The order is for me.
The shark-mers close the distance with terrifying speed. They are faster than I remembered from the collapse, faster than my nightmares could conjure.
The lead shark breaks from the pack. He is a terrifying Great White, significantly larger than the rest, a monster of muscle and scar tissue. His fins are deeply notched from a hundred territorial battles in the trench, a brutal tally of his violent life. He angles his head upward, his heavy gray body a spear aimed at the sky.
He spots the bright red scales.
He spots me.
His flat black eyes lock directly onto mine. There is no recognition of a shared sentient nature. There is zero hesitation in his posture. There is just the cold, predatory calculation of strike distance and kill speed. He flares his gills, a sudden, terrifying flash of deep red, and accelerates straight toward my chest.
The rest of the swarm eagerly follows his lead.
The entire wall of sharks turns sharply upward, rising rapidly like a devastating gray tide to meet the six glowing red lures floating in the open water.
I don’t raise my trembling hands to defend myself.
I hover in the freezing water and watch the teeth come for me.
Come on,a thought forms, slowly closing my eyes and releasing my final breath.Just make it quick.
I wait in the crushing dark for the brutal impact. I wait for the agonizing tearing of my flesh, the final, brutal embrace of teeth.
But the fatal impact never comes.
Instead, an alien, deafening sound tears through the water. It is a sound I have never heard in my entire life, a sound that has no place in the ocean's natural choir. It’s the horrific, earth-shattering shriek of grinding stone and tearing iron. It sounds like the ocean floor is being ripped in half, the very bones of the world cracking under a pressure it can’t withstand.
And the terrifying noise is not coming from the swarm of attacking sharks. It’s coming from the crushing depths of the abyss. It is coming from directly behind the shark vanguard, from a place where only silence should dwell.
My eyes snap open, my heart hammering against my ribs.
The charging swarm hesitates as one. The Great White faltering in the water, breaking his perfect attack vector as his heavy head snaps around to look behind him.
The hunger in his black eyes is momentarily replaced by a raw, primal confusion. The entire wall of teeth and muscle wavers, a predator momentarily unsure of its place in the food chain.
Something colossal rises from the pitch-black abyss.
It is a towering, mountainous shape made entirely of gathered ocean wreckage. It is a golem of the deep, a nightmare constructed from the debris of a thousand shattered ships and the bones of forgotten leviathans. Rusted hulls of ancient surface vessels are fused together with jagged rock formations. Torn nets and iron chains wrap around the structure like constricting serpents. It rises slowly, impossibly, a monstrous silhouette against the deeper darkness, a phantom of the deep given terrible form.
A massive, spiraling shell drags itself up the steep side of the continental shelf. It’s a Trench Titan. An ancient Goliath Hermit the size of a central plaza spire. The beast's colossal shell is covered in petrified debris, rotting ship nets, and pieces of rusted iron.
The deafening shriek rings out again. It’s the terrifying sound of the Titan itself scraping against the basalt shelf as it climbs.
And glowing brightly from deep inside the dark opening of the shell, pulsing with a furious, electric blue bioluminescent light, is a familiar silhouette.
The terrified vanguard sharks scatter, disoriented and panicked by the water displacement caused by the Titan's sudden ascent.
The Goliath groans under its own immense weight, tilting its shell upward toward the battle lines.
And then, a lone figure shoots fast out of the Titan's glowing opening.
He is small compared to the ancient shell, but he’s still heavy and dense compared to me. He’s pale and gray. He’s covered in brutal white scars. His hair is unkempt. And he’s impossibly fast.
He shoots straight up through the freezing water, placing his broad, muscular body directly between the scattered sharks and the line of floating Red lures.
He stops. He hovers there with his heavy arms spread wide, facing down the entire shark swarm alone.
I do know that silhouette.
