The colossal eye beneath the ruins did not blink.
It didn't need to.
It watched with the patience of a world that had already ended once and was willing to end again.
Kuro drifted forward, each movement cautious yet unwavering. The structure ahead was unmistakably a temple—if temples could be built from the fused bones of dead gods. Towering ribs arched overhead like the bars of a cage. Vertebrae formed broken pillars. Fangs large enough to impale whales jutted from the walls like ceremonial blades.
A throne of fossilized remains sat at its heart.
And on that throne rested the Sentinel.
The creature was neither living nor dead—its form sculpted from skeletal remains held together by strands of shimmering mana. Its torso resembled a Leviathan's ribcage, but its limbs were mismatched: one an elongated fin of translucent bone, the other a mass of rune-etched tendrils. Its skull was cracked down the center, runes glowing from the fracture like exposed magma.
Pressure radiated from its body, making Kuro's shell creak in protest.
Then the Sentinel moved.
Not suddenly.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
As if awakening from a millennium of waiting.
Its brittle jaw opened with a grinding noise that vibrated through the ruin.
"You have seen our memory," it said.
"But memory alone is not enough."
Its voice was a resonance, a vibration of the water itself—ancient and hollow.
"Prove your existence sharp enough to cut the past."
The Sentinel rose from the throne, shedding flakes of fossil dust that drifted like dying embers. A ripple of mana coursed through the Expanse, igniting dormant runes across the temple floor. The water blazed with cold blue light.
For a moment, Kuro only observed.
Then the Sentinel struck.
Its bone-fin cleaved through the water with the force of a collapsing mountain. The pressure wave alone sent Kuro spiraling backward, smashing him into a fractured pillar. Cracks spidered across his shell as he reoriented himself.
Pain pulsed.
He embraced it.
Adaptation demanded it.
Kuro launched forward, tentacles whipping around him like serpents. Barbs extended; mana surged. He twisted past another bone-fin slash and sent a burst of Phase Ripple shredding toward the Sentinel's torso.
The attack hit—
and passed cleanly through.
The Sentinel's form shimmered, and runes stitched its bones back into solidity.
Not physical. Not fully.
It existed between memory and form.
The Sentinel answered his attack with its tendrils.
Twelve of them—runic, jagged, dripping spectral ichor—lashed outward in a spiraling pattern. They pierced pillars, shattered stone, sliced gouges into the seafloor. One grazed Kuro's side.
Agony exploded across his flesh as the tendril burned through his mantle, leaving a trail of sizzling tissue that dissolved into the water like smoke.
Kuro spun away, mind racing.
It wasn't simply a trial of strength.
It was a trial of cognition.
A test of whether he could decipher a creature born from the remnants of an extinct race.
He closed his eyes.
Not to retreat—
but to focus.
He sensed the flow of mana. The shifting runes. The patterns. The fractures. The gaps in the Sentinel's form where reality flickered.
When he opened his eyes, they glowed with cold determination.
He struck the water with Hydro Burst, creating a vortex that cracked the temple floor. The Sentinel lunged into the whirlpool—and the moment its form flickered intangible, Kuro twisted behind it, Phase Ripple ready.
He drove the distorted blade of water into the Sentinel's exposed spine.
The ruin shook.
Cracks webbed across the creature's body.
Runes sputtered. Flared. Then—
Shattered.
The Sentinel released a low, resonant cry—neither agony nor fear, but acknowledgment.
Its body began to disintegrate into drifting lights.
Before it fully dissolved, its cracked skull turned toward Kuro.
"You cut the past."
"Then inherit the burden of the future."
The temple trembled.
The seafloor split.
From deep beneath the ruins, something unfurled—a hidden chamber of obsidian stone, sealed for thousands of years.
A core of pure Leviathan essence floated at its center, swirling with ancient mana.
The Sentinel's final whisper brushed Kuro's mind:
"Claim it… and awaken what sleeps within your blood."
Kuro drifted toward the core, tentacles trembling.
The remnants of gods waited.
And so did evolution.