The darkness after the beast swallowed us wasn't empty.
It *itched*.
My parasite convulsed violently, its tendrils branching through my nervous system like coral through a shipwreck. The CHIP in my wrist – silent since the trench – suddenly screamed to life with a date that stopped my heart:
**"LAST BIOSCAN MATCH: 31 YEARS, 4 MONTHS, 17 DAYS AGO"**
Lieutenant Rhea Vasquez's corpse floated before us, her skeleton perfectly preserved by the warden's mucus. The colony records said she'd vanished on a routine dive.
Her empty eye sockets stared at me.
"You're late," the spores whispered through her grinning teeth. "He's been waiting.
We were in *veins*.
The walls pulsed with rhythmic contractions, their surfaces slick with iridescent mucus that reflected our faces back distorted—Nara's gills flaring too wide, K'thal's coral mask now half dissolved to show the shifting musculature beneath, Cho's silvered eyes leaking metallic tears that burned holes in the flesh-floor where they landed.
K'thal gripped my chin, forcing me to meet his exposed face—what should have been skin was a living kaleidoscope of tissue, human one second, something with too many teeth the next. "Focus," he snarled, his voice vibrating through my jawbone. "The warden digests through *attention*. Look too long at any one thing, and you become part of its ecosystem."
As if summoned, the wall beside us
*blistered*.
A hand pushed through and Cho screamed—a sound that *bent* the water, forcing the tunnel to convulse. Behind us, the fleshy walls spasmed, birthing dozens of skeletal hands that reached for our ankles.
K'thal moved like the tide itself, his body uncoiling with lethal grace. His claws—fully extended now—sliced through the grasping bones, but for every one he severed, two more emerged. The warden's bone cathedral pulsed around us, its rib-like arches contracting like a throat preparing to swallow.
*"Run!"* He shoved me toward Cho, his coral mask now half-gone to reveal the truth beneath—not a monster, but a man *marked* by the same silver that flowed through Cho's veins. His eyes, usually mercury-bright, had darkened to an eerie cobalt at the edges. *"Follow her light! I'll hold the gospel back!"*
Then he did something I'd never seen before.
K'thal *hissed*—not in warning, but in a language that shouldn't exist. The sound vibrated through the water like a subsonic tremor, his gills flaring wide as silver-tinged blood seeped from them in curling tendrils. The parasite at my neck burned in response, translating the intent in jagged pulses
GUARDIAN. COME. NOW.*
The abyss answered.
First as a tremor. Then as a *shadow*—a wedge-shaped monstrosity gliding from the trench's throat, its armored plates scraping against bone spires with a sound like grinding teeth. The Abyssal Thresher was all edges and fury, its obsidian hide studded with bioluminescent scars that pulsed cobalt in time with K'thal's ragged breathing.
But its eyes—oh, its *eyes*—twin abyssal flares that locked onto me with terrifying focus.
K'thal didn't flinch as the creature circled us, its powerful tail sending controlled shockwaves that shattered the nearest bone spires. Instead, he lifted his bleeding wrist—exposing a scarred, circular bite mark.
"Steady," K'thal rasped, his claws digging into my waist as the Thresher circled. Not to hunt. To *inspect*.
"She smells the warden on you."
Eclipse's due,"* k'thal gritted his teeth out, his voice thick with pain. *"But tonight, you fight first. Feed after
The Thresher paused. Considered. Then—
It *blinked*—one long, deliberate motion—before whipping its tail in a devastating arc. The resulting shockwave obliterated the nearest section of bone cathedral, giving us a clear path to escape.
K'thal grabbed my hand, his claws retracting just enough not to cut. *"Now we run,"* he panted, his cobalt-tinged eyes burning with exhaustion—and something like hope.
*"She'll hold it long enough. But come the eclipse... we owe her a hunt."*