CHAPTER 183: ATTACKED!

The water was still trembling when Kaen thrust his arm forward, signaling the formation to move. In an instant, the two squads shifted, tightening into a wedge formation built for underwater traversal.

While the students weren’t as sharp as the Maritime Officers, they learned quickly and were able to get themselves into formation.

Kaen at the front, Serah mirroring him on the opposite side, students forming layered ranks behind them. The Market District’s once-still plazas now churned with drifting debris, broken coral, and the fading afterglow of the distant violet explosion.

"Stay close," Kaen ordered, voice firm through the comms. "Visibility is dropping. No one falls behind."

The group surged westward, propelling themselves with mana-reinforced kicks and silent bursts from their Abyssal Descent stabilizers.

The deeper they went, the more the water pressed against them—thick, heavy, aware, an unseen weight that fought every movement like a hand dragging them downward.

Albedo kept pace easily, but even he felt the pressure chewing at his mana like slow-moving fangs.

’It’s thicker... heavier than before.’

Even his Source Code needed more mana than usual to pierce through the dense mana haze. Symbols fluttered in the corner of his vision like echoing afterimages, unable to form clear patterns.

Beside him, Lilian swam smoothly, though her brow was furrowed, "Something’s warping the environmental pressure. It’s like the city’s mana veins are, "

Before she could finish, Serah’s alarmed voice cut through the channel.

"Movement, directly ahead!"

The formation halted instantly. Through the billowing clouds of silt and fractured stone, something shifted. It wasn’t the rumble of ruins collapsing. Not the tremor of distant detonations.

It was alive.

Kaen and Serah both stiffened as their visors pinged new mana signatures, huge, ones, materializing from the murk ahead.

"Oh... shit," Dorian breathed.

The silt cloud parted.

And what emerged from the dark was a nightmare born from the deepest trench.

A colossal silhouette, longer than a city tram, slid into view. Its body was serpentine but jagged, covered in armored black scales etched with faint abyssal runes that pulsed like diseased veins.

Its head resembled a monstrous angler fish but with serrated mandibles that opened too wide for any natural creature.

It was a Sea Beast completely corrupted and warped by the Abyss, and it was not alone.

More shapes slithered behind it, sleek, quadrupedal creatures with spined backs,

hammer-headed titans with glowing eyes, and smaller yet still deadly eel-like predators that darted like electric currents.

At least thirteen signatures.

"Formation helmets on full opacity," Serah commanded sharply. Her tone wasn’t panicked, it was cold, deadly focused. "Do not make eye contact with their bioluminescent sacs. That provokes them."

The largest beast exhaled a low, deep-frequency growl that ripple-vibrated through the water, shaking armor plates and making bones hum.

Lilian’s breath hitched. "They’re territorial... it thinks we’re invading its nest."

"No," Kaen corrected her, his pupils narrowing, "It thinks we’re prey, the Abyss has completely dominated it,"

The beast lunged, and Kaen moved first.

A burst of compressed mana bulleted from his boots as he shot upward, evading the creature’s colossal jaw as it snapped shut where he had been a heartbeat earlier.

"SCATTER FORMATION!" Kaen commanded, voice sharp as a blade. "Pairs of two AT LEAST! Do NOT fight these alone!"

The squads burst apart in coordinated arcs of motion.

Albedo immediately grabbed Elara’s shoulder, towing her aside as a smaller eel-beast shot past, jaws snapping with a flash of bioluminescent light.

Lilian spun toward them, activating her bloodline reflexes, her mana forming thin defensive membranes around her arms, "I’ve got your flank!"

From the opposite side, Serah engaged alongside other students, hammering back a lunging quadruped using synchronized bursts of kinetic mana.

The battlefield dissolved into chaos.

Elara thrust his palm forward and unleashed a burst of pure mana, but the attack began to fizzle out after hitting the first beast.

Not fully, but like a flame struggling for oxygen. The water swallowed the spell, diffusing the energy before it could reach full power.

"Tch." She clenched her jaw in frustration, "Mana propagation’s slowed by at least 40%..."

Kaen’s voice snapped across the commline as he recognized a decent amount of the students struggling, "Focus your mana CLOSE to the body! No long-range casting unless you funnel it, CONTRACT your output!"

"Contraction?" Dorian echoed.

Serah intercepted a charging beast with a brutal whirl of her spear, the motion tight, minimal, yet devastating. The spear, glowing only faintly—carved through a beast’s tendons.

"Small movements, dense mana!" Serah barked. "The pressure out here will EAT any wide or unfocused spell. Constrict your casting pathways, your spells must be dense and extremely compact, not big!"

A quadrupedal Abyssal beast lunged for Dorian. He panicked and fired a massive burst of wind mana.

It sputtered like a dying sparkler.

"Oh come on!"

Fade slammed into him from the side, knocking him out of the danger zone.

"Tighten your casting, idiot!" she snapped, "Think of it like trying to shout underwater, it’s pointless unless it’s extremely close!"

