Countless pitch-black tentacles coiled tightly around the midsection of the capsized aircraft carrier, treating the twenty-seven-thousand-ton warship like a child's discarded toy.
With a final, catastrophic groan of collapsing steel bulkheads, the behemoth dragged the vessel straight down into the lightless abyss of the Pacific.
The entire sinking had unfolded in less than three minutes. The surrounding naval escort flotilla had barely managed to process the nightmare before the surface closed over their flagship.
Aboard an escort destroyer a nautical mile away, Vice Admiral Saitō gripped the bridge sill, his eyes bloodshot and wide with horror.
He could hardly comprehend the visual feed before him. The pride of the his nation's maritime fleet—the cornerstone of their regional power projection—had been wiped from the face of the earth in the span of a single breath.
The only mercy was that he had transferred his tactical flag to the escort vessel rather than remaining in the carrier's primary command island; had he stayed, his bones would already be crushed under the hydrostatic weight of the trench.
Snapping out of his paralyzed daze, Saitō lunged for the fleet-wide emergency channel, screaming with every ounce of air in his lungs:
"Retreat! All units, full reverse! Disengage immediately!!"
At this catastrophic junction, Saitō had zero alternative. The campaign was already an absolute, unmitigated defeat. Standard shipboard munitions and torpedo salvos were fundamentally incapable of piercing the dense biological hide of an abyssal behemoth. Prolonging the engagement would only yield an ocean of floating corpses.
The moment the withdrawal order blared across the intercoms, every surviving destroyer and frigate frantically pivoted their bows, churning white foam as their turbines throttled to maximum reverse.
It wasn't merely Saitō who recognized the futility of the slaughter—the sailors on deck had long since lost the will to fight an enemy that could crush them at will while remaining completely immune to their fire.
Yet despite the frantic speed of their retreat, the predatory reaction of the deep-sea leviathan was far faster.
SPLASH!
The massive, barnacle-encrusted tentacles that had just dragged the aircraft carrier into the abyss broke the surface once more.
Compared to the colossal hull of the capital carrier, the smaller five-thousand-ton destroyers were practically fragile kindling. A single muscular tentacle was wide enough to wrap entirely around a warship's midsection—and the abyssal behemoth commanded dozens of them.
SKRRR-CRUNCH!
"Open fire! Open fire!!" Saitō's hoarse, ragged roar echoed through the fleet broadcast. "Weapons free! Counterattack! All personnel, counterattack!!"
Sailors who could still keep their footing on the violently listing decks threw themselves behind heavy machine guns, automatic shotguns, and deck-mounted cannons. Muzzle flashes ignited the sea air in a frenzied circle of orange fire.
Bullets hammered into the rubbery hide, splattering thick, bile-green blood across the bridge windows.
"Warriors of the fleet!" Saitō yelled into his microphone, his voice cutting through the ringing gunfire. "We have zero hope of escaping this abyss! Since survival is denied to us... let these abyssal monsters witness the final resolve of our nation!!"
The veteran commander had long since stepped out of the safety of the bridge.
Having secured his waist to the starboard deck railing with a heavy nylon harness, Saitō raised a standard-issue assault rifle to his shoulder. His knuckles were pale, his jaw set with suicidal fury.
He pulled the trigger, unloading an entire magazine straight into the towering wall of black flesh rising less than ten feet from his face.
ROAAAR!
Stung by the barrage of concentrated gunfire, the massive tentacle thrashed in sudden irritation. The violent tremor tossed the destroyer like a cork. Under the leviathan's tightening muscular contraction, the warship's reinforced spine snapped clean in two.
With a thunderous explosion of steam and seawater, the severed halves of the destroyer plunged into the depths, dragging Saitō's strapped body into the dark waters below.
Though the commander perished, his final words had successfully ignited the dying embers of human defiance.
Across every encircled vessel, sailors ceased all attempts to abandon ship. Abandoning their survival instincts, they stood their ground, screaming curses as they unloaded every remaining round into the dark appendages constricting their hulls.
Yet against a primordial beast of the abyss, such defiance achieved nothing beyond blinding irritation.
Stimulated by the burning pain of countless small-arms rounds, the leviathan ceased playing with its food. With brutal, catastrophic momentum, its tentacles slammed the coiled warships violently against the ocean's surface, smashing hulls into twisted scrap metal before dragging the wreckage down.
Within minutes, an unnatural, dead silence descended over the southwestern waters.
There was no sound of humming turbine engines. No mechanical roar of rotating gun turrets. Only the faint, oily lap of waves against jagged debris, and a handful of surviving sailors desperately kicking toward floating wooden crates and life vests.
Yet the Atlantean vanguard, circling the perimeter like a school of ravenous sharks, held zero intention of allowing survivors to reach land.
THWACK!
A young sailor who had just pulled himself onto a floating crate hadn't even found the breath to celebrate his miraculous luck before a razor-sharp coral spear pierced straight through his sternum.
A silent, merciless mop-up unfolded across the blood-stained sea. Within a quarter of an hour, the human voices fell entirely silent.
The Southwestern Fleet of the Maritime Self-Defense Force had been completely, utterly annihilated.
[Tokyo — Ministry of Defense Operations Bunker]
Deep beneath the capital, the command operations center fell into a suffocating, tomb-like quiet.
Every officer stared at the main screen, where over forty digital warship transponders had blinked out of existence in rapid succession, leaving only empty blue ocean markers.
