Ian turned toward the prince. “What’s the point of the sharks gathering? We’re not going to enter the water.”

Euryphel shook his head. “That’s not why we need to get out of here.” The prince darted forward, tugging Ian behind. “It’s found us again.”

Ian’s lips curved downward. “The tentacle riftbeast? How did it catch up?” Ian hadn’t sensed its approach.

“It’s going to come up from an underwater passage,” Euryphel explained. “I also have no idea how it moved so quickly. Wait...”

“What?”

“It’s being pulled by the sharks.”

Ian stared at the back of the prince’s head with a blank expression.

The prince continued, saying, “It’s going to try and split us up. Don’t let that happen.”

Y’jeni, what future is Eury seeing?

“The water’s going to rise,” Euryphel transmitted. “Kill as many sharks as you can and tell Bluebird to get ready to break ice. Pull up your hood and breathing apparatus.”

As they raced through the air, the water began to swell back and forth as though someone were swishing a glass of wine.

“Here it comes.”

In one heaving surge, a titanic wave of water crested and began to plummet their way, utterly unavoidable. It cracked stalactites and smashed into the duo with the force of a falling building. It surged between them like a wedge, pushing them apart.

Ian held the prince’s hand in a vice, locking their fingers in place. They could break every bone before their hands separated. Ian bit his lip and controlled his and Euryphel’s bodies, forcing them together against the rapids.

When the torrent between them disappeared, their bodies smacked against each other, only to be smashed down by another wave deep into the water. Sharks swarmed around them with bared jaws, their neurotoxin-lined mops of hair billowing out.

Ian’s eyes flared violet. All sharks in their field of view shuddered and fell momentarily still before turning around.

You might think of water as your domain, Ian thought, but it’s mine now. Where air and earth were poor conductors of Death energy, water was an ideal medium, his Death energy reaching further than anywhere else. Thousands of sharks had their allegiances turned in an instant, tearing into brethren and sparking a maddened feeding frenzy. They wouldn’t be able to act autonomously for long unless Ian made them into proper constructs with soul gems, but they only needed to serve as a momentary distraction.

Meanwhile, Bluebird propelled Ian and Euryphel away from the approaching tentacle riftbeast. Ian was a scythe of carnage, sharks falling before their passage. Rather than sending these sharks away, Ian began to strip the sharks into flesh and bone and converted their energy into soul gems.

Soon Ian and Euryphel were surrounded by an egg of Death energy not unlike a giant Deathseed. But unlike a Deathseed limited to producing one construct at a time, Ian pumped out several constructs per second. Bone serpent constructs slithered out and tore into sharks with fangs and bony spines.

“You’ve killed so many of them,” Euryphel observed. “It’s...displeased.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Ian replied. “The riftbeast is going to be displeased no matter what.”

“It wasn’t pursuing us at top speed before when it was being tugged along by the sharks, but a critical mass of those are dead. It’s going to catch up with us and when it gets close it’s going to freeze the water solid.”

“Is Bluebird not going to be enough to thaw us out?”

“It won’t be fast enough,” Euryphel replied.

“And the water is still filling the cavern to the ceiling?” Ian asked.

“Yes.”

Ian narrowed his eyes. “How did it move so much water?” A peak water elementalist would be hard-pressed to relocate even a fraction of the rift’s total fluid, let alone raise the water level to the ceiling.

“It’s not a proper practitioner–it’s not intelligent enough, and it has no fate arrows that I can see. It does have power over the rift, however. When we try to reach what was formerly open air, the pressure on our bodies increases. Haven’t you noticed which way the dead sharks have been drifting?”

Ian felt a pit in the center of his stomach. “Are you suggesting that it...reversed the orientation of gravity?”

“Honestly, Ian, I’m just trying to keep us alive; we can reason about this later. It’s going to reach us in forty seconds and freeze us solid.”

Ian could just barely make out the vitality of tentacles approaching from below. The distance made a mockery of scale, but every second the tentacles drew closer and took up more of Ian’s field of view.

“Apologies for being so useless. I keep running scenarios but nothing is working particularly well: It’s too large for you to incapacitate and kill, even with your increased underwater range. It freezes the water and promptly swats us from existence.”

“There’s really nothing you can do to control it with End?”

