The egg sac ruptured with a gentle, liquid shiver. Atsuya's small body shot forward, propelled by instinct he barely understood.
The water was everywhere cold, dark, and heavy. Particles floated lazily in the void, tiny points of bioluminescent light drifting like stars in a sky he had never seen. His vision was blurry, refracting, a kaleidoscope of green and violet glimmers. He tried to focus. Tried to see.
His body was… strange. Transparent, delicate, a fragile vessel for something that was no longer human. Eight limbs flexed without command, curling and pushing against the water.
Instinct screamed louder than thought: move. Flee.
A shadow surged from below a filter-feeding crustacean, monstrous in proportion to him, its maw gaping wide. Time slowed. Predators were meant to kill. He was meant to die.
A primal reaction surged. Tentacles lashed. Muscles contracted. Water expelled in violent jets. A puff of ink burst from his body, weak and cloudy, a haze that clung to the water like smoke in a windless chamber.
Shock cut through him. That was me. That ink, that cloud it came from his own body. It was part of him.
Another instinct followed: escape. Another flick of his small, pulsating limbs. The crustacean passed, disinterested or confused, and he shot forward, deeper into the black.
He tried to scream. Tried to call out with voice, with words, with anything human. Only bubbles erupted, floating up in delicate, glimmering spheres before popping silently.
And then the realization hit.
The mind of Atsuya Kurose, the human marine biologist, was still present. But the body? The body was something else. Alien. Predatory. Adapted. Infinite potential wrapped in a tiny, vulnerable form.
Prey. That word slithered into his awareness, uninvited but undeniable.
I am prey.
The current pulled him. Shadows pressed from all sides. Tiny sparks of light danced in the darkness. He twitched again, limbs bending instinctively, and a new thought unbidden, unshaped rose from the depths of his alien cognition:
I will survive.
But for now… he was prey.
The abyss was patient. And it was hungry.