CHAPTER 184: BREAKING THROUGH THE ATTACKS!

"Then, we cut our way through." Kaen said, and the water shuddered as he immediately thrusted his arm west-ward, no rallying cry or any more words of comfort.

The Lieutenant didn’t need to speak as he swam towards the West Perimeter, and all the squads surged forward behind him, their bodies angling into sleek lines as they swap deeper.

The deeper they swam, the more the world changed. The ruined streets of the Market District gave way to descending avenues carved into coral stone.

Buildings half-collapsed leaned against one another like drowning giants. Enormous shadow-pits, collapsed pressure vents, lined the streets, leaking thick plumes of abyssal smoke.

"Readings are spiking," Serah muttered as her visor flickered. "The ambient pressure is still climbing."

"Which means more beasts," Kaen replied as they continued forward, feeling the various changes in the water and mana flow.

All of the students and even the Lieutenants could feel that the water was thickening into a medium that resisted all of their movements, slowing them down, and they all recognized it was artificial.

The deeper they descended towards the Western Perimeter, the more the silence changed. The various explosions of the battle had disappeared.

All at once, the silt around them trembled, vibrating with a low frequency hum.

Kaen’s hand shot upward.

"STOP!"

Everyone froze mid-stroke.

A heartbeat later, something slammed into the ruins ahead.

A serpentine shape, thinner than the earlier abyssal leviathan-descendant but easily fifty meters long, crashed through a decayed temple archway and spiraled into view. Its scales were translucent, showing writhing internal tendrils of blackened mana. Four long fins jutted from its body like serrated wings.

Behind it, a dozen smaller predators followed in an undulating wave, eel-thin, needle-mouthed, and glowing with bioluminescent veins.

A distant explosion extinguished the remaining sunlight filtering from above.

Kaen didn’t hesitate.

"BREAK THROUGH THEM! WE DON’T STOP!"

The wedge formation compressed again, thinner, deadlier, and they shot forward like a spear.

The predators shrieked, not audibly, but with a ripple of water-pressure that sent vibrations through bones.

Kaen led the charge with a single thrust.

His blade stabbed, less than a meter of movement, but all of his dense mana compressed into the strike’s point.

The spear-fang serpent snapped toward him and Kaen met it, steel touching scale, and instantly, a microburst of water shot outward from the point of impact, a localized shockwave so dense it fractured the serpent’s entire snout.

With a twist, Kaen ripped upward, slicing slit through its skull in a geyser of abyss-black blood. Serah descended immediately after, her spear drove downward like a hydraulic piston.

A quadrupedal beast leaping toward the rear ranks was impaled through the upper spine, pinned in an explosion of sediment.

Behind them, the students tightened formation.

Fade darted ahead of Dorian, slashing through an eel with a tightly condensed mana blade.

"KEEP YOUR CASTING SMALL, YOU BREATHING LIABILITY!" she shouted.

"I know manaaaaagh—!"

Another eel rushed at Dorian; he yelped and flailed but managed to fire a tightly-focused wind burst point-blank. The blast drilled through the creature’s head.

Fade gave a begrudging nod, "Better."

Lilian spun gracefully beside Albedo, refracting the blood she had manipulated earlier into razor-sharp crescents swirling around her like a personal constellation.

"Left side!" she snapped.

Three eel-beasts shot in, she responded by flicking her wrist, sending the blood-sabers spinning with surgical precision. Each creature lost its head in a plume of dark ichor.

Elara worked behind them, channeling her nature mana into ultra-dense darts that she shot like underwater armor-piercing rounds.

One hit a serpent fin.

Another pierced a lung.

A third blew through a predator’s eye and out the back.

She exhaled with new confidence. "This contraction casting... it’s actually working."

"Don’t get used to it," Lilian replied with a smirk. "It hurts like hell in training."

The beasts swarmed again, but the group was cutting straight through them, no pause, no slowing down.

The West Perimeter was still far, and the pressure was continuously growing the closer they got, trying to hold them back, but Albedo surged ahead.

The filters on his visor dimmed, adjusting to the surging black-blue flashes of abyssal runes lighting up along a beast’s spine as it charged toward him.

His pistols materialized in a ripple of violet-black mana, Havoc & Ruin. The water struggled against their form, as if reality disliked their presence here.

Albedo’s mana contracted, and folded, collapsing inward until he shot off Havoc and Ruin in Abyssal Mode, which detonated on the head of one beast, crushing the torso of another.

The water shook after that shot.

Lilian let out a low appreciative whistle. "Your guns are actually bullying the water."

"Sucks I can’t use Infernal Mode tho," he muttered and the group continued onward, carving a bloody corridor through the various Abyssal Sea Beasts that attacked them in ambushing packs.

As time passed, all of the students adapted to the water pressure and were more efficient in battle. However, Kaen and Serah were still leagues above all of the students, annihilating most beasts, and all the strongest ones the student couldn’t handle by themselves.

