The scene at the walls of Atlantis was chaotic. Hundreds of men moved frantically across the ramparts while others swam above, transporting heavy machinery and medical supplies.
The water vibrated with the hum of the turrets and the blast of grenades. All efforts were concentrated on a single point — a colossal, monstrous turtle advancing relentlessly toward the walls.
Byrrah operated his radio with one hand while gripping a ledge with the other, constantly switching frequencies.
"Switch to armor-piercing firing mode!" he ordered at the top of his voice. "Those standard shots aren't even tickling it!"
Without waiting for a response, he switched frequency again, desperation creeping into his voice.
"Where the hell are the sonic turrets?" he bellowed.
"I'm sorry, sir," a soldier replied amid the sounds of heavy metal being dragged. "Someone must have moved them. They haven't been used in a long time and they're not showing up in the sector inventory."
Byrrah cursed under his breath and jumped to another channel to demand more grenades at the front, before checking on the status of the civilians.
"How is the evacuation going?"
"Seventy-four percent of the nearest sector has already been cleared, sir," a tense voice reported from the other end.
"Stay alert and keep the alarms sounding," Byrrah instructed. "If we can't stop that thing, we'll have to evacuate the next sectors."
He put away the radio and swam quickly toward a group of mechanics working on a large radio communications station. The parts were scattered and the men were reassembling them with trembling hands.
"Why the hell can't we get through to the palace or the surrounding areas?"
"We have no idea, sir," one mechanic replied without looking up. "The palace and the surrounding areas are impossible to reach. There's some kind of interference completely blocking the signal."
Byrrah let out another curse.
"What do we know about the men we sent to deliver the warning?"
"They should be close by now," the mechanic answered. "We just need to hold out a few more minutes until Prince Namor arrives."
Byrrah made a grimace of disgust, clenching his fists.
"I told them that depending so heavily on Namor would weaken us," he said with bitterness. "Centuries ago, our ancestors dealt with things like this using their own ingenuity and capability. Now, all we can do is try to hold it back until Namor comes to save us..."
A sudden silence fell. Byrrah turned and noticed that the mechanics had stopped working to look at him, shaken by his words.
"Why the hell did you stop?" he shouted at them, recovering his authoritative tone. "Keep going!"
The mechanics snapped out of it, returning to their work with renewed urgency as the shadow of the giant turtle drew ever closer.
Hundreds of soldiers swam to the front, forming a cloud of warriors that began unleashing their weapons against the enormous creature. The turtle, irritated by the constant harassment of the shots, launched slow but devastating bites and tried to strike them with its limbs, but the Atlanteans were quick and managed to dodge the attacks by getting clear just in time.
While the bulk of the army distracted the monster, other groups surrounded it carrying heavy machines equipped with powerful hydraulic drills. In unison, they fired the projectiles.
Several bounced uselessly off the hard skin and shell, but three of the drills managed to penetrate the flesh deeply enough to remain firmly anchored.
Seeing that the harpoons were holding, the Atlantean soldiers pressed a button on the machines' terminals. Instantly, powerful electric discharges traveled through the cables connecting them to the drills, injecting volts directly into the creature's nervous system.
The turtle let out a roar of pain and agitation, emitting a vibration that shook the foundations of nearby structures.
In an act of fury, the beast began to spin on its own axis at a terrifying speed. The Atlanteans holding the machinery couldn't resist the force and were obliged to release the equipment.
However, the danger didn't end there.
The violent water movement generated by the spinning created a suction phenomenon. The water began to swirl around the creature, acting like a funnel that pulled in everything nearby.
Many soldiers, despite their efforts to swim against the current, were sucked into the whirlpool and then brutally struck by the still-spinning body of the beast. The battle front turned red as the warriors' bodies were sent flying by the force of the impact.
"Fire the cannons! Fire!" Byrrah screamed.
Several soldiers who had been maneuvering heavy artillery pieces finished aligning their sights.
In unison, the cannons unleashed powerful bursts of red laser that cut through the water. The impact was direct. The turtle recoiled from the force of the blast as the sound of its skin cracking under the heat of the shots filled the battlefield.
Seeing the damage, Byrrah clenched his fist tightly, a spark of hope lighting up his face.
"Fire again! Don't let it recover!"
