The water pressed against him, not like a simple liquid, but like a living, conscious entity. It was a cold, absolute, crushing weight that instantly silenced the world, leaving only the low, internal thud-thud of his own pulse.
Vorren—Zander, beneath the fragile mask of his false name—descended slowly, his body perfectly aligned with the vertical maintenance shaft that plunged toward the lower, lightless sections of the Nereis Biodome. The utility lights from the lagoon level above grew distant, fading from a bright teal to a dim, distant halo, and then to nothing. The depths swallowed him.
Around him, the black water shimmered faintly with spectral, moving rivers of light: streaks of electric blue and pale gold. They were the residual traces of the biodome's vast energy currents, leaking from the conduits that powered the city's ecosystem, painting the darkness with silent, ghostly fire.
He had descended to a thousand meters.
The pressure here was suffocating, a physical hand squeezing his skull, his chest, his very bones. But Zander had long since learned how to adapt. He exhaled slowly, a final, controlled plume, letting the last bubbles of air slip from his mouth before stilling completely. The silence became absolute, a tangible, heavy presence. His heartbeat, a slow, heavy thump, sounded impossibly loud, like a drum echoing inside a sealed steel tank.
Forty minutes.
That's how long he had managed to hold his breath during the last session. It was nearly double what he could achieve just months ago, a feat that defied human biology. Now, suspended in the quiet dark, he sought to push that boundary once more.
He crossed his legs, his body neutrally buoyant, and let himself float motionless. Eyes closed. His focus turned inward, away from the cold, away from the pressure, away from the screaming need of his lungs.
The Force wasn't just energy; it was motion, vibration, the invisible current threading through every atom. Down here, beneath the crushing, physical weight of the deep, he could feel it in its rawest form—dense, slow, and heavy, flowing through the surrounding ocean like a planetary pulse.
Zander extended his senses, not his sight or hearing, but his awareness.
The Force responded. It coiled around him like invisible, living tendrils, brushing against his skin in microscopic, tingling pulses. He guided it inward, not to build a shield against the pressure, but to match it. He drew the Force deep into his muscles, into the marrow of his bones. The external pressure became his tool; his body, the anvil.
Pain followed. It was not a warning; it was a confirmation. It was sharp, immediate, and vibrantly alive.
His veins throbbed as the physical weight of a thousand meters of water combined with the internal, psychic strain of Force compression. His muscles tensed involuntarily, every fiber screaming. But Zander didn't resist. He surrendered to it. He welcomed it, letting it temper him, layer by layer, crushing the weakness from his very cells.
Every heartbeat, every phantom contraction of his starving lungs, was a hammer stroke. This was what Sensei had meant by refinement before evolution.
He wasn't chasing power for its own sake. He was sculpting the vessel that would one day be strong enough to hold it.
Far above, in the biodome's sun-drenched primary training lagoon, Aethros paced near the edge of the water.
His claws, black as obsidian, dug deep trenches in the wet sand as he glared at the lagoon's placid, shimmering surface as if it were a mortal enemy. The feline's rippling reflection stared back, distorted by every nervous, huffing breath. Around him, bubbles rose from submerged filtration vents, filling the humid air with the constant, soft hiss of machinery.
He hated this.
The water, even this shallow, controlled pool, called to every buried, primal fear he possessed. It was a dread rooted deep in his bloodline, a genetic memory of helplessness. For his kind, water wasn't a place of strength; it was a trap. It was heavy. It was cold. It suffocated.
Still, he took a step forward. Then another.
The water lapped at his massive paws. Cold. Clinging. His dual hearts began to race, a frantic, uneven rhythm. He remembered the icy, turbulent river—the one that had nearly ended him months ago. The feeling of his fur, heavy and waterlogged, dragging him down. The sheer, animal panic as his lungs burned. The suffocating helplessness.
Not again.
Aethros snarled, a low, guttural sound of self-disgust, and lunged forward, splashing heavily into the lagoon. The shock of the cold water was a violation, making him tremble, but he forced himself to move. His massive frame cut through the surface, not with grace, but with sheer, brute-force desperation.
"Steady," Vorren's voice echoed faintly in his memory, a calm anchor in his panic. "Control the rhythm. Don't fight the water—guide it."
He tried.
At first, he sank like a stone. His movements were erratic, too forceful. His powerful claws swiped through the liquid, not pushing, but tearing at it, creating a chaotic turbulence that only hindered him. The instinct to fight, to tear his way back to solid ground, almost made him retreat.
But he didn't.
Instead, he stayed in. His long, scaled tail flicked for balance. His hind legs kicked, awkward but fiercely determined. He swam short, frantic laps, reaching from one end of the lagoon to the other. It wasn't graceful, but it was progress.
He surfaced after a minute, gasping, his massive frame shuddering.
A day ago, he could barely last thirty seconds before the panic became overwhelming.