Elara, emboldened, spread her senses outward using her Battle Map Gift. Her eyes widened.

"More signatures ahead—lots of them!"

Kaen’s pupils narrowed. "Distance?"

"Half a kilometer!"

Serah inhaled sharply, "Then we’re close. The West Perimeter should be just beyond the next ridge."

The water around them stirred violently, as if the current itself feared what awaited.

Albedo’s Source Code flickered uncontrollably. Symbols spasmed in his vision. Something huge was ahead.

The group shot over the final collapsed ridge of the Market District’s deep-west edge.

And then, every single student froze. Not because of fear, but because the scene below them was so overwhelming it stunned the senses.

The West Perimeter, once reinforced with coral-forged archways, mana-lattices, and defensive friezes, was a battlefield layered in chaos.

Ruins lit with flashing mana. Explosions erupting in the deep. Abyssal Sea Beasts swarming like a living storm.

And in the center, multiple different squads of students, each led by a Maritime Officer, were locked in brutal combat.

Zeus Duskbane crashed into the skull of a hammerhead titan, fists glowing faintly with dense mana. The shockwave he produced rippled back through the trenches.

"COME ON THEN!" Zeus roared, voice shaking the water. "THERE’S PLENTY OF ME TO GO AROUND!"

A massive spined eel lunged at him and Miranda flickered her wrist, space twisting as the eel’s trajectory warped, bending away from Zeus.

"Please refrain from shouting, Zeus," she said calmly, "You’re attracting them more of them,"

"Good! That’s the point!"

On the other side

Lucian shot through the water with terrifying speed, black hair streaming behind him like a streak of shadow. Every movement produced two or three afterimages, his body pushed to the limit by Transcendence.

The Transcendence Gift had once again blessed him with a buff, as his body was now perfectly adapted to battling in the water.

Meanwhile, Orphelia chanted softly, water condensing around her fingertips into compact baldes that she swung, cutting various beasts into pieces.

An Officer shouted over the comms, "WE CAN’T HOLD THIS LINE MUCH LONGER—THE PULSE WAVES ARE DESTROYING OUR REGULATORS!"

Another officer near Lucian added, "THE ABYSSAL SIGNATURES ARE MULTIPLYING, THEY’RE NESTING IN THE FOUNDATIONS!"

"WE NEED TO LEAVE THE AREA TO CONTACT HQ!" Kaen ordered, "WE MOVE NOW!"

He shot forward, and all of the others followed, slicing through the various enemies attacking them, all of the students expending as much power as they need to take down the swarming Abyssal Sea Beasts.

Albedo shot downward with his pistols drawn, a vortex of dark violet mana spiraling in his wake while at the front, Kaen struck another blow at a serpent-beast that lunched at him.

The Lead Lieutenant slid beside the serpent, gripping its fin and driving his blade direct into the beast’s skill with a focused, microburst slash. The creature convulsed violently, blood mixing into black clouds.

Serah pierced the underbelly of another as she rocketed past, ripping downward in a controlled spiral.

Lilian caught three predators with one spinning crescent of condensed blood. Elara fired a compressed bolt through a hammerhead titan’s eye socket.

Zeus finally noticed some figures coming closer.

"FINALLY!" he bellowed, punching a beast so hard it bent around his fist. "About damn time!"

Miranda smiled, barely. "Reinforcements arrived earlier than projected."

Lucian glanced up, eyes widening slightly as he caught sight of Albedo streaking downward, but before he could call out to him, Albedo shot off Havoc and Ruin, two beams of condensed mana slashing through the water venomously.

They were like spiraling jets of superheated energy that cut through all of the beasts that were trying to catch up to them.

Lucian blinked, "Show-off."

Albedo smirked. "You’re welcome."

Fade grabbed Dorian’s collar, yanking him out of the way of a lunging serpent. "STOP ALMOST DYING!"

"I’M TRYING!"

"TRY HARDER HUMAN!"

The two officers leading Lucian’s squad stared in blatant stunned disbelief at the sudden reinforcements cutting through the enemy lines.

Kaen didn’t pause.

"STATUS!"

One officer saluted underwater, a strange, jerky motion. "West Perimeter defenses are failing! The largest nests are still below, we’ve been holding them off but the detonations disrupted everything!"

"What detonations?" Serah demanded.

"Unknown source!" the officer replied. "But—"

He was cut off by a massive roar.

All eyes turned.

The largest abyssal beast yet loomed from the trench below, easily three times larger than the angler-beast from earlier. Its body was plated in jagged armor like obsidian coral, bioluminescent runes crawling along its sides.

It was a one of the descendants of a leviathan Kaen had told Albedo and the others about earlier, although this time, it was completely corrupted entirely by the Abyss, and it was staring directly at them!