The silence was crushing.

It pressed from every side, a blanket of weight that made my ribs ache. After the death of Harbour, after the fight and the fire, the quiet felt like punishment. I moved because the water did. If it had stopped, I think I would have too.

The trench behind me was a graveyard, cooled and black. Ahead, only a faint red shimmer under drifting ash. Even the current seemed nervous, moving in short bursts like it didn’t want to be noticed. I counted my own heartbeats to keep time. When that became unbearable, I counted the seconds between sonar clicks and their broken echoes, learning a map I didn’t trust.

Then the seafloor trembled.

At first, I waited for a collapse. The small crackle of glass settling, the brittle creak of stone adjusting under pressure. Nothing came. The shake that rolled up through the trench wasn’t random, it was rhythmic. Intentional.

A pulse rolled through my chest. Slow, deep, and heavy enough to make my gills flutter on instinct. The ash lifted into rings, then settled. The second pulse came closer.

And then the dark began to move.

At first, I thought it was the wall of the trench shifting. Then I realised the wall was breathing.

A shape slid through the fog, bigger than anything I had ever seen. It moved like a continent waking up, each shift of muscle sending waves across the abyss. The water thickened with pressure, the sound of it crawling into my bones.

The Fang-Eel.

It wasn’t just large. It was obscene. A living piece of the sea floor. Its body stretched across the trench from wall to wall, coiling through the fog like molten rock. Scars covered its hide in tangled lines, faintly glowing with inner light, slow lightning crawling under glassy skin. Every breath sent faint flashes through its body, a silent heartbeat visible across kilometres of water.

The eel didn’t swim. It displaced. The sea made way for it.

Plankton boiled in its wake, vaporised by the friction of its passing. Fish that tried to flee burst into clouded pulp from the pressure alone. The trench sang with the vibration of its pulse, low enough to feel through the skeleton, too deep to hear.

I pressed myself into the rubble of a dead vent, forcing every fin to stay still. My body shook anyway. The thing didn’t even look in my direction, but the water around it felt aware. The trench bent around it, currents reshaped to its will.

It hunted by touch. The water was its eye.

Every shift of current, every vibration through rock, every molecule out of place, it all told it what was alive and what wasn’t.

The eel passed close enough that the heat of it brushed my face. Its body was a wall of darkness, the scars running along its side glowing like slow lightning strikes. I could have fit a hundred of my old human selves across its flank and still not reached the end of one ridge.

Its head was massive, broad as a hill, mouth closed in a line that could have split the trench in half if opened. Its eyes were just pits of lightless glass. Even its breathing pulled the sea with it, the in and out dragging whole sections of current into rhythm.

Stolen novel; please report.

When it exhaled, the trench answered.

The water vibrated. Stone cracked somewhere behind me.

Then it stopped. The stillness felt worse than the noise.

I waited, counting.

One heartbeat. Two.

The eel moved again.

No rush, no effort, just inevitability. Its body curved, the whole trench bending with it. Then came the sound.

A sharp pulse rolled through the abyss. The pressure hit first, flattening everything. I saw the herd before I heard them, shadowy shapes of deep fish turning to run. They didn’t make it.

The pulse tore through them.

Their bodies imploded before sound caught up. The sea turned red, then black again. Bones shattered into dust before they had time to fall. It was over in a heartbeat.

No chase. No hunger in the movement. Just... erasure.

The Fang-Eel glowed faintly brighter. Its scars pulsed with light like veins of magma running through stone. The vibration that followed made every vent nearby scream.

It was feeding, but not with teeth.

The System flickered.

[Apex Biomass Class Detected]

[Observation Mode Recommended]

[Risk Index: Lethal]

I already knew.

The eel didn’t eat to live. It existed to unmake.

The water around it flattened with each strike. Whole ecosystems died without it even noticing. The floor of the trench looked scraped clean, scoured by its wake.

I stayed low. I watched. I counted the seconds between the pulses.

Three beats, then quiet.

Five breaths, then movement again.

The pattern was deliberate.

The man in me was terrified. The beast in me was learning.

The eel’s light flickered again as it turned. Another pulse rolled outward.

Pressure crushed a wall of rock like wet sand. Thousands of small lives vanished in an instant, their heat absorbed into the creature’s skin. The trench shook so hard I thought it would collapse around me.

The beast in me wanted to flee. The man couldn’t look away.

It was beautiful. Terrible, but beautiful.

Lightning caged in flesh. A storm that had learned to swim.

The eel curved again, stretching through the fog until it seemed endless. My eyes couldn’t find where it began or ended. It wasn’t a creature anymore. It was the shape of dominance itself.

I realised how small I truly was. How all of us were. Everything that had happened, Harbour, the rival, the fights, the killing, it was nothing. Just noise before the song began.

The Fang-Eel was the song.

It moved again. Another pulse. The trench walls lit up with streaks of molten red, as though the earth itself had veins that mirrored its scars. The sound hit a second later, a low rolling note that vibrated through my jaw and up into my skull.

The eel drifted through the wreckage it had made, its glow dimming with each turn. When it had taken enough, it slowed.

The sea went still.

Even the ash stopped moving.

The silence that followed felt sacred.

I breathed shallow, careful not to make sound.

“It doesn’t feed to live,” I whispered, voice trembling in the current. “It feeds to erase everything that isn’t it.”

My words vanished into the dark before they could echo.

The Fang-Eel began to move again, deeper this time. Its glow faded, the trench darkening behind it. The hum of its pulse lingered long after its body had gone.

I waited until the heat in the water dropped. Then I moved. Slowly.

I followed the path it left, the broken stones, the half-cooked bodies, the shimmering film of heat. Every scar it left on the sea was a trail, a record of its passing.

It was too big to hide, too powerful to oppose. But its destruction fed everything that followed behind.

And I was one of those things now.

I marked its trail in memory. The curve of the trench, the way the ash spiralled inward, the direction the current bent in its wake.

A roadmap written in extinction.

The eel’s hum echoed faintly through the deep one last time. I felt it pass through me, a vibration that wasn’t sound anymore. It felt like a promise, or maybe a warning.

Then it was gone.

I floated in its wake, small and silent. The sea was still trembling from what it had seen.

And I understood something simple.

You don’t need to be a god to survive a god.

You only need to know how to move after it.