The trench shook before the sound reached me.

A deep, grinding rumble rolled through the water, low enough to feel in the ribs before hearing it. The vent walls began to vibrate. Fine dust rained down from the ceiling of Harbour. The warmth that usually held steady shifted into something wild, unsteady.

Then the world split.

The tremor tore through the stone like a scream. The vent field erupted. Pressure hit me square in the chest, a blunt force that flipped me end over end. The water turned solid, compressing and expanding all at once.

I slammed against the wall. The impact knocked the air from my gills. Light burst across my vision.

The vents howled. A column of white-hot gas punched through the floor where the seam had cracked. The water turned to mud and boiling grit. The current flipped direction twice in a heartbeat.

I tried to swim but the sea had stopped caring about direction. The current dragged me sideways, then down, then nowhere at all. My tail caught on stone. The plates along my spine burned from the heat.

Harbour was collapsing.

Chunks of rock sheared off the ceiling and sank through the clouded water. One struck the wall near my head, splitting it into smaller shards. Another landed on my shoulder. The pain flared, sharp and real.

I forced myself free and followed the only rule that still made sense, up.

But there was no up anymore.

The tremor had twisted the world. The currents bent in spirals, pulling everything toward a single collapsing vent.

The sea screamed.

And somewhere in that chaos, another echo answered.

A body slammed through the silt beside me, heavy enough to shake the current. For a moment, I thought it was a rock. Then I saw the scar.

Him.

The rival.

He’d been caught in the same collapse.

Our eyes met for half a heartbeat through the boiling haze. No time for anger. No space for pride. The trench didn’t care who hated who, it was swallowing us both.

The current yanked him sideways. Instinct made me follow, not for trust but for survival.

We moved together, not by choice but by the simple fact that neither of us could live alone in this storm.

The vents below burst again, ripping through the silt. The heat warped the water into rippling sheets of light.

Visibility was zero.

We couldn’t see, only feel, the tremor, the pull, the pressure shifts.

The rival darted right, brushing past me. I caught the movement in the corner of my eye just before a falling slab of stone tore through where I’d been.

I followed his lead, kicking through the chaos. We stayed close, two bodies pressed against the same storm, moving in imperfect unison.

Each pulse of heat sent debris upward. Each aftershock tried to drag us down.

He twisted through gaps before I could think to. I mirrored his path by reflex. My sonar was useless; the echoes came back a thousand times at once. All I could do was trust movement, mine and his.

For a long moment, we didn’t fight the current. We used it.

When it pulled, we rolled with it. When it twisted, we let our bodies curve. The sea wanted to crush us, but its violence had rhythm, and if we matched it, it couldn’t find purchase.

We cleared the first collapse, sliding between two falling slabs of stone that scraped the length of our bodies. The rival darted ahead, then turned sharply, letting the pressure burst from a vent pocket push him sideways through a narrow crack. I followed through the same split-second gap.

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Heat tore across my flank, blistering the thin skin near my tail, but I stayed with him.

Survival was a kind of dance now, ugly, blind, precise.

We moved in sync, neither speaking, both knowing what came next before it happened.

A new tremor rolled through the ridge. The entire wall shifted.

We were trapped in the wrong place, the ceiling folding down behind us.

The rival slowed, pivoted, and drove his body into a slab blocking the tunnel ahead. The impact jarred through my chest. The rock cracked, just enough to bleed bubbles.

I followed his motion, slamming the same spot from the other side.

The rock split clean. A wall of heat and water rushed through, catching us both and throwing us upward.

The current turned violent again, a roaring vertical storm.

For one mad moment, it felt like flying.

Then his tail whipped too close, sliding against my gills, sharp enough to sting.

Not enough to cut. Enough to warn.

Or promise.

I couldn’t tell which.

We rode the rising column together, the sea’s fury pushing us through the fissure. The light shifted from red to white as we neared the top.

Then the trench gave way.

The pressure released all at once.

Hot water erupted beneath us, shooting us into open current.

We broke through the steam cloud, coughing heat through our gills. The force carried us higher still, until we drifted above the vent field into water that felt almost cold.

For a long time, neither of us moved.

