Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume8 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 3===

A few of the men in black continued pursuing Kyousuke and Olivia along the side deck. Sinceria and Rachel must not have been able to keep them all away, but they had done enough. Now that the human wave attack had thinned out, Kyousuke could use his Blood-Sign as a staff to knock down the enemy. More importantly, the frontline summoner, Railroad Executioner, was no longer after them.

“Olivia, jump in here!!”

“U-uwehhh! Looking down, this is really high-…hyahn!?”

They could not wait around, so Kyousuke picked up Olivia’s small body and immediately jumped over the railing. There was almost 10 meters to the ocean surface, which was about 3 floors.

They fell into the area of sea partitioned off by the ship itself and the additional float. Still holding Olivia, Kyousuke used just his feet to get his head above the surface. The heat island effect had thoroughly warmed the urban ocean, so it felt like sweaty skin and the clothing plastered to his skin felt as unpleasant as a crowded train.

“Pwah. Olivia, climb on there. Once we untie the rope, let’s take the submersible to the ocean floor.”

“…Onii-chan is princess carrying me… Wow…”

“Olivia.”

Had she hit her face when they landed in the water? Kyousuke’s brief shout dragged the double braid girl back to reality, so he pushed on her small butt to get her on top of the spindle-shaped submersible.

Still soaking wet, he untied the rope, raised the streamlined protective cover, and climbed inside with the girl. After closing the cover again, he aimed the nose down and parted the seawater.

The men in black must have noticed.

Several gunshots rang from the side deck above and the bullets piercing the ocean surface stabbed through the thick water like spears of white air bubbles.

“Onii-chan, what about the cooling sheets?”

“We don’t need them this time. In fact, they’d only leave us shivering in the cold.”

Regardless, they had won now that they were in the ocean. The enemy could not hit while forced to file blindly thanks to the bright sun reflecting off the surface.

As they dove deeper, the light faded like someone was twisting a dimmer switch. Yes, ocean water was not 100% transparent, so it would block the sun if a thick enough layer was in the way.

“?”

Just as the planet’s slight axial tilt altered the length of daylight time and thus created the seasons, things changed quickly once they lost the blessings of the sun.

“Onii-cha-…It’s kind of…eh? It’s really cold…?”

“We were dealing with a greenhouse effect before, but this is what happens when sunlight is removed from the equation. We aren’t directly in contact with the surface layer of seawater that has soaked up all the heat, so the change will be even faster for us than a diver.” Kyousuke hit a few buttons to turn on the lights. “I don’t see a nuclear sub anywhere… It looks like we might need to dive further than 100 meters.”

“Uuh, I’m soaked. Are you sure we shouldn’t have changed, Onii-chan?”

“We didn’t have time…as I already explained. And it’s August, so we aren’t going to catch cold.”

They voiced no concern for Sinceria and Rachel. They had already seen just how skilled those two were during Kingdom F’s civil war. A natural disaster or a crime would not be enough to kill them. That would take a war.

It would be one thing if Illegal Award 999, War Criminal, made an attack himself, but Kyousuke doubted his bodyguard forces could do anything.

And since the core of the Blue Film was in the nuclear submarine and not the cruise ship, the odds were extremely good that War Criminal himself was waiting at the bottom of the ocean.

“Won’t they notice us if we’re shining the lights like this?”

“Submarines put more focus on sound and magnetism than light, so often times normal lights will actually create a blind spot. Sound travels a lot faster than in the air.”

Just as Kyousuke said that, a large torpedo shot right by the submersible, leaving a trail of white bubbles in its wake.

The war had begun.

The crude steel tube had nothing like a propeller. It combined chemicals to propel itself with the power of air.

No proximity fuse had activated and it passed right by them, but it pulled in the nearby seawater, shaking the small submersible.

“Oniiiii-chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan…?”

“That wasn’t because of the light. They probably detected the sound of us moving through the water. I can’t completely eliminate the noise even if I cut the engine.”

But Olivia should have thought more carefully about this.

If the enemy had a complete lock on them, they never could have avoided the torpedo. There had to be a reason why it had passed by the small submersible and exploded somewhere else entirely.

“A thermocline. …Ocean temperature is not fixed. The currents give it a marbled pattern. And sound travels differently through warm water and cold water. Soundwaves reflect weirdly on the border between layers, so sonar becomes useless. Whether it used soundwaves or a timer, they can’t hit us if the original location data was wrong.”

“Th-then can we safely descend…?”

“I’m not so sure. If they know there’s a thermocline, they can take countermeasures. More importantly, that shot stirred up the water, so it might have been temporarily mixed together like Italian dressing. This isn’t a repeatable method.”

As they continued down, Kyousuke guided the submersible toward a cliff-like shelf.

Three more torpedoes were fired, but none of them managed to hit. By intentionally reflecting their noise off of the rock wall, he could shift the apparent source of the noise.

“…Found it.”

They were in extreme danger where a single hit would tear their submersible to pieces, but Kyousuke did not bat an eye.

There was a large cigar shape lodged in the V-shaped gap between two rock shelfs. The small submersible’s lights illuminated a pitch black ship nearly 100m long. The ID number had been scraped off, but it was definitely a military product. It was a US Navy San Francisco-class nuclear submarine. Those had supposedly been decommissioned in accordance with the Strategic Arms Platform Reduction Treaty signed with Russia 3 years prior, but this one at least had apparently been secretly sold to a civilian buyer. Its combat ability may have been completely removed before being sold, but parts acquired via a different route could be used to repair that. Besides, simply selling a nuclear-powered sub was an unprecedented problem and in violation of the standards.

“Come to think of it, Onii-chan, didn’t the Ghost Ship Sebastian movie released this spring have a talking submarine for a main character? It was about a baby sub going an adventure through the seven seas in search of his mom.”

“Can that old man turn anything into a hit…?”

Meanwhile, the small submersible approached the nuclear sub waiting on the ocean floor. Using soundwaves to detect enemies was super effective in the water, but there was one surprising weakness: you could not detect something right up alongside you. That was of course because the noise made by your own great size would drown out the enemy reading.

“Now, let’s make our home visit.”

“Nweh? Onii-chan, how are we supposed to get onboard? If we open this protective cover, the water will come rushing in, won’t it?”

“This submersible Lu-san gave us is usually used by Illegal to make illicit deals in the dead of night. It has arms for grabbing packages in the dark ocean and it can dock with other ships. The other ship’s hatch format doesn’t matter here.”

The San Francisco-class was covered by a thick hull built to resist the immense water pressure and explosive blasts, but that hull was not made from a single smooth panel. In addition to the boarding hatch on the bridge where the normal periscope was, there was the ballast tank’s water intake, torpedo launch tubes on the front, and 12 vertical-launch mass drivers on the top. It had plenty of seams that acted as openings.

The sturdiest of them would of course be the boarding hatch.

Kyousuke checked the pressure sensor on the control column’s grip and tried moving the two arms.

“Good, good. That’s an Illegal smuggling submersible for you. It’s pretty sensitive to make sure they don’t damage the waterproof package. Hmm, so this is how you grab things.”

“Onii-chan, what are you going to do about all that rock in the way?”

“If there’s no accessible entrance, we’ll just have to make a new one.” Kyousuke looked entirely unconcerned. “If we make some noise, they’ll open up the hull themselves to begin the torpedo launch process. We’ll provide them something more than water to flood the tube. And once the tube is clogged, the torpedo will blow open a hole for us.”