Standing behind the central battle console, the Defense Minister stared at the blank grid, his fists trembling so violently that his fingernails broke skin.
"Authorize the strike," the Minister whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying, suppressed fury.
"Launch it."
Out on the blood-tinged battlefield, the colossal sea leviathan idly slapped its massive tentacles against the rolling swells, blowing plumes of water into the air like a contented beast after a heavy meal.
Around it, thousands of Atlantean warriors breached the surface, brandishing their tridents and singing victorious tribal anthems as they basked in the warmth of the sun.
Standing atop the crest of his war beast, Attuma surveyed the flaming wreckage with his chest thrown out. Every gaze directed toward him from the waters below was saturated with fanatical, religious reverence.
"Look upon this, Arno!" Attuma laughed, his booming voice echoing over the waves. "The surface-dwellers are broken! I have achieved a conquest that even Namor in all his arrogance never dared to dream of! The total humiliation of humanity!"
Attuma was completely drunk on the euphoria of power, his rugged face beaming with unmasked arrogance.
Standing half a pace behind him, however, General Arno's expression remained deeply troubled. An unshakable, cold premonition hung over his thoughts like a suffocating shroud.
'Is this truly the military ceiling of an industrialized human superpower?' Arno thought, his sharp eyes scanning the empty sky. 'A civilization that split the atom and built iron cities across continents... felled by a single vanguard assault?'
It made zero strategic sense.
Arno opened his mouth, intending to urge his new king to submerge the army beneath the protective density of the thermocline—
SHREEEEEEK!
High above the horizon, the thick cloud layer was violently cleaved in two.
A blinding, hypersonic trail of white vapor tore across the sky, shrieking toward the ocean at Mach 4.
Arno's combat instincts, honed through decades of studying surface military doctrine, recognized the trajectory in a fraction of a millisecond.
There was no time to sound an alarm.
Without uttering a single syllable, Arno lunged forward, grabbing Attuma by the collar of his golden breastplate, and hurled both of their bodies headfirst into the ocean depths.
"What in the hell are you—?!" Attuma began to roar, entirely unprepared for the sudden treasonous tackle.
FLASH!
Before the usurper could finish his curse, an apocalyptic flash of incandescent white light erased the surface world.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!
A supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, packing a multi-ton high-explosive thermobaric warhead, detonated dead center among the celebrating surface ranks.
The colossal shockwave tore through the water, violently blowing Attuma and Arno backward across the seabed like dry leaves in a gale. Above them, the sea surface collapsed into a massive, boiling crater, displacing millions of tons of water into a towering, vaporized geyser that pierced the upper atmosphere.
A blinding vacuum pulled thousands of gallons of water into a roaring, localized maelstrom.
Seconds dragged on like centuries before the concussive pressure waves finally dissipated into the surrounding trenches.
Gasping for breath, Attuma forced his stinging eyes open, looking up through the murky water toward the surface.
The sight made the blood in his veins turn to ice.
The thousands of Atlantean warriors who had breached the surface to celebrate were gone. Not a single body remained intact; the raw thermal energy of the missile strike had incinerated them in a microsecond, while the subsequent kinetic blast wave had shredded the accompanying sea beasts into floating chum.
Fortunately, the strike had targeted the surface coordinates. The dense, non-compressible physics of deep seawater had absorbed roughly seventy percent of the concussive force, leaving the reserve units waiting on the seabed bruised and disoriented, but alive.
Attuma's chest heaved violently as he pushed himself up from the silt, cold sweat mingling with the saltwater on his brow.
The dawn of his grand coronation had nearly been extinguished by his own hubris.
"This is..." Attuma rasped, his voice shaking.
"A long-range strike," Arno answered coldly, swimming back to his sovereign's side. "Humanity's retribution. The war has only just begun, King Attuma."
Attuma swallowed hard, his arrogant swagger utterly shattered.
"Arno..." Attuma gritted his teeth, his eyes narrowing with venomous malice. "Deploy the converters. Prepare our next offensive."
Meanwhile, inside the silent, suspended realm of the King of Sky and Wind.
Chisei Gen, flanked by the Avengers, the Execution Bureau enforcers, and the stranded Atlantean royal contingent, finally set foot upon the high terrace before the grand palace.
The long march across the wide bluestone causeway had been suffocatingly tense, yet miraculous. Not a single one of the thousands of dragon-scaled sentinels lining the path had stirred.
"Well, looks like those Deadpools really were just fossils," Crow muttered, tossing away his cigarette butt with a relaxed smirk. "This Nibelungen has probably been rotting in vacuum for three thousand years."
The oppressive silence that had held the coalition in a vice grip finally snapped. A low ripple of murmurs and rustling armor spread through the ranks as sailors and agents alike breathed a collective sigh of relief.
While the Atlanteans sank onto the marble steps to conserve their physical energy in the dry air, Chisei Gen strode directly to the colossal, ancient stone gates of the inner sanctum.
Sakura Yabuki dropped to one knee, her gloved fingers lightly brushing the pale dust accumulated along the threshold.
"High Patriarch," Sakura reported quietly, her sharp eyes tracing the disturbed stone. "There are distinct signs of recent passage. The seal was breached barely an hour ago."
Chisei offered no verbal reply.
His dark eyes remained cold, focused, and steady. Reaching out with both hands, he planted his palms firmly against the ancient, carved relief of the doors—and shoved them open into the dark.
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