Looking around, I find myself in a deep ravine. How far down it goes, I don’t know. Far beyond my sight, at least. Unfortunately for me, the ravine wall is just out of reach.

  A powerful kick, enough to compress the water, gives me the leverage I need. I rocket forward and slam a fist into the wall. I bury my arm deep into the rock cliff face, ripping a gash in the wall before I finally come to a stop.

  Using the shockwave from my leap as sonar, I map out the ravine. I get nothing back from the depths below.

  A bottomless abyss. Fun.

  The ravine I’m in is not a pair of blank cliff walls. Rather, from my position, it’s about a mile to the other side. Each side is a jagged, sawtooth like rocky wall. Each tooth is a shelf, about a hundred feet wide. I can see a dozen of these shelves from the top of the ravine, and to where it disappears into blackness.

  Given by how fast the two sides are coming together, and the fact I can see a hard cut off from what is the ravine and what is nothing, it must be an actual bottomless abyss. I’d hate to see what happens when you try to leave a Fracture’s boundaries. I got sensor reflections off the false sky in land-bound Fractures, so this is different.

  The shelves are covered in dead coral, rocks, and broken ships. Hulls of all kinds are scattered around like discarded toys. Some of them are wooden, others are metal. A few even appear to be some kind of light-weight polymer, the kind used in competitive racing ships.

  There’s hundreds, thousands of them all across the ravine. I drop down onto a shelf, dodging a shattered wooden ship. Its name is worn off by time— or the approximation of time, anyway. Nothing in here has existed long enough for it to be an actual ancient vessel.

  While sonar has worked well enough, anything beyond line of sight is a mess. Every bit of this Fracture is infused with magic. The water, the ships, the rock. It prevents me from using my various sensor suites to look through objects like I normally do, and greatly reduces the range of them in open space.

  I duck inside what remains of the rotting, wooden vessel. Inside I spot a treasure chest, the kind most would expect a pirate ship to have. As I lean down to open it, it explodes into motion.

  A huge, thick tongue lashes out and wraps around my arm. A cavernous maw opens wide, dozens of giant teeth gleam in the gloomy light. I yank towards me, pulling it free from its place. Gripping its top half, I rip it apart. It dies in a cloud of foul black blood.

  Stupid! Should have checked.

  As I exit the shipwreck, another wreck stirs. A huge claw, the size of a car, lunges for me, firing out from underneath a broken bow. I counter attack with a punch powerful enough to cavitate water. The claw explodes into pieces of shell and pulped meat. A chittering screech reverberates throughout the abyssal ravine.

  The massive hermit crab— Nomad Crab— attacks again. My sloppy strike left me off balance, and I can’t counter this one like I did the first strike. Its huge claw gets a grip on me, and pulls me towards a yawning mouth.

  My sword forms quickly in my hand, and the claw hits the seabed not long after. A second later and the screeching crab dies, my blade lodged in its brain.

  More shipwrecks around me stir in agitation.

  Welp, nothing to it.

  I throw one of the Nomad Crabs off the edge, and it slowly plummets out of sight. Some crabs can swim, but I guess these ones can’t.

  I barely duck under a furious strike from a different Crab, and straight into another one. I lurch backwards with the heavy attack, knocked off balance again.

  There’s so many of them that they’re climbing over one another to get to me. Two more slip off the edge and drift down onto lower ledges.

  I don’t have time to recover as a third crab, this one with a shell made of light weight polymer, tackles me. In its haste to grab hold of me, it forgot about its poor footing while standing on its compatriots.

  We both go sailing over the edge. We sink past one ledge, then another in rapid succession as we struggle. The crab tries to pull me into its mouth, and gets a sword of stars for its trouble instead.

  It grips me even tighter, death locking its muscles in place. With how fast the crab tackled me, we cleared all the shelves. I’m headed straight for the Abyss.

  I rip the corpse apart in a shower of chum and blood.

  I leap again, jumping so fast as to compress the water behind me. Despite the immense power, it’s not far enough to reach the rock face, and I drift past another. Only two more remain before the dark void of the Abyss.

  I try to lunge again, but the sloshing currents from the first attempt interfering gets me nowhere, and I sink past another. Just because I’ve turned out to be indestructible so far doesn’t mean I want to test my armor against the nothingness down there.

  As I go to lunge one final time, a long tentacle snakes out from a huge cave in the wall. It’s two hundred foot plus length wraps around me in the blink of an eye, and drags me towards the wall. A huge body pours out from the cave, and a giant squid nearly a hundred feet long reveals itself to me.

  Deep blue skin and a white eye gives the feeling of a wave in motion. I can feel drifts of Potentia waft off the squid. Before I can react, it slams me into the ravine wall hard enough to pound a crater into the rock wall. Part of the shelf above me collapses with a roar of falling stone. Boulders fall around me, bouncing off my armor.

  The cliff face explodes into gravel and dust as I explode outwards, blade in hand. I cut one tentacle free, and it spirals away, spewing black blood into the water. The squid writhes in agony, grabbing me with another tentacle. It pulls me towards its huge beak, large enough to swallow an SUV whole.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Rivulets of Potentia pour off the squid, and a whirlpool forms underneath its mouth, aiding the tentacles in drawing me in. The pull is immense, and I barely get my boots on the outside of its mouth, trying to keep myself from being devoured.

  I’m sure I’d survive, but I’d really rather not have to cut my way out of some kind of Tidal Squid’s stomach.

  Instead I drive my sword deep into its cerulean flesh. It squeals in pain loud enough that the sound alone would have pulped a Typical, and even a low Starred Empowered might have been seriously injured.