Now, he was pushing a full minute.
Over the next several days, their training became a ritual of parallel suffering.
Zander would dive deep—sometimes alone in the shaft, sometimes wearing a high-pressure suit that recorded his vitals, though he often turned the sensors off. He trusted his own instincts more than any digital readout.
Aethros would remain in the biodome's upper sectors, gradually adapting to deeper and deeper levels of the lagoon each time. The technicians monitoring the biodome watched his progress from afar, their faces pressed against observation glass, astonished at his endurance and his capacity to heal from the strain of hyper-pressure training.
By the end of the first week, he was swimming through the lagoon's high-velocity current chambers with a new, near-fluid grace. His claws, once tearing at the water, now sliced through it, leaving faint, shimmering trails of amber energy as he learned to channel his internal Primal Force even underwater.
Still, the fear lingered—like a ghost in the deep.
Every time the shadows beneath him moved, every time he caught a glimpse of the darker, open-bottomed shafts below, his instinct screamed at him to leave. He ignored it, his growls muffled by the water. He remembered Vorren's words:
"If you can master fear, you can master anything."
Down below, Zander's world had narrowed to rhythm, pressure, and silence.
At one thousand meters, he hovered near the biodome's colossal structural pylons. They were mountains of alloy and cultivated, glowing coral that anchored the entire city to the seafloor. Faint blue diagnostic lights pulsed along their surfaces, casting eerie, shifting patterns of light and shadow across his skin.
He focused his breathing, which was no longer breathing at all, but a cycle of internal energy. Slow. Measured. Each inhale was a command, pulling the Force inward. Each exhale was a surrender, integrating it.
The pressure here was enough to crush unprotected flesh into pulp in seconds. But Zander used the Force to resist it—not by pushing outward, which would be a futile, exhausting fight, but by harmonizing with it. He allowed his body's internal density to synchronize with the ocean's external density. He was no longer a foreign object; he was just another pressure, another part of the deep. He was water, pressure, and will.
He felt every microcurrent, every fractional shift in temperature, every echo of vibration from the city far above.
Then, for a moment—clarity.
A perfect, ringing moment of stillness where the pain and the pressure vanished. The Force expanded. He could see it, not with his eyes, but with his awareness. He saw the life-force of the pylon's coral, a slow, green pulse. He saw the electric signature of the city above, a web of light. He saw the distant, cold-blooded thoughts of a predator moving in the blackness, kilometers away. It all formed a vast, interconnected, living network.
He drifted in awe, silent and motionless.
Then—pain.
A sharp, agonizing tremor rippled through his chest. His body, pushed beyond its absolute limit, rebelled. His chest seized in a violent, involuntary spasm. He gasped, a mistake. A precious, explosive cloud of silver bubbles burst from his mouth, shooting for the surface. The water pressed harder, heavier, instantly filling the vacuum.
His lungs screamed, not for air, but against the void. His muscles trembled violently. The instinct to flee, to shoot for the surface, was a physical, nauseating command.
Not yet, he thought, his mind a diamond of focus in the midst of the body's betrayal.
His lungs felt as if they were collapsing. His vision tunneled. But instead of surfacing, he focused inward one last, desperate time. The Force surged through him—tempering, compressing, reforging. He felt his very bones hum and sing, as if they were melting and re-cooling all at once around this new, incredible pressure.
When he finally pushed upward, his ascent controlled even in his oxygen-starved state, he broke the surface minutes later with a gasping, desperate breath.
He floated on his back, chest heaving. The timer on his wrist, its screen cracked from the pressure, read 44:17.
His vision was a kaleidoscope of black spots and blurring light, but his mind was sharper, clearer, and colder than ever.
Almost there, he thought, his breath ragged. But not yet. Not until every sense, every instinct, obeys me.
Later, in the biodome's high-pressure observation chamber, Aethros rested beside him. His damp fur gave off the faint, coppery scent of his exertion, his tail twitching. The great beast had managed to swim through the full perimeter circuit for the first time that day—nearly two kilometers of controlled, panicked, but completed submersion.
Vorren sat on the metal bench, a faint, weary smile curving his lips. "You're getting better."
Aethros gave a low rumble that might have been a laugh, his voice a gravelly vibration. "If I drown, I'll haunt you."
Vorren chuckled softly, the sound quiet in the humming room. "I'd deserve it."
They sat in the heavy, pressurized silence, watching the artificial sun begin its programmed "rise" beyond the dome's massive glass wall. The warm, golden light felt like a lie against the cold, hard truth of the depths they had just left.
Somewhere far beneath them, the real ocean pulsed with unseen life. Pressure, light, and Force intertwined—testing, molding, and strengthening them both.
Neither of them spoke again. They didn't need to. The abyss was teaching them, in its own crushing, silent language, more than words ever could.