The sea groaned below like a wounded animal. The vent collapse had changed everything, the ridges, the lanes, even the rhythm of the trench.

The old world was gone.

We floated side by side in the soft current, both of us burnt and bloodied, too exhausted to pretend we weren’t breathing the same water.

The silence that followed was unreal.

No vent hiss. No crackling stone. Just the faint hum of distant heat far below.

My pulse slowed. The rival’s movements matched mine again, calm and even.

We drifted that way for a long time, two hunters with nothing left to hunt.

For the first time, I noticed how similar our breathing had become. Same cadence. Same pause between gulps.

Our bodies rose and fell in rhythm.

For a second, it almost felt like kinship.

Two lives surviving what should have killed them.

I looked across the current. The scar on his flank had opened again, leaking a thin red ribbon into the water. My own side bled the same way.

We were mirrors, cracked but aligned.

The water between us felt still.

Then he moved.

A short flick of his tail. Quick. Precise.

The edge brushed my gills again, just hard enough to draw a sting.

Warning. Or reminder.

My muscles tensed before I could stop them. He held my gaze for one breath, then turned, slow and deliberate, and swam away into the new current that wound between the freshly broken ridges.

He didn’t look back.

I stayed where I was, letting the water cool my wounds. The sea’s new heat still rippled faintly below, reshaping everything.

The trench had changed, but the balance hadn’t. We’d survived the collapse together, yes, but the ocean didn’t care about alliances.

It only cared about what lived long enough to learn.

I let the current push me toward a stable vent seam, one that hadn’t blown. The water there pulsed with steady warmth, weak but dependable. I pressed my body against the rock, feeling the steady hum pass through my plates.

Breathing slowed. Pain dulled.

I thought about the rival, the way he’d moved through the chaos, how his instincts matched mine beat for beat. How his choices had kept us both alive.

And the tail flick.

If he’d wanted to kill me, that would’ve been the moment. But he hadn’t. Not yet.

Maybe he saw the same thing I did: two reflections learning the same lesson, surviving because the sea wanted to see what we’d become next.

I wondered if that counted as respect. Or a debt.

The thought settled heavy in my chest.

“Maybe the sea doesn’t just take,” I whispered, voice small in the churned water. “Maybe it teaches, with teeth.”

The System stirred again, faint but steady, lines of light forming through the haze.

[Safe Zone Destroyed: Harbour]

[Cooperative Predation: Temporary Link Formed]

[Integrity Restored]

The words pulsed once, then faded.

I felt the warmth seep into the cracks along my ribs, the pain dulling as new tissue grew. The sea was patching me up, not as reward, but because the game wasn’t over.

I looked down at the dark wound where Harbour had once been. The place that had sheltered me was gone, buried under stone and steam.

But maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

The collapse had taken everything I’d built, but it had also shown me something else.

That even in chaos, survival wasn’t a solo act. It was a pattern. A mirror. A test.

I drifted for a while, letting the new current decide my direction. The water was thinner now, the vent glow dimmer, the silt rising like ash behind me.

The rival was somewhere ahead, following the same new path.

The sea had torn us from the trench and thrown us into another.

It wasn’t mercy. It was invitation.

I followed the new current north, riding it like a scar across the seabed. The world here was unfamiliar, warmer in places, colder in others, the pressure uneven.

Every few minutes, I caught faint disturbances in the flow: vibrations that weren’t mine. Always just far enough to stay hidden, but always there.

He was still moving too.

Still teaching. Still learning.

I felt the ache of fatigue in my jaw but didn’t stop. My reflection was out there, alive.

We’d both escaped the sea’s punishment. That meant we’d earned something worse.

Expectation.

The sea wanted to see what we’d do next.

And part of me wanted the same.

By the time I found a quiet ridge to rest against, the trench behind us was a memory. Steam rose in long trails from the cracks below. The water hummed with new life already filling the wounds.

The abyss never stayed empty for long.

I closed my eyes and let the warmth flow over my body, dull and rhythmic.

The tail flick still burned against my gills.

Warning, promise, it didn’t matter.

It meant we weren’t done.

I smiled into the dark, slow and tired.

If the sea wanted to teach with teeth, then I’d learn.

Even if the lesson was written in blood.