A few hundred meters below the surface, the tentacles were still pulling her down.
If he hesitated even a moment she was dead. She might already be dead. The thought arrived clean and clinical and he held it for exactly one second before setting it aside because it was not useful yet.
What was useful was the shape he had spotted in the distance. A handhold. A chance. His body was already angling toward it through the water, muscles burning against the current, dodging a tentacle that broke the surface beside him and swept back down.
He stopped.
Looked back at the dark water where she had gone under.
The internal argument assembled itself without invitation, arriving with the particular efficiency of a thought that had been waiting for exactly this moment.
'She knows the way but there is no chance of defeating that thing. Your survival is the only thing that actually matters. Everything else is a distraction.'
He treaded water and said nothing.
'Why are you hesitating? This is your chance. Your only chance. Turn around.'
He had always known, in some abstract corner of his planning, that Leishna was a variable he would eventually have to account for. He had known it since the first day.
She had her own agenda, her own loyalties, her own fingerprints on every event that had brought him to this point. He had never fully trusted her and he had been right not to.
'You always knew she was someone you might have to be rid of one day. Well. Here you are.'
Yes. He had known that.
'Then turn around, fool. She is already gone.'
The regret arrived before the decision did, filling his chest with a weight that had no useful function and he breathed through it anyway, one long slow inhale against the cold of the water.
Then he gritted his teeth and dove.
'What are you doing?! You are throwing yourself away! Why?!'
The black water closed over his head and the cold became total. He could not see anything. His eyes were useless down here. But his sense for yai signatures still functioned, dulled by the water and the interference of whatever lived in the depths, but present.
Enough to feel the gargantuan's mass somewhere below. Enough to track the direction the tentacles had taken her, if she had not already been pulled past the point where any of this mattered.
'You fool. You absolute fool. Give me one good reason.'
He kept swimming down, following the signature, ignoring the pressure building against his ears.
The answer was simple. He had known it before he turned around.
'Because without her I die up there anyway.'
He told himself that was the reason.
He was not entirely sure it was the only one.
Because he wanted to.
Not because of survival calculus. Not because she was useful. The reasoning he had handed himself on the way down was true enough but it was not the whole truth and he was done pretending otherwise.
He was tired of it. Tired of bending, of calculating, of clutching at the smallest available handhold and calling it a plan.
Always afraid, always willing to abandon whatever needed abandoning, always finding the rational justification for the thing that kept him breathing one more day since the moment he arrived to Inumaki village.
It had kept him alive. It had also made him into something he did not particularly want to examine too closely.
He wanted to survive. He had always wanted to survive. But he wanted to survive as himself, with the choices he could live inside, not as whatever was left after he had stripped everything else away.
He dove deeper.
The cold was past the point of cold. It had become something structural, pressing into the joints, into the tissue, frostbite already working at the exposed skin of his hands and face.
His body was an Ascension 2 body and that was the only reason he was still moving through this water rather than sinking through it. Any lower ascension and the pressure alone would have ended things some time ago.
He could not see anything. The darkness at this depth was complete, absolute, the kind that the eyes eventually stop trying to negotiate with.
He moved entirely on his sense, feeling through the water for signatures, for mass, for the shape of things he could not see.
The tentacles around him were growing in girth as he descended. He had not yet felt the body of the creature itself but the scale of what surrounded him suggested it was not far.
Something vast and patient and entirely unconcerned with what he was, waiting somewhere below in the dark it had always occupied.
Then he caught it.
A small shadow struggling against a much larger one, a short distance ahead and below. The movements were weakening even as he watched, the small shape losing ground against the coil wrapped around it.
Leishna!
He stopped thinking and swam.
As he closed the distance the details resolved themselves through the dark. A single tentacle had her, coiled tight around her body, pulling her steadily downward.
She was still fighting, still moving, hands working at the flesh wrapped around her, but the movements were slowing. She was running out of air. Running out of time.
Atiya reached the tentacle and grabbed hold of it with both hands, the flesh cold and slick and throbbing against his grip, the muscle beneath it contracting with a strength that made his own feel momentarily ridiculous.
He held on anyway.
Given any choice at all he would not have touched it. But fighting underwater was its own problem entirely.
Without solid ground beneath him every strike lost half its force before it arrived, the water absorbing the energy, slowing the motion, turning anything decisive into something merely irritating.
He summoned Sajibu.
The staff came to his hand and he adjusted his grip on the tentacle with his other arm, locking himself against the pull of it, and slashed across the flesh just below the point where it was coiled around Leishna's lower torso.
He knew before the strike landed that it would not do serious damage. The water saw to that, dragging against the arc of the swing, bleeding the momentum out of it before the blade completed its path.
But Sajibu's edge was what it was. The scythe hook at the crown found the flesh anyway and opened it, dark blood billowing out into the water around them in a spreading cloud, black and immediate in the cold dark.
The tentacle reacted.
