The corpse drifted for hours before the current claimed it.
Its silver scales dulled to grey, fragments of shell spiraling upward like slow snow.
Kuro watched, still, suspended in the heavy dark. His body was changing again — denser, sharper — yet his thoughts came in echoes, distorted through water and memory.
> [Predatory Assimilation stable.]
[Core temperature normal.]
The System's tone was distant, blurred by static. It no longer sounded external; it pulsed from somewhere inside his skull.
He turned his gaze to the abyss below. A rift, vast and black, breathed beneath him.
Every exhale from that trench carried a low vibration — not mechanical, not natural.
A rhythm. A voice too slow for language.
> Kuro…
Descend.
The word brushed the edge of comprehension. He froze, tentacles fanning wide. No sonar reading, no signature. Only the whisper, like a thought that wasn't his.
Then the scent hit — iron, faint but sharp.
Something alive, wounded, moving through his domain.
He moved before deciding to. Pressure folded around his body as he plunged through the dark, guided by instinct. Ahead, a shadow thrashed — a serpent, long and skeletal, its fins tattered like torn banners. One of the scavengers drawn by blood.
The serpent struck first. Its jaws split wider than its own head, the membrane between fangs glowing with trapped plankton light. Kuro rolled aside, the edge of the attack grazing his flank and leaving a smear of cold that burned.
He retaliated. Tentacles shot outward, wrapped, constricted — muscle against muscle. The serpent writhed, the water vibrating with force. Then came the sound: a wet crack, dull and final, swallowed by depth.
Silence returned, thick and warm. The current carried a dark haze between them, red drifting like smoke. Kuro inhaled through the water, tasting the mineral weight of victory.
> [Assimilation Available — Abyssal Serpent.]
He hesitated. For the first time since awakening, the hunger felt wrong — not need, but command. The voice below pressed closer.
> Feed.
He obeyed.
The energy flooded through him, but with it came images that weren't his — flashes of eyes staring upward, schools of prey scattering, and a vast outline deeper still, watching both predator and prey like a god surveying dust.
The abyss laughed, the sound rippling through his mantle.
> You climb toward me, little one.
But every ascent is a descent.
Kuro thrashed, forcing the hallucination away. The trench had gone quiet again, the voice fading like steam. Yet the water around him felt heavier now, as if gravity itself had shifted.
He looked down once more. Something vast moved within that rift, unseen but certain — a presence so immense that the ocean bent around its will.
His domain quivered.
> [Warning: Abyssal Entity Signature Detected.]
[Classification: Unknown.]
Kuro steadied himself, feeling the new strength in his limbs, the pulse of heat in his veins. He was no longer prey, but neither was he safe.
The trench below whispered again, a sound between pressure and prayer.
And in that moment, Kuro realized: the hunger he felt wasn't just his own.