Read Novel Full Chapter 630: Rising Through Ranks
Chapter 630: Rising Through Ranks
The group had barely cracked the top 1,000.
The chaos from the upper depths was gone. No more frenzied mobs clawing at everything that moved. Down here, every group that had survived long enough to reach this depth moved like a scalpel — deliberate, efficient, wasting nothing.
Pymon beat his wings once. The motion pushed a slow wave of displaced water outward as he leveled their descent. His golden lightning pulsed in a wide arc, and for a moment the abyss answered — jagged ridges of black basalt rose from the seabed like the spine of something buried and enormous, and between them, shapes the size of buildings drifted with a patience that only things at the top of a food chain ever develop.
"Left," Maya said.
Her pupils contracted. A cold geometric sigil expanded from the center, held for a breath, then vanished. Behind a distant ridge, something pulsed with a deep, steady light. Massive. Unmoving.
They moved toward it.
They weren’t the only ones who had seen it.
A group of ten had already engaged. Their target was an armored whale, easily sixty meters from jaw to fluke, its hide layered in overlapping plates of calcified bone that had fossilized over what looked like centuries. Energy chains had been threaded through its pectoral fins, locking them against its body. A construct of levitating spears worked in a mechanical rotation, driving into the same point on its back over and over, each strike drilling deeper than the last.
The whale turned its head and exhaled.
The shockwave hit like a wall. Three fighters were thrown end over end, tumbling into the dark. The remaining seven scattered and regrouped.
Then a spectral hammer dropped from sixty meters above — no warning, no windup — and drove straight down into the creature’s skull with a sound that reverberated through the water as a deep, physical thud felt in the chest more than heard.
The whale went still. It sank slowly, trailing a dark cloud.
+10,000 points.
#742.
Aryan watched the leaderboard shift. "They’re fast."
Alfred’s gaze had already moved past the dead whale, toward the darker water ahead. "Then we move faster."
---
The terrain changed. The ridges grew taller, the gaps between them narrower. Creatures here were larger and fewer, which made each one more dangerous in a different way — they weren’t competing for space, which meant they didn’t spook easily. They held their ground.
One came from below without warning.
It was serpentine, forty meters of dense muscle wrapped in crystalline scales that had grown in irregular clusters, each one catching the faint ambient light and fracturing it into scattered points. The effect made it difficult to track — its outline blurred as it moved, edges dissolving into refracted light.
Silvester didn’t slow down. Stars flickered across his irises and went dark. He drove in at an angle, both blades moving in overlapping arcs that cut spiraling lines across the serpent’s body — not deep enough to kill, but precise enough to matter. Where the crystalline scales cracked, faint luminous fractures spread outward through the underlying tissue like fault lines under pressure.
Hiroshi came in behind him. A thin, still line crossed his pupils horizontally and held. His blade found the exact intersection of three fracture lines converging near the base of the skull and passed through without resistance.
The serpent’s body separated into two clean halves, the cut so precise that the severed edges barely drifted apart.
Marcus extended one arm. The drifting mass slowed, contained in a sphere of compressed pressure. Maya’s hand came up, and the temperature around it dropped sixty degrees in under a second — the tissue locked rigid, ice threading through every fracture.
Rudra hit it once.
The frozen mass detonated. Shards scattered outward in a perfect sphere and dissolved into the current.
#603.
---
The trench opened.
What had been a narrow canyon became a basin the width of a city, its walls covered floor-to-ceiling in bioluminescent organisms — coral-like structures that pulsed in slow, alternating rhythms of blue and pale green, their light casting shifting patterns across the stone like sunlight through shallow water, except there was no sun here, and the light felt borrowed. Suspended between the walls, organisms the size of cathedrals crawled on too many legs, their shells thick enough to stop most things that tried to go through them.
A group nearby had already picked one target. A winged humanoid hit the shell first, coming down nearly vertical, using speed as mass. The crack it left became the entry point for the rest of the team. In twelve seconds, the creature was open. In twenty it was dead.
Nobody was taking their time anymore.
Chronavael didn’t announce anything. Time in a two-meter radius around the group thickened almost imperceptibly — not frozen, just slowed enough that they moved through it like water while everything else moved through syrup.
Rexion lowered his jaw and released a single thread of flame downward. It wasn’t wide. It didn’t need to be. It cut a glowing line into the seabed eight meters deep, the rock on either side cracking from thermal shock, the superheated channel forcing trapped creatures upward as the pressure equalized.
Five emerged.
Aryan’s eyes changed — a spear-shaped sigil blinked once across both pupils. He drove forward, and three separate trajectories converged in the same motion, each spear-path finding the core of a different target simultaneously. Three creatures went limp before they’d fully cleared the fissure.
Hiroshi stepped once. Fourth.
Silvester descended on the fifth. His blades didn’t carve this time — they separated, working different angles, disassembling the creature into sections before it could orient toward him.
