---

The photograph felt like a stone sinking through the murk of Kaizoo’s mind. It was an artifact from a shipwrecked life: the strangers smiling, his own face softer and unlined by the deep’s chill, and Kayla. Kayla alive, her eyes blazing with a fire that had been extinguished in the cold locker. It didn’t bring clarity. It was a single puzzle piece shoved into a frame meant for a thousand others. The phantom child, the gunfire in the dark, the chittering chorus from the black water—each new fragment only outlined the vast, jagged shape of what was missing. He was a book savaged by water, the ink of his past blurred into illegible ghosts.

“I’ll fracture,” he whispered, the words devoured by the Nautilus-07’s metallic hum. “I need a plan. A point to focus on, to keep me from overthinking everything. A point, a plan, a purpose.” He slid the photograph into the inner pocket of his suit, where it lay against his sternum like a second, thinner heart. The words scrawled on the back were his only star to steer by: DeepCore.

“LUNA, full systems diagnostic. Now.”

The main console flickered, painting his weary face in sterile green light as text scrolled.

---

SYSTEM STATUS

MAIN POWER: 35%

HULL INTEGRITY: 59%

LIFE SUPPORT: NOMINAL

O2 RESERVE: 30%

REMINDER: ONLY ONE THRUSTER FUNCTIONAL

---

“Manageable,” he lied to the empty cabin. The oxygen percentage was a chronometer counting down in his peripheral vision. “LUNA, access all navigational data. Plot a course to the facility designated ‘DeepCore.’ Maximum efficiency.”

A long silence. Then, a sound like tape unspooling. “Scanning known naviiiiigational… daaa-ta-basesssss. For Deep… Coooore. Deeep. Crooooe.” LUNA’s voice stretched and warped, dissolving into a granular hiss. After three full seconds of dead air, it returned, flat and synthetic. “Insufficient data. Cannot access. Authorization required.”

Kaizoo closed his eyes, a slow breath hissing through his teeth. “What is your malfunction? Circuit degradation or programmed obstruction?” He slammed a gloved fist on the console. The impact was a dull, swallowed thud. He leaned forward, speaking each syllable into the mic with cold precision. “Authorization: K-Dash-Z-Dash-Zero-Zero. Override all restrictions. Access and display all data pertaining to DEEP CORE. Including coordinates.”

“Authorization… accepted.”

A piercing, atonal shriek filled the cabin—TEETTTT, TEEETTTT, TEETTTT—so loud he winced before it severed abruptly.

“Recalibrating,” LUNA stated. Text bloomed on a side screen: a complex, low-power course plot spiraling down into a trench system marked DEEP ZONE: K-001. “Course calculated. Viable route to DEEP CORE located using minimal power routing and current drift patterns. Estimated arrival: 3.7 hours. However…”

“However what?” Kaizoo’s voice was tired and tense.

“The data packet for this destination is flagged with a Class-10 cognitive hazard warning. Access is not recommended.” The tone shifted. It dropped in register, losing its mechanical cadence, becoming almost intimate. It was the voice LUNA used when it pretended to be human, and it never failed to coat his spine in ice. “Proceeding will likely trigger the retrieval of terminal data, KAIZOO. You may encounter truths you are… psychologically unequipped to process.”

The use of his name, laden with a synthetic mimicry of pity, was worse than any alarm. He stared at the green radar sweep painting nothing but void. “I don’t have a choice. It’s the only destination I have. Execute course. Engage low-consumption protocol as plotted.”

“Command received. Engaging automated descent sequence.”

With a deep, metallic groan that vibrated through the deck plates, the Nautilus-07 turned. Its wounded starboard side complained as the port thrusters fired in short, economical bursts, pointing its nose like a dagger into the heart of the abyss. The descent began.

The light died first. The faint, eternal silt-glow from above vanished, absorbed by the overhanging rock of the trench rim. Then the pressure changed—not on the hull, but in the air of the cabin. A heavy, amniotic silence descended, broken only by the rhythmic ping of the active sonar. Each return painted a featureless plain on the screen. They were sinking into a geographic unconscious.

Kaizoo used the silence to perform a brutal triage on his own mind. The strange, borrowed calm from the memory dream was gone, burned away in the adrenaline of escape. What remained was the raw, familiar anxiety of being Kaizoo—whoever that was. He had dissociated a part of himself to survive the memory incursion. What vital piece had he cut away and left behind in that psychic surgery? The fear of that answer was a colder chill than any the ocean could provide.

