CHAPTER 8: DESCENT INTO THE FORGOTTEN
The station groaned as the creature's tentacles encircled it, each sucker-lined limb wider than my entire body. Dr. Cho's scream echoed through the crumbling corridors as the first pressure wave hit, shattering what remained of the observation deck.
CHIP'S WARNING:
"Leviathan bio-signature at 98% synchronization. Direct engagement not advised."
I didn't have a choice.
The beast's central maw yawned open, revealing a nightmare gallery of half-digested faces—Federation scientists, mermaids, even the twins from the submarine, their sonar implants still pulsing in its flesh.
"Elara! "Cho grabbed my arm, her nails biting into my already-cracked scales. "The heart pearl—can't you—"
The Leviathan struck.
The battle was less a fight than a desperate dance with death:
The Leviathan struck first. A dozen tendrils, thick as ship cables and lined with serrated suckers, lashed through the water with terrifying speed. I barely had time to react. Instinct and training screamed at me to move, and I twisted my body, channellings hydrokinesis in a desperate burst. A jet of water propelled me backward through the shattered remains of a viewport from a long-lost deep-sea wreck, the jagged edges scraping against my luminous skin.
Not fast enough.
One of the tendrils clipped my right flank, the impact sending a shockwave of pain rippling through me. Scales tore free, drifting away like fallen petals in the current. A deep, stinging heat spread through the wound. The Leviathan didn't just attack—it corrupted.
Inside my mind, the CHIP—the AI system fused into my neural pathways—flickered with a warning.
CHIP Corruption: 3.1%
(Song-code overwriting evasion protocols)
I gritted my teeth. That was new. The Leviathan's attack wasn't just physical—it carried something deeper, something hacking into my very instincts. I could feel my body resisting, my reflexes dulling, hesitation bleeding into movements that should have been second nature. If I let this corruption spread, it would own me.
I couldn't let that happen.
Before I could counter, the Leviathan sang.
It wasn't a melody—it was a weapon. A low, thrumming wail vibrated through the abyss, warping the water itself. The pressure around me collapsed in an instant, as if the ocean had become a liquid sledgehammer slamming into every cell of my body.
Pain. Unbearable, raw, and absolute.
My eardrums shredded under the assault, sending white-hot agony lancing through my skull. Blood streamed from my gills in curling crimson clouds. My vision swam. The water felt thick, syrupy, like it was trying to hold me, drown me even though I no longer needed air.
I had no choice. I had to adapt.
The CHIP pulsed in my mind, reacting to the sheer trauma. Something within my mutated biology clicked, an ancient survival mechanism unlocking itself. My body shimmered, my bioluminescent patterns shifting, dimming, vanishing.
New Ability Unlocked: Bioluminescent Cloak
(Temporary sonar invisibility activated)
I felt it working instantly. The Leviathan's mindless, seeking rage faltered. It had lost me. My glow had vanished into the void, leaving me nothing more than a whisper in the current.
But I knew this advantage wouldn't
The moment my shimmer flickered back to life, the Leviathan struck. A maw lined with abyss-forged fangs snapped shut around my tail. Not a full bite—just a graze—but it was enough.
Pain lanced through me, but it wasn't just the wound. It was the venom.
Black tide venom. A toxin older than stars, an infection that didn't just kill—it drowned you from the inside out. My muscles spasmed, my tail convulsing against my will. A cold, sickening numbness crawled up my spine, stealing my strength with every second.
Then, deep inside my chest, the heart pearl screamed.
A surge of heat, like liquid fire, erupted from my core. The pearl—the strange, ancient relic embedded within me—reacted on instinct, burning away the venom before it could spread. The purging was violent, a supernova of searing energy coursing through my veins. I arched backward, mouth open in a silent scream as the toxin was incinerated from the inside out.
When the pain finally faded, I felt something was… missing.
Cost: 12% permanent scale bleaching
I looked down. The iridescent blues and silvers of my tail had been marred—patches of pure white now stretched along my skin like scars of light. A price paid. A piece of me lost.
But I was still alive.
And this fight wasn't over yet.
While I kept the Leviathan distracted, she:
While I Kept the Leviathan Distracted, She Moved.
I had no time to check on her, no time to see if she was still safe. The Leviathan's attacks came relentlessly—tentacles slicing through the water, its malformed body pulsing with unnatural energy. I twisted, dodging another strike, my gills burning with exhaustion. Seconds. That's all I could buy her. She had to make them count.
Hacking Station Pharos' Defense Grid
Her fingers flew across the shattered control panel inside the derelict station, bypassing centuries of rusted security locks. Pharos had once been an outpost for deep-sea research, its torpedo launchers meant to deter massive predators from breaching the facility. But the station had long since fallen silent, its defenses useless—until now.
With a final override, she woke the dead.
Across the seabed, turrets hidden beneath layers of coral groaned to life. The torpedo tubes hissed as they primed, ancient machinery grinding against time itself. But she didn't just fire them. No—she had a plan.
