.
We're there so the Hull keeps moving. So trade routes stay open. So the kids on upper decks can tell stories about sea monsters without knowing how many of us the stories cost.
If you ever see a beast-hunter stumbling out of a bar at dawn, stinking of ethanol and bad decisions, try not to judge too hard.
Some of us have to get drunk before we go back in with the teeth.
— J.M., Khelt