SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 886: Through the Breach

The observation port on the fourth ring was a disc of reinforced glass two hands across, set into the outer wall so engineers could look at the dome from inside.

Rhosyn stood in front of it a long time.

Through the glass there was open water. Black, empty, nothing in it except the dome lamps thinning out into the distance. It was a place, she could see it, and that was all her folds ever needed.

'Not too far. If I get this wrong, I will end up inside the shell.'

She opened the passage and stepped through.

The ocean closed around her from every direction.

Kilometres of water pressed down from above, and the only reason her body held together was the space she had formed around herself.

A thin shell surrounded her, barely separated from her skin, keeping the pressure outside. She wasn't strong enough to resist the ocean directly. She was simply keeping it from reaching her.

It demanded her full attention. If the shell failed, the pressure would reach her immediately, and there would be nothing she could do after that.

She had done things like this before, and stranger things than this, once, with a soul in her hands and an entire world between her and where it needed to go.

That experience didn't make this easier. It only meant she knew exactly how careful she had to be and how little attention she could spare for anything else.

She turned and looked up.

The dome rose above her in a curve so broad that from this close it almost looked flat. Plates, support ribs and long welded seams covered the surface, silver-grey beneath layers of growth where nobody had cleaned it.

Small lights ran along the joints, but their glow disappeared quickly into the surrounding water.

Rhosyn stared for only a moment before moving on.

Nobody living inside Meraval would normally see the city from here. It had been built to keep the ocean outside, and there had never been a reason for anyone to stand on this side of it.

Rhosyn started swimming.

She couldn't fold safely out here. A fold needed somewhere she could see clearly, and beyond the last dome lamps there was only darkness in every direction.

So she stayed close to the outer wall and followed it, watching the lights grow farther apart as she moved deeper into the dark.

The breach appeared ahead without warning.

It was much larger than she had expected. Four charges had torn open a huge section of the outer shell, forcing the plating inward and leaving long pieces of metal bent toward the flooded ring.

The glass looked even worse. Instead of breaking apart completely, large sections still hung inside their frames, some of them as large as doors, shifting whenever the water moved.

Rhosyn watched the opening carefully.

The damaged sections moved slightly with every change in the current. Small fragments broke loose while she watched and disappeared into the darkness below.

'That could close while I'm inside.'

She went through anyway.

The inside of the sector was worse than the open ocean.

Water filled everything from the streets to the vaulting, and almost all of it was dark. Each movement disturbed silt from the floor, clouding the water around her and forcing her to slow down until she could see again.

Debris floated everywhere. Doors, crates, broken pieces of cargo gantries and part of a walkway hung at different heights, moving slowly through the flooded streets.

There were bodies among them. Most had sunk, while others remained caught higher up. Rhosyn went around them without stopping. Looking too closely served no purpose, and too much of her attention was already going into maintaining the shell.

Trafalgar had drawn the route from memory on the back of a supply requisition. Four streets in, second turn, then the warehouse with no trading name and an abandoned cooperage a few doors away.

Finding it took much longer than she wanted.

The warehouse had partly collapsed. The roof had dropped several feet and caught on the shelving below, leaving just enough space near the loading entrance for her to force herself through.

She started searching immediately.

The books were ruined. Several sets of ledgers remained on their shelves, but the pages broke apart when she touched them, reduced to grey pulp with the ink long since washed away.

The sealed crates had survived better. She managed to open two.

The first contained material rather than documents, packed into sacks and wrapped twice against moisture. Most of it was still intact, and she took what she could carry.

The second held records. They had been properly boxed and remained mostly dry until she opened the container, so she wrapped them in oilcloth before the water could do much more damage.

Then she searched the intake side of the warehouse. If anything still showed where the shipments had come from, that was where she expected to find it.

There was nothing left.

The eastern third of the building had faced the breach directly, and most of it was simply gone. Only a slope of broken material disappearing into open water was remaining.

Rhosyn stayed in front of the opening with both arms full and looked over what remained.

'We can find out what they were doing here. Maybe who handled it. But where it came from is gone.'

There was nothing else to recover, so she headed back toward the breach.

The opening had changed while she was inside.

Part of the upper section had dropped farther, and one of the large glass panels had shifted across the route she had used before. The gap that remained was too narrow for her to pass through while carrying everything she had recovered.

She couldn't fold through it either. There was no clear destination on the other side that she could see.

That left only one option.

Rhosyn followed the inside of the dome with one hand against the plating, searching for another opening. The structure shifted whenever the water moved, and without the dome lights outside she had almost nothing to use for direction.

She kept going.

By the time she finally found another way through, she had been holding the shell far longer than she wanted. Her hands had begun to shake from the strain, and keeping the space around herself stable was becoming harder with every passing minute.

She cleared the breach and turned toward the fourth ring.

Rhosyn didn't stop again until she could see the observation port ahead of her.