The colossal angler-beast whipped its massive body around, its tail smashing through a coral pillar like wet paper. The shockwave spiraled outward, sending debris and runaway mana ripples through the water.

Kaen moved, the Lieutenant’s body blurred as he draw his blade, its glow faint but intensely concentrated, obviously designed explicitly for underwater combat.

He didn’t swing wide.

He swung tight, a micro slash, no more than half a meter, yet the mana compressed into the blade erupted outward like a high-pressure cutter.

The beast reeled back as black blood seeped from its armored hide.

"That," Serah said coolly, stabbing through another smaller creature’s eye with a similarly tight thrust, "is what we mean."

Albedo had easily caught on, but the second to catch on after him was Lilian, who quickly began to manipulate the blood of the dying Abyssal Sea Beast around her, slashing the blood forward in a crescent arc.

The arc wasn’t wide, but was extremely compact, slashing various beasts into pools of blood.

"That’s it!" Kaen called. "Keep your power inward, then release!"

Elara’s gaze sharpened. She adjusted her hand, rewinding ambient currents around her palm by a fraction of a second.

A spear of compressed nature mana shot out, dense and deadly. It tore clean through an eel-beast’s skull.

Elara focused next. Her breathing steadied as she let her mana take shape, not the wide, branching style she used for potions, but a dense bloom of concentrated Nature mana.

The spell swirled around her like a tight, green halo.

She thrust it forward, and a concentrated burst cracked through the beast’s armor like a drill.

"Nice hit!" Lilian called, flashing a grin.

Meanwhile, Albedo continued to cut down beasts, his hands curled inward. Mana contracted, folded on itself in layers, like collapsing origami.

His pistol-like Soul Weapon materialized in his grasp, black metal shifting with its internal Havoc & Ruin modes.

Infernal Mode flickered.

Graviton Mode hummed.

He held the weapon close, letting the pressure condense the forming bullets until each shot became a singularity of force.

He pulled the trigger.

The shot didn’t erupt outward in a fiery explosion.

It whispered, barely a ripple, and then detonated inside a beast’s skull.

The monster convulsed, then sank.

Lilian whistled softly. "Well. That’s unfair."

The colossal angler-beast pulled back, its bioluminescent sacs flickering in aggressive patterns. Runes along its sides ignited with sickening black-blue light.

Kaen reacted instantly, "EVERYONE, SHUT YOUR MANA OUTPUT! NOW!"

"Why?!" Fade asked the question all the students had on their minds.

Serah’s voice cut in sharply, "It’s preparing a mana siphon pulse!"

The angler-beast’s glowing tendrils spread like a grotesque crown.

A wave of abyssal energy exploded outward.

Albedo immediately killed his mana. Lilian, Elara, Fade, and the others followed, some slower than others, but fast enough.

Dorian was a split second late.

The pulse hit him. He screamed as his mana was violently sucked out, the water around him shimmering with red and green as it tore free from his body.

Serah grabbed him, forcing a stabilizer patch into his suit. "Don’t—EVER—let it catch your mana signature!"

"It hurts like hell," Dorian gasped, clutching his chest.

"That was the mild version," Serah muttered.

"Enough of this," Kaen said coldly.

He surged forward, blade drawn back in a tight arc.

The angler-beast roared and lunged. Kaen met it head-on.

The clash shook the water, a shockwave rippling through the entire perimeter. Kaen’s blade punched into the beast’s open maw, slicing up through its jaw.

The creature thrashed wildly, trying to swallow him whole, but Serah streaked in from above, driving her spear down behind its skull.

Twin strikes with one singular purpose. The angler-beast convulsed, then fell limp, blood seeping out its wound as it died.

Silence rippled outward.

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then the remaining Abyssal beasts, sensing the fall of their alpha, turned, and fled to regroup with other beasts. They vanished into the trenches, their silhouettes swallowed by darkness.

The battlefield stilled and the ruins trembled all around them, but the group focused immediately on regrouping and assessing the situation.

Kaen flipped his blade, checking its condition, "Any injuries?"

"This kid almost died," Serah replied.

"I’m fine," Dorian groaned.

"No," Serah said, "you’re an idiot."

Still, she injected a mana stabilizer into his suit’s regulator. Once she was done with that, Serah inspected her squad with swift, efficient motions. "All accounted for. Two suit fractures but auto-repair is covering it."

Kaen scanned the battlefield, "No time to linger."

Lilian nodded, "The detonations came from the west. If the other squads were caught in that..."

Her voice trailed off. No one needed the rest spoken. Kaen’s visor flicked toward the distant horizon, a faint purple haze still drifting through the water.

"Everyone," he said, voice low and solemn, "We move. Full speed."

"But what if more beasts, " Elara began.

"There will be more beasts," Kaen said simply, "And our people are running out of time."

Serah floated beside him, "If those detonations were triggered intentionally... the west perimeter may already be overrun."

"Then," Kaen said, "we cut our way through."