Tavras had appeared in Leviathan’s Cradle, rushing forward in his lightning swim. He arrived at the crustacean’s side immediately after it had been impaled. The surrounding water glowed blue as he began putting it back together.

Please, don’t heal that thing, Val thought. It had been hard enough to kill. Besides, its impaling gave her a sense of accomplishment. Even so, she could not bring herself to speak her mind to Tavras.

“Why would you do this to this poor, little copepod?” Tavras asked.

“It’s a copepod?” Val echoed, getting a taste for the strange word on her tongue. She would not call that fish little, but she supposed, compared to Leviathan it was an ant.

“Yeah. They are docile and harmless creatures!”

Val could only dart her eyes to Arius with his shredded hand. Earlier, it had been his chest that had a gaping gash. Most definitely, these copepods were not docile nor harmless.

Tavras worked for a long while to put the copepod back together. First, he directed Val and Arius when to make their aura recede as he healed it. Then, he reinstated the integrity of the tail and its exoskeleton. All put back together again, only now did he pay attention to the humans trapped in Leviathan’s Cradle.

Seeing as how Arius still had to collect air from the nearby bubbles, Tavras rearranged the water and air so that he could join Val in the bubble. “Thanks,” Arius muttered, dripping across the bottom of the bubble. “It was about time.”

“Can you get us out of here?” Val rushed to ask. The shining sun and tropical waters of Bibashie Reef awaited her, but she could not wait.

“We’re going to return our copepod friend back to his friends, first.” More fondly than he ever pet Foofy, Tavras patted the copepod on its head.

While he swam with the copepod slowly at his side, Val and Arius had a transitory, quiet moment together. Still in a state of awe, they blinked at one another.

“We did a good job killing them, though,” she whispered, quietly enough for Tavras not to hear. Hastily, she corrected herself. “You did a good job. You were amazing!” Her body felt shaky as she looked down to her curled fingers, undamaged unlike Arius’s hand.

“You did good too.” Reiterating what she had said initially, he remarked, “We made a pretty good team against those things.”

“Copepods,” she mused.

“Copepod… kebab—same difference,” Arius said.

Val restrained her laugh and gave him a slight warning glare.

“What? They sound the same to me!”

While she appreciated the quasi-pun, he had spoken too loudly at the risk of their savior overhearing them. Keeping her eyes narrowed carefully, she said, “Let’s not antagonize Tavras right now.”

“Fine. You’re right. I’m just trying to keep the mood light.” As he quieted down, Arius took to sulking.

Val sat across from him, looking down as well. Her hands began to wring around. “I can use Keep the Peace on you. That might help with the pain,” she tried.

“Nah, I’m great. I already have my own way to deal with pain,” he said with a genuine grin. Arius held up his destroyed hand between them. “This looks sick.”

That was certainly one way to put it.

Actually, if Arius had a way to address pain, it made sense how he could smile through his crushed hand and laugh through a slashed lung. The earlier injury had been more extensive, yet he had seemed more euphoric then.

“Wait, Arius, are you a masochist?”

“Um, I guess so,” he said, “but not in the sexual way like you were hoping.”

Her mouth dropped open, making her gag in her laugh. Gods, it looked like things were going to resume between them, just as their dynamic had been before.

“I can mess with nerve stimulation, so I’m swapping the pain signals with pleasure.” Jerking his hand for emphasis, he said, “My hand feels so good right now, you don’t even know!”

Val blinked at him, definitely unable to understand.

Defensively, he added, “That doesn’t mean that I like getting injured or anything. I recognize that this is kind of messed up. It just helps me get through a fight in the moment.”

She nodded along. “It’s fine. I get that much.” Gently, Val dared to touch her hand to the one that held the sword. “You can let this go now. Tavras is here.”

“I would rather keep it, just in case.”

Val gazed on at him with sad eyes. “Tavras isn’t going to hurt you right now.” Did she even need to explain to him that he had no chance of winning, even if there would be a fight? Leviathan’s Cradle did not exactly make for a favorable terrain to battle the Sea Itself.

Arius must have come to a similar conclusion because he sighed and let his portion of the aura evaporate alongside Val’s energy.

Now, she could hold Arius’s good hand more firmly in both of her hands. “I’m going to make sure that Tavras will get you out of here too. I promise.”

“Thanks, Val.” The slight crease in his brow made him look genuinely worried, but his eyes softened the longer that he gazed into Val’s earnest eyes.

There was a loud, dramatic sound of a clearing throat. “Yoo-hoo. I’ve returned,” Tavras said, waving both hands at Val and Arius within the bubble.

Shit. She now wondered just how long he had been waiting there.

Since he spoke underwater, Tavras’s voice was muffled yet some ability projected his voice better than anybody else underwater. “What is actually wrong with you?” His judgmental glare flitted between them. “That question is specifically for you, Val. I already know what’s wrong with Arius.”

She shrunk back, almost missing when it had just been him and her in Leviathan’s Cradle. “I don’t know….”

Arius pointed upward at his chin with a perfect smile. “I’m the favorite son to the God Supreme. That’s the only thing wrong with me, according to you.”

“Not even close,” Tavras said with a shake of his head. Barking anew, he said, “Val, why are you acting so friendly with this psychopath again?”

“He saved my life,” Val said, “and he’s not a psychopath.”

As if marine life were the only thing that mattered to Tavras, he exclaimed, “He was trying to kill the copepods for no reason!”

“They attacked us first!” Val snapped.

“Only because he disturbed them.” Specifically directed at Arius, Tavras put a great deal of animosity into that one pronoun.

“I’m literally right here,” Arius interjected. “This feels kind of weird.”

Completely ignoring him, Tavras went on in his lecture about the aquatic critters. “These copepods are trying to exist in a simple, symbiotic relationship with Leviathan. They feed off its blood and try to ensure that no one wakes their host!”

That sounded like a parasite to Val—again, definitely not docile nor harmless.

Val squeezed Arius’s hand tightly and would not let him go. “Arius saved my life. I was trying to trick him into going down Charybdis’s whirlpool all by myself. It kind of worked, but I mean, only because I was clumsy and fell in; Arius chose to come here with me so that I wouldn’t die.”

Slowly, Tavras calmed down and looked to Arius with consideration for the first time. “Why am I not surprised?” A massive sigh huffed out of him.

There was a pause which left Val to stew in her own foolishness.

“What took you so long to show up?” she asked with a pinched brow. “We waited for a long time.”

“Someone spilt a tanker’s worth of oil and set fire to the reef,” Tavras said, glaring at Arius.

Without any defense to that, a nonchalant shrug bobbed across his shoulders. The gesture was uneven due to his one broken shoulder, but his attempt at moving it only made Arius smile wider. “I’m guilty as charged.”

“Then, when I did get back, Foofy was the only one who had stayed put. I needed to call Charybdis back before I could come here!” Tavras gave a sad shake of his head. “I almost can’t believe you would fall down Charybdis’s maw, but as I said, nothing can surprise me anymore.”

“I-I’m sorry, Tavras. Can we just go back home?” By ‘home’, Val also thought of returning to the Summit.

“Fine. Don’t think for a moment that you’ve heard the end of this though!”

While she balked, Arius chuckled. “He really did take on a paternal role for you, huh?”

“Hush, you,” Val urged.

A quizzical look crossed Tavras’s face, but he ignored them. “Let’s go, you two. We are relocating to Leviathan’s core so that I can ask it to teleport us out.”