"What is that...?"
They finally broke their hug. "Hey, what's that?" Azael shouted, pointing at the sparkling rock in the wall.
Melissa looked. Her face went white. "Azael... how long has that been there?"
Then the world exploded.
A deep, shuddering BOOM ripped through the water. The stone floor beneath them jumped. Azael was thrown into the air..... or what passed for air underwater tumbling helplessly. He smashed into the wall, pain blooming across his back.
"IT'S AN UNDERWATER EARTHQUAKE!"
Chunks of the ceiling rained down. Azael saw a massive block of stone slam into Melissa's side. She cried out, a puff of blood clouding the water near her head. The dagger spun through the water, lost in the chaos.
"Melissa!" Azael fought the churning current, grabbed her arm, and hooked his other hand onto the heavy chair to anchor them. The room was coming apart. "What's happening?!"
She clutched her head, dazed. "The rock!" she gasped, pointing at the glittering gem. "It's a beacon! It's calling the Leviathan! That's a moissanite!"
Azael's blood went cold. Attracting the Leviathan? Now?. They weren't ready. They had no plan. He moved to swim toward it, to tear it out.
"Don't!" Melissa yelled, her grip like a vice. "It's too late! She's almost here! Just get ready to fight!"
Azael nodded, heart hammering. He saw the dagger tumbling nearby and snatched it. The handle was cold but somehow comforting.
The quake grew worse. They clung to the chair to avoid being flung into the crumbling walls.
Then, through the broken window, Azael saw
a living shadow darkening the water beyond. Not one creature, but thousands, a swirling, black-and-red swarm of Vampire Fish, their needle teeth gleaming, driven forward by a terror greater than their own hunger. They were fleeing. And they were heading straight for the cathedral.
"Melissa, we need to go—!"
"Hold on!" she screamed.
Her body began to change. Not the grotesque crunching of before, but a rapid, fluid dissolving. Her skin grew translucent and began to spread out like a sheet of liquid silk, thinning at the edges. Her form melted, collapsing inward and then billowing outward. Her head smoothed into a smooth, mushroom-shaped bell. Her limbs elongated, thinning into dozens of long, delicate, gossamer tentacles.
In seconds, the beautiful girl was gone. In her place floated a large, ethereal jellyfish, its body a pulsating, pale lavender orb. From within its bell, a soft, protective purple bioluminescence glowed.
One of its longer tentacles coiled gently but firmly around Azael's waist. It pulled him smoothly, insistently, not towards an exit, but up, into the safe hollow space beneath its own bell.
Azael stunned he didn't resist. He was drawn into the jellyfish's embrace. The water inside was strangely still, insulated from the chaos. The light from the creature's body cast a calm, violet glow on his face. It was quiet. It was warm. For a moment, he was safe.
Outside, the swarm hit.
The fleeing fish became a battering ram. They smashed into the tower with the force of a torrent. Azael, sheltered inside, felt the impacts as terrible THUDS. He saw gashes tear open in the jellyfish's flesh around him. A tentacle was ripped clean off.
The walls of their prison shattered. Stone exploded. The roof tore away completely. In an instant, they were exposed on a broken platform, the open ocean stretching above them.
The jellyfish took the beating, shielding him until the very last fish passed.
Then, it went limp.
The tentacle released him. The bell sagged open.
Azael drifted out into the cold water.
"MELISSA!"
The jellyfish was shredded, its beautiful form in tatters. It shrank, softening, melting back into a familiar shape. It landed in his trembling hands.
It was the small, pink axolotl. But now it was wounded, a long scrape on its back, its gills torn. It lay in his palms, breathing in tiny, pained hitches.
They were exposed. R'lyeh lay in ruins below them.
And in the vast, hungry dark beyond the settling dust, something began to move.
The ocean floor erupted in the distance. it's a massive sand-tide , churning wall of silt and debris roaring toward R'lyeh. At its heart was a shape, a moving mountain in the dark.
"Oh, God," Azael breathed, tucking the wounded axolotl against his shoulder. "Is that… her?"
He didn't wait. He swam, limbs burning, to the collapsed ruin of a nearby tower and wedged himself behind a jagged slab of stone. He pressed his back against it, the cold seeping through his torn tunic.
The sand-tide hit.
