December 15, 2025 — 2:41 PM
Southbound, East China Sea — 190 Nautical Miles from Luzon
The sea stretched on forever—calm, deceptively peaceful, glittering under the weight of the afternoon sun.
Inside the Sea Phantom, Thomas Estaris kept both hands on the control yoke as the craft cruised smoothly over low, rolling swells at a steady twenty-two knots. The hum of the hybrid diesel-electric engines was the only sound besides the occasional faint chirp of the nav system recalculating drift corrections.
He hadn't spoken in an hour.
Not out loud. Not even to himself.
The silence was beginning to feel like a second skin.
The cockpit was tight, but comfortable—designed for long stretches of solo operation. The padding on the pilot seat had molded to the shape of his body. The filtered air system kept the humidity down. The tinted canopy glass shielded his eyes from the glare. Everything in the Sea Phantom was as it should be.
But he wasn't.
The salt on his skin still itched.
The wound on his temple had stopped bleeding, but the bruising around it pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. He hadn't slept. He hadn't eaten since the C-17's crash—just a single ration bar and a few sips of desalinated water.
His mind was sharp. His body was wearing down.
He tapped the panel again, checking his heading.
ETA: 6h 13m
Distance to MOA Complex: ~185 nm
Fuel: 73%
Internal temp: 24.3°C
Desalinated water: 4.8 liters
Beacon Status: Weak Lock – Low Priority Response
Still no signal return from Overwatch.
The comms suite had synced briefly with a low-altitude satellite at sunrise, but nothing solid since. It wasn't unusual—at this distance, signal reception was patchy even for aircraft. But the silence gnawed at him.
He leaned back slightly and let go of the yoke.
The Sea Phantom stayed on course, held in place by AI-controlled micro-adjustnts. Its bow sliced through the water like a surgeon's scalpel—precise, unerring, silent.
Thomas turned his attention to the sonar panel.
Just routine.
Ping.
Pause.
Ping.
Pause.
The readout was clean. No wreckage. No terrain spikes. No marine life large enough to be tracked.
He sighed. "Too quiet."
He tapped the speaker control and cycled through the available recordings—Overwatch logs, basic radio chatter, even old music files.
He picked one—instruntal acoustic, low tempo—and let it play through the cabin.
The soft notes didn't ease the tension. If anything, they made the silence more obvious.
Ti passed.
The sun dipped lower on the horizon, casting golden slants across the cockpit. The water looked like silk stretched across the world. Almost beautiful.
He took another sip from the water reservoir and forced down a bite of ration bar.
Ping.
He glanced at the sonar again.
This ti, the return was… faint.
Unusual.
Object Detected
Depth: 25m
Signature: Inconclusive
Movent: None
Thomas frowned and tapped for detail.
The object was roughly three ters in size—rounded on one end, tapered on the other. Could've been a container. Maybe part of a wreck.
He adjusted heading two degrees to the west, just enough to get a visual when they passed by.
The Sea Phantom glided closer.
Ten minutes later, the object breached the edge of the visual range.
He slowed to a crawl—throttle dropped to eight knots.
The object was drifting near the surface, caught in a slow current.
And it was not a crate.
It was a corpse.
Floating belly-up.
At first, Thomas assud it was human. It had a humanoid torso. Arms. A head.
But as the Sea Phantom passed closer—within twenty ters—it beca horrifically clear that it was anything but.
The lower body wasn't legs—it was a long, slick, scaled tail, like sothing between a fish and a serpent. The flesh was patchy, so of it peeling away like burned rubber. The arms were webbed between the elbows and fingers. The jaw had split down the middle into two hanging slabs of at. Gills lined the neck.
And its eyes were open.
Yellow. Cloudy. Unblinking.
He felt the hairs rise on his neck.
"Bloom infection in marine species," he muttered. "Shit…"
He throttled back up and resud course, keeping the boat steady.
A mont later, he shut off the music.
The water was still again.
But the silence had changed.
It felt… wrong now.
He glanced over his shoulder. The corpse had disappeared beneath the waves.
Had it sunk?
He ran a thermal sweep.
No reading.
He tapped sonar again.
Ping.
Pause.
Ping.
Object Detected
Depth: 18m
Speed: Slow movent
Direction: Parallel to vessel
He exhaled slowly.
One was creepy.
Two was sothing else.
He narrowed his eyes. Maybe a current dragged it. Maybe it was harmless drift.
Then the panel blinked again.
Second Object Detected
Depth: 19m
Size: ~4m
Speed: Intermittent acceleration
Thomas reached forward and tapped the evasion route subroutine, highlighting ergency turns, safe-speed options, and hull integrity overlays.
Then a third object appeared.
And a fourth.
Multiple contacts. Subsurface movent increasing. Recomnd attention.
Thomas gripped the throttle, cold sweat now trailing down his spine.
He'd seen strange things since the collapse. But the Bloom adapting to water? That was new.
And if the water wasn't safe…
Then nothing was.
He didn't speed up.
Not yet.
He didn't want to panic too soon. Not without knowing what was below.
But his hand hovered over the defensive protocol button, and for the first ti since crashing in the middle of the East China Sea, he truly felt hunted.
Not by hunger.
Not by ti.
But by sothing old. Sothing primal.
And it was coming up from underneath.
Thomas's hand remained frozen above the defensive panel, his breath shallow.
Ping.
More blips.
Each one closer.
They weren't moving like fish. Not like sharks either. These things were slow, deliberate—strategic. As if they were asuring him. Waiting for a mistake.
His instincts scread louder than the alarms ever could.
He reached up, flipped the safety cover off the stunner circuit, and whispered to himself—
Outside the hull, sothing brushed the boat.
Sothing big.
The Sea Phantom rocked gently, and for the first ti since the ocean swallowed the sky, Thomas whispered, "I need to survive this."
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