Since arriving at Barracuda Bay, Xia Nan had always avoided fighting in the water.
There was nothing strange about that. His highly mobile combat style, built from the combination of multiple Combat Skills, truly was ill-suited to an underwater environment. The viscous currents would greatly hinder his speed and explosive power.
Out of caution and responsibility for his own safety, even while sailing across the sea and facing underwater enemies, he had mostly relied on the ship's ranged weapons, attacking from the deck.
But just like those old internet jokes from his previous life about "having less combat power than a goose," anyone who genuinely believed that grown adults were chased all over the place by flapping domestic white geese because they were actually weaker than them would be gravely mistaken.
Much of the time, humans feared and avoided battle simply because they resisted getting hurt—even if it was only a scraped patch of skin—or because they did not want their clothes dirtied.
When the necessity of fighting overrode everything else, whether driven by the survival instinct of hunger or by rage after being provoked, even without the intelligent tools that had placed humanity atop nature's pyramid, snapping a white goose's neck with bare hands would not take much more effort than twisting open a bottle cap.
The same was true for Xia Nan.
His resistance to Underwater Combat did not mean he was incapable of fighting in water.
And unlike before, he was not in a vast, uninhabited sea area with no end in sight. He was right beside the docks, with land only a few dozen meters away.
There were no towering, mountain-like waves, nor did he need to worry about several sucker-covered tentacles thicker than a human body suddenly emerging from the abyss beneath him. In fact,