“I wish there was...but there’s simply nothing there for me to leverage.”

“What if I wield Bluebird and charge all my energy into a single strike?”

Euryphel paused for a moment. “If you attack the tentacles while empowering Bluebird with the energy you collected from the sharks...you should be able to decay them all the way through. But you’re going to have to time it just right–they need to be as close as possible.”

Ian smiled. He didn’t have much practice wielding Bluebird as a ranged weapon, but he figured he could hit a massive target like the tentacles up close. “Time to take our stand. What’s a rift without a little danger?”

He reached out to the glosSword. Bluebird, stop propelling us. Come.

Yes, Iggy! Bluebird’s wings cut through the water like a knife, its body appearing just before Ian’s open hands.

We’re going to blast these tentacles and rip their tips off. Can you prepare yourself to handle my energy in addition to your own?

If you send your energy to supercharge my soul gems, I’ll be able to make use of it, though some of the gems might crack afterwards, the glosSword cautioned.

I’m not concerned about breaking soul gems.

The bird folded its wings together like a butterfly and angled them forward away from its body. Ian grasped its ovular torso, oily energy at once oozing and fizzling around his fingertips.

“I’ll tell you when,” Euryphel said.

Now that they weren’t swimming away, the tentacles were on them in seconds, water freezing wherever they passed. Five tentacles boxed the duo in and froze the water solid.

Ian had faced a coordinated ice assault off the coast of Godora, but hadn’t ever been frozen solid, not even in the loop. His shield of bones resisted the ice’s encroachment but was ultimately subsumed. Ian was completely unable to move, his eyes just barely able to follow the path of the remaining three tentacles closing in for the kill.

“Eury...any time now.”

“Wait...”

Ian felt a sense of panic begin to well up in him as the trio of tentacles closed in, plunging through the ice without resistance. He couldn’t even adjust his aim. This can’t be how it ends, right?

“You’ll get all of them in...three, two, one!”

Ian didn’t see how that was possible since the tentacles were closing in from different angles, but he funneled energy into the Bluebird, sourcing from the loose cloud of Death energy around him as well as from a handful of soul gems. Bluebird’s body thrummed and glowed with crackling blue energy and writhing black tendrils, the glow most intense between and along the parallel edges of its wings.

After a brief moment of humming, a horizontal blast of blue and black light shot forth. The three tentacles darted in a split second before the discharge, the blast catching them twenty feet from the tips. Instead of barreling through Ian and Eury, the tentacles shuddered and fell off to the side, smashing the ice and sinking upward. The stumps were blackened with necrosis and weeping dark fluid, blue blood mixing with putrid brown.

“Don’t stop firing until they stop coming,” Euryphel transmitted. “The five that boxed us in are coming next. You’re going to need to move your hands to adjust your aim to get the one on the left, then rotate around counterclockwise. Two of the soul gems are going to shatter so you need to be ready to replace them.”

Ian sent forth a barrage of bone splinters to finish the work of the dismembered tentacles, shattering the ice around him. He took in a gasping breath of air, water flowing past his breathing apparatus.

The necromancer then spun to the left and supercharged Bluebird for a second time, the glosSword emitting a blast of energy and severing a length of tentacle. Ian whipped around and sent out another blast, clipping two tentacles but not severing them completely. Gritting his teeth, he sent out a final charge just as the tentacles closed in on Euryphel, the dismembered limbs swerving into the prince’s half-frozen ice block.

Two of the soul gems in Bluebird shattered and sent a flare of energy into Ian’s face. He flinched but worked past the momentary blindness, sliding new gems into the vacated sockets and continuing to rotate left. He lined the glosSword up again and cut through another two tentacles until he was once more facing his starting position...and the approaching stumps of the three initially-severed tentacles back for vengeance.

“It's going to try and freeze the area around us again, but you can’t let them. You need to bring us both downward, shooting at them as we go.”

“I’m not very fast in the water,” Ian replied. “I won’t be able to bring us out of the way without using Bluebird for propulsion.”

“We just need to reach one of the tentacles and get inside of it,” Euryphel ordered.

“Like what I did with the leviathan in the Infinity Loop? Got it.”

“Not quite,” Euryphel retorted. “We’re entering through a tentacle stump, not through the main body. It’s going to be a long, messy ride.”

