The fish spook and all hide deeper in the coral maze.

"Well that was anticlimactic."

"A bit, yeah. At least I don't have to shoot a thousand fish right away. Do we just... walk around, looking for the witch...?"

"I think so. With the tree witch it was really obvious, start at the branches and then go to the trunk, maybe there'll be a similarly obvious landmark to try to find here?"

"Maybe." Haru looks around, picks a tunnel, and starts through it. He glows his gem when they're in the dark. He shoots an eel that looks at him funny.

And Yutaka will be insurance, for now, though he'll keep a handgun ready just in case.

The schooling fish continue to be timid. Haru shoots barracudas, and a jellyfish that jumpscares him, and a mola-mola.

The witch is, unlike the labyrinth, not pretty. The witch is a bobbit worm the size of a subway train.

Okaaaay now he can pause again.

"Uh. Okay. Uh."

"I don't like that thing and I'm not sure it will even care if it's got a hundred arrows in it, fuck!"

"...back when you were fighting Godzilla you could fire three arrows at a time and have them redrawn by the time you were pulling the bowstring again, I think you can do a lot more than a hundred."

Time to do some terrain and boss monster exploration! Does it look like it has any obvious weaknesses or features to exploit?

It has an inside, if he'd care to risk that. It's very big but its armor isn't actually that thick. Haru starts experimenting with multiple arrows at once, and in relatively short order goes from two to three, and starts filling it with golden fletching.

Haru's arrows decelerate as they go and eventually stop midair after they're let loose, so unless he's practising pretty close to the witch they won't reach it.

And Yutaka will... touch the worm with his hand for a fraction of a second to see if that unpauses it—yes it does—how about with his feet—no it doesn't—so maybe he could walk inside it but he'd feel kind of nervous to.

"Maybe we could try just shooting it a lot and seeing what goes wrong with that when I resume time?"

"Okay. From a safe distance, though, like - over there." Up on a mound of coral where they'll have reaction time if it comes for them." Twang twang twang.

"Yeah, sensible."

Alright, so, time to learn how to shoot guns. Which he should perhaps have done before he had an audience he wanted to impress but, like, what's done is done. In the very worst case he can rewind to before they stopped time (he's feeling nauseous again, but he's barely paying attention) because he can't rewind within stopped time, his rewinds are all sidereal time, but, like, it should be fine, right? He's got the common sense things down—keep guns clean and well-maintained to avoid jams, no pointing them or touching the trigger until you intend to shoot, make sure there aren't things behind your target that you don't mind hitting if you miss it, keep breathing and posture stable, have a firm grip but not a brittle one to deal with recoil—and it's just a matter of practising those last couple of things.

He hopes.

Here goes nothing.

Haru's never touched a gun in his life so he has no expertise with which to critique anything about Yutaka's form. He's getting faster and faster with his arrows, and wandering the length of the worm to make sure all of it's about to be peppered with sharps.

Yutaka's trying to prepare for the recoil but there's nothing quite like experiencing it first hand to know what to prepare for. So he practises, and tries to shoot, and gets a couple of jams at the start, and when that happens or he runs out of bullets in a gun he drops the gun and swaps for a new one. It's a lot faster and easier than reloading the gun, anyway, and once the witch's labyrinth is gone they will be too. Pew pew pew.

"I really hope any of this works at all," says Haru, from where he's ducked under the rearing form of the worm to shoot it on the other side.

"If it doesn't we can figure out what comes next, next!" he says, cheerfully. "But we've got the power of guns and magic arrows on our side, we'll be fine."

"If this doesn't work it will be because guns and magic arrows don't work! I'd really like to be able to behead this thing. Maybe you should stick a chainsaw in your shield."

"...that would be really funny if that worked. The hole isn't that wide but it's a magic infinite bag, so..." Shrug. "It might."

"You can go to a hardware store and borrow one of everything."

"—expensive medicine. And, like, hard to get research materials. ...sorry, just, we were thinking earlier about things I could dupe and..."

"Yeah!" Twang twang. "Though those have the issue that they're hard to get to the end user without complicated questions."

"Yeah." Pew pew. "Something that could be used to make a lot of something else, stuff production is bottlenecked on... Bottlenecks, that's something to think about, duplicating things lets us relax those..."