CRASH!
A colossal armored swordfish, over twenty meters in length, surged from the frothing sea. Its spear-like bill sheared straight through the reinforced steel hull of an escort destroyer, impaling three Japanese sailors in a single horrific thrust before dragging them down into the crimson depths of the Pacific.
On a neighboring frigate, a massive Sea Gorilla—a muscular, amphibious brute covered in thick blubber and barnacle-encrusted hide—leaped thirty feet into the air, landing heavily on the forecastle.
The heavy gunfire rattling against its chest tore flesh and sprayed dark blood, but the frenzy dulling its pain receptors did not slow its momentum in the slightest. With a sweeping backhand from its massive forearms, a dozen armed sailors were violently hurled over the railing into the churning waters below.
Though the beast was eventually shredded under the point-blank hail of a 20mm automated Phalanx CIWS, the chaos it left in its wake was catastrophic.
The vessel ceased fire entirely. Across its blood-soaked deck, only the desperate screams of dying men echoed into the wind.
It was an identical nightmare across the entire defensive line. Primordial sea beasts leaped from the waves, dragging the mechanized naval battle into a visceral, close-quarters abattoir. Despite the Maritime Self-Defense Force possessing advanced automated firearms and heavy deck artillery, the sheer savagery of the boarding assault caused their casualty count to skyrocket by the second.
THWIP-THWIP-THWIP-THWIP.
Just as the surface formation was on the verge of fracturing, a massive, imposing silhouette broke through the coastal fog on the distant horizon.
An enormous, flat-decked aircraft carrier carved through the swells.
Although constitutional restrictions strictly forbade the nation from commissioning offensive strike carriers, military leadership had long perfected the art of bureaucratic loopholes. If an "offensive" carrier was forbidden, commissioning a 27,000-ton "defensive helicopter destroyer" fully equipped for vertical takeoff and landing operations was deemed entirely acceptable.
The moment the carrier entered operational range, dozens of modern attack helicopters roared off the flight deck, banking sharply toward the heart of the massacre.
BRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
Rotary autocannons and guided rocket pods unleashed twin rivers of tracer fire across the water. High-explosive munitions hammered into the swarming aquatic beasts, shredding muscle, crushing armored carapaces, and blasting the boarding monsters clean off the warships' decks.
In a matter of minutes, the overwhelming firepower of the air wing forcefully wrested control of the surface back into the hands of the JMSDF.
Deep in the silent currents below, Attuma watched through the dark water as his vanguard's surface offensive was methodically incinerated by the incoming gunships. His yellowed eyes flared with venomous rage.
"Arno!" Attuma snarled, turning fiercely upon his chief strategist. "Have your beast-tamers exhausted their utility already?! If their mongrels cannot breach iron hulls, activate the converters and drown the entire coastline in a tsunami!"
Seeing his shock assault stall before the human fleet, Attuma's fragile patience had completely snapped.
He was an usurper reigning on a fabricated tragedy. He required a swift, uncontested, and godlike triumph. Only an image of absolute, terrifying invincibility would cement his eternal claim to the throne of Atlantis. If the price of this campaign was an agonizing war of attrition with mounting casualties, the political foundation beneath his feet would rot before he could even hold a coronation.
"King Attuma, we have not yet reached the desperate threshold requiring that weapon," Arno replied smoothly, his tone ice-cold. "Direct the tribal masters to sound the ancient horns. Call forth the abyssal behemoths. As long as we crush their massive capital ship, the moral spine of their fleet will shatter, and victory will remain ours."
The command division under Arno's direct authority guarded their absolute strategic trump card: the Super Sonic Oceanic Converter. Activating the device beneath the seabed would warp tectonic plates, generating cataclysmic tidal waves capable of wiping regional landmasses off the map.
Yet Arno refused to deploy it prematurely. To a military commander, war was a lethal game of asymmetric poker. The general who held the final unplayed card was the one who dictated the terms of survival. There was no such thing as an invincible weapon in modern warfare; the second they revealed their ultimate card, the surface world's scientific apparatus would adapt and devise an operational countermeasure.
Until the human military exhausted its reserves, Arno would keep his iron hand clenched tight.
Summoning the high shaman of the oceanic beast-tribes to the front, Arno issued the imperial mandate on Attuma's behalf:
"Sound the call of the abyss. Awaken the ancient terrors."
The tribal elder offered a slow, reverent nod. Reaching into the folds of his kelp robes, he pulled out a massive, curved horn carved from the fossilized jaw of a primordial leviathan, heavily etched with glowing, deep-sea runic bindings.
Placing it to his lips, he channeled his vital energy and blew with all his might.
HOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNG—
A desolate, ancient, and bone-vibrating resonance echoed through the pitch-black abyss.
Miles down, inside an unmapped underwater trench where the warmth of the sun had not touched the earth in three hundred million years, a pair of gigantic, unblinking yellow eyes snapped open in the freezing dark.
As the ancient acoustic vibration reached the depths, dozens of colossal, shadow-draped tentacles—each thick as a high-rise tower—began to slowly, rhythmically unfurl.
