The lasers carve in the wake of the spotlights, their bright beams coming to rest squarely on Bao’s head. Shit. I throw up his charge signal, aiming it right back at the closest boat, but he shakes his snout from side to side, still confused.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I growl into the respirator. It’s no use.

The cetoid is the first to strike, coming up hard against Bao’s underbelly with its plated snout. The hit sends me flying into the air as Bao shrieks in pain, and my fingers instinctively wind around the line-hook cables as my feet go sailing over my head. I land hard on my back, the helmet cracking against Bao’s plates. A thick tentacle towers out of the sea to our left and lashes down around his neck, inches from my position. I grit my teeth, turn the Otachi to their brightest setting, and plunge them against the cephalopoid’s soft flesh.

A scream echoes out from somewhere beneath Bao and the tentacle snaps back, a curl of smoke wafting up from the neat hole I’ve just burned in it. But before I can congratulate myself, the cephalopoid’s limb slams down again, and this time I can’t roll out of the way.

The world goes dark. I feel like I’m suffocating, like I’m spinning, like “up” and “down” are figments of my imagination, and then suddenly I’m back. I choke in a breath through the respirator and discover that we’re underwater, that the blackness wasn’t all imagined. My head throbs so viciously that for a second I think my skull has cracked. I’ve been tossed around far too much to get away intact at this point. Bao flexes underneath me, his jaws gnawing insistently at something, but everything else seems too still.

Then the cephalopoid’s tentacles loom out of the darkness again, lashing down around Bao’s body. He rolls his head and catches one in his beak, and thick Reckoner blood flushes into the water around us, blinding me. I flatten myself against Bao’s skull. There’s nothing I can do in this blackness but feel the power of the monster beneath my feet as he struggles, locked in mortal combat.

The only consolation is that the trainers up above are just as blind as me. With the fight underwater, they can’t afford the refraction throwing off their aim, can’t risk setting their beasts on each other. It’s all down to the three Reckoners.