The seabed had changed. Black stone, ancient and flat, cracked in long, irregular lines that ran for hundreds of meters in every direction, not from anything that had happened recently, but from whatever geological violence had shaped this place long before anyone thought to turn it into a hunting ground.
Faint red veins of bioluminescence pulsed beneath the stone's surface, lighting the mineral dust drifting through the water from below like embers rising from a fire that had been burning for a very long time. The current here didn't move so much as exist — a slow, pressured weight that made every motion feel slightly deliberate.
It was also notably not empty.
Three other groups held position in the mid-water ahead of them, spread at careful distances from each other. No one was attacking anything. No one was moving unnecessarily. They were doing the same thing predators do when they end up in the same territory — sizing each other up, working out if the math was worth it.