Instead of warheads, she loaded them with something more insidious: Alpha's coral shards.
A living bioweapon cultivated in secrecy, Alpha's coral was engineered to latch onto organic matter and consume it from the inside out. The Leviathan, with its grotesque fusion of flesh and machine, would be the perfect host.
The launchers locked on. She fired.
Triggering the Emergency Beacon
As the torpedoes screamed through the depths, she activated Pharos' long-dormant emergency beacon. But this wasn't a distress call—this was an attack.
The beacon pulsed, sending a high-frequency signal not to rescue teams, but to the Leviathan's own corrupted CHIP fragments.
Every piece of stolen technology embedded in its body—every scrap of code it had assimilated from fallen ships, from dying explorers—was forced to reboot. The result was chaos. The Leviathan convulsed, its monstrous body glitching as conflicting commands tore through its system. For the first time, it hesitated.
And then—she did the unthinkable.
I barely caught her shape moving through the wreckage, her body trembling, her hands clutching a syringe filled with something dark and writhing. Black tide venom.
I turned in horror as she jammed the needle into her own arm.
"What the hell are you doing?!" I tried to reach her, but she only gave me a weak, fevered grin.
"If it wants infected prey," she gasped, the toxin already turning her veins black, "I'll give it a toxic meal."
The Leviathan snapped toward her. It had ignored her before, its corrupted mind focused only on me. But now—it smelled her blood, tainted and seething with the very venom that coursed through its own veins.
She let it take her.
The beast lunged, its jaws clamping down her arm —but the moment her tainted blood hit its system, it howled.
A psychic shockwave blasted through the water, its howl a sound of pure, unholy agony. Black veins exploded across its body, its mutations spiraling out of control as it absorbed a dose of its own worst nightmare.
She had turned herself into the poison.
Now, we had seconds to finish this.
CHIP's Evolution
As the beast recoiled, my implant changed:
[CORRUPTION RESISTANCE: LEVEL UP] New Ability:Tiebreakers (Short-range black tide purification)
Side Effect:Every use permanently overwrites 1% of my memories
Current Loss:The sound of Professor Alden's laughter*
The Leviathan wasn't just attacking now—it was afraid.
"You, "it hissed through a hundred stolen voices. "You carry the first light."
Then Cho's torpedoes hit.
We fled through the collapsing station as The coral reefs *detonated*, sapphire shrapnel shredding the Leviathan's flesh and Its stolen CHIP fragments malfunctioned, causing tentacles to attack each other The heart pearl in my chest sang, guiding us through the debris
But victory came at a price and it is Dr. Cho's Condition The black tide injection left her right arm permanently necrotic She even now speaks in cryptic verses "The prisons dream of keys "and My Transformation"
The mirror in Pharos' ruined medbay showed a stranger.
Where once my tail shimmered with liquid-pink radiance, now great sweeping patches had turned opalescent white—not dull, but glowing with an eerie inner light. The scales caught the water like frosted glass, scattering prismatic fractals across the crumbling walls.
Pretty. and deadly .CHIP's analysis scrolled: "Bioluminescent restructuring complete. White zones emit 300% stronger glow... at the cost of structural fragility."*
I ran a webbed finger along my flank. The "healed" scales shattered at the lightest touch, dissolving into luminous dust that: Poisoned nearby fish within seconds Made the station's coral recoil in recognition Left afterimages on Cho's retinas when she blinked "You're becoming her," Cho whispered. *"The first Lightbearer."
Then CHIP glitches—and she spoke through it:
"Little sister. "Alpha's voice was a chorus of deep-sea vents and whale song. "You weep too much for monsters."
The heart pearl in my chest burned in response.
New symptoms manifested:
Dream walking - I now wake up inside CHIP's memory banks, watching Alpha's dissection on loop Echo Speech- Sometimes my voice overlaps with hers mid-sentence
The Pull - The trench below Pharos calls to my white scales like a magnet
Cho's necrotic hand gripped mine. "Fight it. Please."
But the prettiest things in the abyss are always the most hungry.
DUAL NATURE
The evolution of beauty—and the curse it carries.
Beautiful Change:
Opalescent scales glow like drowned stars
Horrifying Consequence:
Shattered scales release neurotoxic dust
Beautiful Change:
Voice gains harmonic depth
Horrifying Consequence:
Uncontrollable siren song leaks out
Beautiful Change:
Heart pearl pulses rhythmically
Horrifying Consequence:
Its light attracts Leviathan spawn
Beautiful Change:
CHIP's tone becomes melodic
Horrifying Consequence:
Alpha's memories overwrite mine
I didn't notice the worst of it until we escaped Pharos.
The white scales spread while I slept.
Now, when I cry my tears burn through metal .My laughter makes glass shiver And my nightmares manifest as bioluminescent ink in the water
"You're halfway to godhood," Cho joked weakly.
But we both saw the truth—every healed wound, every purified infection, was rewriting me into something older.
Something the Leviathan remembered.