The ocean was a big place.

People usually described it as probably infinite. People had climbed aboard big ships packed with food and sailed into the unknown, sometimes traveling for years before returning. Wild-eyed and messy-haired, they told of waters that stretched on forever, punctuated by island after island, monster after monster, and wonders without end.

Or so Elisa was telling Marco. He was having a hard time believing it.

“It’s just infinite,” Elisa stated. “It just is.”

“How, though? Things end. Here’s the beginning of my boat. And there’s the end, because things have ends.”

Marco pointed to the end of his ship, the aftmost side. There, it narrowed to an elegant point, part of an overall boat shape and design scheme that screamed speed at every nail, join, and tar-filled crack. The outside hull was a marvel of engineering, clad with magical bark that fit the boards like perfectly tailored leather, removing drag at the same time it distributed force from incoming attacks. On top of that, the ship itself was blessed by the system, courtesy of Marco’s Conquest skill. It was fast, could stand a beating or two, and even moved when there weren’t obvious winds.

She was The Foolish Endeavor, and she was beginning to be quite the thing indeed. When Marco had taken her from the hands of a much more experienced ship captain, she was nothing much more than a rowboat modified with a sail and a few other ship-type features wholly inappropriate to the size. Back then, a single cannonball would have probably reduced the entire craft to splinters.

Now she was bigger, fancier, and much more deadly. She had larger sails that were enhanced beyond what conventional fabric could do, courtesy not only of normal system encouragement but also other, weirder things that were particular to him.

“Yes, Marco. Some things do. Most things do, I’m sure. But that doesn’t mean everything has to,” Elisa said.

“But where would everything come from?” Marco asked. “All the water? All the Monsters? All the islands?

“The system makes them, Marco. The strongest thing around.”

The last sentence was said by Elisa with such confidence Marco would have quit right then and there if it was only him in the argument with her. Elisa had a Learned class, which meant she could read and remember what she had read at levels far beyond what other classes could manage. She used that knowledge to keep them alive, mainly. If a task involved something someone could do with just their mind, she was the one to get it done. She could read the stars and sun for positioning, make educated guesses on where to hit an enemy, and calculate exactly how long supplies would last. Those and dozens of other uses for knowledge turned out to have meant a whole lot once you added them all up.

It also made her near-unbeatable in an argument, but that didn’t mean the rest of the crew wasn’t willing to try.

“But there could be edges somewhere. What if the ocean is just very big instead of infinite? So big that we’ve never seen the edges yet.” Aethe used her finger to pull some hair out from in front of her eye. Months ago, when Marco had rescued the elf from a life as the only semi-individualist in a completely conformist society, she had always worn her hair up and out of the way. Recently, she and Elisa had been playing around with hairstyles that let loose strands run free a little. Marco turned and appreciated the effect for a bit. They were involved, so to speak, or at least as much as two people who traveled around on a boat killing things while trying not to get killed could be. “How could they know?”

“Lots of reasons. The distance of stars can be calculated, somewhat. Those are so far you can hardly imagine them. The curvature of the sea can be known, and the stars still stay overhead but shifted. That means that given long enough, you could sail right under them. And the stars are further than you could possibly imagine.”

“And that’s all?”

“No. Seers can make predictions based on leaked information from the system. There are indicators that would make sense if the ocean went on forever just the way you’d expect them to if you were predicting an infinite sea. It’s hard to explain all the reasons, but I’ve read them all, and they all point in that direction.”

That seemed to satisfy Aethe, which meant all the truly smart people on the ship were out of the game now. That didn’t mean everyone was, though. Marco was on team more-physical-than-knowing, but only made up half its members.

“So what you are saying is that it’s very likely it goes on forever,” Riv said stubbornly. “It might just be that everyone is only seeing what they want to see. They could still be wrong.”

“They could, but it’s a very small chance. Much smaller than you’d think,” Elisa said.

“I get that. And I believe you. It’s just that I don’t even think it’s possible for the sea to be infinite in the first place. The system can’t do that.”

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“I don’t understand.” Elisa gave Riv an examining look. “You don’t think the system can make the ocean? That it was the one who made the ocean, at some point?”

“Oh, no, that’s fine.” Riv put down the hammer he had been using to re-nail some boards and picked up his club. As a Sturdy, he dealt in the fine arts of applying a lot of low-finesse force to situations and outlasting whatever fatigue or damage came as part of that deal. He approached arguments in the same way, brute-forcing towards answers that he could understand. “It’s that the system can’t make the ocean fast enough. Nothing can.”

