The last time she’d climbed up a palm tree with the intent of hopping right off was eight months ago, when she’d killed the Mutant-Class skeleton shrimp, and at the time, there was a black storm. It was cold, it was rainy, and she had the weight of her ten-year-long journey on her back. Reach the city or die—that’d been her objective.

  This time, she had a different objective.

  [Objective #70: Slay the S-Rank Mutant-Class water strider]

  [Time Limit: 7 minutes]

  [Reward: 2,000 points]

  [Failure: Destruction of at least six Imperator warships]

  With the crab children cheering beneath her, she launched off the treetop twenty metres off the ground, backflipping through the air like a thrown dagger. Wind ripped past her face as she twisted mid-fall, aiming for a perfect landing.

  Then her glaives struck the bark of the tree halfway down, lightning crackling around the bladed edges.

  She started skating down the tree, across the black sand beach, and then up the slick chitin incline that was the giant horseshoe crab’s raised tail. It was a long, gargantuan thing—at least fifty metres long and five metres wide—and it curved higher still, steepening with no hesitation. She had no hesitation either. She pushed faster, feeling the burn in her thighs, the charge in her nerves.

  Every muscle screamed for more.

  Then—the peak.

  She launched off the tip of the tail.

  For a second, everything stilled.

  The sky stretched wide, blue and cloudless. Below, the wreckage-strewn sea gleamed like shattered glass, sunken skeletons of warships bobbing on the surface. In the distance, the ten massive Whitewhales surged forward, hauling the battered fleet of twelve warships forward. Hundreds of cannons thundered. Harpoons sliced the air. A storm of projectiles rained behind the fleet, desperately fending off the tide of black chitin closing in from the even further horizon.

  Her eyes flicked to the charging mass.

  It was a tidal wave of monsters.

  Thousands—no, tens of thousands—of black-chitined giants stormed across the great blue, so meaty and bulky they were stacked on top of each other as they crawled through the sea. They were all sorts of Giant-Class crabs, lobsters, and even a few dozen remipedes leading the charge, but none led the charge more than the colossal remipede slithering forward at the front of the wave.

  Kalakos, the Remipede God, snarled and shrugged off every cannonball that detonated in her face.

  The wave of bioarcanic mass was a kilometre away from the fleet. Not close enough to launch an attack on the fleet, but still too close for comfort.

  She snapped her focus back forward. The Mutant-Class water strider was still moving, skating straight for the front of the fleet. There were only a hundred ways it could destabilize the entire fleet. It could kill the Whitewhales pulling the ships to slow their momentum, it could destroy a marauder town or two to sow panic amongst the bandits, or it could skip right past the whales to just cleave a ship in half directly.

  If she fought the Mutant in the middle of the fleet, she’d definitely be able to kill it with the other Imperators, but the Mutant was hers to kill.

  Nobody else's.

  She angled her descent with her streamlined wings, wind howling in her ears. Then she tucked, flipped, and lined up her kick.

  The Mutant didn’t turn. It had no idea she was coming.

  She forced a grin onto her face, because she was going to have to smile all the way down.

  “Hey!”

  Her shout caught its attention. It whirled ten metres from contact, and in a single blink—contact.

  A clash of lightning.

  Their glaives collided, sending a shockwave that blasted seawater in every direction. Sparks bit at her skin, but she bared her teeth and pressed harder, forcing her weight into the clash, refusing to be knocked away.

  The Mutant-Class certainly tried to shove her back with nothing brute force, so she activated spraying discharge and blasted air behind her, giving her just that little extra bit of a boost.

  The force curved her glaive past the Mutant's own, and her glaive sank deep into its chest. Her glaive wasn't close to its heart—not even close—but her intention wasn't to kill it. She wouldn't be able to kill it on the surface if it was actually taking her seriously.

  So she wouldn't fight it on the surface.

  She drove them both into the ocean, breaking the surface like falling meteors, and the world immediately turned blue.

  Cold water engulfed her, pressure squeezing her lungs. Tiny bubbles shot past her ears as they spiraled downward, her glaive still buried in the Mutant’s chest.

  I ain't spent eight months fighting down in the whirlpool for nothing!

  Watch this!

  The Mutant thrashed under her, its long limbs snapping toward her like spears, but she had eight months of training. Eight months of learning to fight, kill, and move like a true deep-sea soldier. She doubted the wild water strider had ever fought beneath the waves before, let alone as deep as she was going to take it.

  [You have six minutes’ worth of oxygen from your gills mutation,] the Archive said. [Make them count.]

  She snapped both her hands up, fingers splayed wide, palms pointed to the surface. Repelling hydrospines sent a powerful force wave above her, pushing them deeper down. At the same time, she leveraged spraying discharge again and released jets of high-pressure water upwards, kicking up an explosion of bubbles as she propelled them even, even deeper.