The ultimate biological weapon of the undersea empire had been summoned to war.
Above the trench, the relentless strafing runs of the attack helicopters had finally cleared the decks of the surrounding destroyers.
The battered surface fleet caught a brief, ragged breath. Vice Admiral Saitō stood in the flagship's bridge, screaming frantic orders into the command frequency, yet the only sounds returning through the speakers were the groans of wounded sailors and the static of destroyed comms arrays.
His face flushed with cold fury, Saitō switched to the secure naval frequency, preparing to authorize the subterranean submarine wolfpack to fire a fatal torpedo spread into the enemy's rear vanguard.
Silence. Dead, hollow static.
"Report!" Saitō barked, spinning toward his sensor officer. "What is the status of our submarine division?!"
An icy, sickening dread settled into the pit of the admiral's stomach.
The adjutant frantically worked the sonar terminal, re-running diagnostic scans across the seabed coordinates. The screen remained empty. Every single blue telemetry transponder marking their advanced attack submarines had vanished entirely from the digital grid.
The officer froze, his trembling fingers hovering over the acoustic logs. A single, corrupted automated distress ping, transmitted three minutes prior, flashed on the monitor.
"General..." the adjutant whispered, his voice cracking with sheer disbelief. "The submarine flotilla... all hands are lost. The vessels were crushed."
"..."
"BASTARDS!"
Saitō slammed both fists onto the console, his roar vibrating with raw, unadulterated fury and helpless terror.
"Damn them! Damn these abyssal animals to hell!!"
Saitō's sanity frayed at the edges. He knew with absolute certainty that whether the fleet survived this engagement or not, his military career was over. A court-martial awaited him in Tokyo. It was his own arrogant dismissal of the enemy's underwater dominance that had sent Japan's finest submarine crews into a silent, watery grave.
Without subsurface strike capabilities, his surface vessels were blind targets floating above an abyss.
"Deploy search-and-rescue protocols for the wounded immediately!" Saitō shouted hoarsely, dragging a hand across his face. "And send an emergency priority dispatch to the Ministry of Defense. We require immediate, heavy naval reinforcements!"
Yet the deep sea held zero intention of waiting for Tokyo's bureaucrats.
Miles beneath the hull of the newly arrived aircraft carrier, colossal undercurrents violently surged. A pitch-black abyssal cephalopod—spanning hundreds of meters in length and waving a nightmare of muscular, armored tentacles—glided silently upward through the dark water, locking its predatory hunger onto the massive steel belly of the flagship.
Up on the carrier's vast, unobstructed flight deck, the helicopter pilots and heavy machine gunners, riding the high of an effortless tactical victory, were jumping down from their cockpits.
They gathered in boisterous, laughing circles near the island superstructure, sipping canned coffee and peering down with condescending pity at the smoking, blood-splattered destroyers struggling in the surrounding water.
"Man, the destroyer boys have completely gone to soft," one gunner laughed, adjusting his tactical goggles. "Sure, those scaled beasts were tough, but letting them board the bridge? Pathetic."
"Can't blame them too much, Koinu," another pilot chuckled, lighting a cigarette against the wind. "Surface ships don't have our elevation. If our squadron hadn't arrived to bail them out, half the squadron would be fish food by now."
"Hahaha! Watch your mouth, man," a crewman smirked. "If the fleet captains hear you bragging like that, they'll challenge you to a brawl the second we hit dry dock."
Laughter and arrogant banter washed across the wide expanse of the flight deck. Serving aboard the military's prized, multi-billion-yen capital ship naturally instilled an unearned sense of elitism over the smaller escort vessels.
CREEEEEEEAK—SPLASH!
Without a fraction of a second's warning, a titanic, pitch-black tentacle—over forty meters in diameter and lined with thousands of razor-sharp, rotating suckers—violently erupted from the ocean, slamming straight down across the middle of the flight deck.
The reinforced steel plating buckled like a tin can.
Before the frozen flight crews could even process the horror, seven more colossal appendages breached the surface, coiling tightly around the carrier's hull, crushing radar towers, and wrapping the thousand-foot warship in an inescapable, suffocating vice grip.
Sirens shrieked in deafening pandemonium across the ship.
"ACTION STATIONS! ACTION STATIONS!!"
"WEAPONS FREE! FIRE EVERYTHING AT THE TENTACLES!!"
The bridge officers screamed frantic counter-orders over the intercom, but the sailors on deck could barely keep their footing. The entire multi-ton warship was being violently tossed like a toy in a bathtub.
Dozens of multi-million-yen attack helicopters snapped their tiedown chains, skidding across the slick deck and tumbling into the sea alongside screaming flight crews and burning fuel drums.
As if growing bored of toying with its prey, the ancient abyssal leviathan concentrated its titanic, muscular mass onto the starboard flank of the vessel.
With a sickening, catastrophic groan of tearing iron and buckling bulkheads, the massive beast dragged the carrier's superstructure straight down into the water.
Within seconds, the pride of the naval fleet was forcefully flipped completely upside down, capsizing into the boiling, foam-covered waves.
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