The remaining cannons followed the instruction, punishing the creature again as it writhed under the constant assault. Byrrah smiled faintly, murmuring to himself.
"It's working... if we keep this up, we'll stop it."
But his relief was short-lived. The turtle, enraged and bleeding, opened its enormous mouth toward the cannons punishing it. Byrrah watched in horror as the water around the monster began to be sucked toward its jaws. His eyes went wide as he understood what was coming.
"Evacuate the cannons!" he screamed into the radio. "Take cover, get out of there now!"
It was too late for many. The turtle fired a jet of water compressed at such devastating pressure that the liquid seemed like a laser. The initial impact hit one of the cannons dead on, disintegrating the machinery and wiping out the soldiers who hadn't managed to leave their posts.
The creature didn't stop. While maintaining the torrent of water, it slowly moved its heavy head, sweeping the wall with the high-pressure blast.
The impact ran along the Atlantean defenses, destroying the remaining cannons and reducing the structure to rubble. The fate of the soldiers in the line of fire was fatal — the pressure was such that nothing was left standing in its path, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
Byrrah let out a curse upon seeing the enormous fissure running through the wall. The structure was vibrating, threatening to collapse right along the line where the compressed water jet had struck. The damage was immense. In desperation, he switched the radio back on.
"What happened to the damn sonic weaponry?!" he shouted, his voice loaded with helplessness.
"They're nowhere to be found, sir," the soldier replied with a trembling voice. "We've searched every depot but they haven't turned up."
Byrrah slammed his fist against the wall.
"Give me an approximate casualty report."
"Close to one hundred and thirty soldiers have died in that attack, sir."
Byrrah shook his head, closing his eyes for a moment at the magnitude of the number. However, Atlantean pride would not allow him to retreat.
"We cannot give up, not yet," he said firmly. "We must keep that thing away from the civilians. Regroup — we must—!"
He stopped when he saw the turtle opening its jaws once more. The water began swirling toward its mouth again — it was preparing for a second shot that would this time surely bring the wall down entirely.
"Evacuate!" Byrrah roared. "Get off the walls, take cover, get out of there now—!"
At that instant, a powerful violet laser blast, shaped like a vibrant spiral, was fired from the wall.
The impact struck directly inside the creature's mouth. The turtle let out a roar of agony that shook the water as it recoiled violently, cutting off the suction and canceling the attack.
Several soldiers let out cries of triumph. Byrrah smiled with relief and spoke over the radio.
"I thought we didn't have the equipment yet — good shot!"
"Sir... that wasn't us," came the voice from the other end. "That weaponry isn't ours."
Confused, Byrrah turned his head toward the source of the shot.
There, where a standard turret had stood before, a strangely modified piece of machinery now towered — covered in exposed cables and components glowing with a purple light. Behind it, he recognized Shuri's silhouette.
The princess fired again and the spiraling projectile struck the beast's shoulder, making it recoil once more amid cries of pain. Byrrah swam quickly toward her.
"What are you doing here?!" he shouted when he reached her. "This place is not safe — I told you to go to the palace!"
Shuri didn't even look at him. She was concentrated on joining two cables and cutting a metal plate with her dagger to adjust the output frequency.
"I figured you wouldn't be able to manage alone," she replied casually. "So I'm giving you a hand."
"This is unacceptable!" the Atlantean replied. "This is an Atlantean matter that we must resolve ourselves. If something happens to you, war won't just be a possibility — it will be a certainty."
"I agree," Shuri said while adjusting a screw. "But I'm not leaving. I'm still making improvements to this to give it more power. Besides, you were about to lose your position before I stepped in. Do you seriously want to lose more soldiers? Only with my help do you have a chance of stopping that thing."
Byrrah clenched his fists and looked around. He saw the rubble, the wounded, and the unstoppable shadow of the turtle. Swallowing his pride, he lowered his head slightly and nodded.
"I have no other choice... But listen to me carefully — at the slightest sign of danger, you leave."
Shuri waved her hand, brushing it off.
"Yes, yes, I know. Now get back to what you were doing — the turtle seems stunned."
Byrrah nodded and picked up the radio again.
"Drill squadron, return to the attack!" he ordered. "The creature is disoriented — now is our moment!"
Shuri moved toward him and pointed to a holographic schematic projected from her bracelet over the beast's anatomy.
