The abyss didn't just grow quiet; it held its breath. Deep within the crushing weight of the midnight zone, a sharp, metallic chime cut through the brine—a sound of cold, celestial clockwork.[High-Rank Evolved Creature Devoured.]
[Evolved Tier Upgraded.]
[Devourer Core Upgraded.]The tectonic plates of the sea floor seemed to shudder. El-Mond slowly curled his left fingers into a fist, watching the skin pull taut over knuckles that now thrummed with the rhythm of a dying star. Power didn't just flow; it ignited, surging through his marrow like molten lightning."I am... once more..." he whispered, his voice a low vibration that displaced the water. "A Duke-Level Evolver."His pupils contracted into vertical slits. This wasn't the sterile strength of his past life. This power felt foreign—an invasive, oily heat that tasted of copper and ancient salt. It was intoxicating. It was starving.A primal coil tightened in his chest, uncurling with a single, absolute command: DEVOUR.He snapped his head up. High above the sediment-clouded battlefield, the Crimson Eel drifted like a stroke of blood against the dark. Its gargantuan form radiated a heat that boiled the surrounding water, electric arcs dancing between scales the color of a fresh wound."As expected of a godling's get," the Crimson Eel rumbled, the sound vibrating through El-Mond's very teeth. "Impressive. But I have no patience for appetizers." Its eyes, glowing with a malevolent amber light, flicked toward its subordinates. "Handle him. Leave enough of the meat intact for questioning."The three elite eels hissed, their bodies blurring into streaks of jagged motion. The water didn't just move; it screamed, cavitating as they broke the sound barrier beneath the waves.In a heartbeat, they were gone. In the next, they were a wall of teeth.They closed in from every blind spot, jaws unhinging to reveal rows of needle-teeth designed to shred Duke-levels into ribbons. They moved with the confidence of apex predators who believed their prey was still frozen in shock.El-Mond didn't even blink. His eyes remained locked on the Crimson Demon above.He grinned—a jagged, terrifying expression.BOOM.Using the mangled carcass of a fallen sentry as a grim springboard, El-Mond detonated forward. He became a living kinetic slug, trailing a wake of white-hot bubbles. As the first elite lunged, El-Mond's hand moved in a blur of casual violence—a backhand that carried the weight of a falling mountain.The impact was seismic. The eel was driven into the seabed with such velocity that the silt erupted in a mushroom cloud of dust and gore. Before the creature's nervous system could register its own extinction, El-Mond's shadow passed over it, and its evolved core was gone—consumed in a flash of dark hunger.The second elite found its tail seized in a grip of iron. With a rhythmic, savage grace, El-Mond began to whip the creature against the jagged reef, left and right, cracking the crust of the earth until the eel was little more than a bag of broken glass and ruptured scales.Silence returned to the trench, save for the rhythmic crunch of El-Mond swallowing the final core. The entire execution had occupied less time than a single heartbeat."Trash," the Crimson Eel spat. With a flick of its fin, it launched a spinning disc of crimson electricity, cleaving the rocketed corpse El-Mond had used as a distraction into two cauterized halves.Blood bloomed in the water like ink.[High-Rank Evolved Creatures Devoured.]
[Devourer Core Upgraded x3 / Rank Upgraded x2]El-Mond wiped a smear of ichor from his jaw, his gaze burning with a predatory fever. "No more snacks?" he asked, his voice echoing through the red-stained dark. "Good. I was starting to crave the main course."He vanished.There was no transition, no movement—only a void where he had been and a shockwave where he appeared. He materialized inches from the Crimson Eel's snout, his fist already buried in the beast's midsection.The blow sent a ring of displacement screaming toward the surface, three hundred thousand feet above, momentarily clearing a vacuum in the deep."Arrogance," the Crimson Eel hissed, unmoved. The punch had landed against a barrier of pure, concentrated lightning. "Consider it a mercy to die by the hand of the Crimson Demon." The lightning detonated with a subaquatic roar, fracturing the deep into a strobing world of crimson static. El-Mond felt the searing kiss of the current peel the skin from his forearms, a bloom of heat that defied the crushing cold of the abyss. He threw himself backward, his powerful tail churning the brine, but the Eel was a master of the tides. It eclipsed him in a heartbeat, its massive bulk coiling with the fluid grace of a titan's flail.
