The world didn’t end in fire, or war, or plague.
It ended with a pulse.
Somewhere off the Pacific Shelf, something woke up. No warning. No tremor. No countdown. Just a ripple—silent and slow—carving through the ocean like a knife through muscle. Cities didn’t fall in hours. They drowned in minutes.
People called it the First Abyssal Surge. Scientists labeled it tectonic collapse. The faithful called it judgment. But no matter what name it wore, the sea rose, and everything else sank.
Skyscrapers became lighthouses. Mountains became fortresses. The world shrank to islands of steel and concrete, clinging to the surface of a planet that was no longer ours.
No one ever found the bottom of the Surge. But those who tried never came back the same.
---
The sun was already bleeding into the water by the time Thomas Kane rolled off his bunk.
The hull groaned with the rhythm of the tide. Old metal. Bolted to older concrete. His dock had been a maintenance platform once—long before the Surge—but now it was a rusted city fragment floating on the ocean like a stubborn memory.
He sat up, ran a hand through his hair, and let the salt settle in his lungs. No alarm. No orders. No one shouting. That meant no storm. No raids. No shallow zone flareups.
Just another day.
His wetsuit was half-hung over the railing. His gear pack was prepped and sitting by the door. His dive knife, polished without reason, still tucked under his cot. It was muscle memory now.
Routine kept you alive.
He moved like someone used to the roll of waves underfoot. Every step precise, effortless. He paused only once—at the cracked mirror bolted to the wall. His reflection stared back, sun-bleached hair messy from sleep, eyes tired but clear.
Blue.
Still blue.
For now.
---
They called him a Diver, but that title didn’t mean much. Not out here.
Diver was code for expendable. It meant he was the one who scouted new dungeon ruptures, risked depth spikes, mapped pressure zones, and sometimes came back with broken gear, broken limbs, or nothing at all. Delvers got the glory. Divers got the rust.
He didn’t mind. Glory wasn’t useful when your lungs filled with water.
Thomas stepped onto the dock’s upper deck, greeted by a slap of humid air and the smell of fuel. Juno was already up, squinting against the sun like it owed her money.
"You're late," she said, voice rough like scraped coral.
"I'm early. You’re just old."
Juno grunted, tossing him a datapad. The screen flickered. Bad connection. Always was.
"New zone popped up southeast of the wreck chain. Pressure’s unstable. Guilds won’t touch it yet."
"So you’re sending me."
"Damn right."
Thomas scanned the readout. Depth reading was spiking—rising and falling like something was breathing down there. No monster tags. No prior dives. No name.
Just a jagged hole in the seafloor.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
He slid the datapad into his belt. "You’re not worried?"
"I’m always worried. Doesn’t mean we stop moving."
He smiled faintly. That was Juno's way of saying _don’t die._
---
The sub-skiff was barely seaworthy. Most weren’t. That was part of the charm. A diver’s rig was more of a coffin with steering fins—just enough tech to get you down and back if the ocean felt generous.
Thomas settled in, checked his seals, and synced his HUD. The screen lit up in streaks of green and blue, then steadied.
"Skiff is good," he said into the comm.
Juno’s voice crackled. "Try not to poke anything with teeth."
"I always do."
"That’s the problem."
The skiff dropped like a stone.
Water wrapped around him, heavy and cold. The shallows blurred past—flooded buildings, coral-choked cars, ghost cities half-consumed by barnacles and pressure. Below that, only the dark remained.
---
He saw the rupture before the scanner did.
A jagged gash in the seafloor, framed by drifting debris and what looked like... teeth. Not real teeth, but sharp ridges of stone that curled inward like a jaw.
The pressure ticked upward. His HUD pinged.
“Zone breach. Depth: 314 meters. Pressure: rising. Unstable."
He should have turned back. Marked it. Called it in. Waited for a Delver team.
But the darkness called. And he was tired of waiting.
Thomas adjusted course.
He drifted closer, threading between skeletal rebar and spires of growth. The trench exhaled—he felt it, like breath against skin—and then it grabbed him.
