"Oh, it's the other way around completely." The bomb expert spoke. "A grenade exploding underwater is way more dangerous than in the air. Air is a good conductor of pressure waves. But liquid? Liquid's incompressible. Just about instant pressure wave at full strength."

  He turned and then handed Wade the grenade bandolier, filled with the three modified grenades. "There's a reason they banned dynamite fishing everywhere in the world. If you're exploding a grenade underwater, make dead sure you're above the surface. Else, well. Dead."

  Shrapnel from the detonating grenade ripped apart from the tiny thing, rapidly shredding itself into smaller metal pieces as they were blasted out into the liquid mana.

  The explosive heat equally dissipated almost instantly, unable to heat up the surrounding chilly liquid with any real speed.

  The pressure wave was a completely different beast.

  Wade wasn't certain that kind of damage would bypass Azdrial's armor tech. He couldn't guess at it until he put it to actual use.

  Liquid was in direct contact with Not-Leon just about in every nook and crack of his armor, directly pressing up against his body. Maybe even inhaled, mouth open. There were too many bubbles everywhere around him from their impact.

  Too much uncertainty in this plan. So he'd put a ton of separate plans all together and hoped one or the combination of them would work.

  The mental attack attempt had half worked. He'd made it to Not-Leon and managed to tackle him into the liquid mana, despite being a head-slice away from getting killed by a clearly superior swordsman.

  That part had worked.

  What hadn't worked was that even while being completely overwhelmed with internet deep fried lore, the enemy had been dedicated enough to stab Wade through the gut with that shaking sword in midair.

  Wade didn't feel it, not with the amount of adrenaline flooding his body. But he could tell a sword was lodged in his gut.

  They hit the water with one last infohazard attack, which gave Wade just enough time to do the last part of his plan.

  The pressure wave hit them both almost the second they were fully underwater. Maybe his luck stat was just enough to tip the scales. Or he'd timed it good enough.

  There were already a few notifications on the side of his eye, wording that remained perfectly crisp and clear despite all the bubbles of air everywhere and the chaos of landing and sinking down.

  He saw a debuff was applied, but didn't have the time to check further into it.

  Because right after, Wade felt a force crush him, compress his lungs together, and squeeze all the air out. Which left him choking and suffocating.

  And nothing other than that.

  Barotrauma immunity. No pain, no damage, nothing.

  Not-Leon was still in front of him. Wade couldn't tell if the enemy was even moving or not.

  For all he knew, the demonic armor had somehow protected the assassin, so Wade was already focused on part two even as more notifications scrolled past in his vision.

  Slowly, his hand moved in the liquid mana.

  And held tight, was his Glock.

  "Second weird question in a row." The bomb expert said. "But sure, technically you can fire a Glock underwater. Can't say it's a great idea though, underwater I mean."

  "Why's that?" Wade asked. "Besides the obvious it's underwater, I'll guess probably not ideal place to shoot."

  "Less than ideal." The man laughed. "Bullets lose punch real fast underwater, there's your un-ideal situation. Lethal range is basically measured in inches at best. And if you try a bigger bullet instead, it'll just rip itself apart instead. You're wasting your bullets firing into water."

  Slowly, all lit up by the glowing mana everywhere, air bubbles having all been compressed and flattened out of the way, the Glock's barrel lined up… and firmly pressed against Not-Leon's head.

  Directly against his forehead.

  Wade pressed the trigger.

  The Glock fired.

  A cloud of red ripped free from the assassin's skull. The head snapped back a few inches, then went still.

  The body sunk without any further movement, slowly sinking through the liquid mana like a ghost. Fingers letting go of the blade hilt, which still remained firmly skewered in Wade's gut.

  He wasn't sure if the pressure wave had killed his target, if the crackling lightning damage of the dodge roll triggering off the grenade did the trick, or if his final execution plan had nailed the coffin shut. Maybe having the Glock pressed hard against the asshole's forehead meant there wasn't any space for his armor to magically shield him from that.

  Maybe the assassin hadn't been able to focus enough to even keep his armor powered and it had been over from the very start. Or maybe there'd been enough damage the armor was too drained to keep running.

  The shape-shifter drifted down into the well lit abyss below, a trail of red steadily lifting off his head. Oddly peaceful and morbid at the same time. And Wade was silently following behind.

  But that was fine. Because he knew for a fact that he'd won.

  Three Storefront Coins have been collected from your defeated enemy.

  Gold Lootbox spawned nearby.

  Greater Challenge Mode Unlocked.

  The System itself had declared him the winner.

  He didn't read through the whole text log, there were tons just above the gold lootbox, mostly repeating the same word over and over: Mana Necrosis.

