Heart Bonds in the Beastworld - Prologue: The Abyssal Shift
The clunk of the submarine's sonar pounced off the structures around them; it was thrilling. Kayo's breath could be seen, as she beamed over the monitor: at her depths, water was a crushing, silent blackness, broken only by the piercing beams of our submersibles and the occasional creature that lit up the dark ocean like a firework or constellation appeared.
All around them, these ancient ruins in the middle of the South China Sea seemed to defy all of known history—sweeping arches that were too old to exist the way they had, for being underwater for so long... and huge glyph-covered pillars and obelisks, all made of a pearl-like stone that glowed and glinted like metal... but that was impossible. Each of these with a faint, internal luminescence which the team still could not explain. It was a city one might dream of finding at the bottom of the sea. The South China Sea, a secret it had kept for millennia?
Yu Fang had found it herself, by accident after reviewing some seabed scanning images and decided to check it out for herself. Bringing this entire team together! She really was a powerhouse!
"Kayo, are you getting this?" Hikari Rinne's voice was tight with a discipline that masked her awe. On the monitor aboard the Nereid, she saw the feed from Kayo's camera, gliding over bizarre, beautiful flora that pulsed with light.
"Every magnificent inch, Hikari," Kayo Sazanami's voice crackled through the comm, a marine biologist's dreamy excitement evident even through the distortion. "The bioluminescence is unlike anything documented. It's as if the ecosystem is wired directly into the architecture."
From her station, Hikari watched the feeds. Her role as captain felt superfluous here, a formality. The only threat was the immense pressure outside their hulls. Her gaze flicked to Haruka Tsukino, who was meticulously cross-referencing a digital manifest.
"All permits are green, international waivers are locked. We are perfectly on schedule," Haruka said, her voice the calm, logical counterpoint to Kayo's wonder. She touched the simple gold cross at her throat, a habitual gesture.
"The structural integrity is... baffling," came a new voice, crisp and focused. It was the one and only Dr. Yu Fang. She was the amazing lead archaeologist and the original person who even managed to find this ruin when so many others had already overlooked this area and never noticed anything. She had managed to secure 2 million in funding to be able to organise this initial investigative expedition; the mere fact that she was in the second sub spoke volumes! Those things weren't cheap and the pride on her face was clear in her monitor, her chestnut brown eyes gleamed, and her dark hair with a purple tinge bounced with delight. She then switched her feed to the external camera on the submarine. She was facing a huge obelisk - perhaps the tallest, but they'd have to catalogue and index every one of them to know for sure. This one showed intricate carvings of beasts and swirling elemental patterns. "The weathering suggests extreme age. Without carbon dating, I couldn't say for sure at this stage, but this...the preservation of the detail on these carvings is.. is preternatural. This isn't just a city; it's a library. And I think... I think it's a battery... a battery that might still be running! There's clearly some power source that's causing the light behind those obelisks."
Then, as she controlled her submarine and moved her extendable arm. It was attached outside of the sub. It made a thud as the rubber of the grabber made contact with one of the pillars; the world began to turn inside out. "Let's get that carbon dating sorted, with a sample straight to the Tokyo University lab!"
It wasn't an explosion. It was unfolding. All of it, everything around them was unfolding into darkness that enveloped everything.
The central spire of the sunken city began to pulse, not with light, but with a darkness that drank the light from their beams as it oozed over towards them slowly. "What IS that?!" Yu screamed, as it moved through her submarine and enveloped her whole...
"Yu Feng, do you read me?" Hikari began, "Doctor Yu Feng, do you come in? Over." Everyone listened intently, as those in the first submarine watched this oozing darkness growing in size begin to approach them.
The water itself seemed to thicken, to solidify with the sickening possibility that Yu hadn't made it - that whatever that thick black cloud was, it wasn't friendly to life.
"Hikari! The structure... one of these structures—it's emitting some kind of substance, maybe an energy field! I don't know what. It passed through Yu Feng's hull like it was nothing. We're heading back to the surface." Kayo's voice was sharp with panic. On Hikari's monitor, she saw Kayo reach for a curious pair of bracelets she had been given by Yu Feng a few hours earlier, which had been found in a sealed chamber from an expedition hours earlier. They were now glowing with a violent violet light.
"Readings are going haywire! It's some form of... concentrated geomantic energy!" Hikari, her voice straining with professional shock.
"Abort! All teams, abort and surface!" Haruka had jumped up and began to bark into the communication device, her legal training joining Hikari's military training and both sought to seize control of the situation to avoid any further fatalities.
"It's caught up to me! I'm not going to make it back, it's passing through the hull!" Kayo screamed in what sounded like an agonising death, but she was hundreds of meters below the boat, there were no other submarines, they didn't know what the substance was and...it was clearly too late when the screaming stopped.
The darkness from the spire swelled, a silent, slow-motion wave of pure negation. It consumed Yu Fang's sub first, her feed dissolving into static snow. Then it enveloped Kayo's vessel, the violet light of her bracelets flaring once, defiantly, before being swallowed.
On the bridge of the Nereid, Haruka looked up from her screen, her wide grey eyes meeting Hikari's on the internal monitor. She clutched her cross, her lips moving in a silent prayer as she watched the ocean outside a porthole turn darker and darker until it was black... the substance was moving up. She began mouthing the lords prayer to herself.
Hikari watched, helpless, as the wave of darkness touched the hull of the Nereid. It didn't break the metal; it passed through it. The very air grew thick and heavy. Consoles flickered and died not with a bang, but a sigh. She couldn't help but wonder if this was some type of radiation. She could believe it! The light from the emergency lamps was extinguished, not by shattering, but as if the darkness itself was a liquid being poured into the room - did radiation do that? She wasn't sure.
It crept across the deck towards her, this silent, slow pulse. In the distance, she could see the open door to the cabin. She ran towards it. Haruka was in there! Perhaps the door might help keep it out. She bolted until halfway, she stepped on a dark, shadowy tendril, and then felt a profound coldness shoot right through her body, from her foot, to her chest to her mind, a numbness that started in her extremities and moved inward. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever felt and witnessed—not a violent end, but what felt like an erasure. She watched it happen to Haruka; just as Haruka watched it happen to Hikari.
As the darkness finally enveloped her, swallowing the last of her vision and the image of Haruka's terrified face, a final, bizarre sensation cut through the void. A voice, not in her ears, but in the very core of her dissolving consciousness. It was whimsical, ancient, and infinitely powerful.
"Hmm... you're an interesting one too. Then it is settled! You will get the evaluation and maybe even a choice too! How exciting."
In her last moment of coherent thought, Hikari assumed it was a hallucination, a final, desperate flicker of a dying brain. The voice had felt more real than the deck beneath her feet or the air in her lungs.
Then, nothing...