Chapter 70: The Swarm

Sen stared down at the shimmering, multi-colored dome stretching across the abyssal trench.

He was so far down that the upper waters were completely lost to absolute pitch-blackness.

Whatever that spectral cloth had been, it had dragged him through days’ worth of swimming depth in a matter of hours.

The dome was staggering—a massive, manufactured barrier laid over the seabed, clearly built to seal away whatever lay beneath it. And strange enough, it didn’t look like a natural phenomenon of the breach at all.

It bore the unmistakable design of a high-tier array, a human-made barrier formation anchored into the ocean floor.

Sen raised his weapon. He unlatched the hilt, exposing a cluster of stabilized spatial shards trapped inside an energy sheath, humming with volatile spatial power.

Before he could release the shards to cut a path toward the dome, his numb body plummeted into a deeper, unnatural freeze.

Skrrrch... skrrrch...

A horrifying sound of grinding teeth echoed through the water, high-pitched and shrill enough to make his ears bleed inside his skull.

Sen snapped his head around. Diving out of the black depths was a figure glowing with a harsh, radiant orange light, burning like a dying coal against the ink of the ocean.

But what made Sen freeze wasn’t the creature’s speed—it was the atmospheric effect of its approach. The closer the glowing entity drew, the colder the surrounding water became.

The chill seeped past his skin, sinking straight into his marrow and stiffening his joints. His very circulation was slowing to a crawl.

Shaking off the creeping frost through sheer force of will, Sen tightened his grip on his spatial blade and kicked forward, surging through the water to meet the target head-on.

As the distance closed and the orange glare washed over him, Sen’s eyes widened.

It wasn’t a beast. It was a human being.

Sen stared through the murk at the approaching figure. The light down here was practically dead; the pale, distant glare of the dome beneath his feet barely illuminated the abyss unless he focused his eyes directly on it.

The entity swam forward with agonizing, deliberate slowness, radiating an unnatural, freezing heat that defied all logic—a temperature so low it felt like it was scorching his skin to ice.

It had the silhouette of a human, but Sen knew better than to trust appearances in a high-tier breach. He held his ground, his spatial blade locked in his hand, ready to unleash the floating shards to tear the thing apart at a single thought.

Closer. And closer.

The entity drifted into full view—a hollowed, glowing husk wrapped in primordial light.

Before Sen could adjust his stance, the void before his eyes shattered into a blinding crimson glare as a system prompt forced itself into his vision:

[ ETERNAL BREACH LORD REVEALED ]

Name: The Burning Man

A king once beloved by his people, who sacrificed everything to save them, now reduced to nothing more than a primordial, burning Titan.

[ MANDATORY OBJECTIVE ]

Defeat the Titan to unseal the breach.

Wait, what the hell—?!

The momentary distraction almost cost him his life.

Before the sentence could even fully form in Sen’s mind, the figure thrust its arm forward. A terrifyingly condensed beam of light-fire erupted through the abyssal water, vaporizing the surrounding ocean into explosive thermal shockwaves as it locked onto his chest.

The sheer intensity of the heat hit Sen like a physical wall, flash-boiling the water around his skin.

Shift!

Sen’s instincts took over. He unlatched his weapon, releasing the fragments of his blade into the water. The floating spatial shards scattered in an instant, surrounding the incoming beam of light-fire and violently expanding the localized space between Sen and the projectile.

The attack—which should have incinerated him in a fraction of a millisecond—was suddenly forced to travel across an artificially stretched distance. The beam slowed down, hovering roughly fifty meters away from his chest.

Sweat mixed with freezing seawater poured down Sen’s face as he exerted absolute mental focus.

Around the trapped pillar of light-fire, each razor-sharp shard of his spatial blade spun rapidly in mid-water, bending the geometry of the deep ocean to compress and lock the Titan’s devastating energy inside a localized spatial pocket.

The beam tore through the stretched space Sen had created, but the extra seconds were enough. Sen kicked his legs hard, throwing his body to the left as the blinding heat blasted past him, flash-boiling the ocean and turning the water around his shoulders into blistering steam.

He caught his breath, his eyes locking onto the creature. It wasn’t a hollow shell after all. It was a man—or what was left of one.

His clothes were shredded, a single hollow eye stared out from his face, and two jagged wings made of white-hot light burned against his back. Spider-web veins pulsed across his skin, glowing so bright they made his body look translucent.

Red warning text flashed across Sen’s vision:

[ WARNING ]

Killing intent detected.

