The seabed had changed. Black stone, ancient and flat, cracked in long, irregular lines that ran for hundreds of ters in every direction, not from anything that had happened recently, but from whatever geological violence had shaped this place long before anyone thought to turn it into a hunting ground.
Faint red veins of bioluminescence pulsed beneath the stone’s surface, lighting the mineral dust drifting through the water from below like embers rising from a fire that had been burning for a very long ti. The current here didn’t move so much as exist — a slow, pressured weight that made every motion feel slightly deliberate.
It was also notably not empty.
Three other groups held position in the mid-water ahead of them, spread at careful distances from each other. No one was attacking anything. No one was moving unnecessarily. They were doing the sa thing predators do when they end up in the sa territory — sizing each other up, working out if the math was worth it.
"It looks like the clash will other teams will beco inevitable if we want more points," Maya said.
Her pupils flickered once. Around their position, void-ice began threading outward in a slow radial pattern just below the visibility threshold. Not defensive yet. Just there.
Pymon hadn’t folded his wings since they’d dropped into this depth. Golden lightning ran continuously along his feathers in quiet arcs, the kind of energy that looked calm right up until it wasn’t. Rexion drifted beside him with the relaxed posture of sothing that had never once needed to be tense to be dangerous — the water around his body shimred faintly, heat distortion bending the light in a two-ter radius. Chronavael stood on nothing, hooves resting on a point in the water that apparently held his weight because he decided it did, ti rippling beneath him in slow concentric rings. Alfred floated slightly apart from the rest with his eyes half-closed, which was either boredom or the way he looked right before sothing stopped existing.
Then the seabed cracked.
Not the subtle kind of cracking that precedes sothing interesting. The kind where a three-ter section of ancient black stone just ceases to be in the way, and sothing underneath decides it’s done waiting.
The creature that ca through the gap was built like a crustacean that had, at so point, been used as a foundation for a fortress. Its shell was layered in thick, ridged plates stacked over each other, each layer slightly offset, glowing seams of pressurized energy visible at every junction. Its limbs unfolded in segnts — six of them, each the length of a building — and at the base of every joint was a compression chamber that vented jets of water so forcefully that just the exhaust from two of them was enough to reshape the silt beneath it. For sothing that size, it was moving fast.
It also had company, because a ten-man team had been waiting for exactly this.
They hit it from above in a clean formation. One of them deployed a rotating ring construct that expanded around the creature’s upper shell and began tightening. Two others launched anchor chains that drove through the layered plates and locked their lateral movent. A fourth found a seam running along the right side and put a concentrated beam directly into it, working the gap wider.
Efficient. Coordinated. About eight seconds from finishing the job.
Aryan’s eyes changed.
The spear sigil burned across both pupils, bright and sharp.
He drove forward, and five invisible trajectories threaded through the cracks the other team had spent thirty seconds creating, converging on the creature’s core from five different angles simultaneously.
Rudra was already moving.
His fist ca down, and the pulse that left it wasn’t one — it was layered, each wave tid to detonate inside the creature’s body at a slightly different depth, the combined pressure building from the inside out.
The shell bulged.
Then it ca apart.
10,000 points.
The other team went very still.
Their leader turned toward Aryan. The look on his face communicated sothing specific and not particularly polite.
Silvester, who had been watching from slightly behind, smiled. "Oh, they’re angry."
The leader raised one hand. A blade construct assembled behind him — wide, heavy, rotating at the base — and he swung it without any further ceremony.
The water split in a clean line where the pressure wave traveled.
Marcus stepped into it.
A crest flashed across his eyes, and the wave curved, redirecting upward and dissipating against nothing. He looked completely unbothered. "Not interested."
The other team attacked anyway, because apparently so lessons cost more than others.
Three of them rushed simultaneously.
Silvester went to et them before they’d covered half the distance. Stars strobed across his pupils, and he hit the first one’s weapon so precisely that it didn’t bend — it shattered, the fracture point clean. The second took two overlapping cuts that forced him back six ters and made him reconsider his life choices. Silvester didn’t slow down.
Hiroshi moved once.
A thin still line crossed his pupils, and his blade traced a path through the water that looked like nothing until the third charging opponent stopped mid-motion, his attack collapsing, a spreading curse locking his joints and pulling his movents toward half-speed.
Maya raised one hand.
Black ice climbed out of the water around the stationary ones, sealing them to the stone from the ankles up.
"Back off," she said. Sa volu she’d use to order food.
They backed off. Choose not to waste the ti. Smart, actually.
"Correct," Alfred said, mostly to himself.
---
The seabed shook again.
Deeper this ti. A sound that wasn’t quite sound, more of a vibration that registered sowhere behind the sternum and said *sothing large is moving under you.*
The stone split in a line fifteen ters long, and sothing ca through it that had no interest in being proportional to the gap it made.
Serpentine, but armored differently than anything they’d seen. Its body was segnted in overlapping plates that didn’t just sit there — they rotated, each ring of armor spinning independently at low speed, the gaps between them constantly shifting. Worse, each plate was putting out gravitational distortion as a passive effect, bending the surrounding water inward toward its body. Debris was already spiraling toward it in lazy arcs.
Two other groups rushed in from opposite sides, and the contest zone beca a disaster area in about four seconds.
