Sophia choked as she forced herself to try to breathe the water of the pool near the crystal in the center of Izel. She’d known it was going to be unpleasant, but that was a mild way to state it. It sucked a lot. Both Amy and Taika seemed to feel the same way; she could hear them gasp and choke as they tried to convince themselves that the water was air. There was definitely no mystery as to why the Waters of Izel Challenge was unpopular; there was no way Sophia was going to do this again.

  Dav seemed unaffected.

  Sophia glared at him once she managed to finally get herself underwater. Her lungs still burned, but that was probably mostly from the coughing, not the liquid. She tried to say something to Amy, only to realize that she wasn’t making any useful noise. She had to send the message telepathically instead. “Now I understand what it must have been like when Dav and I were immune to that gaseous poison back in the Corpsevine Challenge.”

  “That was worse,” Amy answered after a moment that said she’d fumbled the same way Sophia had. “But have you looked around? Much better view here, too.”

  “I’ll say,” Sophia agreed as she looked around. This wasn’t at all what she’d seen from above water. That clearly meant that it was part of the Challenge.

  The underwater area seemed to be mostly open, but large rocks and some sort of seaweed rose from the reflective sea floor. Fish darted through the colorful undesea vegetation and dodged cloudy bubbles. There was a reflective “floor” that looked almost like an underwater pool, but Sophia was certain it was simply reflecting what was above.

  On second thought, maybe it actually was a pool of “denser” water? It was the entrance to the next level down. If that became the new “surface,” maybe there was a reason it looked so odd.

  Sophia was pretty certain they’d never go there. She did not want to go through that unpleasantness again. If they did come back, it would have to be after she forgot just how bad it really was to deliberately try to breathe water.

  What they had to do in the Waters of Izel Challenge sounded simple, because all they had to do was move a rock out of the way so that they could get into the room they needed. There was a second way into the room, the normal way, but it was guarded by a giant squid and an assortment of jellyfish. They were nasty enough that the Registry recommended that groups weaker than the second upgrade use the back entrance.

  It wasn’t simple. It was a round boulder, which Sophia had assumed would be simple enough to roll out of the way, but the boulder was actually stuck in place like a cork. There wasn’t anything nearby to use as leverage and even if there was, they’d have to be careful because they couldn’t afford to even touch the “floor.” That would push whoever touched it “down” a level and prevent them from reaching the goal of the area they actually had a chance at completing.

  They had the tools that were recommended, but it was still difficult and annoying. The first step was to get a bar, basically the flat end of a crowbar, in between the boulder and the hole it was stuck in. That would have been hard enough on dry land, but while the rock had no give, the “cave” it was stuck in was coral. They could break it if they could bring the force to bear.

  The problem was that they couldn’t. There was nothing to stand on and nothing to brace behind; they couldn’t even get up a decent amount of momentum because they were swimming. Everything was at least three times as difficult as it should have been, and that was before Sophia counted the fact that curious or hungry fish would occasionally approach.

  They had to shoo the curious fish away while killing the hungry ones, but it added a time factor: killing too many fish would attract attention they couldn’t afford. Someone stronger could kill the predators, but Sophia, Amy, Dav, and Taika were not yet past the first upgrade. They could handle the hungry fish in small numbers, but anything more would be too much underwater.

  They eventually managed to get the first spike in place using Sophia’s Root Grab to hold Dav in place while he beat on the spike with a mallet. It took a lot more work than it would have on dry land, but it was in.

  That took them to the second step: repeating the first step at least two more times. More was better, but Taika was simply too small to beat on a spike to lever the rock in the direction they wanted it to go. The only other option, really, was to break enough of the coral around the rock that it was easy to move, but that would be even harder than spearing the three crowbars in far enough to jiggle the rock loose.

  Sophia grumbled to herself. If they had big equipment, this would be easy. For that matter, if they just had a secure place to anchor a rope a little way away from the boulder, she could use her climbing kit to make anchor points and set up a crude pulley of a rope around a bar to help get the rock out. It just didn’t exist; everything else was either too close to the false floor to be safe to touch, made of coral, or not anchored firmly to the “seabed.”

  Sophia tried.

  It had to be deliberate, done as a way to encourage people to use the “front” entrance. It really was too bad that fighting the sea life at the front entrance was too tough; it sounded like an interesting fight.

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  By the time they managed to get the second lever in place, Sophia was worried about the number of fish they’d killed. They were nearly two-thirds of the way through the “safe” number, but the fish seemed to be arriving more often and in larger groups. If that continued, they might not make it. Fortunately, she’d come up with an idea when Dav was in the middle of pounding the second spike into place. She couldn’t solve the problem with her tools, but maybe she could make it easier?

