Chapter 20: DO NOT ENGAGE
The Toxin Cloud thinned. Gray felt it dissipating, the microscopic nematocysts losing their potency and scattering into the water like ash on a current. The Razorscales noticed too. Their silver bodies pressed closer to the entrance, needle fangs gleaming in the faint glow of his bioluminescence.
He deployed a second cloud, forcing the nematocysts outward in a dense, choking sphere. The water itself seemed to thicken with venom. But the Razorscales had already tasted blood. Two of them darted through the poison before it could fully spread, their needle fangs cutting through the toxic haze.
[TOXIN CLOUD — 8 DAMAGE]
[TOXIN CLOUD — 7 DAMAGE]
[RAZORSCALE FRENZY — HP: 37 / 45]
[RAZORSCALE FRENZY — HP: 38 / 45]
[PARALYZE — RESISTED]
[PARALYZE — RESISTED]
’They’re not even flinching.’
The first Razorscale lunged. Gray pulsed sideways, nineteen SPD carrying him out of the path of those needle fangs by inches. He felt the rush of displaced water as the creature shot past, close enough that its razor scales grazed his bell margin, leaving a thin, stinging cut. The second one was already coming. It had learned from the first, anticipated his dodge, and caught him across the bell with surgical precision. Needle fangs sank deep into his translucent flesh and tore.
[-14 HP]
[LACERATION — 3 damage over 5 seconds]
[GRAY ASHFORD — HP: 45 / 250]
Pain detonated through his body. The laceration effect was a cruel bonus, a lingering burn that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. Blood leaked from the wound in faint, shimmering tendrils that curled upward through the water like smoke.
The scent drove the Razorscales into a frenzy.
They surged into the overhang as one, a tide of silver bodies and needle fangs. Six of them flooding the narrow space, their jaws snapping at his tentacles, his bell, anything they could reach. The overhang that had been his shelter became his coffin. The stone walls that protected him now trapped him.
Gray deployed Toxin Cloud again. The Razorscales plowed through it, taking damage but refusing to retreat. Their scales caught the venom and scattered it, their frenzy making them immune to caution.
[TOXIN CLOUD — 9 DAMAGE]
[TOXIN CLOUD — 8 DAMAGE]
[TOXIN CLOUD — 7 DAMAGE]
They swarmed him like piranhas, each bite tearing another chunk from his translucent flesh. One latched onto his tentacle and shook its head violently, needle fangs shredding through the gelatinous tissue like a dog with a rope. The pain was exquisite, a white-hot scream that traveled up his nervous system and detonated in his brain.
’Get OFF me!’
He thrashed, pulsing wildly in every direction, but there was nowhere to go. The Razorscales were everywhere. Their needle fangs found his bell, his margin, his oral arms. Each bite was a small death.
[-12 HP]
[-10 HP]
[-15 HP]
[GRAY ASHFORD — HP: 8 / 250]
[HP CRITICAL]
The world flickered. His vision dimmed at the edges, the Bioluminescent Pulse that had been his constant companion guttering like a candle in a storm. Pink and blue light stuttered across his bell in erratic, dying pulses.
’Taste this shitty fish!’
He activated Overcharge in desperation. Blue-white lightning erupted from his body, arcing through the water and into the silver mass of fish surrounding him. Every volt of power he had left poured outward in a corona of brilliant, deadly light.
[OVERCHARGE — 34 DAMAGE]
[RAZORSCALE FRENZY DEFEATED — 55 EXP]
[RAZORSCALE FRENZY DEFEATED — 55 EXP]
Two of them dropped instantly. Their small bodies convulsed as the electricity overloaded their nervous systems, needle fangs locked open in silent screams, silver scales blackening at the edges where the current had burned them. Their corpses drifted downward, trailing smoke-like wisps of charred tissue.
The others scattered from the electrical burst, but they didn’t flee. They regrouped at the entrance to the overhang, six silver bodies circling with sharp, deliberate movements. Their needle fangs clacked together in anticipation. They’d lost two of their school, but six was still more than enough.
Gray’s Overcharge was on cooldown. His MP was nearly depleted. His HP sat at eight — a single digit between him and oblivion.
’This is bad.’
The Razorscales tensed for the final assault. Their needle fangs clacked together in anticipation, a sound like tiny scissors opening and closing. The largest of them, the one with the deepest scars and the brightest scales, positioned itself at the front of the formation.
Gray gathered what little strength he had left. If he was going to die, he’d take as many of them with him as he could.
’Come on then—’
The Razorscales stopped.
Every single one of them froze mid-motion, their silver bodies going rigid in the water as if they’d been turned to stone. Their oversized eyes, which had been locked onto Gray with predatory focus, now darted wildly in every direction. The leader’s needle fangs, which had been clacking together in anticipation, now chattered with fear.
Something had changed in the water. Something Gray couldn’t feel yet, but the Razorscales could. Their senses, evolved for survival in the deep, had detected a shift in the world that his jellyfish body hadn’t registered.
Then the leader let out a sound Gray had never heard before.
It was a high-pitched keening, a thin, desperate wail that vibrated through the water and into his very core. The other Razorscales took up the cry, their voices overlapping in a chorus of pure, primal terror.
They fled with the desperate, mindless panic of prey animals who had just realized that death was already in the room. The school scattered in six different directions, their synchronized formation dissolving into chaos.
They ran like creatures who understood, in whatever primitive way their simple brains could process, that staying meant dying.
Gray hovered in the entrance of the overhang, his body still sparking with residual electricity.