“I don’t follow.” Elisa shook her head.

“I think I kind of do.” Marco felt a tinge of understanding around the edges of his consciousness. “Keep going, Riv.”

“Okay.” Riv took a deep breath, as if reinvigorated by Marco’s encouragement. “Elisa, say the system is incredibly powerful and it can make a million miles of ocean a day. After a day, it has a million of them. After a million days, it has a million million.”

“It might actually be that fast,” Elisa commented.

“That’s fine. Doesn’t matter.” Riv swung his club lazily. “Because you are saying the sea is infinite. Which means that it goes on forever. And however much ocean the system can make a day, even if it was a million million million miles, means there’s an endless amount to make right after that. It doesn’t ever get any closer to being done.”

“That’s….” Elisa’s eyes widened. “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

“It could just be making more all the time,” Aethe said. “If it can make a million miles a day, then it isn’t infinite in one sense, but it sort of is in another. You could keep sailing forever and never get through it.”

“And that would be confusing for the seers. Because they wouldn’t be able to see an end of it no matter how far they looked. Maybe it’s just further than anyone thinks is possible, which is why they call it infinite, but in reality, it’s just really really really big.”

“Huh,” Elisa said thoughtfully. “Maybe.”

Marco looked up at the sky. “That bird is coming back.”

Aethe looked too.

“I don’t see it.”

“I can only hear it. It’s like it’s scratching its claws on the wind, somehow,” Marco said.

“Oh. Yeah. Is that what that noise is?” Elisa flared up the elemental magic she could make from her hands, channeling lightning through one and a spike of intense cold out of the other. “Let’s get it this time. I’m getting really tired of it.”

The bird had been attacking their ship for days now, long days in which they hadn’t seen so much as an island. It was their first encounter with a beast out in the outer sea, the first real risk they had faced since they left the safety of their civilized, pacified region and sailed out towards the promise of adventure. It had almost killed Elisa a few times now, sweeping in with wings as long as a horse and trying to whip her off the deck out to sea where it could deal with her at its own leisure.

Both Marco and Riv had been targets before, and had released themselves by applying pure, old-fashioned damage. They had walked away clawed up, but the bird had got even worse out of the ordeal. The damage hadn’t been enough to seriously hurt either side, but each time, the bird withdrew for a few days before circling back.

“Yeah, let’s get it,” Marco said. “Do you still have that basket of fish?”

“I do.” Elisa kicked at the basket on deck, one they had modified with arm-loops so she could wear it on her back. “I’ll strap it on now.”

As she got geared up to look more like bait, the rest of the team checked their weapons. Aethe was the first to fire, as was usual for her. Her Scout class came with a good stat mix for seeing things far away, as well as more than a few skills that interacted with that kind of thing. The bird moved fast, though, and Marco saw it within the next few seconds after that.

Arrows flew through the air at the enemy and mostly found their mark, but the tough skin and shell of the animal meant that the majority of those shots drew scratches rather than doing any huge amount of damage. The bird came in fast, diving out the of the sky at a sharp downwards diagonal that was aimed at Elisa.

What it didn’t count on and couldn’t understand is what a combination of lightning and ice would do to it. As a reptilian sort of thing, Elisa had expected the cold would slow it down and that the lightning would build on that effect, however modestly. As the bird tried to latched onto her outstretched arms, it got the full effect of both barrels of each element and stalled on actually picking her up for one fatal wingbeat.

That was all they needed to win. As Elisa crumpled downward as much out of the way as she could, Riv came leaping through the air and absolutely slammed into the bird with his club. It did the first serious damage they had ever seen it take, significantly cracking its shell, pushing its claws away from Elisa’s arm, and sending it tumbling end over end across the deck.

Marco got on it next. His weapons weren’t really suited for this kind of enemy, but the destruction of an entire pirate armada had done wonders for his equipment, which absorbed the equipment of enemy captains like some sort of perverse bounty on their lives. A strike at the broken part of the bird’s shell skewered it and left it squawking as he twisted the sword, shot with his magically reloading pistol, and generally did what damage he could until Riv caught up and crushed it once and for all.

“Good. Finally,” Elisa said. “What did you get? Don’t tell me you didn’t get anything. The experience from that thing wasn’t that great.”

“Oh, I got something. It’s pretty good, too.”