The trench had become a chessboard.

The current lines that once guided me now carried another presence, always just beyond reach. Our wakes crossed like scars cut into the same body. The herds we hunted moved differently now, jittery, alert, feeding in shorter bursts before vanishing into cracks. They could sense that two predators had begun to map the same water.

No ambushes anymore.

No surprise kills.

Just waiting, each of us for the other’s first mistake.

The days blurred into rhythm again, but the rhythm wasn’t mine alone.

Every turn I made, he made. Every drift, every test click, every glide through the vent shadows was answered somewhere out of sight by a mirror echo. I could feel it, a second pulse layered beneath my own.

At first, I tried to ignore it. The trench was wide, the currents complex. But the more I hunted, the clearer the pattern became. When I stalked left, he shifted left. When I looped around a ridge to strike from above, I caught the faint pulse of his sonar doing the same.

The abyss had turned us into reflections.

I started changing tactics, breaking the routines I’d built. Instead of circling, I moved in bursts: stop, drift, sink, rise. I used the vent flows to throw my scent away. I struck upward through shadows rather than down through light. Each move was something new, a test.

He adapted.

Every time.

I would feel the faint tug of displaced water a few ridges away, and I knew he’d mirrored me again. The sea was teaching us both, shaping instinct into counter-instinct, rhythm into duel.

The herds had learned too. They travelled in tighter spirals now, keeping low near mineral vents that stung our scales. The clever ones used the heat shimmer as cover, breaking sonar lines. The smaller ones vanished outright, hiding in the plumes we couldn’t risk entering.

The trench had gone quiet in its own way, no easy prey, no easy victories.

Each hunt was a duel of shadows.

We stopped chasing kills. We started testing each other.

The first duel began without plan.

A pod of grazers drifted through a vent lane, their bodies glimmering faintly in the blue haze. I stalked from the left wall, using the gas vents to blur my echo. The plan was simple, drive them against the ridge, strike from below.

The water felt too still.

Halfway through the approach, I felt a faint vibration through the ridge, soft, deliberate. Not prey movement. A tail flick.

He was here.

Across the herd, hidden in the opposite current.

For a heartbeat, I considered pulling away. Let him take them. But the hunger that had been patient for so long began to stir again, not for food, but for dominance.

We struck almost together.

Two shadows breaking through the vent haze.

The herd scattered instantly. Their small bodies shot into cracks, vanishing in every direction. Our wakes met mid-strike, colliding hard enough to churn the water white. The current twisted between us, thick with sound and heat.

Neither of us hit flesh.

The grazers were gone, leaving only the noise of our near miss.

He turned sharply, cutting a wide loop through the silt. I followed the motion until he disappeared behind the vent field.

For a long moment, I hovered alone, my gills flaring too fast, the trench around me vibrating with what felt like laughter.

The abyss mocked us both.

From that day, every hunt became a game of misdirection.

We stopped killing for food and started killing for position.

I learned to read the smallest shifts in current, the tremor of water disturbed by a finbeat, the faint drift of displaced plankton. I used the vents’ exhale to mask my motion, slipping between warm bursts and cold eddies.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

When I descended, I let my body roll to mimic a current fold. When I struck, I struck at angles no creature was meant to use.

But whatever I learned, he learned too.

If I banked to the left, his shadow did the same. If I slowed mid-glide, the water on the other side of the ridge slowed too. Even when I hid my scent by cutting through the vent’s exhaust, the water carried back a faint echo of his doing the same.

It was as though the sea itself was holding a mirror against me.

The prey began to sense our pattern before we did. Schools fled long before either of us reached striking distance, their trails curving through the dark like threads of warning.

The trench turned quiet again, not dead, but listening.

The silence had weight now.

It pressed on my ribs and filled my head until even breathing sounded loud.

The next encounter came four days later.

A small herd of shellfish clung to a vent shelf, their shells glowing faintly in the blue light. I waited above, counting their rhythm as they opened and closed. Every fifth pulse, they fed. Predictable. Easy.

But the warmth of another body drifted through the water.

He was near again.

The silt on the ridge shifted in a long arc, his tail, brushing stone.

He was waiting for me to make the first move.

I watched his shadow stretch along the wall. The scar on his flank caught faint vent light, flashing like a blade whenever he turned.

We circled. Slow.

I moved first, testing. A short lunge. He didn’t chase, didn’t flee, just matched distance.