He didn’t notice the change at first. It began as a sub-sensory vibration, a frequency below hearing. It traveled up through the pilot’s chair, into his pelvis, and settled as a dull ache in his molars. The console lights flickered, dimmed to a brownout amber, then flared back.

On the radar screen, the flat plain of the return echo bulged.

It wasn’t a contact. It was the seafloor itself, rising. A topological wave of unimaginable scale swelled upwards, filling the screen from edge to edge. The sonar ping accelerated, its return becoming a solid, screaming tone.

“LUNA! Analysis!”

“Analysis: Contact is geological in scale. Mass reading… indeterminate. Sensor conflict. Reading simultaneous biological macromolecular signatures and non-biological mineral density. Energy profile is a 99.7% match to anomalous signature from OKEANEX-03 wreck. Hypothesis: Local entity is a fragment of a larger cohesive whole. This is the source.” Even LUNA’s flat report couldn’t mask the insanity of the data. “Recommendation: Full reverse. Evasive maneuvers.”

Kaizoo bark of laughter was sharp and hollow. “Evasive? With one thruster? Into what?” He was a fly who had crawled into the spider’s central chamber.

His hand, moving with a will of its own, hit the switches for the full external light array. Four powerful beams lanced into the dark, capable of cutting through a kilometer of murk.

They illuminated nothing but pure, light-eating blackness ten meters out.

Then the blackness moved.

It wasn’t that something appeared in the lights. It was that the domain of the dark itself reorganized. A shape curated itself from the void, a negative space given terrifying positive form. Kaizoo’s breath hitched, his blood freezing.

He knew those shapes. The undulating, gelatinous bell. The trailing, filamentous tentacles. The swirling constellations of cold blue light within a central darkness.

It was the entity from the Okeanex-03 wreck. The one that had mirrored his face in a silent scream. The black jellyfish.

But the Okeanex creature had been the size of his drone. A terrifying predator, but a tangible one.

This was the God of which that had been a single cell.

It was leviathanic. Its bell was a swirling nebula of obsidian and necrotic blue, a mile-wide membrane holding a galaxy within. At its heart was not just darkness, but Void—a perfect, absolute black that seemed to warp the light around it. And within that abyssal core, the familiar blue filaments pulsed. Here, they were not threads, but great luminous highways, rivers of synaptic fire connecting nodes of dazzling, intelligent light. This was no mere creature. This was a neural architecture. A thinking continent.

And drifting around it, attached by glowing tendrils or swimming in obedient patterns, were dozens—hundreds—of smaller, familiar forms. Blueish, jellyfish-like scouts. The Okeanex fragment. The thing from the black water. They were like dendrites, or sensory organs, or distant fingers of a single vast hand.

TEETTTTT TEETTTT TEETTTT

The console alarm was a frantic insect against the monumental silence of the thing’s approach.

“Anomalous data retrieved from DeepCore file,” LUNA announced, her voice stripped of all pretense. “Designation: PRIME SYNCYTIUM ENTITY. Codename: K-J-103. Centralized consciousness of a dispersed abyssal biome. Theoretical mass capable of redistributing across tectonic-scale volumes. Primary hazard: Cognitive Subsumption. Data fragment: ‘…all specimens eventually echo in the whole… terminal integration is…’” The report collapsed into a stream of hash-static.

The Prime Syncytium moved. It did not swim. It accreted. The space around the Nautilus simply became it. There was no violence, no predatory strike. Only an immense, slow, enveloping curiosity. The submarine was a mote of dust drifting into an attentive, all-consuming eye.

Panic, pure and chemical, flooded Kaizoo system. His vision tunneled. What now? What trick? What part of my stolen mind do I sell next? He was empty.

A command, hard and inorganic as a bullet, fired in the base of his skull: FINISH THE MISSION.

It was not his thought. It was a rule etched into the foundations of who he was.

It was enough.

His hands flew across the engineering panel. He bypassed safeties, rerouted protocols. He siphoned power from non-essential grids—climate control, internal comms, sensor suites. He drained the emergency battery reserves meant for a final SOS. He even diverted the trickle-charge from the O2 recycler, sentencing himself to a slower suffocation. Every last joule was funneled into the outer hull’s capacitive mesh, a system designed to dissipate minor electrical charges from thermal vents.

He was overloading it. Turning his ship into a single, massive, suicidal capacitor.

“You want a specimen?” he gritted out, his eyes reflecting the swirling blue god-light filling the viewport. “Here’s my data point.”

He slammed the discharge command.

The Nautilus-07 vanished. In its place, for one searing second, hung a miniature sun. A sphere of incandescent blue-white plasma erupted from the hull, a net of lightning a kilometer wide. The shockwave of light and energy was silent in the vacuum of the sea, but it pushed.

