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CHAPTER FIVE: FIRST BLOOD
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I.
Shanghai. Chongming Island. Eastern coast.
Three hundred meters of flesh stretched across the boundary of sand and shallow sea. It had no fixed shape — an amalgamation of 137 human bodies fused into one massive, writhing organism. Countless mouths opened and closed on its surface. Countless eyes rolled and blinked. It breathed in five-second cycles, each breath sending visible shockwaves through the surrounding air.
Three days ago, this had been a fishing village. Men, women, children, elderly. They had metamorphosed simultaneously in one night and spent the following twelve hours slowly, agonizingly merging into one.
Code name: the Catch.
Qi Yue activated his golden eyes. In that spectrum, the Catch was not a mound of flesh — it was a tangle of over a hundred souls, twisted together. Most were dim, nearly extinguished. But at the deepest center, one soul burned brighter than the rest — shielding thirty-four others within itself, like an exhausted man holding everyone he could in his arms.
"There are survivors," Qi Yue reported. "At least thirty. A core consciousness at the center — one person protecting the others."
Nadia's Death Sight confirmed: "Thirty-four surviving souls. Core is the village chief, sixty-seven years old. His desire was to protect everyone. He's been holding them together. But he's fracturing."
Alexandros closed his eyes. White pupils. The Oracle showed fragments — water receding. Light rising. Light fading. A person falling. White hair.
"Chiya enters for purification. Qi Yue — you are her escort. At any cost."
Qi Yue didn't argue. "If there are survivors, we save them. Non-negotiable."
First time he'd accepted Alexandros's command.
II.
The Catch struck first.
When Nadia's Death Sight probed it, the Cthulhu-will within the creature detected the intrusion. Dozens of tentacles — each as thick as a utility pole — erupted from the surface. All aimed at Qi Yue and Nadia's position.
Qi Yue's body moved three-tenths of a second before his brain. Ironclad Body at full output — muscle density quadrupled, tendon elasticity amplified to absorb over two tons of instantaneous force. He grabbed Nadia around the waist and leaped backward. His takeoff cracked the sand.
The nearest tentacle smashed the spot where they'd stood. A crater two meters wide.
"It's seen us!"
Alexandros, three hundred meters back, raised both hands. White lightning flickered at his fingertips. He wasn't attacking — he was reshaping the battlefield. Heavenly Authority manipulated electromagnetic fields and atmospheric conditions.
In thirty seconds, wind rose from nothing to Force 8. Force 9. Force 10. Precisely directed from sea to shore, pressing the Catch away from the waterline.
This was step one: sever its connection to the ocean. As long as it touched seawater, it could regenerate infinitely.
Erik had been waiting. He stood on the coastal bluff, wind whipping his blond hair back, eyes now pure blue-white light.
He raised both fists.
Slammed them down.
Not at the Catch. At the rock beneath his feet. The impact radiated a two-meter fracture pattern. Simultaneously, three bolts of lightning fell from the storm clouds Alexandros had summoned — each one precisely guided to strike the three thickest tentacle joints.
Thunder shook the ground.
Each bolt exceeded 30,000 degrees — five times the sun's surface temperature. The struck tissue blackened instantly, muscles seizing, connection points cracking. Three tentacles dropped limp.
Five seconds later, the charred tissue began sloughing off. New pink flesh grew from beneath. Ten seconds: full regeneration. Thicker than before.
"No good. It heals. Comes back bigger each time."
"Because it's still connected to the sea," Nadia's voice crackled through comms. "Its base has at least twenty root-tendrils extending into the seabed — each one siphoning energy from the ocean. It's like an umbilical cord. Until the cord is cut —"
"Understood," Alexandros said. "Plan adjustment. Step one: Qi Yue severs the roots. Step two: Nadia suppresses regeneration with Underworld Rift. Step three: Erik and I apply maximum pressure. Step four: Chiya enters for purification."
"The root connections are at the base — its underside," Qi Yue said. "You want me to go under that thing?"
"The wind has pushed it roughly thirty meters from the waterline. You need to get to its belly, find the root attachment points, and break them."
Qi Yue looked at the Catch — a three-hundred-meter mass of screaming flesh with dozens of tentacles whipping through the air.