It twisted violently sideways, a convulsive full body response, and Atiya held on as it flung him through the water, gripping the flesh with everything he had, his body swinging wide through the dark.
He did not let go. He moved his grip upward along the arc of the motion and cut again, dragging the blade through the spongy tissue as he went, opening a longer wound than the first.
He was not trying to sever it in one strike. No single strike was going to accomplish that and he knew it.
What Sajibu could do, beyond the obvious, was pierce, slash, and maintain a cutting edge through continuous pressure.
He pushed the staff deep into the wound he had opened, drove it in until the resistance changed, then shifted his grip and pulled the blade downward through the tissue in one long deliberate draw.
The flesh parted.
Blood surged out in a torrent, hot against the cold of the water, and with one final push the tentacle separated completely, the severed end recoiling away into the dark, trailing ichor.
Atiya turned immediately to Leishna.
What his senses found made him scowl.
She was barely there. Conscious in the loosest possible sense of the word, her movements reduced to the faint involuntary drift of someone whose body had made most of its decisions already. The coil had been around her long enough.
He got his arm around her and started upward.
He needed the surface and he needed it now.
He pushed the twitching remains of the severed tentacle aside, dismissed Sajibu, and got his arm around Leishna across the torso. Her skin was cold through the thin fabric of her tunic, colder than the water around them, which told him everything he needed to know about how long the coil had been on her.
She resisted weakly. Not recognizing him, just reacting, some dim survival instinct still firing despite everything else shutting down. He pressed her against his chest and held her there and looked up.
The surface was so far away.
His lungs had passed the point of pain and arrived somewhere beyond it, somewhere that did not have a clean name, a biological demand so absolute it had stopped feeling like a sensation and started feeling like a fact. No air. His body was converting what remained of its reserves into movement and losing the argument. His vision would have been darkening if there had been anything to see.
And the creature knew where they were.
The tentacles were already moving. He could feel them through the water before he could sense them directly, the displacement, the pressure change, the dark mass of them converging from multiple directions simultaneously.
In another second or two the gap would close and there would be no gap left to swim through.
He did not know how to get them out of this.
He started swimming anyway. One arm stroking hard against the water, Leishna locked against his chest with the other, angling upward toward a surface he could not see.
The tentacles tightened their formation around them, flesh pressing in from every direction, the embrace of the thing below becoming inescapable by degrees.
He gritted his teeth.
"Tre—"
Water poured into his mouth and the word dissolved into nothing. It did not matter. The intention was enough.
The skill read it and fired regardless, the yai dropping out of his reservoir in the same familiar chunk, fourteen percent gone, leaving him at fifty one.
Somewhere deep below them, in the dark he could not see into, Tremetus found something and cut through it.
He did not know if it was the main body.
He hoped it was the main body.
He kept swimming upward.
He swam.
Every stroke was a negotiation with a body that had stopped cooperating and was now simply being overruled.
The tentacles writhed around them, shapes he could finally read against the furious white light burning somewhere deep below, Tremetus still doing its work down there, the creature's attention split between whatever was cutting through it and the two things trying to escape its reach.
He moved through the gaps as they appeared, dragging Leishna with him, angling upward with the single minded urgency of something that has reduced itself to one objective.
Up.
He knew surfacing this fast carried its own risks. He knew it and filed it away because the alternative was not surfacing at all.
The tentacle barrier fell behind them. He was through it, open water above, the surface still impossibly far and getting closer by degrees that felt too small.
His consciousness had begun to thin at the edges. Not dramatically, not all at once, just a slow quiet withdrawal, the cold and the oxygen debt pulling his awareness back from the periphery toward some central point that was growing smaller.
The suicidal desire to open his mouth and breathe was no longer a desire, it was a physical command his body was issuing and he was refusing on sheer will alone, his muscles spasming against the refusal, his chest locked around nothing.
He thought about Leishna in his arms. Whether she still had anything left. Whether he was pulling a living person toward the surface or just carrying her there out of stubbornness.
He did not let himself answer that.
And then his head broke the surface.
The air hit him before he had finished registering it and he gasped, a full body convulsion of a breath, coughing immediately, his lungs refusing to process it cleanly on the first attempt.
He coughed and gasped and coughed again and on the third breath something finally unlocked and the oxygen reached somewhere it needed to reach.
Leishna was already doing the same against his chest. Her ribcage moving hard and ragged, pulling the air in with the desperate graceless quality of something reclaiming what had almost been taken from it permanently.
They had made it.
Atiya held her up and looked around, blinking against the dark, waiting for his eyes to remember how to function.
The lamp was gone. The pack was gone, all of it except the one bag that contained the sculpture, still somehow present, still somehow with them.
The world had collapsed back down to absolute darkness and the sound of water moving against stone somewhere close.
He caught the edge of broken glacial ground at the limit of his vision and started swimming toward it, pulling Leishna with him, his body running on something that had stopped being energy some time ago and had not yet found a name for what it was instead.
They were almost at the edge.
Then he felt them.
The two speedsters had closed in.