"Tell them not to shoot at random," she suggested. "They need to aim at the base of the flippers or the soft joint between the neck and the shell. The flesh there is much weaker and the drills won't bounce off."
Byrrah nodded and passed the message to his men.
The tide of battle finally shifted in favor of the defenders.
Every time the turtle tried to react, a powerful shot from Shuri's modified turret interrupted it.
Wakanda's technology, adapted to the underwater environment, demonstrated its superiority — the violet projectiles didn't seek to pierce the thick outer shell, but upon impact, the energy diffused through the skin, passing through the tissue with a kinetic force that punished the internal organs. It wasn't enough to kill it, but it was enough to keep it in a constant state of disorientation.
The Atlantean soldiers, inspired by the change in momentum, gave the creature no respite.
The drill squadron — or what remained of it after the initial disaster — positioned themselves with precision at the zones Byrrah had indicated. They fired five drills: four sank deep into the bases of the flippers and one anchored firmly into the soft flesh of the neck.
"Now! Maximum power!" Byrrah roared into the radio.
The electric discharges began to flow immediately. The turtle's muscles began to convulse violently, preventing it from swimming or spinning on itself.
Overwhelmed by the grenades, the soldiers' fire, and the standard turrets, the beast was completely overpowered. It tried to open its mouth to charge its water jet, but a shot from Shuri struck its head again, canceling the attack.
Byrrah clenched his fist, feeling victory within reach.
"Well done! We almost have it!" he shouted, encouraging his men.
Shuri was smiling, focused on the controls of her creation. Not every day do you discover new technology and put it to use instantly against a titan from the ocean depths. However, in the middle of the adrenaline, something clicked in her mind. A forgotten detail came back to her.
She began looking around with a growing sense of unease.
"What's wrong?" Byrrah asked, noticing her restlessness.
"The radar signals!" Shuri exclaimed suddenly. "There were two signals detected... Where is the other one?"
Byrrah's eyes went wide as he realized the fatal mistake they had made by concentrating solely on the visible threat.
Right before them, the water seemed to distort and ripple until something began to materialize — a giant eel that had remained invisible, waiting for the right moment to attack.
The creature opened its jaws before them.
Byrrah reacted in time and threw himself onto Shuri, pushing her with all his force to get her out of the way. At that very moment, the eel expelled a dense jet of black liquid.
The corrosive venom washed over Shuri's modified turret and a large section of the wall. Within seconds, the metal and the millennia-old stone of Atlantis began to bubble and melt under the potency of the acid.
Byrrah could only watch helplessly as the eel, having destroyed their best defense, opened its mouth again for a second attack.
===
The great shark moved through the depths with fury.
With its one remaining good eye, it scoured the void searching for whoever was responsible for its injury, but after circling without success, it decided to resume its course toward Atlantis.
To its surprise, it didn't get very far — something attached itself violently to its blind side and it felt, once again, how colossal tentacles wrapped around it.
The titan tried to shake free and launched desperate bites, but the situation was different this time.
The grip was iron-tight. Where before the other creature had barely been able to hold on, now it demonstrated a strength that surpassed its own.
Two limbs coiled around its snout, squeezing its jaw shut with such force that it found itself unable to open its mouth again. The predator suddenly found itself trapped, unable to defend itself as the squid finished wrapping itself around it completely.
The attacker moved to the shark's right side, positioning itself directly in front of its vision. It was then that it could see — an enormous violet and black eye staring at it with a terrifying fixedness. The squid's skin had changed, turning to a pale white streaked with black lines that looked like cracks running across its entire body.
"You're not so big now, are you?" a voice vibrated through the water. "Let me ask you something — have you seen Nemo?"
The shark watched as the squid aligned its sharp beak directly with its good eye. It struggled with every muscle, attempting one last movement to escape, but the tentacles gave not an inch. Without hesitation, the squid drove its beak in, piercing the eye and tearing through the tissue as a dense cloud of blood began to stain the ocean's darkness.
The great shark, now plunged into total blindness, fell into a panic.
In a desperate act of survival, it compressed every muscle in its body and, with a tail stroke that shook the currents, launched itself in a vertical dive toward the deepest part of the ocean. The speed was terrifying and the water pressure increased by the second, but the squid didn't give way.
From its tentacles, sharp black spines began to emerge, driving deeply into the shark's flesh, anchoring themselves like harpoons.
