There were two more rooms before there was a closed door. The trash packs pulled together included more nautilobsters, including a larger one - nearly horse-sized - called a nautilobster juvenile, which was a little odd, since the smaller ones had no such identifier. There wasn’t another crabtopus, but both rooms had mushrimp clinging to shadowed areas on the walls and ceilings, ready to join the fight. If they were a smaller group - or were otherwise underprepared - the sudden appearance of the black-shelled monsters could have been devastating.

Grabbing everything into one big back, cleaving it a couple of times, and then dancing around while Courbois peeled mobs off a couple at a time for the party to batter down made the trash trivial. He just had to run in circles for ten minutes and then the problem resolved itself.

“Everyone alright?” Kaldalis asked, once the last nautilobster was down. “Are we ready to move on?”

“One minute,” Myrin grumbled, shaking the fishy guts and bluish blood off her greatsword. “I have shorter legs than all of you, so all this running fucking sucks.”

“Sixty seconds, starting now,” Kaldalis said, gesturing at the door. “We’re speedrunning, after all.”

Kaldalis took the time to check the door at the far end of the room. There was the beginning of a hallway, and two steps down into it to reach the door. The surface of the stone there was visibly damp, and Kaldalis wondered at the damage that they’d seen on the walls previously. Had the barrier built by the lataxinans failed to hold back the sea? Was this place flooded beyond this door?

Carefully, he put an ear to the door. He didn’t hear anything - which meant he didn’t hear the rush of water. But it was possible that the door was too thick to hear through. Grimacing, he pulled back and wiped the moisture off the side of his face. His hand came away slightly greenish.

“Ugh,” he grunted, opening his inventory and finding some scraps of cloth in his inventory. Using them, he was able to get the algae off his face. “It slimed me.”

Kaldalis reached down and touched the stone floor beneath the door. There was a little dampness there, but his fingers came away clean without sign of the layer of algae that the door held.

He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he wanted to be prepared for the worst. If they had to venture underwater, whatever happened would be restricted by their breath bar.

Balrim had mentioned weeks ago that there was some way to circumvent it, but he didn’t remember how. Was it a potion? An ability? He found himself wishing they had pursued that more intently.

“That eager to move on?” Reno asked from behind him as she stepped down to sit on the stairs into the hallway.

“I just want to make sure we aren’t blundering blindly into whatever’s next,” Kaldalis said, standing up and examining the walls. “With how few mechanics there’s been thus far, that three hour time from Voker’s group is making me nervous. What slowed them down so much?”

The wall told him what he wanted to know. The stone wall was only slightly damp, but down around ankle level, there was a clear mark that looked like water damage.

“Any theories?” Reno asked, following his gaze, though too far to see what he saw.

“Yeah,” Kaldalis confirmed. “I think I know what happened.” He straightened up and wiped his hands on his pants. “The next room is a boss fight, and it killed them. They had to wipe, respawn, and try again. Possibly a couple of times.”

“How are you so sure of that?” Reno asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “I’m not doubting that they died a bunch, but how do you know they died to this boss?”

“I don’t just know that they died,” Kaldalis said, shooting a characteristic smirk back at her. “I know how they died.”

Now both eyebrows were raised at him. “Now I know you’re lying.”

Kaldalis grabbed a hold of the door and pulled just a little. As soon as he started, an unseen force from within forced it open. Four inches of water rushed out of the opening, pushing the door open as it washed over Kaldalis’s boots and splashed against the stairs. Reno stood up quickly to only get her feet wet, so that the water didn’t splash all over her legs as well.

“They drowned,” Kaldalis said, gesturing at the water lapping at his ankles. “The boss fight is going to be underwater.”

“Annoying,” she said. Grimacing down at the water, she stepped back out of it, kicking droplets off of her feet.

“Don’t worry about wetting your boots,” he said with a laugh. He opened the door the rest of the way and pointed forward, where even from here he could see the ceiling angle down. “We’re going to be fully submerged soon enough.”

“Balls,” Myrin said as she approached. “I don’t like the look of this.”

Balrim grumbled agreement at that as he followed her towards the door.

“Come on, guys, don’t you remember fighting underwater before?” Kaldalis asked, pointing vaguely in the direction he assumed was the ocean. “Operating in three dimensions was a good time, right?”

“The movement wasn’t bad,” Balrim said, but his slit-pupiled eyes narrowed. “But breath bars in video games always give me anxiety.”

“Didn’t you have a thing for that?” Kaldalis asked, scratching his head. “I thought you were working on something.”

“One of my crafter friends in Cotanaku gave me a quest to make water breathing armor,” Balrim said with a sigh, “but it needs a nautilobster heart, and none of them want to drop one. Between Myrin and I, we’ve killed like a hundred of the fuckers and not one of them had a heart.”

“Normally, lobster hearts are connected to the shell,” SeventyEight said helpfully. “And if it’s not there, it’s gotta be in the coiled shell, right?”

“It doesn’t matter where it is anatomically,” Myrin said with a shrug, “The fucking thing drops as loot. I can cut parts off of things all day, but they don’t count. The crafters call them inert materials.”

“No use crying over spilled hearts,” Courbois said, splashing down into the water to stand with Kaldalis. “Or unspilled. Whatever. We’re speedrunning, right? Wait time is over. It’s go time again.”

