Chapter Two: Saved by a hunk
Lin Wan barely had half a second to register what was happening.
Then splash.
The pool swallowed her whole.
The cold water hit Lin Wan everywhere at once, so sudden and so total that her body went into shock before her mind could catch up. Lin Wan clamped her mouth shut on pure instinct, squeezing every last bit of air inside her lungs and holding on to it with everything she had. She did not know what grabbed her. She did not know where she was being taken. She only knew that whatever had wrapped around her waist was dragging her down and it was not stopping.
Lin Wan kicked her legs hard, everything she had, fighting against the suction with every muscle in her body.
Nothing happened.
It did not slow down. It did not budge an inch.
Whatever had Lin Wan simply continued pulling her deeper like her kicking wasn't necessary. Lin Wan grabbed at the thing around her waist with both hands and felt something slick and thick and horribly cold and wrong, not like skin, not like anything she had ever touched before, and she dug her nails in and pulled and twisted and it made absolutely no difference.
The surface was already far above her.
Lin Wan looked down.
Her heart dropped straight out of her chest.
It was enormous. The biggest animal Lin Wan had ever seen in her life and she was attached to it. A neck so long and thick it looked like a tree trunk, leading down to a body that disappeared into the darkness so far below that Lin Wan could not see where it ended. A head. Flat and wide and heavy, slowly turning upward toward her. Its eyes found Lin Wan in the dark water and they were pale and huge and completely, utterly empty.
No anger.
No hunger.
Just blank, patient focus. Like Lin Wan was simply something that belonged at the bottom of this pool and it was merely returning her there.
Lin Wan screamed inside her own head because screaming outside of it was not an option.
Her lungs were pulling now. That tight desperate squeeze of a body that needed air and was not getting it. Lin Wan looked up at the surface, at that shimmer of light getting smaller and smaller above her, and she knew there was no hope left for her
She was not getting back up there on her own.
Was she going to die here?.
On the worst day of her life, in a place she did not recognize, because she stopped to drink water. The unfairness of it was so enormous that Lin Wan almost laughed.
Almost. Except her lungs had fully stopped cooperating and her vision was going soft at the edges and the creature below her was still pulling, still patient, still utterly unbothered by the girl attached to its neck who was running out of time.
Lin Wan's hands went slack.
Her eyes were starting to close.
Then boom.
The impact came from nowhere and it shook everything. Something hit the creature below with a force so massive that the shockwave rolled through the entire pool like an earthquake and Lin Wan felt it slam into her from every direction at once. The grip around her waist ripped open. Just like that. Gone.
Lin Wan hung in the water for one suspended second, completely free, completely weightless, sinking slowly toward the dark.
A hand locked around her wrist, and she was quickly brought upward.
Fast. Impossibly fast. The light above her was rushing toward her now instead of away and Lin Wan had just enough time to think this is either rescue or something worse before she broke the surface and the air exploded into her lungs.
Lin Wan grabbed it. Pulled it in. Coughed it back out. Grabbed more. Her whole body was shaking so hard she could not control it, every muscle trembling, teeth knocking together, the coughing coming in waves she could not stop. A hand gripped her arm and pulled and Lin Wan found herself on the bank, on her hands and knees, pressing her palms flat against the solid wet ground and focusing on that. Just that. The ground. Real. Solid. There.
Breathe.
Just breathe.
Lin Wan breathed.
Slowly the coughing eased. Slowly her vision cleared. Slowly the shaking in her hands became something she could almost hold still.
Lin Wan became aware of someone standing over her.
Lin Wan looked up.
The man who had saved her life, was incredibly tall, like almost seven feet, Water was running off him in streams, dripping from his dark hair, rolling off shoulders that were broader than anything Lin Wan had seen up close before. A piece of dark animal hide was wrapped around his waist and nothing else. Three bold dark stripes marked his upper arm, sharp and clean against his skin, and Lin Wan stared at them for a moment because her brain needed something simple to hold onto while the rest of her consciousness caught up.
His chest was rising and falling harder than someone just standing should need it to.
Whatever he had done down there, it had cost him.
His dark eyes were fixed on Lin Wan with an expression she could not read at all. Not warm. Not cold. Somewhere carefully between the two, like a door that had not decided yet whether it was open or closed.
Lin Wan opened her mouth.
"You saved me," Lin Wan said. Her voice came out rough and waterlogged and embarrassingly small.
He said nothing.
Lin Wan looked at the pool.
The surface was completely calm. Still and clear and innocent, like nothing had happened in it at all. Like whatever had grabbed Lin Wan had simply ceased to exist. Like Lin Wan had imagined the whole thing.
Lin Wan had not imagined it.
"What was that," Lin Wan said, looking back at him. "In the water. What was that thing."
His expression shifted . Brief and controlled and almost too fast to catch.
"You do not need to worry about it," he said. His voice was low and even.
Lin Wan stared at him.
She had just been dragged to the bottom of a pool by something the size of a bus and this man was telling her not to worry about it.
"Thank you so much," Lin Wan said. " For saving my life."
The expression on his face shifted again, that same quick controlled movement, there and gone.
"It's okay" he said.
He looked at Lin Wan.
Lin Wan looked at him.
The pool sat perfectly still behind him and the strange bright sky pressed down above them both and neither of them moved and neither of them looked away and Lin Wan had approximately one hundred questions and no idea where to start with any of them.
And then from somewhere deep inside Lin Wan's own head, cheerful and completely unbothered by the fact that Lin Wan had nearly just died in a pool on what was already the worst day of her life, a sound rang out.
Beep.