Bernie’s eyes blazed red, and he gnashed his teeth at me.

  Instinctively, I crossed my arms in front of my face. Bernie clamped down on my right arm and surged forward, swimming around the tank, dragging me along with him.

  My arm left a trail of sparkles in the water behind us, and yes, it felt as bad as it looked.

  “Ahh!” Silas screamed. “Neptune’s starfish pasties! What do we do?”

  I remembered hearing a tactic about how to survive shark attacks, so I punched Bernie in the nose, but that only further enraged the apex predator.

  He kept my arm clamped and began thrashing his head back and forth like a puppy with a toy. It felt like he was gonna rip my arm off any second. A host of alerts flared across my HUD, but I ignored them all. I couldn’t exactly read a small novel at the moment.

  I pointed my free hand toward the canister of MS-222, but Silas was suction-cupped on the shark’s back, hammer-fisting its head to no avail.

  “Let go of Rickshaw Erik Shaw! He may be a git, but he’s my git and only has half the limbs of a Karjok! He needs them all, so pick on someone from your own biome!”

  As if on cue, Bernie released me and began barrel-rolling against the glass to squeegee Silas off his back.

  Silas wailed. “I didn’t mean me, you stupid cartilaginous fish! I meant another shark!”

  I swam a desperate one-armed stroke to reach down for the sedative, never more grateful that I still had water-breathing time. My arm dangled from my shoulder like a rainbow Slinky, constantly spewing glitter into the water. Even with the age-appropriate content filter on, the sight and the sensation of it made my stomach lurch.

  I kicked and scrambled with my good arm, clawing at the water toward the MS-222 canister. Hopefully, this rapidly devolving situation would qualify us to use it.

  While I frantically pulled strokes through the water, I noticed only four minutes remaining on my water-breathing ability. At this rate, I was just as likely to drown as to run out of sparkles.

  Silas screamed from behind me just as I grabbed the canister. The moment it flashed green, I deployed it. A cloud of pastel rainbow haze exploded into the water around me, but not near Bernie. A two-minute cooldown timer appeared on the canister.

  We don’t have time for this!

  I spun in the water, squaring myself with the aquatic kerfuffle, attempting to draw Silas’s attention and get him to lure Bernie into the rainbow cloud.

  Bernie kept barrel-rolling against the glass to try to scrape Silas off, but true to his cephalopod-ic nature, he squished and smooshed, contorting every which way to maintain his hold on the shark.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I thrashed and waved my good arm, finally catching Silas’s eye.

  “I can’t heal you now, mate,” he called. “I’m a bit busy giving Bernie what for!”

  I wanted to scream, but underwater, it wouldn’t do me any good. Maybe if I upgraded my water-breathing ability, I’d eventually be able to communicate with more than just unclear hand gestures.

  Finally, Bernie lost patience with his current method and decided to swim toward the center of the tank, right toward me. He opened his mouth, and I frantically attempted to swim away into the rainbow cloud. None of it looked dignified.

  I braced myself for more pain, but by some miracle—maybe a good hit off my Luck stat—Bernie passed through the whispers of the remaining MS-222 cloud on his way to biting me in half.

  His red eyes promptly turned to twinkling stars, and he drifted limp in the water, mouth going slack and closing slightly.

  “Ooooh!” Silas blurted. “That’s what you meant. I thought—”

  Then his eyes turned to stars, too, and his suction cups popped off the shark. He drifted limply in the water, muttering nonsensical things to himself. Apparently, he didn’t count as a Dentist Trainee like I did.

  I need to keep a canister of that on hand.

  My HUD flashed red. I had two minutes of water breathing left, one damaged arm constantly pulling my health lower and lower, and my helper—if he could be called that—had just been drugged.

  Bernie drifted through the water and bumped his nose into the opposite glass wall. Naturally, when he did it to himself, he didn’t react, but the slightest boop from me had sent him into a frenzy.

  Ridiculous.

  I snatched the toothbrush with my good hand and kicked my legs as hard as possible. I had a minute and a half when I reached him and began brushing his teeth. If his mouth weren’t hanging slightly open, I never could’ve done it with only one functioning arm.

  The teeth-brushing bar began to fill with toothpaste.

  Come on, come on!

  I finished that in less than one minute, and now I had to polish his teeth. With more frantic one-armed swimming and scrambling through the tools like a drowning man, I swam back to Bernie with the polishing tool and only twenty seconds left.

  Silas still muttered incoherently, drifting through the water. He bumped into me, and one of his tentacles tenderly caressed my face.

  “Such a chiseled jaw,” he slurred. “I’ve never seen a finer flesh-statue.”

  I ignored him and worked furiously on Bernie’s teeth, praying this was the last thing I needed to do to complete the objective.

  [WARNING: Your water-breathing ability ends in ten seconds. Nine… Eight…]

  I wasn’t gonna make it.

  I took a deep breath… of water… just as Lucretia counted off the last second. I guess it counted as air while I had the water-breathing ability—game logic.

  Each of Bernie’s enormous teeth had its own meter for polishing, and it took an obnoxiously long time, especially with only one good arm. But I reasoned that I was in good shape and could hold my breath long enough. Not like I had a choice.

  I’d reasoned wrong, however, as being in shape and being able to hold one’s breath were entirely unrelated, and I wanted to breathe really badly after only a minute.

  But I couldn’t surrender. If I died now, I would have to start all over, and this stupid mission would count for nothing.

  Starry-eyed stoner Silas drifted by me again, singing a nonsense song. “A world built within a world I see, see, see… no escape, no way to be free, free free…”

  I registered something potentially important in his words, but admittedly, I was distracted. If my diaphragm weren’t lurching in my chest, if my lungs weren’t burning, if my arm wasn’t shredded, and if just about everything else wasn’t going horribly wrong at the moment, I might’ve been able to put some real brainpower to it.

  Static crept into the edges of my vision, and I made involuntary gulping noises as my body screamed for air, but I was almost done.

  As I polished the last tooth, I couldn’t hold on any longer, and my mouth snapped open. My throat spasmed, and virtual saltwater that felt pretty splashing real poured into my lungs. Blackness crept into my vision, but in the distance, I heard the familiar chime that signaled I had completed an objective.

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  break--Royal Road. They call us the Critical Hitters.

  In the desolate desert of the North American Sector, the government harvests the Soul Energy of siblings Eos and Maxima in secret.

  When their powers attract the attention of a dangerous criminal organization, their routine lives are shattered. Eos and Maxima must search for freedom and the truth about their past as hostile forces close in.

  The answers they seek lie behind one word—!

  Occam's Favor

  A grizzled ex-mech pilot is drawn back into the Everwar, a decades-long conflict raging across Jupiter’s moonscape.

  This time he refuses to fight alone, bringing a crew of misfits and a mech powerful enough to rewrite the war itself.

  is a can't-miss power-scaling mech series. Read it now!

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  Dungeon Crawler Carl Audio Immersion Tunnel for Soundbooth Theater, and he's the lead writer for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Role Playing Game.