The shellfish clamped shut, their glow dimming. The whole vent field seemed to hold its breath.

I dropped lower, using the gas shimmer to hide my form. The heat bit through the thin skin near my ribs, but I ignored it. The water pulsed around me, thick with potential.

I could feel his attention, sharp, constant.

When I struck, I didn’t aim for the prey. I aimed for the current itself, driving the hot plume between us to break the rhythm. The vent burst, scattering bubbles through the water.

For a moment, the world went white.

I felt his movement through the fog, quick, cutting sideways. I twisted and lashed out, teeth finding nothing but pressure.

Then silence.

When the bubbles cleared, the vent shelf was empty. The shellfish gone. The rival gone.

The sea had swallowed everything again.

After that, the pattern grew sharper.

We were no longer predators. We were equations.

Each strike, each turn, each vibration in the water felt calculated. If I shifted a metre left, he did too. If I slowed, he slowed.

The abyss had turned us into reflections of each other, two predators trapped in the same logic.

It began to feel less like rivalry and more like repetition, as though the sea had decided to copy a single thought and set it adrift twice just to see which would last longer.

The idea ate at me worse than hunger ever had.

The prey avoided both of us entirely now. Days passed with no kills, only the constant awareness of another consciousness mirroring every breath I took.

I began to resent the quiet.

It wasn’t fear, it was insult.

Every movement I made had already been made by something else. Every instinct I trusted had already been used.

Individuality, the one thing that had separated me from the dumb herds and silent hunters, was fading.

Was I still evolving? Or just repeating?

Did the abyss breed thought, or just remember it?

The question echoed in my chest like sonar.

Are we echoes repeating the same hunger?

It happened on the seventh day.

A school of grazers crossed the mid-lane, dozens strong. Perfect size, perfect spacing. My body moved before my mind could argue.

I descended along the ridge, silent and focused.

The current shifted, faint, but noticeable. He was there too, somewhere opposite.

I ignored him.

I’d let him have the last hunt. Not this one.

The grazers turned in a long arc, moving toward the vent’s brighter mouth. I waited until they drifted close enough that their heat brushed my gills, then fired downward through the school.

A flash of motion cut across my path, clean, fast, perfect.

He struck first.

The water exploded with light and sound. Scales spun like dust through the vent glow. The blood cloud rose between us, thick and red, burning against the cold.

A signal fire in the deep.

I froze mid-glide, every instinct screaming. He hovered across the lane, the kill fresh in his jaws.

Our eyes met through the haze.

No growl. No sound.

Just the slow understanding that the next time we met, one of us wouldn’t leave the trench.

He turned away, carrying the body into the dark.

The current closed around him. The light faded.

I hovered there, the blood still drifting upward. My gills worked too fast. The heat in the water felt wrong now, mocking.

The sea had decided to draw a line between us.

It wasn’t about food anymore. It was about who the trench remembered.

Back in Harbour, I couldn’t rest. The vents hissed with uneven rhythm. Every sound felt like his echo, answering from somewhere in the dark.

I circled the walls of my hollow, tracing the marks where I’d patched the entrance. Each scar felt smaller now, less like territory and more like a hiding place.

The hunger wasn’t for meat anymore. It was for meaning.

The sea didn’t make copies for no reason. There had to be purpose in it. Some test. Some lesson.

Maybe this was what the System wanted.

To see which of us would stop being human first.

When sleep came, it was shallow and full of sound.

Click-click. Click-click.

Two pulses, always the same distance apart.

The rhythm of two hearts beating in the same water.

When I woke, the current felt colder. The vent light dimmed as if the trench itself was waiting for something.

I ran a soft pulse through the water. It came back clean, no shadow near.

But I didn’t believe it.

Somewhere out there, he was already moving, already hunting. Already thinking of the same question that burned through my skull.

If I beat him, what would the sea make of me?

If I didn’t, would it matter?

The System answered before I could.

[Learning Efficiency +2%]

[Objective Added: Surpass Rival]

I watched the glow fade and smiled without meaning to.

The sea had chosen the game, and now it had given it a name.

Surpass.

Not destroy. Not devour.

Surpass.

A small difference, but it meant something.

He wasn’t just an obstacle. He was the next rung.

And I would climb it.

For growth. For proof. For the chance to be more than the echo the sea had made of me.

The vents hummed again, a slow rhythm that matched my pulse.

Tomorrow, I’d find him.

And when I did, we’d see which one of us the sea remembered.