  The ocean blurred past them in a streak of navy and black, the surface shrinking far above like a distant dream.

  No stopping now!

  Keep going!

  The Mutant snarled, a high-pitched, unnatural sound that carried through the crushing deep. It twisted its body, and then its apiclaws shot out, slashing toward her face in a blur.

  Her reflexes kicked in. Her own apiclaws snapped out, and sparks flickered as their blades clashed, putting them in a deadlock. Then she activated Storm Glaives again, and pinkish-blue currents crackled violently into the water.

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  The moment the lightning hit, the darkening sea lit up in jagged bursts of flickering light, illuminating the abyss. The charge coursed through the impaled Mutant, making it jerk and convulse. Marisol felt the electric burn lashing through her body as well, but she gritted her teeth and endured it. Her ‘Crystalline Underchitin’ dulled the worst of the electrocution and absorbed what would be completely lethal discharge instead.

  And it's a branch mutation right?

  [Which means this water strider in particular might not have the same branch mutation.]

  [It might not be able to use its Storm Glaives comfortably underwater.]

  Still, the Mutant continued convulsing. Its limbs thrashing wildly, but it didn’t die. It wouldn't die so easily. Its exoskeleton flared, resisting the worst of the lightning as it discharged its own lightning away from its glaives in an attempt to kick at her back.

  Marisol didn't let go. They kept plummeting.

  [Five hundred meters,] the Archive’s voice rang in her head. [Six hundred. Seven hundred. Eight hundred.]

  The deeper they went, the thicker the water around them turned in a near-total black void. The last remnants of sunlight had long since disappeared, swallowed by the deep. The only thing keeping them visible now was their flickering glaives, throwing erratic flashes through the abyss, and it wasn't hard to see the shadowed monsters lurking in the dark.

  Colossal shapes drifted beyond the light.

  Schools of serpentine horrors, bioluminescent tendrils pulsing in slow, hypnotic waves. Titanic crustaceans with legs the size of warship masts, jagged mandibles clicking in eerie anticipation. Other, more grotesque silhouettes prowled on the edges of her vision—all abyssal predators, circling the two of them like specters of the deep—but not a single one of them moved to interfere.

  They knew better than to get between two living lightning bolts.

  [Two thousand metres. Two thousand one hundred metres.]

  The Mutant's movements slowed.

  Marisol felt the moment the abyss started taking its toll. The Mutant's frantic apiclaw slashes weren’t as fast, its kicks not as sharp. Underwater pressure was crushing down on both of them, but it wasn’t used for this. She was. She remembered to flush out the nitrogen by pinching her nose and breathing bubbles through her mouth. She remembered to keep her senses open and feel for the natural underwater currents. She rode them further, further, further down, until neither of them could take the pressure easily anymore.

  [Two thousand two hundred metres.]

  The Mutant's strikes got sloppier.

  [Two thousand four hundred metres.]

  It flinched, glaives twitching unnaturally.

  [Two thousand six hundred metres.]

  It snarled, but the sound was weaker.

  [Two thousand eight hundred metres.]

  And Marisol bared her teeth in a grin.

  She owned this depth. The pressure, the weight, the blackness. This was her domain, three thousand metres beneath the surface.

  Then, impact once more.

  They slammed into the seabed like a meteor strike. A shockwave burst outward, a cataclysm of sand and silt erupting into a dense, blinding storm. The sheer force of their landing kicked up a cloud so thick and chaotic that it swallowed the light from their lightning glaives, turning the entire abyss into a writhing blur of black and gray.

  The moment they hit the ground, Marisol was thrown free. The force knocked her loose, and she tumbled, her body rolling across the seabed, slamming into jagged rocks and clusters of abyssal coral. Her back crashed against something hard, her skull rattled inside her head, and her vision flashed briefly white.

  Silence.

  For a moment, there was nothing. Just the sound of her own ragged breathing, the thrum of her heart pounding in her skull, and the faint flicker of her glaives still crackling with residual lightning.

  But eventually, the cloud of sand and debris settled slowly, and in the distance—in the quiet abyss—the Mutant-Class stirred.

  Marisol’s fingers twitched. Slowly, steadily, she clawed her way toward the tip of her crackling glaives. Every movement felt like dragging through sludge, the weight of the ocean pressing in on all sides, but she gritted her teeth and pushed through it.

  After all, the Mutant wasn't throwing in the towel yet. It clawed onto its glaives as well. Its exoskeleton flexed against the pressure, a grotesque display of sheer adaptability. It was an S-Rank Mutant-Class alright. Lesser bugs would've been crushed to paste by now, but this thing was adapting. It started vibrating its hydrospines so hard water pushed away from the both of them in a giant sphere—fifty metres in radius, a hundred metres wide—and it was a strange thing, being able to gasp for breath three thousand metres below the surface. Marisol certainly didn’t mind being able to breathe like normal all of a sudden.