As they descended, the squid concentrated its limbs around the predator's mouth and, holding it open by force, introduced several tentacles directly inside. The shark immediately lost strength — its swimming became erratic and slow as it felt the tentacles destroying its internal organs. A tide of thick blood began to pour from its gills, staining the water a blackish red until, finally, the titan stopped struggling.
Around it, small silhouettes of fish began to gather, drawn by the bloody feast. The squid, under Ghostfreak's control, began to retract its limbs from the inside of the carcass.
Damn, that was intense, Legion thought, feeling a mental shudder. If I had skin right now, it would be crawling.
He moved away a little, watching as marine life began to devour the remains of what had once been the king of these depths.
Then he observed himself for a moment, thinking about what to do next with the squid.
He knew this creature had astonishing regeneration and it would be difficult to finish it off. His thoughts drifted toward Ghostfreak's darker abilities.
If I remember correctly, he could eliminate souls, couldn't he? I'm sure he did it at least once, he reflected, trying to dig through his memories of the alien. It's one of those things that in the show they use once or twice and then forget ever existed.
He closed his violet eye and began to concentrate, reaching inward toward the essence of the squid.
Soon he began to feel "something" — an ethereal, heavy energy that was bound to the physical body. Carefully, he began to manipulate that connection, severing the invisible bonds that kept that essence tied to the flesh. After a few moments of mental effort, only one last vibrating thread remained.
If this isn't a soul, then I have no idea what it is, he murmured in his mind.
With one final pull, he cut the last thread. That energy began to drift away, fading little by little into the immensity of the water until it vanished entirely. Legion felt the immediate change — the squid's body was now nothing more than an empty shell.
Well, I suppose that should be everything, he thought with relief.
He exited the creature's body, recovering his Ghostfreak form underwater. Floating in the abyss, he watched the carcass of the enormous squid begin to slowly sink, disappearing into the darkness of the ocean floor.
Then he turned his head to look around, but found nothing. The darkness at this point in the ocean was absolute — a blackness so dense that even the trail of blood and the shark's carcass had vanished from his sight.
The silence was total. There were no currents, no sound of bubbles. It was like floating at the center of an empty universe.
It's... peaceful, Legion thought, letting his ethereal body relax.
Without realizing it, his violet eye fixed on some point in that infinite nothingness.
There was no light to refract, no particles to observe — only an abyssal void that seemed to stretch on forever.
Little by little, the stillness began to envelop him, and that feeling of solitude — which at any other moment would have been unsettling — now felt warm.
He blinked for a moment and, suddenly, he found himself in his human form, without the armor, floating in the middle of that absolute void. Before him was only the dark abyss.
He turned his head slightly and noticed that, very close to him, there was someone else.
It was strange, but he recognized them instantly — it was himself. The twenty-seven-year-old Nicolás who had died that day on the hot asphalt.
Legion observed him in silence, analyzing that version of his past who now shared the void with him. After a moment, he turned his gaze back to the front, toward the nothingness.
It was then that his former self turned his head. He looked at him with calm and, after a few seconds, returned his gaze toward the abyss.
There, before the immensity of the shadow, he blinked.
====
HEYYYY, HOW'S EVERYONE DOING? HOPE YOU'RE ALL WELL!
WELL, THINGS ARE PRETTY COMPLICATED AT THE WALLS OF ATLANTIS, AREN'T THEY? POOR BYRRAH MUST HAVE A MASSIVE HEADACHE RIGHT ABOUT NOW.
ON THE OTHER HAND, OUR HERO SEEMS TO HAVE FINISHED HIS PART — ELIMINATING TWO TITANIC THREATS FROM THE OCEAN — THOUGH WITH QUITE A STRANGE ENDING, WOULDN'T YOU SAY?
I WONDER WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?
BY THE WAY, THE EEL RECEIVED A SMALL CHANGE SINCE I MADE A MISTAKE IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER BY GIVING IT AN ABILITY THAT CONFLICTED WITH THE PROTAGONIST'S DECISION. THANKS TO CUBO3256 FOR POINTING THAT OUT — IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A PROBLEM IF I HADN'T CORRECTED IT EARLY HEHE.
AS ALWAYS, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR COMMENTS AND ALL YOUR SUPPORT.
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TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES, A KISS 😘