Miwa Masayo paddled hard toward the surface. As a sage, she had awakened the talent to breathe underwater, but she still instinctively disliked swimming.
Now that the mission was complete, she wanted to get back to shore as quickly as possible.
But Miwa Masayo truly could not swim. She had not noticed at all that she had been swept into a whirlpool caused by the released water.
Only when Miwa Masayo surfaced and realized she was drifting farther from shore did she notice the whirlpool.
The Tabby Cat immediately panicked. Completely forgetting that she could stand on the water's surface, she began paddling frantically and charged toward the shore.
Her response was wrong. Completely wrong. Terribly wrong.
It was like a landlubber falling into a pool and, because their hands were braced against the bottom and they could not lift their face above the water, being sealed by a mere meter of water. No matter how desperately they struggled, they simply could not stand up, inching bit by bit toward death.
If Miwa Masayo knew how to swim, she could have followed the whirlpool's current outward and waited for it to spin her around once before easily breaking free. In truth, the Tabby Cat was only at the outer edge of the whirlpool. She was still far from the deadly spin line where escape became impossible.
She only needed to stay calm to break free from the current, leap onto the water's surface, and reach the shore in less than three seconds.
Unfortunately, the Tabby Cat was already completely bewildered. All her attention was focused on paddling, and she was slowly drawn toward the center of the whirlpool, entering the death spin before being swept into the three-meter-wide drainage culvert.
Uchiha Yu had originally been resting atop a huge