The water burned.

I woke to a sound too deep to be heard, a pulse that made the trench itself breathe.

At first, I thought it was the Fang-Eel stirring again. Then another vibration pressed through the water, sharper, higher. It didn’t belong to the eel.

Something else had come.

The abyss quivered, a faint hum growing crowded with motion. One beat, then another, then three, bigger than storms, closer than thunder. The currents trembled in layered rhythm, and the stone floor under me shivered like thin bone.

Predators.

They weren’t as massive as the Fang-Eel, but they were fast, deliberate, shaped for cutting through pressure. Their pulses hit in sequence, they looked like long spears threading through the water. Even from kilometres away I could feel their approach in my ribs.

The trench began to sing.

The notes of the newcomers bounced between the ridges until the entire sea turned to resonance. Each call sharpened the next, folding into itself until the air became hard enough to touch.

The Fang-Eel stirred.

The den answered with low cracks, tiny fractures creeping across glassy walls. Molten beads rolled off the ceiling and sank into the dark.

The first pulse came, a slow roll of the world, the kind that moves mountains sideways.

The second split the floor.

The third made the water scream.

Then everything erupted at once.

The predators struck first. Their attack was invisible but absolute. Sound condensed into weapon. The pressure between their calls cut through the sea like a blade of glass.

The impact hit the Fang-Eel along its flank. Flesh ruptured in long silver seams. Old scars flared white, leaking blood so hot it steamed.

The eel’s answering call wasn’t sound; it was a shift of existence.

A single pulse deep enough to silence everything. The trench compressed, walls folding inward by the width of a breath, and that was enough. Rocks exploded, the sea floor buckled, and the predators scattered, flickering through the fog like shadows with edges.

They were smaller, but they knew how to fight giants.

They darted in and out, weaving around the eel’s coils, releasing bursts of resonance timed perfectly with one another. Their signals merged into a pattern, not harmony, but calculation. Each strike landed where the eel’s scar tissue was weakest.

The Fang-Eel roared. The sound wasn’t a noise but a command. The trench obeyed.

The water turned solid. Pressure spikes rippled outward. One of the predators misjudged its distance. The sea clenched around it like a fist. I saw its skeleton fold inside its skin, light bleeding through cracks in its armour before it imploded.

The others kept attacking.

The eel coiled tighter, twisting through the fog. When it moved, the sea moved with it. Entire ridges tilted. I clung to the rock, claws biting glass, teeth clenched against the pressure that wanted to crush my skull.

The predators changed tone again. Their combined pulse met the eel’s next breath head-on.

The collision made light.

A flash so bright it painted the trench white and left the water boiling. Everything living within sight cooked instantly. My eyes went blind for half a second; when vision returned, I saw the Fang-Eel’s scales peeled open like armour plates torn from a hull.

The predators closed in.

They struck the gills. Each hit carved new holes that hissed steam.

The Fang-Eel thrashed, its body spanning entire kilometres, crashing into the walls hard enough to crush ridges flat. The trench shook like a drum. Vents burst and sprayed near boiling water through the dark.

The predators weaved between its coils, slicing lines of vibration through its flesh. The sea filled with the taste of iron and rot.

The eel rolled onto its back. For the first time, it looked uncertain.

Then it changed the rules.

It stopped roaring. It hummed.

The sound was deep and perfect, a frequency that made everything still. The predators’ calls faltered. Their own songs turned against them, folding inward until they shook themselves apart. The hum kept building, so low it was almost silence.

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Then the trench inverted.

The pressure outside the eel reversed, collapsing inward. For an instant, the water became weightless. Every particle pulled toward the Fang-Eel’s body.

The predators tumbled, caught off guard. The eel struck with its entire length, sweeping the trench clean. I saw one predator slam into the ridge and burst. Another twisted just in time, darting into the fog. The third slid under the eel’s belly, charging up another note.

It released its full song into the wound on the eel’s side.

The blast ripped the trench open.

Ridges shattered. Old vents reignited. The sea itself seemed to scream. The Fang-Eel convulsed, smashing its own body against stone. Its blood gushed in rivers, glowing like magma.

I was thrown across the floor, tumbled end over end, my fins flayed raw by flying grit. When I found a ledge, I dug in and stayed still. Every breath came with pain. Every heartbeat felt borrowed.

The predators circled once more, weaving their pulses in and out of the eel’s dying hum. They were cutting it apart rhythm by rhythm.

The eel struck back anyway.

It surged upward, smashing through the fog. Its mouth opened, a canyon lined with molten teeth, and the light of its throat filled the trench.

The nearest predator vanished into that light. For one second, I thought the eel had won. Then the glow went wrong. It burst outward instead of staying inside.

The predator had detonated its own body, filling the eel’s mouth with pure resonance.

The explosion ripped through its skull.

