“It’s time.”

Macro turned from the wheel and glanced to where Riv, his quartermaster, was standing over a rope. When he had been a child dreaming about life at sea, Marco had vastly underestimated the importance of both rope and durable crew members. Riv, for instance, was absolutely indispensable. He was never going to be as effective in combat as a pure combat class would, but he held his own. On top of that, his raw physical stats were incredibly high, which meant he could do things like hold onto a rope at a level that defied all conventional logic. That was important here.

The rope was a rope, but also so much more than that. Marco had thought Riv and Elisa were crazy when they came to him suggesting that they blow the entirety of their money on a single, long, insanely tough rope. They told him it would never break, and he responded that he could buy hundreds of ropes that would nearly never break for the same money.

They said any knot it made would stay strong, and he had pointed to Riv and his exceptional knot-tying skills and once asked if they really needed it. Elisa had gone into a long monologue about how it made things tied to it a percentage lighter, seemingly thinking that made a very large, very important difference in the math. Marco had finally relented, allowing for the possibility that he was missing something important.

Now, as the rope held strong in Riv’s grip, Marco really understood. It wasn’t simply a matter of value, of gold per unit of strength and durability. Saving the money would have been a mistake. This was a rope that had its place, even if it wasn't needed every day. It was a rope that made the impossible possible.

Elisa was sitting in a chair mounted to an absurdly large crossbow, which in turn was mounted to the deck. Her eyes were staring at the ocean about a quarter of a mile out, and the wind had her hair plastered to her cheek. She had a look Marco knew well, an expression that combined calculation, on-the-spot research and reasoning with a little too much excitement.

“Wait for it,” she said, loud enough for them all to hear. "Riv, you still feeling good?"

"As good as I can holding on to something like this." Riv sat down, bracing his feet on the rail and pulling the rope sharply downward, letting the angle and friction of the rope against the side of the ship take some of the pressure off his hands. "I'm good for a while yet."

"Aethe?"

Aethe stood beside her, long fingers resting lightly on a large, odd-looking arrow. That had cost a lot, too, but Aethe didn't even have to explain why she wanted it before the entire team agreed to it. She did most of her work with normal arrows, relying on pinpoint accuracy and excellent choices to make them work better than they ever should have. When she loaded a specialty arrow into her magical storage quiver, there was a purpose in mind, and she had made new realities with those arrows often enough that the team was willing to spend essentially unlimited resources on them.

Unlike, Elisa or even Riv, she held her gaze steady on the rope. Marco saw her noticing things about the rope, the way it strained, and the way it moved. She was picking up information with her scout's skills that the rest of them just couldn't see. Not Marco the Gluttonous Marauder captain, not Elisa the close-range Learned scholar mage, and not Riv the manual laborer Sturdy. Just Aethe the archer Scout, seeing all.

Aethe didn’t speak, but the set of her shoulders told him she already suspected what was about to happen.

The rope gave a sudden jerk, enough to have yanked Riv overboard if he wasn't already seated and braced. He dug in further, muscles standing out in sharp relief under his shirt. He wasn’t straining, not quite, but it was clear that whatever force pulled on the other end was immense. He grinned despite himself.

“He’s almost done,” Riv said.

Marco blinked. “He?”

Riv nodded. “Yeah. I decided it's probably a male. A big fella. Even if I'm wrong, it's coming soon. Go ahead and use me to yank on the rod. He'll follow.”

Marco turned toward the water, eyes scanning the rippling surface. The rope stretched taut, disappearing beneath the waves where froth gathered and spread in concentric circles. He flared his magical power and yanked the ship in the opposite direction of the rope, burning five percent of Riv's strength as he did. The ship responded by using that power to push through whatever resistance was left at the end of the rope.

Then the sea bulged.

At first it was subtle. But the swell grew, rose, and spread outward until it was obvious that something massive was pushing upward. Marco’s breath caught in his throat at the sheer size of it. Aethe’s hand tightened on her arrow, and for the first time she started to stretch the string back in preparation to fire. Elisa pumped magical energy from her hands into the Arbalest, loading it with lightning until it would take no more.

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Riv just held onto his rope, finally standing and beginning to haul it back foot by foot. The fight was over. The ship had won.

