System Mission: Seduce the Strongest S-Class Hunters or Die Trying!-Chapter 114: [PHANTOMS]

Kairo whipped around, black eyes carving the cavern like twin knives. The echo of that voice—Caelen’s voice—still hung in the damp air, too clear, too cruel.

"Foolish little brother."

It scraped down his spine like iron on stone.

He swept the flashlight beam left, right, behind him—water slashing silver in the light, stone swallowing the beam. Nothing. Only the endless black flood, rippling faintly. "What the hell?" he muttered, jaw tight.

The voice came again, softer this time, venomous and intimate.

"Everyone’s dead because of you, Kai."

Rage kindled in Kairo’s chest, hot and hard—but under it, something else: a flicker of wrongness.

The cadence, the little careless cruelty... it matched Caelen, but the feeling behind it didn’t.

’Tch. This... isn’t Caelen.’

The moment the thought finished—water exploded.

SPLASH.

The floor betrayed him. Where his boots had pressed shallow stone a heartbeat before, the surface yawned open into a cold, swallowing maw.

Slick, clammy hands—too many to count—snapped up, wrapping around his ankles with a pressure that sucked the breath from his lungs.

’How... How could this—’

The world lurched. No longer was he standing on a cave floor; he fell—plunged—into a trench of absolute black.

The cold hit like knives, then a pressure like a crushing tide. Instinct slammed his ribs shut; he took one violent, searing inhale and held it, muscles coiling, eyes forced wide against the burn.

Down and down the light dragged with him, a thin cone in an ocean of void.

And in that void they waited.

Dozens. No—hundreds. Figures like smoke given shape, drifting in the deep. Half-formed humanoids with edges that blurred into the water, limbs too long, joints moving in jerks that didn’t obey flesh.

Their skin was pale as drowned moonlight; their eyes glowed with a faint, cold blue—lanterns in the black, unblinking.

They weren’t leeches. They weren’t the sluglike things. These were phantoms—wraiths stitched from lost things and grief.

Their mouths opened. The sound did not come from the air. It slammed into Kairo’s skull as whispers—overlaid voices that overlapped until they became a single accusation.

"Brother..."

"Foolish brother."

"You couldn’t save them..."

Each phrase was a nail. Each whisper pressed like a weight into his chest until it felt like stone.

The phantoms drifted closer, their movements jerking, like puppets pulled on invisible strings. They didn’t swim; they swam through, sliding between the particles of water as if the liquid itself were a veil.

Kairo’s blood-formed sheath around his legs trembled as the water’s pressure hit it. The cold hands on his ankles tightened—icy hooks that tried to drag him deeper into some hollow hunger. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

For a second, he glimpsed the faces of those they’d lost, overlaid on the phantom mouths—accusatory, hollow.

’Not today.’ The thought was a low coiling promise.

He forced the blade at his side to respond. The obsidian edge flared as mana bent to his will; the taste of iron filled his mouth from the earlier self-inflicted cut.

Blood answered him—hot, obedient—threading through the water in scarlet strands that hissed against the cold.

They braided into needles, into blades, into a whirling storm around his legs, feeding the sheath until it thrummed like a living armor.

Phantoms swarmed in, hundreds converging with unnatural hunger.

Hands clawed, attempted to pierce the blood-armor; some fingers sank and met resistance, then dissolved into steam as crimson threads tightened and burned them from inside out.

A shriek—many shrieks—rattled the trench like broken glass.

Kairo drove the sword down. The obsidian flashed, cutting through shadow and water, and each sweep sheared apart a body that was only half there, scattering motes of light that sputtered and died.

They came again. And again. For every phantom he cleaved, three more slid from the dark.

Between strikes the whispers returned, louder, coalescing into a single tone that sounded hauntingly like a memory of Caelen’s voice, warped by some terrible thing.

"You couldn’t save them. You never can save anyone." The words wrapped around him like a noose.

Kairo’s black eyes flared. He roared—half a battle-cry, half a curse—and slammed his heel into the water, forcing the blood-armor to erupt outward in a violent shockwave.

The current reversed for an instant; phantom bodies were flung back, blue eyes scattering like sparks.

But the trench went deeper still. From beneath the scattered corpses of shadow, darker glimmers threaded upward—more eyes, more shapes pulling themselves free of the black.

Kairo planted his boots into the blood-hardened sheath, dug in, and prepared for the next wave. He was waist-deep in an ocean that wanted to swallow him whole, and all around, the drowned chorus kept whispering.

"You—are—all—going—to—die."

The words were everywhere. They were in the water, in the cold, in the pressure crushing his lungs.

Kairo’s teeth ground together, hard enough that pain jolted through his jaw. Bubbles streamed through clenched teeth, breaking into frantic spirals that rushed upward into the dark.

His free hand twitched, blood from his wrists turned into threads that writhed like smoke in the abyss.

Then—he saw them.

’Mel... Zaira... Mio... And...’

His eyes locked onto one figure.

Eli.

The boy’s small frame jerked violently, thrashing as phantom arms coiled around his ribs like chains. Their grip crushed inward, dragging him lower, deeper into the dark.

’Eli!’ Kairo’s eyes widen further, he didn’t even care how much the water stung his eyes.

Eli’s mouth opened on a silent scream, his lips shaping words that drowned in bubbles. His chest heaved, bubbles bursting in desperate, uneven streams that trailed upward in frantic bursts.

His yellow eyes—wide, terrified—searched through the black as if begging someone, anyone, to save him.

Zaira’s body drifted nearby, limp, her pale blonde hair unraveling through the water like coils of silk. Her slack frame sagged under the weight of three phantoms pressing against her.

Their translucent mouths brushed her skin, whispering words that spilled like venom directly into her mind.

Mel’s body was worse. Already deeper. His small frame had gone still, limbs twitching weakly before faltering altogether.

A cluster of phantoms swarmed him, dragging him farther down into the trench’s throat. Their glowing eyes flared bright blue as their skeletal fingers hooked into his shoulders, their whispers louder than all the rest.

Mio alone still fought.

Threads snapped outward from his hands, cutting the abyss in violent arcs. Silver lines sliced clean through phantom torsos, severing their heads, bisecting limbs.

The water flashed with blinding streaks of steel-like light, precise and merciless.

But it didn’t matter.

Every strike passed through their bodies like smoke. Phantom torsos scattered into ribbons of mist—then reformed again, coiling tighter.

Their hands didn’t loosen. Their grips only grew harsher, dragging him down by the shoulders, his legs, his throat.

Kairo’s eyes narrowed, fury boiling in his chest. ’His threads are going through them? But... I was able to hit them.’

He could feel them. Their hands were bone and frost against his ankles. Their grips carried weight, pressure, hunger. Yet against Mio’s blades—they were untouchable.

The abyss pressed closer. The pressure clawed at his lungs. His chest burned like fire and ice together, the edges of his vision flashing red.

The whispers grew louder. Everywhere. Inside him. Around him.

"You’ll drown too."

"You’ll fail them."

"You’re a failure."

The voices layered over each other, Caelen’s voice among them, crueler, clearer than the rest.

Kairo’s jaw set, bubbles breaking through his teeth. His chest burned, but his blood boiled hotter, flaring against the cold.

Not yet.

Not here.

Not one of them was going to die.

Kairo twisted the blade in his grip, the obsidian edge glinting black-red in the abyssal dark.

Crimson light shimmered faintly across the water, bleeding from the blade as if it was drinking in the very pressure that surrounded them.

His black eyes narrowed, pupils burning with predatory focus.

’I need to finish this quickly.’