Chapter 58: Abyssal Fright
Standing on a small rocky shelf five meters above where the waves were crashing against the mountain, Derek had slowly made his way down. He was starting to have second thoughts.
The ocean stretched out beneath him, the scorching brightness of the local star glinting off the rippling surface, the stench of salt and something that had to be alien seaweed stinging in his nose.
This may have been a bad idea.
Oh, he could swim, hold his breath for literal hours with the right aplication of [Aspect Integration], and could even make himself heavy enough to walk along the bottom of the ocean on the off-chance that became required for some bizzare reason, and he’d even swept the water beneath him with his [Aura] to make sure it was deep enough, but none of that was the issue.
Because for all that he could check what was down there, he wasn’t at a point where he could see the reflection of the sky in the surface of the waves impenetrable to his eyes.
Exploring oceans was weird. And dangerous.
Land could be very easily scanned from orbit, jungle canopies could be seen past with radar, and so on, even caves could be somewhat easily checked via ground-penetrating radar and/or the more “standard” trick of having a device start thumping on the ground and then checking how the sound waves arrived on the other side of the area you wanted to check over.
The ocean, on the other hand … water ate light like nobody’s business, made seeing underwater even before you got into the issue of all the sunlight reflecting off the surface, blinding both observers and sensors.
There was also the small issue of life underwater getting big, with the medium they lived within supporting much of their weight, and as powerful as Derek had gotten, having the local orca-equivalent try and take a bite out of him would still hurt like hell and probably injure him to boot. Although who was to say the local apex predators topped out at Earth’s current maximum? What reason did he have to suspect he would not run into something on the scale of a megalodon or mosasaur?