The plan began with provocation.

Adam slid into the dark, violet-tinged water, the liquid shockingly cold against his hide. He moved with deliberate, powerful undulations, staying in the shallows where his back and the feathered tips of his folded wings remained above the surface. He was the visible bait, a massive silhouette against the glowing fungi of the shore.

«Alright, Ignis. Light it up,» he broadcast.

On a rocky outcrop twenty meters above the lake, Ignis crouched, her Blazeheart Drake form a smoldering beacon. With a focused growl, she unleashed not a wild blast, but a precise, sustained Sun Lance into the deep center of the lake where the treasure was suspected to be. The beam of condensed solar energy pierced the dark water with a furious hiss, superheating the depths in a localized column. Steam erupted in a geyser.

«That should get its attention,» Ignis thought, panting slightly from the focused output.

«Now, the insult,» Lilith commanded from her perch in the shadows of a stalactite cluster. She began to weave. From her spinnerets flowed Umbral Silk threads of tangible shadow that sank into the water without a ripple.

She wasn't creating a net to catch something big; she was creating a phantom. The silk, charged with her psychic intent and void-touched essence, formed the illusion of a large, many-limbed shadow descending towards the treasure site, a blatant territorial challenge from a rival predator.

The water remained deceptively calm for a long moment.

Then, the lake boiled.

Not from heat, but from movement. A shape, vast and dark, uncoiled from the abyssal plain with terrifying speed. It wasn't lured to the shallows. It came straight for the source of the psychic mockery—Lilith's illusion.

"Get ready, it's taking the bait—" Adam began, but his tri-sense screamed a warning a fraction too late.

The "Many-Armed Darkness" didn't just move, it commanded its domain. From the murky edges of the lake, a dozen smaller, eel-like creatures with needle-teeth and bioluminescent spines erupted, shooting not at the illusion, but at Lilith's actual position on the ceiling. They were its scouts, its wardens.

«A secondary swarm! Clever beast!» Lilith hissed, retracting her silk and skittering sideways as a volley of venomous spines peppered her previous location.

The distraction was minimal, but it was enough. The main guardian had located the true threat.

It breached the surface, and the title made horrific sense.

It was a kraken, but not of mythic grandeur. Its body was a bulbous, mottled sack of greyish flesh, covered in weeping sores and phosphorescent algae. From it erupted not eight, but over a dozen major tentacles, each as thick as Adam's body and covered in barbed suckers and bony hooks. Between these writhed a forest of smaller, prehensile tendrils. Its "face" was a nightmare of converging beaks—one large central parrot-like beak, surrounded by a ring of smaller, clicking mantis-shrimp-like appendages. Its eyes, dozens of them, glowed with a cold, alien intelligence across its mantle. This was no beast, it was an Abyssal Kraken, a Dungeon Lord that had evolved in utter darkness and madness.

And it wasn't falling for the simple lure. It ignored Adam in the shallows. One massive tentacle, moving with whip-crack speed, shot out of the water and towards the ceiling, aiming to pluck Lilith like a fruit.

"Not happening!" Adam roared. He surged forward, not diving deep, but using the lakebed to launch himself. His jaws snapped closed on the rubbery, armored tentacle a mere meter from Lilith. Venom of the Void and crushing force injected into the limb.

The Kraken shuddered, a sound like grinding stones echoing from its beaks. It retracted the wounded tentacle, but three others slammed down towards Adam from different angles.

«Solar Wind!» Ignis shrieked, unleashing a broad, scorching gust from above. It wasn't enough to badly injure the massive limbs, but it scorched the sensitive barbs and suckers, causing them to flinch and spasm.

«Void Bind!» Alice, who had been lying in wait on a nearby rock, struck. Shadows erupted from the water's surface where the tentacles breached, solidifying into grasping chains of darkness that tangled and slowed two of them.

But the Kraken was a master of multi-limbed combat. While three tentacles were occupied, two more snaked along the lake bottom, unseen. One erupted beneath Ignis's perch, smashing the rock shelf. The young drake yelped, tumbling into the air with a frantic beat of her wings. The other targeted Adam's anchored coils, trying to yank him into the deep.