Floating cannons opened up from the left, firing compressed energy spheres that punched through the water with enough force to leave visible tunnels. From the right, a spear formation rained down in a dense pattern. The creature ignored both and twisted sideways, and whatever it hit on the left side of that motion was now a person-shaped problem that wasn’t going to resolve itself.
Chronavael stepped forward.
Ti slowed.
Not stopped — slowed. The compressed spheres hung at reduced speed. The falling spears dropped at half their velocity. The creature’s rotation beca readable, each gap in the spinning plates visible long enough to matter.
Aryan mapped the weak points imdiately.
Hiroshi and Silvester went in together, each taking a different approach angle, carving along the rotation pattern instead of against it — using the movent of the plates to guide the cuts rather than fighting the resistance. Marcus held them stable against the gravitational pull, countering the inward drag so they could work without being pulled off-line. Maya pushed frost into the sections they’d opened, expanding the cracks, seizing individual rings, and stopping their rotation.
Rudra hit it.
The pulse waves layered through the weakened sections in sequence, each one finding tissue that the previous had already damaged.
Rexion had been waiting for the gap. His beam went through the exposed center like a needle through cloth.
The creature convulsed.
And naturally, another group chose this exact mont to swoop in for the finish.
Alfred opened his eyes.
The other group’s attack arrived at the creature, and then it simply didn’t, the energy dispersing as if it had hit sothing that wasn’t there. Alfred’s expression didn’t change.
The creature split apart into two unequal pieces.
10,000 points.
#82.
---
Now, everyone was hostile, which simplified the social dynamics considerably.
One group released a swarm of autonomous blades — maybe three hundred of them, each the length of a forearm, moving in a coordinated pattern designed to overwhelm through volu rather than individual strength.
Another summoned a spectral predator, massive and semi-transparent, all jaw and montum as it lunged.
Pymon spread his wings fully for the first ti since the descent.
The golden lightning that had been running quietly along his feathers didn’t arc — it detonated outward in a single expanding pulse, and every blade in that swarm hit it, and not one of them ca out the other side.
Rexion surged into the spectral beast with his claws burning, tore through its mass in two passes, and watched it dissolve.
Silvester and Hiroshi hit the two opponents who’d decided close quarters was a good idea, blades crossing in overlapping arcs, neither of them stopping long enough to let the opponents reset.
Marcus redirected three incoming shockwaves in sequence, each one bent harmlessly into the stone below. Maya froze the attacks that were moving too fast to redirect. Rudra’s pulse hit the space between the two groups and put a very definitive barrier between them.
The opposing teams looked at each other, looked at what remained of their opening moves, and made a rational decision.
They left.
Nobody down here could afford to bleed ti on a fight that wasn’t going to pay out in points.
---
The abyss settled back into its version of quiet, which ant the explosions happening in the distance were soone else’s problem.
Then sothing moved in the dark below them, and it was large enough that the movent was visible as a shadow before anything else.
It rose slowly. No urgency. The kind of ascent that says *I’m coming up because I’ve decided to, not because anything is making .*
The creature that erged was unlike anything they’d seen at these depths. Its body was composed of concentric rings — dozens of them, each one a separate armored band rotating on its own axis at its own speed. The rings were stacked along a central column, the outermost slow and wide, the innermost fast and tight. Every single ring was actively distorting space, the energy pulses from each one overlapping and interfering with each other in patterns that made the surrounding water visually wrong angles, bending slightly, distances appearing inconsistent. Mythic-tier presence, radiating outward like pressure from a depth charge that hadn’t finished expanding.
Every group in the zone felt it at the sa ti.
Five teams moved simultaneously, from five different vectors, and the abyss beca a different kind of chaos than before — not the ssy chaos of a contest zone, but the dense, urgent chaos of everyone committing everything at once to sothing that could kill them all individually.
Beams crossed. Blade constructs the size of buildings swept through the water. Summoned entities collided with the creature’s outer rings and were thrown back. The creature responded by lashing outward with two of its middle rings, and the participants who hadn’t cleared the area in ti took the full force of a space-distorting impact at close range. Two of them didn’t co back up.
Chronavael made specific monts readable.
Maya seized individual rings, driving frost through the energy channels until they locked, frozen in place and vulnerable.
Aryan marked the central axis — the structural core that all the rings rotated around — and the sigils burned steadily across his eyes.
Hiroshi and Silvester went through the gaps between the frozen rings, working inward, each layer carved open for the next.
Marcus held their formation together against the distortion, compensating for the spatial bending so their movents landed where they were aid.
Rudra’s pulses stacked through the layers in sequence, each one driving deeper than the last, chasing the damage inward toward the axis.
Rexion put his beam directly down the center.
Alfred cut the regeneration at the source.
The creature ca apart from the inside out, the rings losing their rotation one by one, the central column fracturing, the whole structure collapsing in on itself before the debris cloud expanded outward.
100,000 points.
The leaderboard didn’t update gradually. It jumped.
#49.
Top 50.
Aryan looked at the number, then at the darkness below them.
The strongest of people in this event were there. He could feel it.
The contest zone was about to get far more intense and bloody
...
It had been three days since Almond and the gang took control of the Kingdom Alliance, and since then, mayhem had not stopped spreading even once.
Today, the group just launched an utterly crazy thing with their combined efforts to completely dominate this bottom-tier plane, and change its na from the playground of losers, to the playground of chaos.
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