"So they're everywhere," Rudra said to the empty water, and there was something almost like grim satisfaction in it. He had wanted to know the shape of this fight. Now he knew.
He fought it the way an Admiral fights a superior fleet, which is to say he did not fight it at all until he understood it. Nine days in the drowned dark he studied the thing, and every weapon he owned came back the same. Immune to his strength, which was considerable. Immune to the pressure he could turn against it, the cold, the sheer force of a man who had put down monsters that ended coastlines. There was one thing, and Rudra hunted it with the methodical patience that had kept his forces alive across a hundred engagements, and he found it in the last place he thought to look, which was the pressure itself.