"Earthshaker!" Adam bellowed, channeling power through the lakebed. The shockwave of force traveled through stone and water, stunning the grasping tentacle and sending a violent tremor through the Kraken's main body. It was the first blow that truly seemed to hurt it.

The battle became a chaotic, multi-front melee. The Kraken used the lake perfectly: it would submerge, becoming a shadow, then lash out from unexpected angles. It used the smaller eel-creatures as harassing missiles, forcing Alice and Lilith to defend constantly. It seemed to have a tentacle for every one of their moves.

Adam realized their error. They had tried to pull it onto their terrain, but the Kraken had simply expanded its terrain to include the shore and the air above it. It was a true area dominator.

"We need to break its focus! Ignis, the eyes! Alice, Lilith, full suppression on the limbs! I'm going for the core!" Adam commanded, adapting the plan on the fly.

Ignis, now airborne, dove like a fiery comet, Sun Lances stabbing at the clusters of glowing eyes. The Kraken recoiled, bringing up tentacles to shield its face. Alice layered Void Bind after Void Bind, creating a morass of dark restraints. Lilith focused her Mind Spikes not to kill, but to inflict waves of disorienting psychic pain.

Adam's Pressurized Spines shot forward like a volley of crystalline spears, cutting through the water with a sharp, whistling sound. But the Abyssal Kraken was ready. Two of its larger tentacles whipped in front of its body, the barbed, rubbery flesh deflecting most of the spines. Those that struck true sank only shallowly into its thick blubber before dissolving. In response, the Kraken expelled a thick, jet-black cloud of ink that bloomed through the water, obscuring everything.

"Blind? Really? Predictable!" Adam growled, but he wasn't relying on sight alone. Hunter's Tri-Sense engaged fully. He filtered out the frantic vibrations of the smaller eels, the churn of water, and focused on the heavy, rhythmic pulses of the massive creature's movement.

There.

He surged forward through the ink, but the Kraken was already attacking from another angle. A massive tentacle, sheathed in pressurized water like a hydraulic hammer, slammed into Adam's side from the murk. Monarch's Aegis flared, dispersing most of the force and reflecting heat, but the impact still cracked a scale and drove the breath from him. Pain flared, but was immediately smothered by the warm surge of Blooming Vitality already working to knit the damage.

«Adam!» Alice's voice was sharp with worry. She fired Void Bolts into the ink cloud, not aiming to kill, but to harass and distract.

Ignis, circling above, saw a tentacle rise from the ink and tried to sear it with a Solar Flare. «Hold still, you slimy meatball!»

The Kraken seemed to almost… calculate. Instead of pursuing Adam, the tentacle Ignis had fired at suddenly changed trajectory, not retreating, but shooting straight up towards Alice, who was perched on a rock overseeing the battle. Alice phased out with Void Step, reappearing a few feet away with a dismissive flick of her tail. «Amateur.»

But it was a feint. As Alice teleported, a second, thinner tentacle—almost transparent and unnoticed—lashed out from the ink not at her, but at Lilith, who was silently preparing a psychic assault from a lower ledge. It wrapped around two of her legs and her thorax with terrifying speed, yanking her off the wall and into the air, beginning to constrict.

«Agh! How… inelegant!» Lilith's psychic cry was laced with surprise and pain.

"Ignis, now!" Adam roared.

«ON IT!» Ignis dove, a living meteor. She didn't use a skill, she simply Cinder Dashed directly into the constricting tentacle, her body wreathed in superheated flame. The flesh sizzled and recoiled, loosening its grip for a critical second.

That was all Adam needed. He was there in a powerful surge, his jaws closing like hydraulic shears on the tentacle between Lilith and the Kraken. Venom of the Void pumped into it as he bit clean through. The severed limb thrashed, spraying ichor.

Alice, in a flash of void energy, appeared beneath the falling Lilith, cushioning her landing with a shadowy platform before leaping back to safety. «You owe me,» she thought to Lilith, her tone dry but relieved.

«Noted. Thanks for that,» Lilith replied, mentally gritting her teeth as she checked her injured legs.

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