Ludger placed a hand on the lid and let his Mana Sense slide into the glowing lines. He felt the structure imdiately, tight, interlocked loops ant to catch intrusion and lock harder, nested patterns that rerouted if one line was disturbed.
Good work, he thought grudgingly. Annoying work.
He exhaled slowly in his air pocket, then began. First, he dispersed. Not with brute force. Not yet.
He bled mana into the rune lines in careful pressure pulses, enough to make the pattern react, enough to map its response. The seal pushed back, tightening its loops, shifting flow into secondary channels to prevent a direct drain.
Ludger adjusted, twisting his input like turning a key that didn’t quite fit.
He wasn’t trying to “pick” the seal in a refined way. He was trying to convince it he belonged. That required an unlocking rune. A counter-pattern. He didn’t have the exact shape. So he built it by feel.
He shaped mana in the air just above the lid, forcing it into a crude unlocking glyph, one he’d seen variations of in old rune manuals and on golem cores, adapted by instinct and experience. A pattern ant to say authorized access.
But the Empire’s seal didn’t accept a weak imitation. It resisted, flaring brighter, its glow sharpening as if offended. Ludger’s jaw tightened. Fine. If it wanted authority, he’d give it authority. He poured more mana into the unlocking rune. A lot more.
His mana pool was deep, absurdly deep for his age, and for once that wasn’t just a combat advantage. It was a lever. A heavy one.
The unlocking glyph thickened, brightening into a solid structure, its lines stabilizing as he fed it. The ocean around his hands shimred faintly from the pressure shifts, like the water itself was disturbed by the density of mana being forced into a single shape.
The seal fought him. It cycled. It reinforced. It tried to reroute.
Ludger stayed on it, minute after minute, adjusting angles, increasing pressure, thinning one line while thickening another, like grinding down a lock with a file until the chanism finally gave up and turned.
His breath stayed calm. His body stayed still. Only his mana moved. It took longer than he liked. Long enough that he started counting the seconds like a heartbeat.
The Empire hadn’t held back. These were high-quality seals, built to resist exactly this kind of tampering. Built with layered triggers that could have exploded, frozen, or shredded an intruder if they detected sloppy input.
But Ludger wasn’t sloppy. He was stubborn. Eventually, the glow flickered. Once. Twice. Then the rune lines went dim, collapsing inward like a net losing tension. The lid’s seam loosened. Unsealed.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He steadied the chest with one hand and lifted the lid with the other, careful, slow enough not to jolt whatever was inside.
A faint shimr escaped, like trapped mana exhaling. He peered in. His mind was already lining up expectations.
Alien tal, maybe, those conductive silver swords had pointed to sothing strange beyond the ant labyrinth, and the Empire had been sealing information hard. Illegal export. Secret trade. A backdoor deal with foreign engineers. Sothing like that. Sothing that made sense.
Instead… Ludger stared. Inside the chest were marbles. Fist-sized marbles. Dozens of them, nestled in padded compartnts like eggs in a nest, smooth spheres of glassy material, each one a different color. So were deep crimson. So ocean-blue. So sickly green. So golden, almost sunlit even down here.
They weren’t random trinkets. They were too perfect. Too consistent in size. Too carefully stored. Too heavily sealed. Ludger squinted, eyes narrowing so hard it felt like he was trying to force the truth to confess through sheer pressure.
“…What,” he breathed into his air pocket.
Colorful marbles. Not tal. Not cores. Not guardian plates. Not anything that fit into the neat story he’d built. And that, more than anything, made his skin crawl. Because the Empire didn’t risk drowning ships and pay five hundred diamond coins for toys.
They did it for secrets. For power. For things that shouldn’t exist in anyone else’s hands. Ludger hovered in the wreck’s shadow, staring into the open box of bright, innocent-looking spheres… and felt, very clearly, that he’d just found the kind of cargo that started wars quietly.
The mont the lid opened fully, Ludger felt it. Not the blunt, hungry pull of a mana core. Not that familiar “fuel” sensation, dense, uniform, and eager to be burned. This was different.
The energy coming off the spheres was… layered. It pressed against his Mana Sense in soft waves, like each marble had its own rhythm, its own signature, alive in a way that made his instincts itch.
He hovered closer and studied them without touching. The colors weren’t just paint or glass. They had depth, like the color went all the way through the sphere and kept going, as if the light was trapped inside and didn’t know how to escape properly.
A deep crimson one glowed faintly like embers under ash, warm and angry, but contained. A blue marble held a cold, clear radiance that reminded him of winter starlight, a glow that felt clean but wrong in the ocean’s gloom. A green sphere pulsed with a sickly shimr, not poisonous exactly, but… alive in a way that made him think of vines finding cracks in stone.