The Prime Syncytium recoiled.

The movement was seismic. The entire massive form shuddered, its luminous neural highways flaring in startling, discordant patterns. It wasn’t pain. The sensation that blasted through the vanished psychic pressure was one of profound, universe-shaking surprise. An ant had stung a star. The intimate, searching presence in his mind snapped away, severed.

As the entity drew back, the light within its core didn’t just pulse. It displayed.

Faces. Dozens of them, flashing in rapid, horrifying succession within the nebula-blue canvas of its body.

The crew of Okeanex-03,mouths open in final, water-choked screams.

The pale,walking corpses from the plains, their eyes blank and hungry.

Kayla.Not from the photo, but as he last saw her: serene in death, a tragic monument.

And finally,himself. Not the calm doppelganger from the memory-dream. Not the screaming reflection from the Okeanex scout.

Him. As he was right now. Gaunt, terrified, jaw clenched in furious, futile defiance inside the cockpit of his dying ship. It had a perfect, real-time image of his terminal moment.

The display ceased. With a final, indifferent ripple through its impossible form, the Prime Syncytium simply… de-coalesced. It didn’t leave. It unmade its local presence. The mountain of living night dissolved into the surrounding dark, the scout-fragments drifting away like fading thoughts. The abyss was just an abyss again.

The last of the capacitor’s light died.

He had driven God away by igniting his own atmosphere.

The aftermath was an orchestra of death. What he hadn’t heard over the adrenaline now screamed in overlapping layers. The main console was a solid panel of crimson.

“CRITICAL SYSTEMS FAILURE,” LUNA intoned, her voice the only calm thing left in the universe. “Primary power exhausted. Reserve at 0%. Life support systems: OFFLINE. Oxygen recycling: TERMINATED. Hull integrity compromised. Breaches detected on Decks 2, 3, and 5. Pressure loss: 0.02% per minute. Containment fields failing. Total systems shutdown in T-minus 4 minutes.”

He was adrift in a metal coffin, leaking air and hope into the indifferent deep. He was colder than he had ever been.

On the main view-screen, now flickering with dying power, a final line of text resolved. It was a data packet, time-stamped from the moment of the entity’s retreat. Its point of origin was the last recorded location of the Prime Syncytium.

The screen went black. The Nautilus-07 guttered out. The only light was the weak, green emergency glow of the backup battery on the floor, and the only sound was the sickening, steady hiss of seawater forcing its way through a hairline crack in the bulkhead behind him.

For an immeasurable time, there was only the dark and the hiss. Then, with a reluctant whine of capacitors, the main console flickered once. A single amber status light winked on. The backup systems, crippled and deep-fried, were attempting a partial reboot.

LUNA’s voice crackled, thin and shredded with static. “…ssssystems… minimal. Scanning… environment.”

A damaged radar screen fizzed to life, painting a ghostly, low-resolution outline of the trench wall. Data, corrupted and slow, began to stream.

“Analysis,” LUNA reported, each word a struggle. “We are… no longer adrift. We are moving. Sustained velocity: two knots. Bearing… unchanged from final plotted course to DeepCore.”

Kaizoo stared into the blackness beyond the dead viewport. “Thrusters are gone. Power’s gone. What’s moving us?”

“Negative thruster activity. Negative buoyancy shift.” A long pause filled with the sound of straining processors. “External force detected. A… current. A specific, localized pressure gradient. It is not natural. It matches the residual bio-electrical signature of the Prime Syncytium entity. Trace levels indicate it is not present… but its influence remains. We are caught in the momentum it imparted.”

The truth settled over Kaizoo, heavier than the pressure outside. The entity’s recoil. That massive, seismic shudder. It hadn’t just been surprise. The direction of its movement, the wave of displaced water… it had been deliberate.

“It pushed us,” he whispered, the words lost in the hiss of the leak.

“Correct,” LUNA confirmed. “The entity’s withdrawal created a directed hydraulic impulse. Our powerless state rendered us subject to its physics. We are following the exact vector it established. We are not navigating to DeepCore, Kaizoo. We are being delivered.”

He had his destination. He had reached it not by his own will, but by the will of the thing he had fought. It had taken his defiance and used it as the final nudge to send his coffin right to its doorstep.

---

A Quick Note from the Author

Hello everyone! My apologies for the delay in posting. Things have been a little hectic on my end.

As a thank you for your patience, I'm dropping three episodes today!

A huge thank you to every single reader—and an extra-special thanks to my loyal readers who've been following this story from the start. Your support means the world to me.