  I just give it an expressionless grin, my face as static as the day I was reborn. With a heave I pry part of its beak off, and it squirms. Instead of trying to eat me, now it tries to throw me away.

  A wide backswing carves another tentacle off. Already the water is flooded with black blood, and if I had needed light to see, I would have been blinded long ago.

  I slowly climb up the side of the twitching and panicked Tidal Squid as it desperately tries to pry me off itself. I use my sword as a piton, and slowly climb up its body. More tentacles slap at me. One nearly knocks me loose before an awkward chop cuts it free.

  As I near the eye, it slams itself against the wall, hammering another crater before digging a trench. More shelves collapse, and dozens of broken ships tumble down the ravine side. It quickly becomes an avalanche of sunken wrecks.

  The squid continues to screech and writhe before I finally manage to climb up to its car-sized eye. I’ve left a bloody path in my wake, endless amounts of black blood gushing forth from dozens, hundreds of wounds.

  The next few minutes is nothing but gory work. If I still had a digestive system, I’m sure I would have lost my lunch. Though, if I had one, I wouldn’t be down here anyway, so I guess the point is moot.

  It doesn’t take long for me to finally make it to the brain and end this farce of a fight. The Tidal Squid twitches one last time before going still. It begins to sink, and I leap free, landing on a nearby shelf. A reward orb and the exit are nearby, but I hold back from leaving just yet.

  I haven’t even spent thirty minutes here, and I was budgeted two hours in the original plan. This could be an opportunity for exploration. We still know so little about Fractures, especially high Category ones. The few teams and people who can clear them are in high demand, and don’t have time to explore them.

  I start to wander among the unbroken shelves, ducking into the few ships I can. I wish I could see through them like I can with more mundane materials. All this damn Potentia infusing everything makes it impossible. The water is magical. The rock is magical. The ships are magical. Everything is magical.

  Trying to look through it all is like putting on night vision goggles and shining a flood lamp into your eyes. So, instead I’m relegated to looking through them the more mundane way. Though, being able to open up shipwrecks like a soup can does make things a little easier.

  The first time I find something good is in a wooden sailing vessel, one that reminds me of a Greek Trireme. The entire back half of the ship is missing, meaning it’s easy for me to take a look inside.

  Treasure!

  Dozens of bars of gold glint in the gloom. The blue light I emit shines off them. I have to tear the ship apart to get to them, but I quickly store all four dozen bars of gold—magical gold, even—away.

  When I was young I wanted to be a treasure hunter, diving into lost cities and sunken ships in the search of artifacts. My Dad loved the Indiana Jones movies. To get to relieve an old childhood dream, despite the horrors here, is fun. I think fighting sea monsters over sunken treasure makes it even better, really.

  This is exactly what I needed.

  I’d take a deep breath if I could, but it’s good I don’t have to. Considering I’m nearly two miles beneath the entry point to the Fracture, there’s not really a lot of opportunities for breathing. Or not being squished into human jelly, so I guess breathing would be the least of my problems.

  I search for another hour before I find an interesting vessel, a nuclear submarine. Most of it is gone, and only a single missile launch tube remains. The rest of them are ripped apart and empty. I rip into the last missile silo hatch out of curiosity, and I’m stunned when I see an actual missile.

  Radiological signs detected. Yep. That’s a nuke. A magical nuke.

  The missile resembles a Trident II ICBM, and I carefully remove the housing. Inside the missile is a singular nuclear warhead. I can’t tell if it’s disarmed.

  Time to stare into the flood lamps.

  I focus all of my attention on the warhead, getting deep scans. The sensory overload from all the Potentia everywhere is giving me a headache, but I need to know if this is armed.

  After several minutes of staring into magical spotlights, and then several more blinking metaphorical spots out of my eyes, I can confirm it’s disarmed. I may not have finished my mechanical engineering degree, but I know enough to be able to recognize a mechanical firing mechanism and when it’s off.

  I stare at it for a moment longer.

  Do I really want to bring a weapon like this back? It’s a weapon of mass destruction, a magical one.

  Do we need something like this? Does anyone?

  What else lies at the bottom of the ocean? How many more Fractures have we missed? What if they go higher than Cat-3?

  My Mom liked monster movies too much. Staring at this weapon of mass destruction reminds me of Pacific Rim. It’s quickly becoming scarily accurate to real life.

  Giant robots? Well, I sort of count. Check. Giant monsters? I just fought a colossal squid big enough to eat a yacht. It probably would have fucked up that destroyer that brought me here. Check.

  The childlike joy quickly dies. Once again I am brutally reminded of the world we now live in. Magic has not brought excitement and joy, only pain and suffering. We live in a new world, where the fantastical has become nightmarish.

  I take the nuclear warhead and store it away. I rip apart a few more ships, finding nothing before I leave. I take some of the scrap with me. More for the research pile.

  I push through the exit back into the Tasman Sea, just off the coast of Sydney.

  “Captain, I’m done.”

  “Under the two hour mark! Fantastic! Command was budgeting for delays up to six hours.”

  “I recovered a nuclear warhead.”

  “…What? Say that again?”

  “The Fracture was a ship graveyard. It included a nuclear submarine, which contained a nuclear warhead. It is disarmed. I’m not sure if it’s viable, but it’s giving off radiological signatures.”

  “…I don’t mean to question you, sir. But why did you bring it back?”

  “Captain, the Earth is 70% ocean. How many Fractures do you think we’ve missed, down in the deep? This Fracture’s boss was a squid big enough to snap your destroyer in half.”

  “…You’re talking about a Kraken. Fleet killers.”

  “Or worse. Who knows what lies in the Abyss?”