Deep Sea Fish Hunting Specialty Broadcast

Chapter 91: Life or Death, It Doesn’t Really Matter (2)

Deep Sea Fish Hunting Specialty Broadcast

EP.91 Life or Death, It Doesn’t Really Matter (2)

Rumble!! Boom!!

‘W-What on earth is going on?!’

While Parang was bewildered by the chaotic situation that seemed to make the entire ground rumble and shake, it appeared that Alice thought she had found an opportunity to escape.

Fortunately, even amidst the overwhelming confusion, Parang was able to focus properly on Alice and didn’t miss that scene.

Rip- Riiiip-

Alice, who had made a tiny hole, peered outside through it.

Her eyes darting back and forth restlessly were clearly in search of a suitable escape route.

Her movements were so cautious that Parang also became tense.

Continuously rip, riiiip.

At first, Alice had been carefully and stealthily tearing the cocoon as if trying not to draw attention in this chaotic situation, but as it seemed the statues couldn’t notice her tearing the cocoon amidst the confusion, her actions became bolder.

Now the hole had widened enough for Alice’s face to be fully visible from the outside.

Rumble!! Crack!!!

Yet the vibrations showed no signs of stopping, and the statues were frantically running around trying to prevent the building from collapsing.

‘Those guys, aren’t they guarding the cocoon?’

It was clear that nothing in this building seemed more important than the cocoon containing Alice, yet not a single entity was trying to check on the cocoon’s condition.

Parang could only find it perplexing.

‘No, wait, looking closely…….’

This, rather than movements stemming from simple negligence…….

‘Are they just… unable to approach?’

That thought was correct.

From the moment Alice made a hole in the cocoon, no, from when the entire building started shaking, no, perhaps.

‘From the very beginning…?’

Yes. From the very beginning, the statues had not approached within a certain distance of the cocoon containing Alice.

To verify if it was true, Parang flew to the ceiling of the building and looked down at the scene.

‘I-It’s true!’

Surprisingly, the statues were not even setting foot within a radius of about 5 meters centered on the spot where Alice’s cocoon was.

From the moment Parang had entered this memory, continuously. No, perhaps, with almost 100 percent certainty, even before that.

The statues had not stayed near Alice.

Whether they hadn’t stayed or couldn’t stay, that was unknown.

And as far as Parang knew, her old friend Alice was…….

Rip, riiip!!

Absolutely not one to miss such an obvious opportunity.

She tore open the cocoon she had been in with all her might using both hands and stepped outside.

An ominous aura surrounded her entire body, and the needles that had come out with her from the tank left wounds all over her body as they fell out clumsily.

Her blood spread like mist in the water, and the veins beneath her skin glowed purple in various places.

Her face was gaunt, and her body trembled as if it might collapse at any moment, probably from not having moved for a long time.

And the status window was accurately describing her condition.

[ Warning: ‘Fusion’ has been abruptly terminated before completion. Severe abnormalities detected in the user’s body. ]

[ The probability of death is very high unless fusion is resumed or other appropriate measures are taken. ]

Inside and outside her body, numerous pieces of evidence clamored that she would soon die.

But, her eyes.

Eyes that shone brilliantly with a light purple hue, beautiful and pristinely clear.

Those unyielding eyes that looked only forward, despite barely standing with a trembling body.

Those eyes, filled with a burning desire for survival and an even more intensely surging will, were saying that Alice had absolutely no intention of dying here.

Alice quietly turned to look at the cocoon she had torn and emerged from.

Rip- Riiiip!!

As she grabbed it and forcefully tore it off to drape it over her back, she looked as if she was wearing a purple cloak.

‘Huh? That’s…….’

And from inside the cocoon that Alice had torn off, something caught Parang’s eye.

Black mist.

In the place where Alice had just been lying, a black mist in the exact same shape as her was settled.

Parang had seen that faint purple light emanating from where the eyes should have been before.

‘That’s, from that time…….’

The mist-like monster she had seen in Alexandra’s memory.

It was the entity that had appeared when she first saw the Slayers’ memory.

If Parang’s life were written as a novel, it would be around chapter 44.

‘That, it feels like… Alice’s byproduct or something.’

Does this mean that the Slayers were originally supposed to fight the fused Alice instead of that thing?

Parang wanted to ponder this more, but for now, she needed to focus on the memory right in front of her, so she momentarily turned her attention away from it.

Meanwhile, Alice, whether through instinct, intuition, or deduction, seemed to have realized that there was no one here to stop her, and she began to walk forward slowly but surely.

Tap, tap, tap.

The sound of bare feet stepping on the stone floor shouldn’t be audible underwater, of course, but strangely, Parang could hear it very clearly.

The building was still shaking violently, but oddly enough, the space where Alice stood and its surroundings were infinitely calm, like a clear lake without a ripple.