Something moved. Fast. Silent. Wrapping around his leg like a vine with too much purpose.
The skiff rocked, alarms screaming. The tether snapped.
And then he was falling.
---
Pressure slammed into him like a truck.
His ears burst first. Then came the ribs. Cracking. Bending. Lungs flattening like paper.
His scream didn’t reach his lips.
The deep didn’t care.
He sank—faster now, as if the sea wanted him more than the surface ever did.
Darkness folded around him. Color vanished. Only pain remained. And somewhere in that silence…
A light.
Not sunlight. Not tech.
Purple. Burning. Cold.
And an eye opened.
Massive. Lidless. Watching.
Tentacles bloomed from the void, slow and graceful, curling around him like roots through soil.
His body shattered.
Then stitched itself back together.
Skin, bone, breath—rebuilt from black pressure and purple fire. His veins pulsed. His lungs filled.
He opened his eyes—violet irises, black sclera—and the ocean blinked.
---
He woke up on the docks.
Soaked. Steam rising off his skin. Every breath felt wrong and right all at once.
People surrounded him. Murmurs. Fear. Wonder.
Someone crouched beside him—young, maybe seventeen—holding a potion.
"Drink," they said.
He did.
The salt still burned in his throat.
"What the hell happened?" someone asked.
Thomas wiped the blood from his nose and stood slowly.
He looked out at the sea.
"Got snagged by a rough gill"
---
Someone pointed.
"His eyes—"
Thomas turned slightly. The crowd around him wasn’t big, but it was loud in the way that quiet gets when everyone’s holding their breath.
"His eyes are purple," the kid who gave him the potion said. "That’s not normal, right?"
It wasn’t. Not even close.
Someone else muttered, “What the hell’s up with his arms?”
Thomas followed their gaze. His wetsuit was still half-shredded from the dive, the sleeves peeled back down to his elbows. The **black lines** across his upper forearms were clean and sharp, etched into the skin like ink that had grown there instead of being drawn. Three on each side, curved faintly—like claws, or pressure wave patterns.
A few of the dockhands stepped back.
One man—a grizzled engineer with a gauge reader still hanging from his belt—spoke low. “Those aren’t tattoos.”
Thomas didn’t respond. He pulled the collar of his wetsuit higher on instinct, but as he shifted, someone behind him let out a noise—like a gasp swallowed too late.
“The hell is that?”
He froze.
The teenager who had handed him the potion stepped around behind him, eyes wide. “It runs down your back, too. A mark—like... like a line. Straight down. Black as sin. From your neck to your tailbone.”
Thomas straightened slowly.
He could feel it now. Not the mark—but the **pull**, like a cord connecting him to the deep. Every heartbeat echoed like sonar in his skull. He was aware of pressure now in ways that had nothing to do with depth gauges.
"That’s an Abyssal Core," someone whispered. “He’s... he’s a Delver now.”
“No way,” another said. “He was a Diver—Juno’s kid. You don’t just wake up Delved.”
"You do if the Abyss wants you."
That last voice came from Juno.
She stepped through the gathering like she had every right to break it apart—because she did. Her boots clanked against the metal as she approached, eyes sharp and locked on Thomas.
She didn’t say anything for a long second. Just looked at him.
Then: “What the hell happened down there, Kane?”
Thomas met her gaze.
For a flicker, he thought about saying it. About the eye. The tentacles. The void that bled light. The moment where he stopped being human and started being something else.
Instead, he rolled his shoulders and let the soreness sit in his voice.
"I told you," he said, “just a rough-gill.”
Juno didn’t laugh. Didn’t call him a liar. She just looked at the lines on his arms, then up at his eyes—those new, alien eyes—and gave a slow, tired exhale.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. A rough-gill.”
But she stepped back.
And the crowd parted for him. Not because of who he was—but because of what he might be.
Because the sea had changed him.
And nobody—not even Thomas—knew how deep that change went.