"Fine."
He ran.
Ironclad Body boosted his sprint far beyond human limits. One hundred meters in under four seconds. Each footfall hammered the sand into a crater.
Tentacles came from above.
First — a horizontal sweep from the upper right. He ducked. It passed half a meter over his head, the air displacement ringing in his ears.
Second — a straight thrust from directly ahead, like a lance. He sidestepped left at full speed — reaction time under 0.1 seconds — the tentacle's tip buried itself two meters into the sand beside him.
Third and fourth — simultaneous pincer from both sides. No dodge available. The attack angles sealed every evasion route.
He didn't dodge.
He caught them.
Both hands seized a tentacle each. The surface was wet, warm — body temperature, 37°C — and writhing like a massive snake. Small eyes on the tentacles rolled beneath his palms. Mouths opened and closed between his fingers.
He squeezed. Ironclad Body's grip strength: enough to deform steel pipe. The chitinous shell cracked — ga-ga-ga — and he tore both tentacles apart, creating a body-width gap.
He dove through and kept running.
The Catch's underside was like an inverted, writhing ceiling — various tissue types churning overhead, occasional drops of body fluid falling with soft splats.
Twenty-three root-tendrils. Each one arm-thick, gray-black, coated in a chitinous shell harder than bone. They drove vertically from the flesh mass into the sand, through the substrate to the groundwater and seawater seepage below.
Qi Yue punched the first one.
Impact against chitin felt like hitting stone — but his fist exceeded stone's tolerance by orders of magnitude. The shell shattered like glass, fracture lines radiating outward, and the root-tendril's connection point snapped clean.
Dark green fluid sprayed from the stump. Temperature near sixty degrees. It hissed against his forearm — no damage through Ironclad Body, but the burn sensation told him these roots were the creature's blood supply. Cutting them was bleeding it dry.
"One," he said into comms.
Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth.
Punch. Crack. Spray. Next.
The Catch screamed louder with each severed root. Tentacles redirected from all quadrants toward its vulnerable underside. The density of incoming attacks escalated — from a dozen to over thirty.
"Forty seconds," Alexandros reported. "After that, tentacle density will be impassable."
Qi Yue accelerated. One punch per second. Fists coated in green ichor and shell fragments. Each full-power strike cost stamina — Ironclad Body enhanced but didn't eliminate the energy cost.
Tenth. Eleventh. Twelfth.
He dodged between punches — sidestepping, ducking, jumping, pivoting, blocking with elbows, deflecting with knees. Tactical evasion degraded into survival instinct as his brain couldn't analyze each trajectory fast enough. Pure muscle memory took over.
"Twenty seconds."
Fifteenth. Sixteenth.
A tentacle hit him from his blind spot — dead behind. The impact drove him two stumbling steps forward. For a normal human, that strike would have shattered the spine. Qi Yue's back muscles locked on impact, forming a wall of flesh armor. It hurt — hurt like being hit by a truck — but he didn't fall. Didn't even stop. His fist was already swinging at the seventeenth root before the stumble completed.
"Five seconds."
Eighteenth. Nineteenth.
"Time's up! Qi Yue, get out!"
Above him, tentacles wove into a dense net — a cage closing around his position. Two seconds later, it would seal shut.
He gathered every remaining ounce of strength and jumped straight up. His body rocketed through the tentacle lattice like a cannonball. He tucked, shouldered through a gap between two tentacles — their torn surfaces scraping burns across his shoulders, green fluid spattering his face — and cleared the encirclement.
Landed ten meters out on open sand.
Nineteen of twenty-three roots severed.
"Nadia. Now."
Nadia stepped from behind the rocks. Her arm's black markings had extended from her eyes down her neck, across her collarbone, all the way to her fingertips.
She raised her right hand.
The Underworld Rift opened.
Not a physical crack — reality itself thinning at that point. Like a knife pressed against paper, leaving a crease without cutting through. From the rift poured not matter but absence. Temperature absent. Life force absent. Existence itself absent.
The absence hit the Catch's regenerating tissue. Growth stopped instantly. New buds withered, turned gray, then black. Dead from the inside out.
