Two growth cycles had passed.

Harbour was no longer just shelter, it was a system. A place that worked because I made it work. Every kill fed the heat, every scrap brought new life. Worms and scavengers cleaned what I left behind. Even the water had settled into a rhythm.

So had I.

Circle. Strike. Drift. Count.

The hunt had become pattern, clean, repeatable. My movements were efficient now, not wild. I didn’t chase. I cut angles, drove prey into corners, killed before they knew the shape of danger.

It was a trade. Calm for blood.

Each cycle ended the same way. The System flickered in quiet approval, its voice steady, almost comforting.

[Cycle Summary: 184 Kills Logged]

[Integrity: Stable]

I drifted through the vents, body heavy with work. The old burns had faded. The fins were stronger. My bite left smaller messes now. Practice did that, made even death neat.

Sometimes I wondered if that was what evolution meant down here. Efficiency, not mercy.

The trench had changed with me. The water was quieter. The plankton clouds kept a polite distance. The smaller predators had learned my routes and moved on. I was the problem the sea had already solved.

For a while, it almost felt peaceful.

Then one kill went missing.

I noticed it halfway through a cycle, returning along my usual route. A grazer I’d taken cleanly, neck bite, instant stillness. I’d left it near a vent seam while I looped for the next. When I came back, it was gone.

No smear, no blood cloud, no trace.

I hovered, tasting the current. There was a faint thread of scent: oil, salt, iron. Familiar, but not mine.

I circled again. The marks in the silt weren’t drag lines or bite trails. Just a small dip where something large had moved in and out without struggle.

Another hunter, quick and deliberate.

The water pressed close. The sea was big enough for thousands of mouths, but the thought of something taking from my lanes stirred something sharper than hunger.

I followed the scent.

It drifted toward a collapsed chimney where a crust of rock sealed bubbling gas. I knew this place. I’d used a vent like it before to kill the eel. The scar it left on the land still showed where pressure met stone.

The bubbles trembled under the crust as I slipped through the side channel. The scent thickened, still fresh.

Then the water shifted.

A shadow moved at the edge of my vision. I turned, jaw tight.

There, in the dim light, another shape hung in the current.

It was like looking into a warped mirror.

Broad-shouldered. Armoured fins. A thick jaw lined with new plates. A scar ran down its right flank, long and pale. The same burn pattern the vents left when they exploded, my explosion.

It had survived.

Its eyes caught the faint vent glow. They weren’t empty like the swarmfish or the grazers. They were focused. Sharp. Watching.

Alive in the way I used to be.

Neither of us moved.

The current between us thinned, silent but charged.

I clicked once, a soft pulse. The echo came back double. The second pulse wasn’t mine.

He’d answered.

The sound wasn’t random, deliberate, testing. The same way I mapped the sea.

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I sent another, narrower, just to see. He matched pitch, shifted a fraction higher. A mimic’s game.

Then he held still, waiting.

The silence stretched until I could hear my own heartbeat again.

He drifted back a little, calm, measured. The scar down his side flexed with each breath. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t challenging.

He was reading me.

I saw the moment of recognition, the same spark that had frozen me. He knew exactly what I was.

The water between us grew heavy. My throat tightened, not from fear, not yet, but from the realisation that something else down here had learned to think.

And maybe it had been human once too.

The other creature moved first, sliding toward the vent opening. It didn’t rush. Its strokes were confident, practised. It passed close enough for our wakes to touch. Then it was gone, vanishing into the dark lane beyond the ridge.

The bubbles under the crust quivered again, like a held breath finally let go.

I waited a long time before leaving.

Back at Harbour, I couldn’t rest. The rhythm of the vents felt off, uneven. I kept hearing the echo of that second click in the back of my skull.

When the hunger came again, it wasn’t for food, it was for understanding.

I needed to know if it had been coincidence or something worse.

So, next cycle, I tried the same routine. Same lane. Same vent seam. I took another kill and left it there. Drifted for a few breaths. Then I turned back.

Gone.

No blood. No pieces. The same clean theft.

I followed the trail again, careful, quiet. The scent was sharper this time, stronger, fresher. He’d been closer when he took it.