The water erupted. A dome of green‑black shell broke the surface, shedding seawater back down to the ocean. Barnacles clung to it everywhere, some as big as a man. The shape rose higher and higher, water cascading down its sides in glittering sheets, until Marco's brain finally accepted what he was seeing.

A turtle. It was a turtle the size of a mountain, huge beyond reckoning. Its head was broad and ancient, its eyes were the size of barrels, and its gaze was slow and deliberate as it turned toward them. The great beak clacked once, a sound like stone grinding on stone.

The rope stretched from Riv’s hands to the turtle's mouth. The bait had been a dungeon find, something Marco was sure the system had gifted them to make something like this possible in the first place.

Elisa had told it to search for The Large Turtle. Marco had just trusted her that this was a good use of it. Now he was looking at a mouth that could swallow half their ship in a bite and nostrils so big he could almost crawl into one.

“Elisa,” Marco gasped the words through a dry mouth. “What have you done?”

She glanced back, eyes alight with triumph. “Ask your temple-finding sense.”

Marco did. They had been searching for their latest temple for weeks, the last in a long line of temple conquests they had rapid-fire completed since leaving Quill's territory for the greater, wilder oceans beyond. This one had been an enigma, a direction provided to him by the system that nonetheless shifted, wandered, and sometimes disappeared completely.

"That's right." Elisa held up her Glossary of Local Aquatic Fauna, a confusingly unenchanted book they had gotten from yet another dungeon during their wanderings. "There was only one thing big enough to hide and move a temple down there."

"What if it breaks the rope? Or shatters the hook?" Marco asked. "Can we really hold it?"

The turtle’s bulk shifted, sending waves rocking the ship. Riv braced, grinning wider. “Stronger than any anchor,” he said. “Although we might be in trouble if he gets much more rest up here.”

"Oh, right." Aethe grinned at Marco, then turned to Elisa "Ready?"

"Ready."

Elisa fired her overloaded shot straight at the turtle's head. Marco's heart almost leapt out of his chest before he realized there was no real bolt in the shot, just concentrated lightning. It was something Elisa had picked up along the way.

What hit the turtle's head a moment later was pure electricity, irritating and stunning but not directly harmful to something that big and strong. The turtle opened its great mouth just as Aethe's large, silver bolt fired and slammed into its tongue. The impact broke the arrow apart into a great cloud of gas that went unnoticed by the turtle until it had inhaled almost all of it.

Then, slowly, the turtle stopped. It didn't sink; it didn't fight. It just froze in place, floating peacefully.

Marco stared, heart hammering in his chest. He had dreamed of great discoveries, of monsters and treasures and glory. But he had never, not once, imagined they would find their next fortune in the form of a turtle. The rope gleamed faintly, enchanted fibers glowing against the setting sun, and Marco finally understood why Riv and Elisa had insisted on spending every coin they had. Because some things couldn’t be bought in bulk. And that applied to both arrows and rope, he learned.

"We are going in?" Marco asked. "As in, inside? Into the belly of a titan of the sea?"

"Yes." Aethe patted his shoulder. "Don't worry. That arrow was called Sleepy Village. As in an artillary weapon for sedating whole towns, or large portions of an army. Elisa did the math and the turtle should be out for hours."

"What if the math's wrong? We don't know its resistances."

"We know it's not a system beast, or the bait wouldn't have worked. Trust me, Marco. This is a good bet."

Marco hated to admit it, but it really probably would be okay. If Elisa, Aethe, and Riv had signed off on it, all of this would probably be just another day in the dangerous life of a ship's captain. He sighed.

"How long do we have?"

"At least an hour," Elisa said. "But an hour isn't long. Get in the boat, Marco. We are going."

They climbed into the magical outboat and rowed towards the turtle's mouth. It hung slack and open, filled with enough water for them to easily enter it. Marco wondered what chance they'd even have before he saw it. Really, he thought, he should have expected it. To one side of the turtle's inner jaw was an obsidian staircase, leading into a shining black stone tube.

"Looks like we found our path. Let's get going." Elisa tossed Riv a mooring rope, which he dutifully tied to a barnacle in the massive turtle's mouth. "There's not much time."