  New debuffs getting applied, and the roman numerals next to them were going up up and up. While the remaining time to death was going the opposite direction.

  He'd panic about that later, he had something else to panic about right now: Breathing.

  That pressure wave had squeezed all the air out of his lungs like a the final drop of toothpaste. And now he was sinking like a rock with equal amounts of buoyancy.

  Climbing back out of this would be impossible if he had to hold his breath the whole time.

  Wade was planning to test his water master boon for one more abuse case: Waterbreathing.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Wade was gambling that the term 'water' was coloquial - as in anything liquid could be considered 'water'.

  He also somewhat had chemistry on his side of that too: If it referred to pure H2O, then sea water wouldn't count since that has a bunch more stuff added into it besides pure water. Even drinking water was mixed with minerals and all kinds of non-water stuff.

  In fact, the only place on earth that absolute pure water existed was underground in some massive cosmic radiation observatory, all the way in Japan. Wade knew that fact because he'd seen a video on it once and now that information was floating around in his skull forevermore.

  Point was - the System often followed the spirit of the idea with its boons as far as Wade had seen. And water mastery was presumably all about being able to swim in deep waters or hostile environments that he really had no business in.

  Such as pure liquid mana.

  Which he was currently sinking into, in a Mariana Trench-like part of this zone - tiny looking lake, incredibly deep underwater cliff.

  Looking down under, it was like watching a massive swimming pool with lights illuminating the hole going all the way down.

  Well, he'd gotten this far.

  Wade opened his mouth and tried breathing.

  And failed.

  Not because the boon wasn't working.

  But because his body simply refused, the lizard part of his brain telling him it wasn't going to cooperate.

  There was water all around him, if he tried breathing, he would choke and suffocate. And so Lizard-brain was making the executive decision he wasn't going to breathe underwater.

  Hindsight, he really should have tested and trained this in his bathtub when he was figuring out how where all the edge cases were.

  And now it was way to goddamn late.

  He had a slight chance of being able to get back up to the surface without having to breathe if he stopped the decent right goddamn now. His lizard brain told him that was the best plan.

  Swim back up, as fast as he goddamn could. Because neither of them wanted to test water breathing.

  Panic started to come over him. He was sinking fast. Way faster than normal.

  In fact, he could feel the inches passing by him just by the pure mana density. The further downwards he sunk, the more mana was being squeezed into his body. That mana necrosis debuff was probably going crazy.

  Grab the cliffside. If he couldn't outswim the fall, he could at least grab hold of something solid and have it hold him in place.

  He tried to move his legs and arms. To start swimming to the side of the cliff passing him by.

  His legs didn't move. Only his hands and arms half-swam with a weak attempt.

  Wade didn't understand why his legs weren't moving. He also realized he was flipped on his back, curled up like a shrimp, sinking upside down.

  Like he was getting dragged down by something holding his shoulders.

  His addled brain realized the issue: His backpack. Overloaded with heavy metal junk. Of course it was dragging him down now.

  He tried to tap around for an unlock clasp, or some way to remove the backpack, but once more his arms moved with only the weakest effort.

  Lack of oxygen was getting him.

  Part of his brain knew he should be able to breathe here, at least to a mostly high chance of success. That he should be fine. And yet his body just refused.

  And so long as he wasn't breathing, he wasn't refilling his stamina.

  He was almost certain now he was passed the point of no return, that he'd take at least four to seven minutes of struggling to get back up to the surface.

  He might not even have that long. The mana necrosis would likely finish him off first, judging by the feeling in his… everywhere.

  Something hit his backpack and halted it. Wade felt himself sink past it, knocked around right side up again, before the straps tightened up on his back and fully halted his decent.

  He remained there, hung in front of the abyss ahead of him. Feet limp while the rest stretched onwards. Below, the body of Not-Leon continued to sink downwards, slowly growing smaller and smaller.

  And Wade saw something else glinting in the glowing dim blue light. It tumbled against the side of the cliffside walls, and caught on a petal of crystal rocks, then settled into place there. Something metal. Gold even?

  He couldn't speak out loud, but thinking Identify worked just fine.

  Gold Lootbox Compass (System Quality)

  Fuck. This was the worst place for it to end up at.

  Slowly, Wade looked upward to see what held him hoisted over the abyss.

  His backpack had snagged on a crystal spike. One had slipped through a strap and held firm.

  Mana Crystal Vein (High Quality)

  In fact, when Wade looked around him, all he saw were glittering crystals of different shapes and sizes. Above him they had started small, like a faint glittering powder on the bone.

  Now there were much larger chunks surrounding him.

  All of them showed up on his Identify as Mana Crystals.