I found the same ridge, the same collapsed chimney. No shadow waited this time, just a few stirred grains of silt and the echo of movement fading into the trench beyond.

The sea doesn’t make mistakes like that twice.

He’d done it on purpose, waited until I was far enough to take it, left just enough sign to be found.

A message.

I stayed in the shadows, thinking. My gills worked fast, trying to taste meaning in the current. He wasn’t hunting me. Not yet. He was measuring me. The way I’d measured him.

I should have been angry. I wasn’t.

I was curious.

What was I to him? Rival, threat, test?

Whatever the answer, he was learning the same way I had, through hunger, heat, and repetition. The scar said he’d survived something that should’ve killed him. The look in his eyes said that survival had cost him reason. Or maybe given him too much.

Over the next few days, I changed my patterns.

I started hunting in three arcs instead of one. One close to Harbour, one along the mid-lane, and one past the cracked chimney where he liked to move. I shifted my feeding spots, testing which kills he took, which he ignored.

The results were clear by the third night.

He only hunted the middle lane. The one we both knew.

He wasn’t taking at random, he was claiming territory.

Harbour had been my safe zone for weeks. Now there was another like it, somewhere along the same current.

The sea didn’t make duplicates without reason.

Every vent, every scar, every creature filled a place. Maybe this was how balance worked, how dominance was tested.

Not a duel. A pattern of small thefts, of claims tested and erased until one of us learned which rule broke first.

Late on the second evening, I followed the middle lane again.

The vent light flickered across the ridges. The heat pushed strong enough to make my scales hum. The same kill point waited, a shallow shelf above the current where smaller fish gathered.

I struck quick, clean, and left the body floating.

Then I hid.

The vent field buzzed. My own blood thudded in my ears.

Ten heartbeats. Nothing.

Twenty.

Then movement.

The shadow came out of the dark as smooth as before. He didn’t bother with stealth this time. His motion was calm, confident. The scar gleamed along his flank like a stripe of pale lightning.

He reached the carcass, circled it once, then took it whole in his jaw and began to leave.

As he passed my hiding place, he slowed, just slightly, and turned his head enough that one eye met mine through the vent haze.

Then he was gone.

The message couldn’t have been clearer.

I wasn’t being ignored. I was being acknowledged.

Back in Harbour, I lay against the wall and let the thought grow.

There were others. Maybe not many, but enough.

The ocean was recycling its dead, remaking them, testing what kind of things they became after it pulled them apart and put them back together.

I wondered how many remembered being human.

And how long that memory lasted before it was swallowed by instinct.

The system pinged softly in the background, as if taking notes.

[Dominance Challenge Detected]

[Threat Level: Equivalent]

Equivalent.

The word lingered like salt on an open wound.

He was my equal, not by chance, but by design. The same evolution, the same hunger, the same path.

I thought about fighting him. About the scar that ran his side. About what a kill like that might give me.

But under the thought was something else.

A question.

If I fought him, if I won, what would that change in me?

The sea rewarded every act of survival with growth. Every kill made me harder, faster, less human. But this was different. He wasn’t prey. He was proof.

Proof that the sea could remake more than flesh. It could remake minds.

Mine. His. Maybe others still out there.

The trench was big, but not big enough for two predators with the same pattern. Sooner or later, the current would bring us together again.

Part of me dreaded it. Another part, something new, wanted it.

Because deep down, under the hunger and fear, another truth was forming.

Fighting him wouldn’t just be survival. It would be the next step.

The test the sea had written for both of us.

I let the thought settle like silt at the bottom of the current.

If dominance meant killing him, then I’d fight when the time came. But if it meant learning, adapting, becoming something more, then maybe that was worth the blood.

The vent’s hum filled the hollow again.

I pressed my jaw to the stone and whispered softly into the current, words I wasn’t sure were prayer or promise.

The sea remembers. Maybe that’s how it teaches.

The System stirred, faint and neutral, watching but not judging.

I closed my eyes. The current washed over me, warm and slow.

Tomorrow, I’d hunt the middle lane again.

Not to kill for food.

To see what the sea wanted to make out of us.

And if it demanded a fight, I’d give it one.

Not for anger.

For growth.

For proof.