The statues inside the building were quietly watching Alice, who had torn out of her cocoon, as if they had become real statues themselves.

As they stopped fixing, the rumbling building began to collapse rapidly, with stones and decorations falling mercilessly from the ceiling, walls, and pillars.

However, these things, falling slowly through the water, far from stopping Alice, only added to the dramatic effect as they showered down around her.

And as she walked out of the collapsing audience chamber, she finally reached the door.

During all this, the statues couldn’t even come near her, as if blocked by an invisible wall.

Alice, who had encountered no interference, pushed open the thick and heavy stone door with all her might, and the outside scene unfolded before Parang and Alice’s eyes.

‘Th-This place…!’

The scenery outside was something Parang had never seen before.

They were at the top of an underwater mountain.

An enormously huge mountain, so large that one might believe it stretched from the very bottom of the sea all the way to the surface.

Parang had never seen such a gigantic mountain, not on land, and certainly not under the sea.

A pale, treeless stone mountain rising majestically in the beautiful, bright turquoise water, with a temple perched at its summit.

From the main entrance of the temple to the base of the mountain, there was a wide road winding down along the mountain’s contours, and the entire mountain was filled with black stone buildings in an ancient Greek style.

The sizes of these buildings varied greatly; some looked like houses for humans, others like homes for giants, and the largest ones seemed as if they could house a great mountain inside.

And that’s not all; far below, at the foot of the mountain, the expanse of black buildings continued for quite some distance across the plain.

Although Parang had no idea where this place was, there was one thing among the things she knew that had a similar feeling to this.

She unconsciously muttered that word aloud.

“Atlantis…”

The lost city, Atlantis.

Parang thought that if it really existed, it might look something like this.

But that thought was brief, as there was plenty more to shock Parang and Alice.

For one thing, there was the source of this vibration that had been shaking the entire seabed incessantly until now.

Parang had thought this was a naturally occurring earthquake.

In fact, the seabed crust was unstable, and such earthquakes occasionally occurred during explorations.

But this time was different.

‘That’s…’

Not far from the mountaintop where Parang and Alice were located, ‘that eye’ was there.

[ The skill ‘Waterproof Sanity’ is currently active. ]

The eye that Parang ultimately had to exterminate. The very being that could drive people mad just by looking at it was there.

‘Urghh…!!’

Parang’s head started to ache intensely.

Throbbing. It felt like trying to wake up from a hangover after drinking heavily.

Alice, strangely enough, didn’t seem to feel any discomfort. Could it be the effect of the fusion?

But that was it. There were no particularly strange or unpleasant effects beyond the headache.

Even in her confusion, Parang remembered that her real body was underwater.

‘How did I manage to rest in the tank even then.’

Parang thought that she had greatly benefited from the habit of sleeping in the tank, and decided that she should continue to sleep in the tank as much as possible in the future.

Its eyeball was not visible, perhaps facing the opposite side of the temple, which allowed Parang to see its back.

Parang thought this might be the reason for the relatively mild mental burden.

Even when she first saw it, the mental attack had started from the moment ‘the eye opened’.

Thinking that the clue to exterminating this eye monster might be here, Parang desperately tried to engrave this fact in her mind.

‘It’s my first time seeing its back. It looks surprisingly ordinary.’

Looking at it from behind, it just looked like a sphere with a few tentacles attached, but then Parang noticed something incongruous.

Beyond it. That is, what the eye was looking at now. What was facing the eye looked a bit bizarre.

No, rather than bizarre, it was more like… absurd.

What was there was…

[ Kraken ]

It was… the word ‘Kraken’.

Yes, just the word.

As if someone with poor editing skills had forcibly inserted a text box into a photo, there was the word ‘Kraken’ existing in a place where a chunk of the blue sea had been cut out, leaving only a white background.

Just in Korean, that is.

‘What on earth is that…’

Parang couldn’t just ignore this, so she sorted through a few possibilities in her mind.

‘First of all, there’s no such creature that looks like that.’

It’s nonsense to think that something looking like that was causing this earthquake by confronting the eye.

There’s a high possibility that a distortion of perception occurred at some point in the process of Alice’s memory being transmitted to Parang through evidence.

‘Then where?’

For one, it’s unlikely to be that eye and the Kraken. There’s no way they could overlay the word ‘Kraken’ in such a docile font onto the memory. This is human handiwork.

‘But if we say a person did this, it becomes even stranger.’

Is there even anyone who could meet Alice? The one whom Oceanos couldn’t find even after searching the entire ocean? This is also dismissed.

Then only one possibility remains.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

‘Alice herself.’

For some reason, she cut out the image of the Kraken that remained in her memory and implanted that text instead.

The method and intention are still unclear, though.

‘I’ll have to ask about this too if I meet her later.’

Parang stuck another memo in her mental notebook.