Regeneration time — previously five seconds — stretched to thirty. Then sixty. Then longer.
"Regeneration suppressed," Nadia reported, strain in her voice.
"Erik." Alexandros. "Full power. Now."
Erik had been waiting for exactly this.
He roared — not a command, not a cry, just rage made audible. He thought of Marcus. Of gray fingernails. Of as strong as you.
Lightning fell.
Not three bolts. Not five. A curtain. The entire sky turned white — like someone stuffed the sun into the clouds and flipped the switch. Dozens of blue-white pillars struck the Catch simultaneously. Thunder wasn't a single boom but a continuous five-second roar, a thousand drums at once. The ground shook. The air stank of ozone. Qi Yue's hair stood on end from static.
Massive areas of the Catch's surface charred and peeled away — and this time, with regeneration suppressed, they didn't grow back.
The deep tissue was exposed: dense, dark-red fiber laced with faint lights.
Souls. Trapped in the fibers.
"I see them," Qi Yue said. "The surface is open. Chiya — now."
Chiya was already running.
She'd left her position without orders. She couldn't wait. The souls were dying. Every second of delay meant fewer she could save.
Qi Yue pivoted instantly — moved to intercept, clearing a corridor through the remaining tentacles. One swung toward her; he punched through it without breaking stride.
Chiya reached close range. Five meters from the Catch's exposed interior.
She stopped. Hands together.
White-gold light erupted from her entire body — ten times more powerful than what she'd shown in the briefing room. Light poured from her palms, her fingers, every pore. Her hair rose in the radiance — tips bleaching from black to white-gold in real time.
The light flooded into the Catch. Where it touched corrupted flesh, the tissue didn't burn — it restored. Charred matter dissolved into ash. Twisted fiber relaxed, softened, separated. Human forms began to emerge — peeling away one by one from the monstrous mass. Coated in slime, naked, shaking — but alive.
Not all of them.
Some emerged without life signs. Bodies intact, eyes empty. Souls already consumed.
At the deepest center, the light found the chief.
His soul looked like an old man at the end of his endurance. Arms spread. Holding the last few lights in his embrace. His own soul was more crack than substance — a porcelain vase dropped too many times, somehow still holding its shape.
Chiya's light enveloped him.
His soul trembled. His mouth moved. She heard it — not through sound, through light.
"Did they all... get out?"
Tears fell from her eyes.
"They did. You can let go now."
The old man smiled. His own smile. The smile of someone who'd finished the job.
He released his arms.
The last five lights drifted free, guided by Chiya's radiance. Five more bodies emerged. Medics rushed in.
The old man's soul scattered in the light. Like morning fog in sunshine.
His name was Chen Gensheng. Sixty-seven. Fisherman.
He held thirty-four lives together with his own soul for three days.
---
The Catch, without its core consciousness, collapsed. Three hundred meters of biomass sagged, slumped, and decomposed into gray-white organic matter in under thirty seconds.
Chiya's light went out.
Her knees buckled.
Qi Yue caught her before she hit the ground.
She weighed nothing. Her hair — half white now. Face transparent-pale. She looked up at him with eyes that took two seconds to focus.
She smiled. Tired. Pained. But clear. Completely her own.
Her first words weren't "I'm fine."
"...How many did we save?"
III.
Of 137, thirty-four were recovered.
Twenty-one would eventually return to normal life.
Thirteen required lifelong psychological treatment.
One hundred and three souls were lost forever.
The village chief's name was Chen Gensheng. Sixty-seven. Fisherman.
He shielded thirty-four lives with his own soul.
No one knew what he did.
But he did it.
On the beach at sunset, five people stood at the edge of the three-hundred-meter scar the Catch had left behind. Qi Yue pulled out a cigarette. No lighter.
Erik extended his index finger. A tiny blue-white spark — lighter-flame sized.
Click.
The cigarette caught.
They looked at each other. Qi Yue grinned — his first real smile in months. Erik grinned back.
Five people facing the sunset and the sea. Silent. Far out on the water, something flashed beneath the surface — not sunlight. Deeper. Colder.
Watching them.
Not worried. It had all the time in the world.