Chapter 286: Nobody Mentioned the Teeth in the Lease

The repair crew had less time than the argument about whose pump contract allowed the release, so I left the argument with Tollan and went down the marked service channel. Sera stayed on the local radio, giving me depth readings that mattered more than confidence.

The pressure grew heavy against my body as I descended, uncomfortable rather than immediately crushing. Amphibious Breath kept me breathing, but it did not turn every depth into my personal swimming pool, and I stopped where Sera said the safe service band ended.

Below me, the repair cage hung against the intake wall with four adults trapped inside. The huge creature beneath them looked like somebody had given a fish an industrial vacuum mouth and then fed it every bad decision the district had made for fifty years.

Sera called it a throat-gorger, a large filter predator that normally stayed beyond the working intakes. It had followed the concentrated waste into the narrow channel, where the current now pushed its body towards a grid it was big enough to break.

[System: Open Water, champ. Defeat the throat-gorger and restore safe intake flow before it wrecks the mixed ward’s supply for 6,500 EXP and forty IP. No payment for just poking the bastard and leaving the plumbing to somebody else.]

Six and a half thousand would get me the new body, provided the current one doesn’t come out in the fucking filter. I swam towards the cage while the creature turned below, following the shifting flow rather than demonstrating a personal grudge against me.

The crew had one injured worker and a release wheel jammed by a bent support. I caught the wheel with a tendril and pulled while the strongest worker pushed from inside, moving it enough to expose the pin Sera told us to remove.

Galaxy Brain read the throat-gorger’s turn as its shadow crossed the lights. I warned the crew and kept pulling; dodging would leave their door pinned. The impact slammed me against the wall and reopened my knife scrape, charging my body for a decision my brain had made perfectly clearly.

I stayed solid, kept hold of the wheel and shouted for the crew to use their emergency line. Sera opened the upper service lock remotely, giving them a place to climb once the cage door stopped pretending to be part of the wall.

The pin came loose with a sharp metallic pop. Three workers helped the injured fourth through the opening, attaching their harnesses to the line while I held the swinging door away from their legs and watched the predator circle beneath us.

It wasn’t trying to eat the workers because they had offended its politics. The cage trapped food-rich flow in its frame, and the creature was following the easiest mouthful through a space it had never been meant to enter.

That understanding did not make its teeth less inconvenient. I pushed the last worker towards the line, then pulled myself inside the cage as the creature struck again, choosing metal cover over pretending I could outswim its full charge in open water.

The impact tore the cage loose from one support. We dropped together, and the throat-gorger opened its mouth around the falling frame before I could reach the outer gap, swallowing the lights, the floor and my remaining good opinion of the job.

For a moment, the whole world became water, pressure and grinding metal. I wedged myself inside the cage’s surviving corner while the creature’s mouth closed around the frame, leaving me somewhere between captured contractor and extremely badly packaged lunch.

[System: Stay out of the throat, mate, and look for the water leaving its gills. You’re a snake in a cage, not a fucking suppository with career ambitions.]

If you put that on my death certificate, I’ll haunt every bloody beer you drink until retirement. I found a small pocket of air trapped beneath an overturned service housing and pressed my head into it long enough to see the damaged light inside.

Mist would help in that pocket, but it wouldn’t let me pretend the rest of the creature was empty space. Beyond the housing, the water surged towards a dark opening whose steady pull suggested I had very little time to become less swallowable.

Sera’s voice broke through the cage radio in short bursts. The crew were safely inside the upper lock, but the creature had wedged itself against the intake and the pressure across the grid was beginning to climb beyond the marked range.

"I’m alive, love, but any instructions need to account for the fact that I’m inside the fish." Sera went quiet before asking how the fuck I’d managed that, which felt less helpful than I’d hoped from professional technical support.

She could stop one flow channel and open another, but only if somebody removed the broken cage support blocking the local release. The support was still attached to the frame around me, which made my immediate prison an important piece of public infrastructure.

The cage still had its emergency tether reel bolted beneath the bench. I caught the loose end before it could disappear through the damaged floor and fed it around the service housing, giving each tiny body a handhold against the current along the route Galaxy Brain had already memorised.

I checked the three-hour Multitude cooldown and found it ready after the days since the camp. Twelve small bodies might fit through the cage and reach its broken connections, provided all twelve came back and none decided to become a separate meal.

I tested the tether under load, because knowing every turn would not help if the bloody handrail detached with me on it.

The creature flexed around the trapped metal before I could split. One of the last working lights burst against its inner mouth, leaving the release pin visible for a second beside a fresh crack that ran through the cage floor beneath me.

Then the throat-gorger swallowed harder, and the whole frame began sliding towards the dark passage behind its teeth while Sera shouted that the first intake warning had reached the homes above us.