  Nevertheless, they locked eyes in the underwater air bubble.

  The Mutant grinned. An eerily human-like grin. Its mandibles clicked, and then it spoke as it pointed a steady finger at her.

  “Strider challenger,” it rasped. “Fast or slow?”

  Marisol’s pulse thrummed in her ears. Silence stretched between them, the abyss waiting, watching. Then—she scoffed.

  A quiet, breathless sound.

  She raised her arms and moved, smooth and precise, demonstrating a dance sequence. Glide. Spin. Pause, raise arms. Twirl and caper. Sharp turn. Sharp pivot. Then jump—soar.

  Land. Steady. Quick steps, bend low, stretch arms. Twirl again. Faster now. Sharp turn. Sharp pivot. Jump again—graceful.

  Fluid motion, even three thousand metres below the surface. Once she finished the basic step routine, she planted her glaives into the sand and stared at the Mutant.

  The Mutant immediately copied her.

  If she had to describe it, it moved like a reflection, perfectly mirroring every single step as if it’d just been born knowing. It knew how to glide. It knew how to spin. It knew how to twirl, how to pivot, how to caper. When it went through the whole routine and ended with the beginning of the War Jump, it held both arms out in a Sand-Dancer’s neutral pose.

  Marisol nodded. The Mutant nodded back.

  Then they both turned, skating in opposite directions.

  Fifty metres apart.

  They stopped. Turned around. Faced each other again.

  They both took the same skating stance.

  They glared at each other. Lightning crackling, faint and subdued. They exhaled slowly, closed their eyes at the exact same moment, raised their arms in the exact same manner, and then—glide.

  Forward.

  They launched forward, kicking off the seabed, their speed exploding through the crushing dark. The ocean floor blurred beneath them, their bodies moving in perfect unison. Glide. Spin. Pause, raise arms. Twirl and caper. Sharp turn. Sharp pivot. Then jump, twenty metres apart from each other—and without hesitation, they both performed the War Jump, kicking outwards with their extended glaives.

  A sharp crack echoed across the abyss as they spun past each other, landed, skidded, and screeched to a halt fifty metres apart. They'd swapped places. She stood where it stood, and it stood where she stood.

  Perfect symmetry for perfect silence as the abyss watched.

  And she didn't have to look behind her to hear the water strider laughing in amusement.

  “Strider challenger… pretty.”

  It crumbled behind her as its torso split cleanly in half. Blood billowed into the abyss, curling through the water in slow-motion tendrils, but its voice—though fading—still echoed around her like a taunt as water came crashing in around them, plunging her back into the cold abyss.

  Marisol didn’t move.

  Didn’t blink.

  Even down here, at the bottom of the great blue, the Mutant had been recklessly fast. Maybe even faster than her. But speed wasn’t just about recklessness. There was grace, there was technique, and that was something it couldn’t just mimic in a single minute.

  She hadn’t been sand-dancing all her life for nothing, and in its ambition to become an Insect God—to become human—it’d chosen to mimic something it couldn't immediately best her in.

  ‘Explosive grace’.

  And you were spending so much energy vibrating your hydrospines to create an air bubble around us that you weren’t focusing on your ‘grace’ at all.

  [Objective #70: Slay the S-Rank Mutant-Class water strider]

  [Reward: 2,000 points]

  [Grade: A-Rank Mutant-Class → S-Rank Mutant-Class]

  Nice idea, though, making an air bubble this deep underwater so you can be in your ideal environment.

  Maybe even I… can…

  Her thoughts trailed off as she felt a suffocating tightness creeping up on her.

  Her lungs were starting to scream for air.

  Shit!

  The Archive's voice rang cold in her head. [You may have refilled your supply of air, but the ascent will take longer than the descent. You have six minutes to return to the surface.]

  She stumbled, her vision flickering for half a second. Too long down here.

  No time!

  Claw for the surface!

  With the last of her strength, she skated forward, grabbed both halves of the water strider’s carcass, and kicked off the seabed.

  Spraying discharge, activate. Repelling hydrospines, activate. The ocean above her parted like a collapsing tunnel, a temporary path carved out before slamming shut behind her as she cut upwards like a reverse falling star.

  Faster.

  Faster!

  Her chest burned. Oxygen running dry. Her body screamed for air, her vision tightening to a pinhole. The Archive’s endless warnings blurred into background noise.

  She knew she wasn’t going to make it alone.

  So when the light of the surface—just a distant white speck—moved down towards her, she instinctively reached out to grab onto it.

  A strong, steady, bandaged hand grabbed back.

  Somehow, she still managed to grin weakly.

  “... Good job, lass,” Victor said casually. “Now get your ass onto the fleet. The battle’s only starting.”

  Chapters remaining: 12

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