’...What? What just happened? Why did they—’
Then he felt it.
A vibration.
It started as a low thrum at the edge of his perception, a pressure more than a sound.
The vibration grew stronger. The water itself seemed to grow heavy, dense, as if the pressure had increased without warning. Gray felt it in his bell before his tentacles even registered it—a deep, rhythmic thrumming that resonated through his entire body.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
Gray pressed himself flat against the stone, pulling his shredded tentacles tight against his body.
’Shit... has the god of death come for me?!’
The kelp fronds outside began to sway. Gray saw the fronds bend and twist, their thick stalks groaning under a pressure they hadn’t evolved to withstand.
Then the kelp parted and the nightmare emerged.
At first, Gray couldn’t process what he was seeing. The creature was too large. His mind, still operating on human parameters despite his jellyfish body, struggled to assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. It was like trying to comprehend an earthquake while standing in the epicenter. His senses screamed that this thing was wrong, that it shouldn’t exist, that the ocean had birthed something that defied all rational categorization.
The creature was massive. Its elongated body was covered in thick, segmented plates of black chitin that seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it. Faint, writhing patterns of phosphorescence crawled across its armor like living veins.
Six pairs of legs, each as thick as Gray’s entire body, ended in curved, scythe-like claws. The claws dug into the seafloor with every step, leaving deep furrows in the sediment.
And the head.
It was a nightmare fusion of crustacean and eel—a long, flat snout lined with rows of chaotic, overlapping teeth that extended back past where its eyes should have been.
It had no eyes. Only smooth, black chitin where they should have been. Instead, two long, whip-like antennae swept through the water, bristling with millions of sensory hairs that quivered with constant, hungry awareness.
Gray’s system flickered. The identification window materialized, but the text was wrong. The letters were jagged, fractured, as if the system itself was struggling to categorize what it was seeing.
[?????? — Level: ??]
HP: ??? / ???
Threat Level: ???
« Analysis »
??????????????????????????????
???DO NOT ENGAGE???
???IF DETECTED, REMAIN COMPLETELY STILL???
???DEATH IS CERTAIN???
??????????????????????????????
’What the hell is that creature?!’
The creature passed through the clearing where the Razorscales had been. Its scythe-claws gouged fresh furrows in the sediment, each step a slow, deliberate event. The water around it seemed to grow colder, the temperature dropping by degrees that Gray could feel in his gelatinous flesh.
Its whip-like antennae swept over the two dead Razorscales still drifting near the overhang. They paused there, hovering inches above the charred corpses.
Then the creature did something that made Gray’s blood run cold.
It turned its head toward the overhang.
That flat, eyeless snout pointed directly at the narrow gap where Gray lay hidden. The antennae drifted closer, their tips probing the edges of the stone. One of them brushed against the rock just inches from Gray’s compressed bell. He could see the individual segments, each one bristling with microscopic hairs that twitched and quivered with curiosity. The antenna traced the contour of the overhang, tasting the stone, the sand, the faint traces of his blood still leaking into the water.
Then something moved in the kelp behind the creature.
A Silver-Fin Runner burst from the fronds—a sleek, fast fish nearly two feet long, its body flashing with desperate, panicked energy. It had been hiding, just like Gray. Frozen in the kelp, hoping the Abyssal would pass. But it had broken too soon. Its nerve had shattered, and now it was fleeing, darting through the water with the kind of speed that only absolute terror could produce.
The Abyssal’s head snapped toward the movement with a speed that should have been impossible for something so massive. Its antennae whipped through the water, locking onto the Runner’s bioelectric signature. The creature’s entire body seemed to reorient in a single, fluid motion, its scythe-claws digging into the sediment as it turned.
The antenna that had been inches from Gray’s bell withdrew.
The Abyssal closed the gap in a heartbeat.
Gray had never seen anything move that fast. The creature shot through the kelp like a torpedo, its segmented plates rippling as it accelerated. The Silver-Fin Runner didn’t even have time to scream. The Abyssal’s jaws closed around it, those chaotic rows of serrated teeth sinking into flesh and scale and bone. The Runner’s body convulsed once, twice—and then it was wrenched apart.
The Abyssal shook its head violently, needle fangs shredding through meat and cartilage. Chunks of silver flesh drifted through the water like confetti. The Runner’s tail, still twitching, spun away into the kelp. Blood clouded the water in a thick, crimson haze that spread outward in slow, billowing waves.
The Abyssal kept eating. Its jaws worked methodically, crushing and grinding and swallowing, each bite accompanied by the wet crack of bone. It ate with the casual, unhurried satisfaction of an apex predator that hadn’t faced a real threat in centuries. The scent of blood saturated the water, thick enough that Gray could taste it through his feeding surface—copper and salt and something darker, something that his jellyfish body recognized as death.
Gray didn’t move. He stayed flattened against the stone, watching the gruesome spectacle through the narrow gap of the overhang. The Abyssal finished the main body and swept its antennae through the water, locating the severed tail. It scooped the morsel into its mouth with almost delicate precision, then turned back toward the blood cloud, searching for any fragments it might have missed.
Then, apparently satisfied, the creature let out a low, rumbling sound that vibrated through the water like distant thunder. It turned, its segmented body rippling as it reoriented itself toward the deeper kelp. Its scythe-claws hooked into the fronds, pulling it forward, and its massive form began to move away.
Gray stayed pressed against the stone long after the creature’s vibration had faded. His body trembled with exhaustion and residual terror.
’What the fuck...?’