“Stay close this time,” Kaldalis said, turning and wading down the hallway. “There’s no telling what the boss fight will be like, or if it might lock the door behind us. We have to-”

The next step he took landed on nothing.

He should have expected it. The ceiling started to angle down here, but he still yelped when he dropped down.

His foot didn’t find a stair. It just kept dropping, and a second after he yelped, he was underwater.

Being underwater gave him a new perspective on the hallway. Looking at the ceiling slanting down from above the surface had made it look like it slanted downwards gradually - or descended down a stairwell. Instead, it descended sharply, as if this had been an elevator shaft with all the machinery removed. At the top of his vision, a little blue bar appeared, reminding him that he wasn’t amphibious.

Now that he was immersed in it, the water had a briny feel that confirmed this was seawater.

Despite his metal armor, he didn’t sink to the bottom. The game’s swimming mechanics gave him the ability to stay suspended in the water where he was. It was trivial to swim back up and break the surface, refilling the little sliver of drained breath bar.

“Come on in,” he said when he surfaced, “the water is fine.”

Courbois was the first to join him, and quickly corrected him. “Don’t listen to his lies, the water is not fine. It’s fucking cold.”

“We’re all up to our ankles in it already,” Balrim said as he started to clamber down a bit clumsily. “We already knew he was lying.”

“Ankles nothing,” Myrin grumbled, grabbing Balrim’s shoulder to stop him from teetering over. “Some of us are up to our shins.”

In only a few moments, the whole crew had joined him in the water. Everyone was miserable, but they were ready.

Kaldalis took a deep breath and plunged downward, leading the group down the vertical hallway. About twenty feet down, the floor of stone blocks loomed out of the dark waters, and they followed it up into a narrow square passage. The bottom of the passage was littered with rubble, though the walls were intact, giving no sign of the source of it. Kaldalis assumed that the fragments of stone had come from wherever the walls had been breached by the sea, though underwater he lacked the capacity to share his theory with his friends and get their interpretations.

Even already, Kaldalis could see the anxiety building in Balrim’s body language as they went. Their breath bars were slowly ticking down, and in the watery passage, there was no obvious sign of where their next breath would come from. Kaldalis wasn’t too worried, and nobody else appeared immediately concerned - they had several minutes before they were out of breath - but the uncertainty was obviously having an effect on the Talsar healer.

The only solution was to push the group to hurry. Kaldalis put his back into his strokes through the water, leading the way ahead faster and faster. The passage curved first left, and then right, and then, when Kaldalis started to become concerned, there was an underwater doorway ahead. It opened into a room so large that his darkvision sphere could see neither the walls nor ceiling. But, unlike the previous rooms, there were signs of what had been here.

This had been some manner of meeting hall. Long stone tables were bolted to the floor, and a couple of wooden chairs were present, hooked under the table instead of having been allowed to float to the surface. As soon as they entered the room, he started to swim upward immediately, knowing that if there was air to be had, it would be at the top of the room.

Balrim would want to get to it immediately.

The ceiling came into view earlier than expected, but not because the room was smaller than he thought.

It was because his darkvision globe was expanding, dramatically revealing the boss chamber.

The room was huge. Kaldalis’s first expectation was that it would be forty or fifty feet on a side, but it was far beyond that. As his vision expanded, the ceiling was nearly a hundred feet up, revealing many broken chairs floating at the top of the room. There wasn’t a big bubble of air, but there was a thin layer between the water and the stone ceiling above. It would be enough to get a breath - if the air was fresh - but not enough to surface properly. As his vision expanded, Balrim was already making for the surface at speed, eager to get his bar refilled, even though Kaldalis’ wasn’t even a quarter spent.

A dark shape loomed out of the darkness, connected to the ceiling by a tether, hanging heavily down. It was a disc-shaped thing nearly thirty feet wide and fifteen feet thick at the middle, vaguely tiered like a cake. Its edges were pointy and angular despite the rounded shape, making Kaldalis believe it was some sort of defensive construct built by the Lataxinans.

Kaldalis readied himself for it to charge, or to launch some ranged attack at him from its tethered position hanging from the ceiling, but it was unmoving for long enough for him to realize that it wasn’t the boss.

A ripple went through the water that sent it wiggling gently. It was an inanimate object. A giant metal chandelier. Kaldalis wondered how it had aged so well here, under the corrosive saltwater.

There was an enormous break in the stone wall another ten feet past the chandelier. The space beyond was blocked with rubble, but it was obvious that it was where the water had come from. An opening in the stone blocks went nearly from floor to ceiling, and the rubble that had coated the floor was densest beneath it. The wall had fallen in there, and then the stone beyond had caved in, providing a seal that wasn’t watertight, but was enough to make clear it wasn’t a proper exit now.

Of course, that was when the true boss came into view.

As soon as he saw its familiar shape, he knew exactly what had happened, and why the room was so fuckoff huge.

His darkvision globe first exposed a mass of enormous tentacles, each one wider around than even Kaldalis’s own barrel chest. They twisted and shifted as they came into view, spreading out and acting as a shield hiding the rest of the boss’s body from view. But as they did, they revealed the most familiar part of all.

A huge snapping beak in the middle of the tentacles identified it.

This beast was the massive kraken monster that had brought down the Persimmon.

And now, with their breath bars ticking down, it was the first boss of this dungeon.