It wasn't wind; it was a tsunami of force. The water turned into a blinding, suffocating brown wrath. It scoured the ruins, stripping seaweed, grinding stone, and burying everything in its path. Azael squeezed his eyes shut, turning his face away as the grit pelted his skin like a million needles.
The roar was deafening.
And then, as suddenly as it came, it stopped.
The sand settled, drifting down like a foul, slow snow. Through the clearing haze, the silhouette emerged.
Azael's breath caught.
It was a dragon, but looked utterly disgusting. A serpentine horror the size of a city block. Its body was a colossal, segmented worm of rough, sharp gray scales, each one the size of a shield, crusted with ancient barnacles and glowing parasites. It had no legs, only two enormous, clawed hands. skeletal and grotesquely humanoid that dug deep into the seabed, anchoring its impossible weight.
Its face was a nightmare of teeth. Its mouth, even closed, was a ragged line surrounded by layers of needle-like fangs that overlapped like a thorn bush. Above it, four eyes burned with cold, intelligent malice. Two were small, black, and darting. The other two were massive, bulbous orbs like milky, poisoned moons, scanning the ruins with a gaze that felt like a physical weight.
The Leviathan.
Azael's mind went blank with primal terror. How… how am I supposed to fight that?
"Yup," Satan's voice cut through the dread, oddly casual. "That's her. She's gotten a lot uglier than I remember."
Azael couldn't argue. It was a terrifying, unsettling ugliness. The kind that spoke of endless, rotting envy.
The Leviathan's great hand moved, plunging into the pile of rubble that had once been Azael's prison. Stone and metal screamed as they were crushed. With a slow, deliberate motion, she withdrew her fist and opened it.
There, in her giant, scaled palm, the moissanite gem blazed. Its rainbow fire was obscenely beautiful against her gray, dead flesh.
The Leviathan's massive eyes focused on it. Her brow, a ridge of spiked scale furrowed. The two small black eyes narrowed to vicious slits.
She opened her mouth.
"HOW DAREST THOU SHINE BRIGHTER THAN I…" Her voice was not a sound. It was a pressure, a subsonic boom that hit Azael in the chest and made his ears scream. Blood trickled from one of them. Around them, weakened stones cracked and crumbled to dust.
She was talking to the stone. She was jealous of a rock.
Azael stared, numb. "Is she insane?"
The Leviathan's jaw unhinged, revealing a throat lined with endless, spiraling rows of teeth, a kaleidoscope of nightmares. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the glittering moissanite into that abyss and snapped her mouth shut. A final, sickening crunch echoed through the water.
A tiny, weak paw touched Azael's cheek.
He looked down. The axolotl was breathing in shallow, pained hitches. "Melissa?"
She took a ragged breath, forcing the words out. "This… is our chance. After she eats the prettiest thing nearby… she'll leave. To hunt for more. This… is the only opening. I don't know… anywhere else with something more beautiful." She coughed, a small cloud of blood dissipating from her gills.
"I get it," Azael whispered, his own voice shaking. "But how do we kill that?"
"Leviathan… scales are immune. You can't hurt her from the outside. But… from the inside…" The axolotl shifted, her big eyes locking onto Azael's gemstone blue one. "She has one ability… the Soul Reave. She can suck a soul inside her and trap it forever. But the process… it takes time. it'll Leave her vulnerable from within."
Azael understood. A cold, grim clarity settled over him. "One of us has to get eaten."
The axolotl nodded weakly. "One goes in… as the distraction. The other… delivers the killing blow from inside."
Azael didn't hesitate. "Okay. I'll do it. You'll be the one to finish her." His expression was deathly serious, resolved.
The axolotl's eyes widened. She turned her head away, unable to look at him. Her small body trembled.
"Don't worry," Azael said, his voice softening. "You've got this."
The axolotl took a deep, shuddering breath. Then, she began to change. Her form melted, expanded, and reshaped in a soft, sad glow. In moments, the small, wounded creature was gone. Melissa knelt before him in her beautiful human form, pale, perfect, and utterly naked.
"Ah—sorry!" Azael flinched, turning his head away, his face burning.
Behind him, Melissa let out a soft, watery laugh. But her smile, unseen by him, was tender and heartbroken. and she whispered a single word, so faint it was lost in the vast, cold ocean.
"Sorry."