  If he could grab one of those and bring it back with him to Earth…

  Probably not this time. Wade idly looked over his stats and saw the mana number had gone deep into the thousands. He didn't even want to check his mana necrosis debuff, it was likely sitting at a few minutes till death.

  The next round was going to be hard. If he respawned right here, this far deep under the liquid mana, he was dead on arrival.

  He'd need to bring the water mastery boon with him at minimum just to survive the climb back up. That might not pair well with whatever random boon he got next.

  Maybe he could buy scuba diving gear and jump into the next round with that? Then slowly scale his way back up out of the lake.

  He looked down for a moment. Not-Leon's body was already too small to make out. It was tumbling against the crystals, but without an actual loose backpack like Wade, nothing was really snagging the body, so it just tumbled around.

  Shame Not-Leon's body was going to be that far deep. Would make looting his body real difficult.

  That was the last lucid thought that went through Wade's head, because sheer blind animalistic panic hit him once the lack of air was too much for even his lizard brain to handle.

  He struggled weakly in the liquid, suspended. There was a metal underwater click where his Glock tumbled onto crystal petals and slipped inwards against the cliff just under him. While his hands grabbed at his throat, then weakly thrashed around for anything else.

  The struggling slowed and stopped and Wade just hung there, dying.

  Until his mouth opened in one final, desperate attempt to survive - and he breathed in.

  Liquid mana flooded into his collapsed lungs.

  Life flooded back instantly.

  So easily, Wade couldn't understand why he'd fought against it this entire time.

  He took one more gasping breath in and out. More life came into him.

  Breathing liquid as air felt… heavy.

  He needed to put actual strength and effort into breathing it in and then even more trying to force it out.

  The stamina drain. It was affecting everything, including how strong his lungs were. Air was just really easy to breathe in and out, liquid wasn't.

  He focused on his mana, which he found basically bottomless inside him, and then twisted some of it to empower his lungs instead of just staying there doing nothing.

  His next breath was a lot easier, and the one after. Each a focused singular gasp. Surviving. He was getting air back into his system, letting his stamina recover again.

  And then he puked out a cloud ahead of him, filled with red.

  Uh oh.

  He had to get the fuck out of here.

  He could move his arms somewhat okay, but his legs remained unmoving. And he couldn't tell why.

  When he looked down to check, he saw the sword still skewered in his gut, but the legs dangling right above the abyss looked perfectly fine.

  Maybe throbbing a bit. In that kind of way that felt like adrenaline was masking something going wrong in there.

  Wade looked over his logs and stats. Then down to his debuffs.

  At the very top of the log, right before the massive set of mana necrosis debuffs, he found the issue:

  Mana rupture (Legs) - Muscles ruptured within the legs due to magical strain. Agility reduced by 90%. Immobile.

  That final leap. He'd overtaxed his system and it had ripped his muscles apart. They hadn't been joking about there being limits to that spell and not to abuse it.

  He zipped his text log mentally down to check what the very last mention of mana necrosis was at.

  New Debuff Applied: Mana Necrosis XI - (Time until Death: 17 minutes.)

  His head was running the simulations and options.

  Nobody else could dive this deep after him. Even if Bael and Medy decided to be suicidal and jump into a lake of liquid mana, he was so far deep below that they would suffocate trying to get back up.

  He looked up, to the dim surface far above him.

  Maybe he wasn't that far down? It looked doable.

  He had 17 minutes to scale his way back up with just his hands, while suffering the final effects of mana necrosis. That part was going to be hard. But if he got somewhat far enough up to be seen by Medy or Bael, they'd probably jump in and pull him up the rest of the way. So maybe the trip up wasn't as bad as he thought it could be.

  And then he noticed there was some shining light down here. Not the dim blue of the liquid mana itself, but rather… red?

  It came from his backpack. Yeah, a glowing dim red circle from something inside it. And everywhere the glow was, the nylon of his backpack was starting to bubble.

  Like… like it was being melted.

  A circle that suspiciously had the exact outline of that mithril collar he'd stuck into his backpack.

  What had Selena said about mithril? It could continue to suck in mana, but it would start heating up as a result. After a certain point it would melt, fully releasing the mana within it.

  The lower section of the backpack peeled away and bright glowing red mithril ripped through, lifting upwards. Basically the only thing buoyant despite being full metal. Currently slowly cutting through the only thing holding him from sinking, acting like a hot knife through butter in slow motion.

  Wade started laughing, no sound coming out of his waterlogged mouth.

  Yeah.

  That's going to be a problem.

  The mithril collar broke free, then cut through his straps on its way up.

  Wade started free falling straight down.