Marcus locked the surrounding water, preventing the turbulence from the kills from scattering debris into their next approach. Maya froze everything that was still moving.
Rudra’s pulse detonated the entire frozen field at once. The concussion washed outward in a ring.
Notifications stacked.
#412.
---
The basin floor leveled out below them, ancient and flat in a way that felt geologic — compressed by depth and time into something close to stone. The water here felt different. Heavier. Not from pressure alone — there was an age to it, something that registered not in the instruments of the body but somewhere further back.
Above them, a jellyfish the size of a stadium drifted without urgency. Its bell was nearly translucent, organs visible as dark masses suspended within pale tissue. Its tendrils descended for kilometers, each one thick as a ship’s anchor chain, each one generating its own continuous electrical charge that made the water around them crackle and taste of copper.
Before the group had finished assessing it, another team hit it from the far side. A mechanical construct — humanoid but scaled up, a mech built for this depth — launched magnetic harpoons that anchored through the bell and held. Energy cannons mounted on both forearms fired in controlled bursts, punching through the translucent tissue in sections.
The jellyfish didn’t rush. It gathered, then released — an electrical discharge that didn’t arc so much as fill, saturating a fifty-meter sphere around it with current. Half the attacking formation dissolved. The remaining members converged and finished it anyway.
"High-tier," Marcus said.
Alfred had already moved past him. "We’re better."
His crimson eyes caught the light and held it for a moment longer than they should have.
The basin floor shifted.
Three shapes rose from the silt simultaneously — not surfacing the way creatures do when they’re fleeing, but ascending with the deliberateness of things that have decided to come up. As though Alfred hadn’t found them, but had invited them.
Rexion’s mouth pulled into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "Good."
They attacked from three directions at once. One lunged forward, closing the distance faster than its size suggested was possible. One released a pressure wave laterally, aimed at scattering the formation. One turned and drove toward deeper water.
Chronavael caught the retreating one — time around it compressed, its movements stuttering like a film at the wrong frame rate. Maya neutralized the pressure wave, meeting it with a wall of instant freeze that collapsed the wave’s energy into expanding ice. Silvester drove into the lunging predator’s path, blades moving before it arrived, carving into its momentum. Hiroshi came through the opening, Silvester left, and found the core.
Aryan marked all three. The sigils locked across his eyes like targeting reticles. Rudra’s pulses threaded through each in sequence, layering damage through the marked tissue. Rexion’s flame punched through the largest one’s midsection with a clean, searing line. Alfred placed one hand in the air before black lines pierced them, and the cellular regeneration that had been quietly running inside all three creatures stopped.
They fell within four seconds of each other.
#201.
---
The basin was no longer quiet. Explosions of condensed energy flashed across the dark at irregular intervals — other groups working other targets, some retreating, some turning on each other when a kill was close enough to contest. The light from those distant exchanges strobed across the silt in brief, harsh pulses.
They moved through it without stopping.
Pymon folded his wings against his body and dove toward a fissure in the basin floor, a crack that dropped away into darkness that made the current darkness feel bright by comparison.
The pressure changed character. Not just heavier — it had texture now, a resistance that wasn’t entirely physical. The creatures down here didn’t have the frantic energy of things near the surface. They radiated something slower and older. Each one a Mythic-tier presence, broadcasting its weight into the surrounding water the way a planet broadcasts gravity.
One emerged from the fissure wall without warning.
A leviathan. Armored in plates of layered shell that had built up over what must have been centuries, each layer slightly different in color — black at the oldest, pale gray at the most recent. Its eyes were the color of deep-sea bioluminescence, dim and cold and large enough to reflect the entire group back at themselves.
They didn’t discuss it.
Blades opened lines across the older armor plates where the seams showed. Frost crept into the cracks and expanded them. Pulses drove through the gaps in sequence, each one finding deeper tissue. Spears converged on the joints where the plates overlapped and were thinnest. Flame drove straight down through the widest fracture. The laws governing the creature’s ability to self-repair stopped operating, cut off at the root.
It held longer than anything they’d killed below rank 500. Its armor didn’t shatter — it eroded, each exchange taking something from it that didn’t come back.
A second group arrived from above midway through. They read the situation and came straight for the leviathan — not to fight it, but to steal the finishing blow.
Aryan’s eyes flashed. Spear trajectories fanned outward in a wide arc, not aimed at the leviathan. The approaching group stopped or scattered, whichever instinct hit first. Rudra’s pulses reshaped into a concussive perimeter that held the zone. Marcus locked the surrounding water into a rigid field — nothing moved through it without his permission.
Hiroshi and Silvester entered through the largest fracture and found the core.
Rexion’s beam finished it.
+100,000 points.
The leaderboard updated.
#97.
The group held its position for a moment. Around them, the abyss continued its slow, indifferent movement — distant shapes circling at depths they hadn’t yet reached, lights pulsing in irregular patterns far below, the pressure building with every meter of depth like a promise.
They had entered the top 100.
Whatever was waiting below, it knew they were coming.