The trench had grown still.
Too still.
Even the water's pulse seemed muted, as if holding its breath.
Kuro drifted cautiously, senses screaming.
The Strider's corpse lay behind him—a mound of shattered tissue and broken mana. Yet the Abyss whispered differently now, an undercurrent of something larger, something that had felt him rise from the Strider's death.
Something was moving below.
Slowly. Deliberately. Ancient.
A low, rumbling vibration traveled through the trench floor, pushing sediment like sand through an hourglass. The sound—or was it thought?—echoed in Kuro's skull.
It knows me.
His tentacles flexed. The Phase Ripple coursed through him like liquid lightning, letting him sense the current of pressure around him. Something massive moved, sliding through the water in impossible silence.
Then a shadow emerged.
Not one, but layers of it.
A form that bent the trench walls, twisting them unnaturally. Scales shimmered faintly with the glow of dying bioluminescence, each plate etched with faint, alien runes. Its shape was vaguely cephalopod, vaguely humanoid—but more. So much more. Tentacles twisted around itself like serpents around a crown, each ending in barbed, clawed tips.
And its eye—a void within amber—opened, fixing Kuro with a gaze that felt like the ocean itself staring into his soul.
> [Unknown Presence Detected.]
[Magnitude: Beyond Abyssal God Threshold.]
Kuro's shell tightened. The barbed sensory spines quivered. Every instinct screamed:
This is not a prey. This is a predator of evolution itself.
A pulse radiated outward.
Not pressure.
Not sound.
It felt like command, a dominion over water, mana, and thought.
The Abyss around him bent slightly, responding. Stones floated, currents shifted. Even the lingering remnants of the Strider's death quivered.
Then it spoke—not in words, but in thoughts pressed into Kuro's mind:
"You survive. You evolve. You consume. You answer the call."
The words weren't a greeting.
They were a test.
A warning.
A claim.
Kuro's eyes—more precisely, his visual organs adapted to sense pressure and mana—narrowed. He could feel the ancient being's hunger, its calculation, its recognition of him as potential, but unrefined, untested, incomplete.
He shifted slightly, Phase Ripple surging. The Abyss responded instinctively.
Currents twisted, shadows flared, and Kuro felt his newly assimilated Strider instincts whisper back: Fight. Strike. Test.
He let the instincts rise—but under control.
Tentacle tips glimmered faintly gold.
Shell plates tightened like living armor.
Senses sharpened.
The ancient entity leaned closer, not physically, but psychically, and the water vibrated with every thought it projected:
You will prove yourself—or be absorbed.
Kuro responded—not with words.
Not with screams.
But with movement.
He launched.
A blur of shadow and barbed limbs.
Phase Ripple activated.
The water folded.
He was both here and there.
Tentacles lashed, barbs slicing currents like knives.
The ancient being didn't dodge.
It smiled—or whatever passed for amusement in a creature that had survived eons of evolution beyond the Abyss.
And then the first strike landed—not on Kuro, but through him—a touch that bent pressure and mana, searing parts of his neural network. Pain, visceral and raw, tore through him.
The Abyss hissed in response.
Kuro convulsed, countered, adapted.
Every blow, every psychic push, every twist of pressure and water he had learned—even from the Strider—he used.
But it wasn't enough.
He was being tested.
And deep inside, a single, terrifying thought clawed at him:
This is what the Abyss meant by evolution.
It wasn't survival.
It wasn't dominance.
It was acknowledgment by something older than life.
The trench quaked as the entity pressed forward.
Its tentacles lashed, cutting through water, dragging rocks, tearing sediment. The Abyss itself seemed to twist under its influence.
Kuro's shell cracked slightly under pressure, sensory spines firing warnings. His body burned with mana, neural strain threatening to fracture.
But he didn't retreat.
He couldn't.
Not now.
Because deep in the black, far below, he felt it: the Abyss itself, watching.
And this… this ancient being, this thing that answers evolution, had acknowledged him.
The fight was only beginning.