Chapter 115: Trial of Horaxian
The monolith’s four faces lit brighter, gold script scrolling fast across all of them at once, and every group in the drifting arena read the same words in the same instant.
[All four groups will be transported to four different islands. The ocean surrounding them holds monsters as well as treasures. Most importantly, Horaxian Tokens are scattered throughout the depths.]
[Groups may attack each other, but only within ocean territory. No group may invade another’s island. It is forbidden.]
[Within the next ten hours, the group that collects the most Horaxian Tokens wins the trial.]
Light swallowed all four platforms at once, and when it released them again, Aidan’s group stood on a strip of white sand beneath an open, star-scattered sky, ocean stretching endless and dark in every direction beyond their island’s modest shore.
"Alright." Aidan turned to Beatrix, Solenne, and Isolde first. "You three hold the island. Ten hours of danger in open water isn’t worth risking on people who don’t need to take it."
"We’re not helpless," Beatrix said, arms crossed.
"Never said you were." He pulled resources from his Inventory instead, stacking a modest pile of Spirit Stones and a few of the fresher Talent Runes onto the sand between them. "Meditate. Refine what you’ve already got. Watch the tokens. That’s plenty of work for ten hours."
Solenne eyed the pile, then him. "And if something makes it past the water?"
"Then it meets three people who’ve earned every ounce of what they’re carrying." Aidan grinned. "I’m not worried."
"If monsters comes up here, they’ll need help, especially against Divine-rank ones." Ordun looked at Aidan.
"Participants are forbidden to get on the island, but monsters are indeed a different story." Kysra nodded.
"Don’t worry. I got eyes here for that." Aidan grinned.
That settled it well enough. The three of them found a defensible rise near the island’s center and settled in, and Aidan turned back toward the water with the rest of his people already gathering behind him.
Jovan folded out of the air first. Finn poured out next, delighted at the sheer volume of water waiting. Arthur crashed down with a roar that scattered seabirds off the nearby cliffs. Tom took his usual perch. Anrita stepped forward last, already running silent calculations on current patterns and depth.
"Ten hours." Aidan looked out at the other three islands, distant smudges against the horizon, tens of kilometers of open water separating each one. "First goal, empty the depths around our own territory completely. Once that’s done, we invade the others without pausing to catch our breath."
"Efficient," Ordun said, cracking his knuckles.
"Ready when you are," Kyrsa added, already checking her chains.
Aidan grinned, and the whole group waded into the surf together.
...
The water swallowed them, and the ocean revealed itself immediately as something built for exactly this kind of trial.
Reefs of glowing coral spread beneath them in every direction, pulsing soft blue and violet. Threaded through the coral, half-buried in drifting sand, small crystalline tokens caught the light like scattered stars.
[Horaxian Token located.]
The first cluster went easily, six tokens gathered from an open reef bed before anything larger noticed them at all. Finn scooped up half of them personally, delighted beyond reason at being allowed to actually swim through an ocean that was real.
Then the water darkened around a shape easing out from a nearby trench.
[Depthfang Leviathan. Mid-stage Divine-rank.]
It came fast, a serpentine mass of black scale and glowing teeth, thirty meters of coiled muscle. It went straight for Veshan, jaws wide enough to swallow him whole.
Veshan met it head on anyway, both fists connecting with enough force to stagger the creature mid-lunge, and Sella’s blades opened a line down its flank in the same instant, blood clouding the water in dark ribbons.
Anrita finished it, lightning arcing through the water in a controlled pulse that found every nerve cluster in the Leviathan’s body at once, and the massive creature seized and stilled, sinking slowly toward the sand below.
"One down," Ordun said, already scanning for the next.
He didn’t have to wait long. The ocean here seemed to breed monsters the way other waters bred fish, and over the following hour the group settled into a steady, brutal rhythm of clearing them out.
A pack of Early-stage Divine-rank eels tried to swarm Elowen, and her roots answered from the seabed itself, spearing up through three of them before the rest scattered.
A hulking, coral-armored crab the size of a house came at Jovan with claws that could have crushed stone, and his domain simply wrapped around it, misfortune sinking its own weight straight through the ocean floor before the claws finished closing.
A school of translucent jellyfish drifted into their path next, harmless-looking until one brushed Kyrsa’s arm and left a burn mark blooming instantly across her skin.
She answered with a sweep of chain that scattered the whole cluster before a second one could try its luck, cursing colorfully through her regulator the entire time.
Arthur, in his element in a way none of them expected, tore through anything that came within reach, jaws and claws working with the gleeful enthusiasm of a dragon who had apparently always wanted to try being a shark.
Tokens kept turning up as they went, tucked into coral crevices, buried beneath sand, once even lodged inside the ribcage of something long dead and half-fossilized on the seabed.
[Horaxian Token located.]
[Horaxian Token located.]
[Horaxian Token located.]
Anrita surfaced once between fights, running quiet calculations on the layout of tokens they’d already found, mapping density and pattern with the same efficiency she gave everything.
[Anrita: Distribution isn’t random. Tokens cluster near monster nests. Follow the danger, find the reward.]
’Efficient girl.’ Aidan grinned around his regulator. ’I like the way you think.’
By the time they’d cleared the reef closest to their island, the tally sat comfortably past thirty, and Aidan surfaced briefly just to check the sky’s position, gauging how much of their ten hours had already burned away.
’Two hours in. Good pace.’ He dove back down without wasting the breath on saying it aloud. ’Let’s see what’s waiting deeper.’
The water grew darker the further out they pushed, coral giving way to open trench, and the tokens grew sparser but the monsters grew considerably less polite about sharing space.
A Late-stage Divine-rank shape rose out of the trench ahead of them, vast and armored, twin rows of luminous eyes tracking the whole group at once.
Barnacle-crusted plating covered its flanks like a second skeleton grown over the first, and its tail alone stretched longer than most ships, the patient hunger of something that had been the apex of this water for a very long time.
[Abyssal Sovereign. Late-stage Divine-rank.]
It didn’t attack immediately. It simply watched, circling once at a distance that felt deliberately measured, sizing up exactly how much trouble ten intruders were actually worth.
Aidan grinned around a mouthful of seawater, Wind curling lazy around his fists even underwater, aspects answering him just as readily beneath the surface as above it.
"Guess we found the local landlord," he said, voice carrying strange and distorted through the water. "Let’s introduce ourselves properly."
The Abyssal Sovereign answered by finally moving, jaws parting wide enough to swallow a small boat whole, and the whole group scattered wide to meet it from every angle at once.