On the morning of the tenth day, Mav led his Subjects down into the deep water.
They went in a line.
Two swam in front, because he was the fastest and the strongest.
Three, Four and Five followed.
Six walked along the seabed at the back, and Mav swam above the crab’s cracked shell with the harpoon in his hand.
His leg still ached, but it carried him.
Past the cliff, the seabed fell away in a long slope.
The green light of his base faded behind them.
The water turned from blue to gray, and then to a color that was almost black.
It was colder here.
He could see no more than 10 meters in any direction.
‘Stay close.
Nobody goes out of my sight.’
Then he saw the fish, and for a while, he forgot to be careful.
They were gray and flat, as wide as dinner plates, and they lay on the mud by the dozen.
They were slow.
When Two struck the first one, it barely tried to flee.
Mav felt the Essence come in and opened the entry to see what a kill was worth down here.
[Seaweed.
Rank F.
Essence: 15/200.
Host: Needlefish.]
12 points, from a single kill.
Mav could hardly believe it.
A needlefish gave five.
A shrimp gave three.
These flat gray fish were rank F, one step above everything he had hunted so far, and the Genesis paid for the difference.
’12 points each.
10 kills is more than a full step for an F- seaweed.’
He set them all to work.
It was the best hunting he had seen since he arrived.
The four needlefish struck again and again.
Six crushed the flat fish in his good claw, two at a time.
Mav speared one himself, and then another, and felt One grow warm in his neck.
Every few seconds, another trickle of Essence ran into the back of his head.
By the middle of the day, he had stopped opening the entries.
The numbers were climbing too fast to follow.
For the first time, the arithmetic was on his side.
At this pace, all 10 of his seaweeds could reach rank F within three days.
Rank E- no longer looked impossible.
It only looked hard, and Mav felt almost happy.
He should have noticed how far they had gone.
The base was a long way behind them.
The hunting had drawn them down the slope, a little further with every kill, and the water around them was now completely dark.
The only light came from the seaweeds of his own hosts.
He was about to call them back when all of them went rigid.
It happened to all six at the same instant.
He knew that feeling.
He had felt it once before, on the first day.
‘Back!
Everyone back to me!’
They turned.
They were fast.
But they were not fast enough.
Something rose out of the dark below them without a sound.
It was an eel, and it was as long as two grown men.
Its skin was as pale as bone.
It had no eyes at all, only a blunt head and a mouth that opened far too wide, lined with teeth as thin as needles.
It did not hurry.
It moved like something that had never needed to.
Mav’s blood ran cold.
It did not bite.
There was a flash.
The whole sea turned blue and white for an instant, and something struck Mav across the entire body at once, like a slap from a giant hand.
His arms jerked.
His teeth slammed together.
He was 20 meters away from the eel, and it still felt as if he had put his hand inside a live machine at the foundry.
Three and Four had been much closer.
They hung in the water, stiff and still, drifting on their sides.
The eel turned its blind head toward Three and swallowed her whole.
Mav felt it.
There was no other way to say it.
One of the 10 points in his head went out.
It did not fade.
It was there, small, quick and frightened, and then it was gone, and there was a hole where it had been.
It was like having a finger cut off.
Three was the quick one.
Three was the one who had held on to her rock for her whole life, and had let go because he asked.
Then the eel took Four, and there was a second hole.
Horror and grief hit him together.
Two lines of pale letters burned in the dark in front of him.
[A Subject has died.
Killed by: Pale Eel, Rank E-.]
[A Subject has died.
Killed by: Pale Eel, Rank E-.]
‘Move.
MOVE!’
He did not remember much of the way back, only the panic.
He swam harder than he had ever swum, with Two and Five on either side of him and Six scrambling up the slope behind.
He did not look over his shoulder.
He did not need to.
Through the seaweeds of his Subjects, he could feel the eel following them, slow and patient, never more than a few lengths behind.
It followed them all the way up the slope.
It followed them past the cliff where the crab had lived.
It stopped at the edge of the green light.
Mav fell behind his wall and turned around with the harpoon raised.
The eel hung in the dark water just beyond the reach of the glow, pale and enormous.
It stayed there for a long moment.
Then it turned, slowly, and slid back down toward the deep.
He did not know why it had stopped.
He was only sure that it would come back.
He sat against the Heartstone for a long time, shaking, before he could think.
Then he opened his Status, because the numbers were the only thing he trusted.
[Subjects: 8]
Eight.
So that was the answer to his fourth question.
He had refused to spend a Subject to find out.
The eel had spent two for him.
When a host died, its seaweed died with it.
And death was final.
Every child knew that part.
Nothing in any World, no talent and no treasure, brought a dead Subject back.
Three and Four were not coming back.
He made himself look at what the Status had told him.
Rank E-.
That was three full steps above most of his seaweeds, and two above Two.
It was exactly the rank he needed his own Subjects to reach, and the eel had been born with it.
It could kill two of his hunters with a single flash, from a distance, without even touching them.
He could not fight that.
Not with needlefish, and not with a harpoon.
Then he did the count, because the count was what mattered.
To raise his World to rank E, he needed 10 Subjects at rank E-.
He had eight Subjects left.
The best hunting ground in his World belonged to a rank E- monster.
And he had 20 days.
He knew that his seaweeds could reproduce.
Every species did, in its own way and in its own time.
That was how most Awakened grew their forces.
It was a known fact that when two Subjects had young, or a single one for some species, the young counted as a new Subject.
But he had no idea how a seaweed did it, or how long it took.
Mav searched for the place in his head where Three had been.
There was nothing there.
He had told himself that numbers were simple.
Two of his numbers were gone, and it did not feel simple at all.