The shockwave hit me even from kilometres away. The glass beneath my claws shattered. I dropped back into the current, blind again. The sound didn’t end; it just kept rolling, echoing back and forth between the trench walls until everything else forgot how to move.

The eel’s head struck the floor. The impact broke the ridge apart, sending whole shelves of stone tumbling. The predators fell silent.

Only the Fang-Eel’s breathing remained, short, ragged, uneven.

Steam poured from its gills. Each breath came weaker.

But it wasn’t finished.

It dragged itself forward, scraping its body along the ridge. Its tail hit the vent fields. The explosion that followed could have torn a continent.

Superheated gases roared through the open gills and burst through its skin. The heat turned the water white.

I covered my face with both fins, but it didn’t help. The burn seared straight through my skin. The world disappeared into brightness.

When the glare cleared, everything was wreckage.

The Fang-Eel was still moving, but only barely. Its internal light flickered, stuttering across the body in weak pulses. The predators were gone, either fled or obliterated.

The trench’s walls glowed faint red.

The eel’s pulse slowed. Its body twisted once more, a final loop, and fell still.

Silence.

The silence wasn’t peace. It was the exhaustion of the world after it’s screamed itself hoarse.

I waited, pressed flat beneath a shelf of rock that had somehow survived. My body trembled with its own broken rhythm. My gills stung. My blood ran hot.

Minutes passed. Maybe hours.

The hum that had ruled the abyss was gone. The Fang-Eel’s pulse, that endless heartbeat that everything had followed, was silent.

I pushed the rock away and floated free.

The trench had changed shape.

What used to be ridges were now slopes of glass. Steam drifted in long, slow banners. The heat made the water shimmer gold and red.

The Fang-Eel’s body filled the canyon. It wasn’t a creature anymore, it was landscape.

Its hide was split down the middle. Blood, thick and luminous, pooled in cracks that glowed faintly from the heat beneath.

The smell of it hit before the sight. Metal. Salt. Decay.

I drifted closer. My skin hung in strips from the earlier burns. My gills bled. The current tugged weakly, as if even the sea was tired.

Up close, the Fang-Eel’s body still moved, gas escaping in slow shudders that lifted its chest. A memory of life trapped in muscle.

I reached out and touched one of its scales. It was the size of a hull plate. It flexed under my fin, then sagged. The heat scalded, but I didn’t let go.

For a moment, I just looked.

It had been a god. Untouchable. Perfect. The thing every creature in this trench feared and obeyed.

Now it was meat.

“Gods die easier than they should,” I said. “Maybe they never learn to fear.”

The words left my mouth and vanished.

The System flickered faintly in the haze.

[Apex Entity Terminated]

[Environmental Collapse Ongoing]

[Opportunity Window: 72 Hours]

The glow faded before I could blink twice.

Opportunity. Three days before the trench cooled, before scavengers came to carve it up.

I stared at the body. Steam poured from the gills like slow-moving smoke. Heat shimmered off the wounds.

My own hunger woke again, a dull, instinctive ache that didn’t wait for permission.

I swam to the flank and pressed a hand against it.

The flesh was soft, slick, pulsing with trapped heat. I lowered my mouth and bit.

The first taste was pure iron. It burned all the way down.

The second was better. The meat fell apart like boiled kelp.

The pain dulled. Strength returned. My blood thickened. My heartbeat matched the faint tremor still leaking from the Fang-Eel’s body.

The corpse gave back what it could.

The sea shimmered, faint ripples of colour running through the steam.

The System spoke again, brief and cold.

[Biomass Acquired: +12 Units]

[Structural Reinforcement +1.5%]

[Tissue Integrity Stabilised]

I pressed my forehead against the corpse’s cooling skin. It was almost peaceful.

Not triumph. Not victory. Just survival, small and ugly, the way everything in the sea survives.

I whispered to the dead thing.

“Thank you,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”

The words drifted upward and vanished with the steam.

I turned from the carcass. The trench stretched ahead, carved open by the fight. The walls still glowed with dying heat.

The Fang-Eel’s body had remade the landscape. Entire valleys had been flattened, new caverns opened. The sea’s old map was gone.

For the first time, I understood what it meant when something truly massive died. The world changed shape around the body. The water remembered.

The predators’ echoes had long since faded. They would not return soon.

That left only me.

I swam through the drifting clouds of flesh, letting the currents push me. Every few metres I stopped to take another strip of meat, swallowing it down despite the burn.

The warmth filled me until I could move again without shaking.

When I looked back, the Fang-Eel’s glow was fading, its light turning soft as dusk.

The god of the trench was gone.

The sea had already begun to forget its name.

And in that forgetting, there was room for something new.

I kicked once, pushing into the cooler dark beyond the carcass. My body still ached, still bleeding, but alive. The water opened ahead, wider now, unfamiliar.

The abyss waited, silent and ready.

If this was what it meant for gods to bleed, then maybe the rest of us had finally learned how to live.