Target: Amber Dread Beast (The Burning Man’s Mini-Creation)

Sen didn’t have time to process what a "mini-creation" was before the thing opened its mouth.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Three condensed fire-beams shot out at once.

Moving underwater was like trying to sprint through thick mud. Sen tried to dive low, but the drag of the deep ocean slowed him down. The first beam grazed his arm, ripping through his armored suit and charring the skin beneath. The second beam blasted right past his ear, the sudden thermal expansion of the water blowing him backward and sending his senses spinning.

Sen gritted his teeth and raised his sword. As an Eclipser, he could control the space surrounding non-living objects. He pointed his arm at his own scattered spatial shards floating nearby.

*Clack!*

The shards zipped together, forming a wall of warped space right in front of the third beam. The light-fire slammed into the barrier, buckling the water and pushing Sen back another twenty feet, his boots dragging through the dark current.

His lungs burned. He needed to open a spatial rift to put real distance between them, but tearing a wound in reality under this much water pressure was nearly impossible. The sheer weight of the ocean kept snapping his subtle spatial tears shut before he could step through.

The winged man didn’t give him a break. It flapped its fire wings, shooting through the ocean like a spear.

Sen pulled his sword back together into a single blade just in time to block a heavy strike from the creature’s glowing fist. The impact rattled Sen’s teeth. The intense heat radiating off the monster’s skin scalded Sen’s face, while the unnatural cold in the air chilled his blood.

He swung his blade back, using his spatial manipulation to warp the space around the creature’s arm, trying to twist it out of joint. But the creature felt no pain. It ignored the warping space, using its free hand to grab Sen by the neck.

Sen gasped, air bubbles escaping his mouth as the creature’s fiery grip burned into his flesh. Desperate, Sen focused on a single spatial shard floating behind the monster’s head. He forced the space around the shard to contract violently, driving the steel piece straight into the creature’s back.

The creature hissed, its grip loosening just enough for Sen to plant both boots against its chest and kick off with all his strength.

They separated, drifting ten yards apart in the freezing, ruined water.

Sen hovered there, panting heavily, his neck raw and his arm bleeding. Across from him, the winged man floated quietly, the wound on its back already sealing up with glowing light. Neither of them could gain the upper hand—Sen couldn’t cut deep enough through the water’s drag, and the creature couldn’t break through Sen’s spatial blocks.

They were completely stuck in a deadlock, staring each other down in the dark ocean.

Sen stared at the beast as it hovered in the water, its single hollow eye locked onto him. Even though Sen was an Eclipser-rank contractor—a full step above an Amber-class threat—the sheer drag of the abyssal depth and the creature’s relentless heat were wearing him down fast. If he dragged this out any longer, he’d end up roasted from the inside out.

He needed to kill it now.

Instead of trying to dodge through the heavy water, Sen pushed forward. If a clean slash wasn’t working, he’d simply obliterate it from every angle.

Sen unclasped his weapon, unleashing every single spatial shard housed inside the hilt. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he manipulated the space surrounding the metal pieces, driving them into a whirling, high-speed storm of razor-sharp steel that circled the dread beast like a tornado.

The creature flapped its fiery wings to burst forward, but the vortex snapped shut around it.

Shards tore through its glowing veins, sliced through its single eye, and shredded its flesh. Sen didn’t stop there. He commanded the space inside the beast’s body to contract, pulling the shards deep into its chest and core.

BANG!

The localized spatial force detonated inside the creature’s body, blowing it into a cloud of ash and fading orange light. The shards zipped back through the dark water, locking neatly back into Sen’s sword hilt with a sharp metallic clack.

Sen let out a heavy breath, his chest heaving as the heat cleared. But before he could even take a single stroke toward the dome, the water around him began to hum.

A sickening orange glare washed over the abyssal floor, turning the ocean into a sea of burning embers.

System windows flared violently across his vision, scrolling down so fast the red light blinded him:

[ WARNING ]

Amber Dread Beast detected.

[ WARNING ]

Amber Aberrant detected.

[ WARNING ]

Crimson Dread Beast detected.

[ WARNING ]

Amber Dread Beast detected...

Sen’s blood ran cold.

He looked down toward the human-made dome. Crawling out from cracks along the structure’s edge were dozens—no, hundreds—of the exact same winged, one-eyed figures. Their veins burned with light-fire, their light wings cutting through the dark water as an entire army of dread beasts swarmed upward, locking their hollow eyes directly on him.