  “I want to try something a little different this time,” Sophia sent, then dug in her pack for some of her climbing spikes. She set the first one in the spot they were going to put the last lever, then triggered the spike. It sunk into the coral, but failed to anchor itself properly when the coral broke around it.

  Sophia grinned. That was half of what she wanted to do. A weak spot to stick the lever into would make it far easier.

  The rest of the spikes she’d pulled out went into the rock, placed so that Dav could rest his feet, butt, and back on them while he beat the lever the rest of the way into place. They’d still need her Root Grab as an anchor, but anything should help.

  It did. The last lever went into place in less than half the time of the previous one. When Dav asked why they hadn’t done all of them that way, Sophia had to admit that she simply hadn’t thought of it. The pamphlet suggested anchoring Abilities like Root Grab and people with Abilities to make working in water easier and she just hadn’t gotten far enough out of the box until the last one.

  Once all of the levers were in place, the rock was surprisingly easy to pop out of its hole. The coral crumbled a little against the levers, but that didn’t matter; what mattered was that they could enter the next area.

  It looked like an underwater grotto filled with rocks and plants. Many of them, especially near the entrance, looked like flowers you’d find on the surface, rather than ones that belonged underwater. Crystals floated in the water; they reminded Sophia of the ones that floated in the center of Izel, but these came in orange and purple as well as a soft aqua blue.

  In the center, there was a glyph-inscribed circle on the floor that surrounded a floating platform covered in more symbols. Inside that was a piece of a cone covered in glowing sigils then capped off with a flat surface on which rested a glowing golden metal sculpture of a fire that seemed to actually be producing the floating crystals.

  Sophia stared at it in dismay. The only section that actually had symbols that were set up correctly to form a spell was the conical section, that was only a tiny piece of the whole. It was very very obvious that whatever was here was supposed to be an Ability, not a spell.

  It was supposed to be a “Water Flower” that could emit water or entangle. Did that mean the fiery thing at the peak of the symbol or the flowers outside? Should she include those? What about the floating crystals? They moved, were they important?

  Sophia watched as the “fire” released another crystal. She had to make a decision, so she decided to bound the image she was going to use at the outer glyph circle and include the floating crystals. She didn’t really expect to get an Ability anyway, with how difficult this one was supposed to be to both gain and use, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t try.

  It was fortunately fairly quick, since the only part she had to manually build was the small central cone structure. For once, it took Sophia far longer to get a good mental picture of what she was doing than it did to build the spellform.

  The fact that she couldn’t sketch any of it out first didn’t help.

  She was fairly confident in her small spell, but she was also confident that she hadn’t gotten the image right for the Ability, because the first two times she tried to cast the spell and flash the image to make the Ability, nothing happened. The third time, Sophia got distracted by the flame creating a crystal and that overwhelmed her Image.

  Weirdly, it worked that time. It wasn’t a Grand Ability or even an Ability Fragment, but the Guide gave her credit for making something.

  Feat Completed!

  For your Feat of using an Ability shown in the Firewater Cave of the Waters of Izel Challenge, you have been granted a reward!

  This Feat is awarded to anyone who uses a Firewater Ability while floating in the Firewater Cave of the Waters of Izel Challenge without having used it before or gained it as an Ability previously.

  Reward: Firewater Crystallization Ability

  Capture Fire in a prison of crystallized Water. Requires ambient Water and the Fire that is to be captured. The crystalline prison can be disturbed by a sharp shock, returning to its constituent water and releasing the captive Fire. The crystal will slowly evaporate if kept in a dry environment.

  It didn’t look like she’d made something useful, but at least it was something?

  Honestly, it sounded like something that might be useful to the right setup, but for her was nearly useless. Maybe she could use it to make wet fire arrowheads for Amy, but Sophia had very little confidence that would be worthwhile. Where would she get a strong enough fire to have that tiny amount actually be worth more in a fight than a normal arrowhead?

  Maybe it could be used to set things on fire, sort of like a real fire arrow, but Sophia wasn’t confident this would actually do anything that couldn’t be done without it. While those things required being prepared ahead of time, so did this.

  At the other end of the spectrum, making small water balls with a tiny amount of fire seemed even less useful. Sophia thought the Ability would have been more useful if it was what she’d originally thought it was, the ability to temporarily solidify alcohol, probably as a very cold ice cube. At least then she’d be able to have a cold drink that didn’t dilute itself.

  She’d never actually take an Ability for that, but she was pretty sure she was never going to slot this, either.

  A team set up to work underwater would find this Challenge pretty easy; it’s rated as hard as it is because very few people are actually any good underwater, even with breathable water.

  They could probably have punched above their weight, but not enough to handle something classed as “second upgrade recommended.”