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With a better raft, he was able to crest the wave, only getting splashed from the impact, which was fine. One needed to actually fall into the water to be reset to shore.
Paddling through it, Matt was able to travel another hundred feet out, where an even larger wave smashed into his raft.
It nearly sent him tumbling off, but he was light on his feet and kept his balance long enough to crest the top of the swell.
A second wave at a one-hundred-foot interval could have been a coincidence, but the third at the three hundred proved a pattern, and it sent Matt tumbling into the water as it broke the raft apart.
An instant later, he felt the soft sand of the beach and crawled out.
Liz was there and offered him a hand up. “Well, that’s telling.”
Susanne let out a sigh. “So, it’s a raft building test? I hope the tests don’t keep coming that fast, or it doesn’t keep scaling that hard. If so, we’ll be dealing with mile-high waves before we’re a mile out.”
Matt turned back around and spoke as he thought. “No, something else is wrong. That was Tier 14 synthetic rope and had a weight capacity of five tons. There’s no way that wave could have snapped it. We even triple-wrapped the logs. It’s resistant to cutting and fraying. No way it broke from a wave that small. I think the ruin is cheating somehow.”
Liz chewed her lip and pulled out a length of the cord and dipped it into the sea.
After pulling it out, she found it weak and easily damaged.
The water didn’t affect their weapons and armor, which they were quick to check, which meant the ruin was forcing them to play by its own rules.
Not knowing what to do, they decided to take a break as the sun was starting to set. Liz, with her AI not requiring her to spend Genesis Energy since it was a mana reserve type, sent Aster a message to return before the artificial sun had set. Susanne wasn’t wrong. A wave-type challenge wasn’t unheard of in Minkalla, and they usually corresponded with the night.
While floor themes were well documented and understood, the actual ruins that made up the floors were always random and changed unpredictably. They were theorized to be finite, but they were far from all documented, let alone predictable. One ruin could be seen a dozen times in a row, and then vanish for multiple cycles.
Aster scampered back with a half dozen rabbits, and Matt cooked them up for everyone. They were simple, Tier 0 beasts, but they served as a constant source of food, which helped justify both the build a raft challenge and the fight-off waves theory.
That night, nothing attacked despite them keeping a watch and having the shields running at full power, dismissing their fears about the possibility of a monster wave challenge.
As Matt cooked everyone a rabbit and egg breakfast, he asked, “So what’s our plan?”
Liz, who was tapping on a pad they had lying around, hmmed. “I’m trying to find anything about shipbuilding, but our records are severely lacking in this department.”
Sadly, the pad she was using was the only thing they had that ran on mana and also had their information stored on it. It was packed full of useful Minkalla information for a situation like this, or any of the other floors where their AI wouldn’t work properly. Sadly, there was nothing on shipbuilding.
Matt shook his head. While Luna hadn’t taught them about shipbuilding in particular, she had prepared them, and they had massive repositories of information downloaded thanks to her guidance.
“Have you checked our backup drives? Maybe it’s on one of them?” He was hoping it was just a case of bad data management but suspected that they weren’t so lucky.
Susanne shook her head as she looked up from her own pad. “Don’t bother. I had a video documentary series about a group of Tier 2’s who needed to survive in various places. In one of them, they were dropped on an abandoned island. In that episode, they built a raft to escape, and it’s gone. Or at least blocked. Minkalla clearly doesn’t want us cheating.”
She used her fingers to air quote the last word.
Matt tried to plumb his memory but found nothing there about boats. He grew up near the coast and knew fishermen but had never been on a boat more than a handful of times. Even then, they were modern constructs with mana engines and the like. They surely weren’t wooden constructs cobbled together out of trees.
Liz tossed the pad to the side. “Let’s explore the island really thoroughly today. We can dedicate one full day to that before moving on. I’d feel really stupid if we hit the edge of the ruin just to find out that we were meant to dig six inches down to find a trap door to the exit.”
After their breakfast, Matt cast [Earth Manipulation] but found that the entire island was outside of his control. Even the sand under his feet resisted its own elemental manipulation skill.
With that discovery and wasted Genesis Energy, they split off into twos. Matt went with Aster while Liz and Susanne explored in the opposite direction.
Matt and Aster started by walking around the edge of the forest, keeping their spiritual perception on the beach around them as they walked. Any time they found something even slightly off, they stopped and dug it up.
None of what they found was useful in the way of getting them off the island, but it was mildly interesting. They found everything from chunks of refined iron to processed daggers, and even a few unenchanted pieces of jewelry.
Either Minkalla planted that stuff as false leads, or it hadn’t been cleaned up from the last people to land on this island.
From what Matt understood, it shouldn’t be the latter. Minkalla completely expelled and recycled everything the people who entered its depths left behind.
If that was true, then why would random seeming junk be the exception?
When they reached the others, they compared what they found, which honestly seemed like an eccentric collection from a lost and found box.
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