A golden one didn’t shine like tal. It shone like sunlight filtered through honey, thick and patient, as if the light itself had been pressed into a solid shape. So were violet, so dark they looked nearly black until the glow caught, revealing an inner swirl like smoke coiling in a bottle.
Others were pale white, almost transparent, but with a faint, shifting opalescence that turned with his angle of view like they were reacting to his presence.
They were beautiful. Which made them worse. Because the Empire didn’t spend resources sealing pretty things unless “pretty” was the disguise on a knife. Ludger’s air pocket held steady as he breathed slowly, mind already trying to catalog, to label, to solve.
Not cores. Not tal. Not guardian parts.
So what? His fingers twitched toward one marble, tempted to test it, poke it with mana, prod it with wind, see if it reacted. Then the water around him dimd another shade. He looked up.
The faint brightness from the surface had weakened. The ocean above was losing its last daylight, the rippling ceiling turning from pale blue into a colder, darker sheet. Night was coming fast. Underwater, that ant the difference between hard and stupid.
Ludger clicked his tongue silently and forced himself to stop thinking like a curious idiot.
Later, he promised himself. You can get answers later.
Right now, the priority was simple. Secure. Extract. Leave.
He closed the chest lid carefully, no sudden movents, and set his palm against it. Earth mana responded sluggishly this deep, but he didn’t need finesse. He needed containnt.
Ludger pulled the box free from the wreckage, then grabbed the next. There were more sealed chests nearby, so half-buried, so wedged behind broken ribs. He found them by feel, by weight, by the faint rune glow still clinging to their seams like a last stubborn breath.
One by one, he collected them.
His arms started to ache from hauling, but he ignored it. The wind sheath helped, reducing resistance, letting him move cargo without turning into a sinking anchor.
Once he had them gathered, several heavy chests clustered on the seabed, he shaped the ground.
Earth surged up in a thick, rough container: a sealed stone shell with a lid that fit like a jaw. Not elegant. Not runed. Just heavy and honest.
He packed the chests inside, stacking them carefully, and then reinforced the container’s walls until it was a solid block of compacted rock, dense enough to resist currents, heavy enough to stay put, and sealed enough that the ocean wouldn’t casually scatter the evidence.
As he worked, his Mana Sense brushed the open chest again.
He could feel it even through stone. A field of subtle pulses. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands.
There were thousands of those marbles. Even in the small portion he’d uncovered, the sheer quantity made his stomach tighten. This wasn’t a single artifact shipnt. It was a stockpile. A supply run.
A product.
Or ammunition.
Ludger sealed the earth container fully, pressing the final seam shut until it was one continuous slab. Then he hovered there for a mont, darkness pressing closer, the wreck’s shadow deepening like a mouth closing.
He stared at the stone block he’d created, his private cache on the ocean floor, and felt the weight of future problems settling into place. He didn’t know what the marbles did. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty: If the Empire had been willing to feed ships to the sea to move them… Then their use wasn’t small.
Ludger pushed off the seabed, wind sheath tightening, and began rising toward the surface.
I’ll find their purpose later, he thought, eyes cold as the water around him.
After I make sure the ocean doesn’t swallow the rest of the truth first.
He didn’t co up in a spray-and-wind launch this ti. He rose slowly. Deliberately. As if he wanted the ocean to understand that he was leaving on his terms.
The last daylight filtered down in tired shafts, turning the water above into a dim, rippling ceiling. Ludger’s wind sheath stayed tight, his breathing steady, but he could feel the surface getting closer, the pressure easing, the world brightening by degrees.
Then the top of his earthwork ca into view.
A massive block of stone, his sealed container—sat on the seabed like a crude altar. He had shaped it wide and flat on top for a reason.
Ludger drifted up and settled onto it, sitting on the stone’s crown for a heartbeat to reorient, letting the currents slide past. From the surface, he knew what this looked like:
A boy sitting over it.
Just… sitting there, calm and still, like drowning had beco optional.
Above, on the deck of the S.S. Elaine, shadows moved along the rail.
He could almost feel the thoughts up there, half alarm, half disbelief.
Did he grow gills? Is he even human?
Ludger pushed off the stone and continued upward, slow and controlled.
The ocean darkened around him as the sun sank. The surface turned into a strip of molten orange and deepening red, the horizon burning softly as if the sea were swallowing the day whole.
When Ludger finally broke through, the ship was close. He didn’t launch himself this ti. He simply rose, climbed the last stretch, and let the wind sheath carry him to the deck with minimal effort.
Boots hit wood. He stood dripping, the sunset behind him painting the mast and rigging in gold. A collective exhale rippled across the deck. Relief first. Then confusion.
Because the crew’s eyes weren’t just on Ludger.
They were on the thing behind him, on the darker patch where his stone container sat, felt by everyone who’d seen him pause like a statue in the water. Questions gathered in faces like storm clouds.
What did you find?
What did you do down there?
Ludger saw all of it. He ignored it.
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