The impact was absolute. El-Mond was hammered through the water, a projectile of bone and sinew skipping violently across the thermocline. He snapped his powerful fluke into the liquid resistance, bracing against the weight of the sea as his ribs knitted back together with a sickening snap—the unnatural vitality of his kind at work.
"Strong," he murmured, the word lost to a manic laugh that bubbled into a cloud of pearls. "Superb. You are the crucible I required."
For twenty minutes, they turned the silence of the trench into a thresher of violence. It was a symphony of nanosecond collisions—clashes of strength and bio-luminescent bolt that warped the very geometry of the brine. The pressure of their meeting seemed to bruise the water itself. When they finally tore apart, they hung suspended in a graveyard of steam and drifting debris.
"Durable," El-Mond observed. He flexed fingers that dripped with Void Blood, a dark, viscous ichor that bled into the current like ink from a dying star. He extended a palm, and there, a singular point of oblivion began to gestate—a black-and-red orb that thrummed with the necrotic rhythm of a failing heart. It was a gluttonous thing, hemorrhaging his own life-force to satiate its growing, abyssal mass.
"WEAK!" the Eel roared, its pride fracturing like thin ice. The beast coiled, drawing the ambient energy of the trench into a sphere of crimson plasma half the size of its own gargantuan body. "I will show you the true measure of power!"
The Eel's attack was a sun birthed in the dark; El-Mond's was a mere pebble.
I must evade—
But the Void Blood was a tyrannical sovereign. It usurped his will, shattering his restraint and demanding a violent catharsis. The two spheres bridged the abyss in a breathless instant. There was no thunderous ignition, only a harrowing silence as the dark orb bored through the Eel's plasma sun like a needle through silk. Upon contact, the sphere bloomed into a ravenous vacuum; it did not merely kill, it unmade. Half of the Crimson Eel's colossal length was simply excised from existence, surrendered to the absolute hunger of the void.
"Marvelous," El-Mond whispered, staring at the sudden, hollow silence of the water. "And utterly terrifying."
"MASTER!" Eldred's telepathic scream shattered the daze. "We must move! The resonance—it has summoned something!"
El-Mond snatched the glowing core of the beast, a pulsating prize that hummed with a primal, electric heat against his palm, and surged forward. As he cut through the brine, a cold, crystalline clarity flooded his mind, the system's indifferent logic anchoring his consciousness:
[Rank Ascended x5 / System Skill Manifested: Sky Lord — Tier One]
He swam through the white-hot agony of his mending flesh until he struck an invisible wall—not of jagged stone, but a barrier of sheer, immovable pressure. He looked up, and for the first time, his heart sank like lead in the lightless deep.
Before him rose a cataclysm of cephalopodic horror. A colossal octopus of such impossible magnitude that the six-thousand-meter trench—a canyon designed to bury mountain ranges—became a narrow, stifling artery for its mass. Twenty-eight tentacles, each a thousand feet of barbed suckers and obsidian thorns, drifted in the gloom like the hair of a drowned god.
Then, the mountain moved. A pair of eyes, each the size of a cathedral courtyard, ignited with a cold, pale bioluminescence, fixing El-Mond in a gaze of ancient, predatory judgment. Below that lidless stare, the creature's flesh rippled and split, revealing a beak of serrated chitin—a gateway to a gullet that looked like a jagged black hole. It was a maw that didn't just swallow; it promised a slow, grinding dissolution in a stomach that had outlived eras. The sheer displacement of its movement created a localized tide, threatening to crush El-Mond against the trench walls before a single blow was even struck.
El-Mond exhaled, a small, defiant shroud of bubbles escaping his lips.
"I know, Eldred," he whispered, that sharp, dangerous smile returning to his face. "But the bigger they are..."
He ignited. Lightning and black void-fire wreathed his form as he shattered the sound barrier beneath the waves one final time.
"...The harder they fall."
Fist and fathomless horror collided.
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TO BE CONTINUED