The ocean was a world unlike any Ara had known.
As she slipped beneath the waves, the crushing silence of the deep replaced the howling winds and scorching sands she had once braved. Wearing her SCUBA suit scavenged and reforged from the remnants of fallen tech, Ara descended into the dark blue abyss. The sunlight faded fast, replaced by the cold and the weight of unseen things shifting in the depths.
This place was beautiful—but it was also deadly.
She passed the bones of something massive, half-buried in sand. Faint bioluminescent glows pulsed from strange corals and drifting jellies. Then came the first tremor.
A streak of movement. Shadows too big to belong to fish.
A Megalodon surged from the gloom. Ara twisted, launching herself between jagged rocks, the creature’s jaws snapping shut inches from her leg. She rolled and kicked, rising just in time to see another nightmare join the hunt: a Mosasaur, its eyes cold and ancient, jaws wide enough to crush her whole.
Ara activated her emergency air boost, darting upward toward the kelp forest above.
But the ocean had one more terror to throw at her—Cnidarias, jellyfish glowing with eerie light, drifting toward her in a silent net of paralysis and death. A single touch could end her.
She gritted her teeth and pulled out her only weapon—a harpoon tipped with tranquilizer, not meant to kill, only to buy seconds. She fired at the closest jelly, pushing through the narrowest gap in their field.
Then the shadow returned. The Mosasaur. Too close. Too fast.
But Ara was smarter. She dove between rock arches, leading it into a narrow trench—just wide enough for her, too tight for the beast. It crashed into the walls, stunned.
Her air was low. She had to make it back.
As she broke the surface and pulled herself onto a drifting piece of wreckage, gasping for air, the stars began to shine above the waves. Ara collapsed, salt-stung and shaking, but alive.
She had survived again.
