After that dream dash nightmare I was waiting in my cave. I looked outside and saw a silent ocean. The big school of fish was all sleeping. Some other creatures of the depths were next to them. Slowly the early fishes started to wake back up and go back to the depths they came from.

One of the smaller big carnivorous fish about 6 S1O so smaller than a shark was drifting apart from the school. The fish was so far away from the rest of the school I considered killing and eating it. I would need a good strategy sinds I would not survive the attack from the entire school.

I looked around and noticed what I guessed was a big shell incorporated into the reef close to the drifting fish. I decided on an action plan.

‘Step one, see if that shell is empty and need one to grab things to enter it. Step two, rip the fins of the target and immobilize it. Step three, get it under the shell. Step four, have a free for all with a harmless fish. But as the saying goes, no plan stays intact with contact with the enemy.’

I moved close to the seafloor towards the shell I spotted earlier. When I arrived at the shell it had a gap at the underside of it that I could fit through but not my target.

I tried lifting the thing but it was way too heavy for me with all the corals that grew on top of it. It was uninhabited for all intents and purposes. I would need to dig an entrance for the fish to be pulled through.

After about 20 minutes the plan was set up, I had even set up a quick way to fill the hole to prevent another fish from using it. I looked up and saw the fish still sleeping and drifting off the school. It was time to start this hunt.

I slowly swam to the lone smaller fish. It was 6 times my size but it was about half the size of an adult. I closed in on my target, slowly while using my vision to scan for any reason why I should flee back to the shell.

I prepared for an ambush at the tail fin and got ready to cut it off in one go. I got closer and closer and it still did not wake up. I closed the last distance as fast as I could and started eating and sawing away at its tail.

The fish did not approve of me and woke up and tried to shake me off. I realized I had underestimated how long it would take me to cut through this part of the fish. The fish had a brilliant plan unfortunately for me that plan was for its survival and not mine. It swam to the school it had drifted away from.

I tried to speed up my cutting of the tail plan. I had the lower quarter floating free and was slowly working up. I did the quick mental math and concluded that we would be about 75% to the school when I cut off the tail. I used my siphons to swim the other way and used one tentacle to tear apart the fin part and not the flesh part. This did work and my mental math came to about 70% of the way before I cut off its tail. We were on the 50% mark.

I racked my brain for an idea to turn this around. I just could not do it.

It seemed my luck was even worse than I thought, the blood of my prey was changing the taste of the waster and that attracted the closest few fishes of the school. I was in danger.

I stopped at half dismembering the tail of my prey and decided to flee to the shell and just hide there.

I quickly swam that way, I only had a small list of miscalculations. My prey decided I was good prey. And was still very angry. When it noticed I had let go I was already a quarter of the way back to the shell. It quickly turned around and it became a race. Would I be safe or be food?

Behind the wounded was a part of the school that had tasted blood. It was promising to be a close race.

I was panicking very hard.

‘Thiswasnottheplan, thiswasnottheplan, okeyokey, calmcalm, this might be salvageable. New plan: I get under the shell and see if I can bait the wounded one also under it and trapped. Then I would need to latch on somewhere on the fish and continue eating it alive.’

I continued moving at my fastest possible speed while I could see the fish getting closer and closer. But at the same time the shell also got closer and closer. I did not know what would come first. The school, the wounded fish or the shell. It was a scary race and my hearts¹Octopuses have three hearts. If you wanted to know. went wild.

I got closer to the shell and the school of fish did not continue coming closer, they decided to stay at about 10 S1O away from both the seafloor and the shell. The wounded one does not care and follows me even closer to the shell. I slip under the shell with about 1 S1O distance to the fish.

I moved around close to the edge to show my target where the spot is where it can enter. It does not do that however.

‘I mean I get why you would not want to enter but please just do and become the food I eat.’

I bait the fish by leaving and entering the shell and taunting it. I once more reach out while having two tentacles in the shell ready to pull me back. It comes in to bite me, I retract myself so it misses. This time it came into grabbing distance. I reach back out and use my other two tentacles to grab the fish by its tail.

This restarts the fight. Me trying to drag it under the shell and locking it up for me to eat and the fish desperately swimming away to keep on living.

If there's one thing you should know is that tentacles mostly exist out of muscles, dense muscles. I am slowly dragging my poor prey under the shell. No other fish is going in to help it.

After we both get quite exhausted we are finally reaching the inside of the shell. Well the tail is half inside the shell. The head is still outside. I let loose one of the tentacles I am holding the shell with and move the other to make more wounds to hopefully let it die a bit faster. I can not reach for the gills otherwise I would test how effective that is. The tail definitely is not a one slice one kill, seeing as it is half dangling away from the fish.