The deep was a crushing, silent world, a pressure that would have pulverized bone and steel. To Kaito, it was nothing. He moved through the blackness not by swimming, but by thought, the water offering no more resistance than air. The Dryad's flower, tucked against his chest, was a blazing beacon now, its green light piercing the eternal night and illuminating the descending slope of the continental shelf.
He saw the first signs of the city long before he reached it. Shattered spires of white coral, once graceful, now leaned at broken angles like the bones of a fallen giant. Fields of luminous anemones that should have pulsed with soft blues and greens were bleached white and still. This was a place of death.
And it was not empty.
A shadow detached itself from a canyon wall, a shape so vast it blotted out the distant, faint light from above. It was a fish, or had been. Its scales were plates of jagged, volcanic rock, and a single, massive eye burned with a malevolent red glow in the center of its head. Its mouth was a cavern lined with teeth like shattered stalactites. It was easily the size of the Abyssal Gaze, a leviathan twisted by the same corruption that had poisoned the shore, but amplified to a nightmarish degree in the heart of the blight.
This was no mere mutated trout. This was an abyssal predator, a creature designed to dominate this graveyard. Kaito could feel the hungry aura radiating from it, an echo of the black pool but given form and terrifying purpose. If left unchecked, such a creature could indeed rise to threaten islands.
It moved with a sudden, shocking speed, its tail whipping the water into a violent vortex as it charged, its maw opening to swallow him whole.
Kaito didn't raise the staff. He didn't call upon any refined energy. For the first time in a long time, he felt a simple, direct impulse. He wanted to test the body he had built. He wanted to feel its strength.
As the monstrous fish closed in, he drew back his fist, the water flowing around his arm without impediment. He put the full, unthinking weight of his being into the punch. It wasn't a skill or a technique. It was the application of a force that had once flattened a Forest Titan.
His fist connected with the creature's snout.
There was no sound, but a shockwave erupted through the water. The jagged, stone-like scales where his fist landed didn't just crack; they vaporized into a cloud of fine dust. The creature's head snapped back with impossible force, its colossal body contorting from the impact. Its single red eye flickered and went dark. The sheer, physical force traveled through its entire structure, pulverizing bone and organ into slurry.
The monstrous fish, a threat that could have leveled a coastal village, was dead in an instant, its corpse beginning a slow, lifeless drift into the deeper darkness.
Kaito watched it sink, his hand unmarked. He felt nothing. No strain, no satisfaction. It was like swatting a fly. The power was so absolute it was mundane.
But then, he saw it. A single, dark droplet of the creature's blood, black as the void, drifted from the cloud of dust where its snout had been. It was thick, pulsing with a familiar, hateful energy.
As he watched, the droplet began to swell. It twisted and writhed, drawing the surrounding water and dissipating blood towards it. In moments, a shape began to form—a smaller, but rapidly growing replica of the beast, its single red eye blinking into existence, burning with renewed hatred.
Regeneration. Not from a piece of flesh, but from a single drop of blood. Just like the Hive Queen.
The creature he had just annihilated was already coming back.
This changed things. This wasn't a monster. It was a self-replicating weapon. He had been late. If ten of these things reached the surface, no army could stop them. They would be an eternal plague.
He could not just punch it. He had to unmake it, completely and utterly. As the newborn predator solidified and let out a silent, furious roar, Kaito finally raised the Leviathan Staff. The time for testing was over. It was time to erase.
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CH70.5 The Endless Plague
The newly formed monster, smaller but just as vicious, charged. Kaito didn't move. This time, he didn't rely on his physical strength. He understood the problem now. This creature was a manifestation of the deep-seated corruption, a self-sustaining loop of hatred and regeneration. To destroy it, he needed to break the loop.
As the creature closed in, he simply pointed the Leviathan Staff. He didn't summon an element or a blast of force. He focused on the core principle of the creature's existence: its ability to regenerate from its own essence. He imposed a new rule upon it, a law as simple and absolute as his own immortality.
This creature cannot regenerate.
The effect was instantaneous and final. The charging monster didn't explode or dissolve. It simply stopped being. One moment it was a terrifying force of nature, the next it was gone, its form and the dark blood it was made from erased from existence as if they had never been. The single, pulsing drop of blood that had been the seed of its rebirth was also gone, the loop severed at its source.
Silence returned to the deep. Kaito looked down at the drifting corpse of the first beast. He pointed the staff at it, and the massive body, along with every last drop of its tainted blood, vanished into nothingness. He had not just killed it; he had retroactively removed its presence from the water.
This was the true nature of the threat. The corruption here wasn't just creating monsters; it was creating a self-replicating, undying army. The black pool on the shore had been a symptom, a leak. This was the source of the infection itself.
The Dryad's flower pulsed against his chest, its light now pointing insistently downward, towards the heart of the sunken city. The Coral-King's killer wasn't just a powerful beast. It was a creator, a factory for this endless plague. And it was waiting for him below.
He resumed his descent, moving with a new sense of urgency. The water grew colder, the pressure greater, but it meant nothing to him. The ruins of the city rose around him now in full, a sprawling necropolis of coral and pearl, all bleached and dead. And moving through the canyons and shattered palaces were more of the rock-scaled predators, some the size of the first, others smaller, freshly spawned. They were everywhere, a swarm guarding their nest.
He didn't engage them. He didn't have to. As he willed himself forward, he projected a simple, invisible field around himself, a declaration of a new local law: Any corrupted entity that enters this space ceases to exist.
He became a moving void. The monsters that sensed him and charged simply winked out of reality as they crossed the invisible boundary. He moved through the dead city like a scythe, leaving not even bones behind, a silent, absolute erasure of the infection. He was no longer a fighter or a healer. He was a walking extinction event for this specific brand of poison, and he was heading straight for its heart.