“I can handle messy.”

Ian grabbed hold of Euryphel’s body and directed the two of them in the direction from which the tentacles came, Bluebird held protectively in front while a shield of bone sprang up around them. They didn’t move as quickly as Ian would have liked–not fast enough to dodge the tentacles lashing at them–but Ian hit two approaching tentacles with a blast of energy, disabling them long enough to reach the stump of one particularly necrotized limb.

Ian snarled, tearing into the tentacle’s flesh with his bare hands. It was ridiculous that he needed to leverage a Death energy blast powerful enough to take out a city district just to dismember a single tentacle. The limb wasn’t waiting for them to drill into it, either: It thrashed and tried to shake the two of them free. Only Ian’s ability to latch onto the tentacle’s flesh keeping them from tumbling into the depths.

Ian split the tentacle apart and carved a cavity for himself and Euryphel. He barely managed to seal the flesh behind them just as another tentacle took a swipe.

“Ian...nice work.”

Ian grinned, a surge of euphoric adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. “That was a bit dicey for a second.”

The tentacle surged right, knocking Ian and Euryphel into the side of the water-filled hollow. The prince staggered and held his head, gesturing behind. “Let’s hurry. I know the riftbeast’s flesh resists you, but do your best. Make sure you create a hole to let in water every thirty seconds to ensure we can breathe.”

Cutting through the tentacle was as messy as Euryphel warned, the water clouding with inky, blue blood and soft, putrefying flesh. Ian wasn’t a stranger to it, but he appreciated being unable to smell the fishy, rotting scent of ruined tentacle.

“You’re handling this well,” Ian observed. “Not grossed out?”

“I’m fine,” Euryphel replied drily. “Can’t see very much.”

After what felt like an eternity, Ian finally cut into the main body of the riftbeast. They wouldn’t be able to create an incision to bring in water, but the beast’s vessels were large enough for them to swim through. Ian cut into a vein and sent Euryphel through, following the flow of blood back to the heart.

“These kinds of cephalopod riftbeasts always have at least three hearts,” Euryphel explained.

“What about this one?”

“Four hearts. I believe...you don’t want to waste time destroying the first one we’re going to encounter. When you’re making the soul gem, you’ll want to do so next to the center-most heart. It’s the cleanest way to kill it: Sapping the energy from all of its hearts at once.”

When they reached the valve leading into the first heart, Ian cut the vessel open and sealed it behind before moving forward and cutting through the dense flesh of the riftbeast’s interior. The hearts were as large as small buildings, each pump contracting with enough strength to crush bone.

“I hate how dark it is in here,” Euryphel transmitted. “I’m not used to being blind.”

Ian couldn’t relate: He saw the interior of the riftbeast with perfect clarity. “We’ll be out soon.” He cut into the wall of the center-most heart and pulled Euryphel inside. Ian grunted as the heart contracted around the two of them, Ian’s tri-layered bone shield expanding out to prevent them from being crushed. Ian dragged them up past the wall of the ventricle into the left-most auricle, an upper atrium with comparatively little movement. Once Ian was satisfied that he and Euryphel weren’t going to suffocate, he closed his eyes and set to work.

Ian lost himself in the rhythm of vitality. His hands cupped an ember of energy that continued to accumulate, a mix of alternating violet flame and viscous black. He’d already drained one leviathan; doing so a second time, he had a better sense of the ideal end product, allowing him to better shape and condense the energy into a matrix of power.

As in the Infinity Loop, the hearts slowed as though aged and decrepit until one after the other the hearts failed, their vitality drained. Ian continued to pull in Death energy from the whole riftbeast, its dying tissues fueling the growth of the soul gem.

Ian wasn’t sure how much time passed before he finally regained awareness and beheld the egg-shaped soul gem in his hand, its surface like scintillating oil streaked with frosty-blue lightning.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” Euryphel said. “Well done.”

Ian held up the egg, his hand slightly shaking. “It shouldn’t be possible to make a gem this dense.”

“It’s a riftbeast soul gem. There’s a reason they’re so coveted.”

“...I’ve never seen a gem with blue lightning frozen into its surface.” He turned the egg, inspecting its translucent interior. “Not even its surface, but frozen all throughout its center.”

“Ian, while that’s fascinating...can we please get out of here?”