In the year 2025, an unexplainable cataclysm erupted in the heart of the Pacific. The world convulsed beneath the weight of relentless earthquakes and tsunamis that raged for twenty–four hours without pause. Cities crumbled into dust. Homes engulfed by raging water. Millions fled, their screams swallowed by the roar of the ocean.
When the chaos settled, Earth was unrecognizable—an endless, drowned expanse. Humanity renamed the planet Earthrio, a water–world where land was a relic of memory. Half of humankind was gone. Every land–dwelling animal had vanished into extinction, their bones lost beneath the abyss.
The survivors turned to the skies. Towering cities rose above the waters, suspended on colossal struts and buoyant platforms engineered to withstand the crushing pressure below. The oceans had grown so deep, so heavy, that even a human without protection meant certain death.
By the year 2100, civilization had been reborn in steel and glass. Skyships drifted between city–spires. Submersibles the size of cathedrals prowled the depths. Sleek, airborne pods screamed through the clouds faster than the jets of old. Humanity had adapted, but the ocean had not yet revealed all its secrets.
A group of scientists, venturing into the abyss, encountered something unusual.
At first, it appeared as a faint shape on their sonar—so vast it barely seemed real. The lead scientist, Dr. Ren Halvorsen, leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
"Run that again. No way that's a geological reading."
The sonar pinged a second time. The outline shifted… and moved.
Through the forward viewport, a slow glow emerged from the black. Bioluminescent patterns shimmered across a shape so large it seemed to bend the water around it. As the lights traced over its length, the crew realized they weren't looking at part of the trench wall.
They were looking at a creature.
"By the skies…" whispered Kaito Mendez, their marine biologist, his breath fogging the glass. "That thing's bigger than a blue whale. No—three times bigger."
The leviathan drifted lazily beside them, its movements unnervingly graceful for its size. Serrated gills flexed and pulsed along its sides, glinting like a necklace of knives. Each slow beat of its massive body sent subtle tremors through the water.
Halvorsen snapped to his controls. "Get me Sky City Command, priority channel."
The Comutelator crackled to life.
Sky City Command: "We read you, Research Sub Delta-One. Go ahead."
Halvorsen: "Command, we've made contact with an unidentified aquatic organism—massive scale, never before recorded. Sending data feed now."
Command: "Copy, Delta-One. Receiving. …By all stations, that's—keep tracking it. Can you estimate behavior?"
"It doesn't even know we're here," Mendez said, eyes wide.
But then the leviathan turned.
It rolled its vast body, curling just enough so that one pale, lidless eye passed across the viewport. The scientists fell silent. It was looking at them.
A ripple passed through the water as it drifted closer—not attacking, not yet, but circling. The sub rocked gently, as if caught in the wake of an undersea current.
Mendez gave a nervous laugh. "It's… playing with us?"
The leviathan slid beneath the vessel, its enormous shadow blotting out what little light the depths held. It nudged the sub with its gills, rolling it gently like a toy in a giant's hand. The hull groaned from the pressure.
Command: "Delta-One, your readings are spiking—what's happening down there?"
Halvorsen: "It's—interacting. Possibly assessing us. We should return before—"
The creature shifted. The playful circling slowed, the movements becoming tighter, more deliberate.
"Uh… it's not playing anymore," Mendez said, his voice thin.
Without warning, the leviathan's bioluminescence flared—an eerie white-blue radiance that lit the trench walls for hundreds of meters. Then it struck.
It hit with unnatural speed, its vast body coiling around the sub in an instant. The scientists barely had time to scream. The Comutelator flared with static as the hull groaned, then buckled.
Command: "Delta-One, repeat! Delta-One, do you copy?!"
The last transmission was a deafening crunch of metal, followed by silence.
The leviathan engulfed the submarine in a single, violent lunge. The vessel and its crew vanished into the monster's abyssal maw, erased without a trace.
All that remained was a sudden, violent tremor that rattled homes across the Sky Cities.
By the following day, every news broadcast carried the same grim headline: A team of deep-sea researchers has mysteriously vanished while exploring the lower trench sectors. Officials speculated on a catastrophic systems failure. Others whispered of something far older, far hungrier, lurking in the deep.