Unfortunately, Klein did not get a good night’s sleep.
He was jolted awake by the ship’s violent lurching. His head was still resting on Ophelia’s lap, and in the few seconds it took for his consciousness to be dragged from the depths of sleep, he only registered three things—the cabin was pitch black, the ship was rocking, and Ophelia’s hand was still on his head, but her fingertips had tightened, pressing against the back of his neck.
She was awake.
Just as Klein was about to speak, the runic detector at the top of the mast let out a sharp, prolonged wail. The sound pierced through the deck and the cabin walls, vibrating through the ship’s skeleton several times at a frequency high enough to make his teeth ache. This wasn't the routine scanning feedback that occurred every thirty breaths.
It was a warning.
Klein sat up immediately.
Ophelia was faster. She grabbed the sword at the headboard with one hand and gave his shoulder a push with the other—the force was light, just enough to shove him back into a safe position while he wasn't fully awake. By the time Klein regained his footing, she was already at the cabin door, barefoot, her hair loose, and without even having time to buckle her scabbard.
When the door was thrown open, the sounds from outside flooded in. The sailors' shouts were chaotic and fragmented, half-eaten by the wind and half-covered by the waves, making it impossible to piece together a full sentence.
Klein grabbed his notebook from the table, stuffed it into his pocket, threw on his coat, and followed her out.
The deck was in total chaos.
There was no moon in the night sky, and the starlight was gnawed to pieces by the low-hanging clouds, leaving the entire sea in deep darkness. The lighting runic plates on both sides of the hull cast a ten-meter halo of pale light, which on the water was only enough to see the shapes of the waves.
Right at the edge of that halo—the water was churning.
It wasn't waves.
Something was thrashing beneath the surface.
Three or four thick tentacles rose from under the water on the starboard side. Those damned pulsating patterns on the shell’s surface glowed faintly in the night, flickering in and out of sync with the frequency of the ship’s lighting runic plates. The foremost tentacle had already latched onto the railing; the sound of the wood being squeezed was muffled yet sharp, as if it weren't just taking the weight but surrendering to it.
“Starboard! Everyone to starboard!” the lookout’s voice cracked from screaming.
In the middle of the night, The Voyager was under attack again.
It was different from last time. Last time, the beast had charged head-on, its size clear as day, its silhouette visible from a distance as it humped the water. This time, there was no omen. The runic detector’s scan thirty breaths ago had been clean—nothing, not even the shadow of a large fish. Thirty breaths later, tentacles were hanging off the railing.
Either the creature had risen directly from the scanning blind spot right beneath them, or—it had been there all along, clinging to the keel for who knows how long.
When Klein rushed onto the deck, two sections of the starboard railing had already snapped. Splinters of wood rolled across the deck, mixed with a few iron nails that had popped out of the wood. A tentacle poked through the gap, its suction cups dragging across the deck and leaving a wet trail of slime. The stench was so foul that the two nearest sailors gagged repeatedly.
“Don't get close to the starboard side!” the first mate bellowed, stabbing at the tentacle with a short spear. The tip pierced into a gap in the shell and got stuck. The tentacle retracted, dragging the man and his spear halfway over the railing. The first mate’s knees slammed into the deck, and he bit his lip hard enough to bleed.
Lohr ran over from the port side. He wasn't wearing armor, only a simple tunic, but his blade was already drawn. Battle qi glowed in a thin, steady layer along the edge of his blade. He hacked down at the middle of the tentacle, the blade of battle qi slicing through the shell. A spurt of black pus erupted from the cut. The front half of the tentacle twitched on the deck a few times before going still.
The severed back half retracted beneath the surface, splashing water all over Lohr’s face.
He wiped it away with his sleeve and was about to turn when the ship suddenly tilted violently to the left. It wasn't a wave—something was pushing from below.
Klein grabbed the mast to steady himself and peered over the side of the ship.
The light from the lighting runic plates hit the water, and about five or six meters down, a dark shadow was moving. It wasn't massive, a size smaller than the ones they had handled that afternoon. But its position was devious; it was practically rubbing against the bottom of the ship, its tentacles climbing up from both sides of the keel as if giving The Voyager a slow embrace.
Another tentacle flipped over the port side.
This time it brought fragments of shell with it, the pulsating patterns on the pieces flickering in the darkness with a rhythm similar to a heartbeat.
Klein glanced back at Ophelia.
Ophelia stood in the center of the deck, barefoot, her sword held across her body. Her golden battle qi was kept low, only floating in a thin layer along the blade’s edge.
“Peel it off the bottom first,” Klein decided, taking two steps to the railing. One after another, the nodes of a gravitational field spell lit up between his fingers as he held his palm downward.
Ophelia didn't say much. She shifted the form of her battle qi from a slash to a blunt impact—the golden light on the blade narrowed and thickened, the cutting power of the edge suppressed and replaced by a high-density impact surface.
She leaped over the railing, hitting the water with a dull thud.
A flash of golden light erupted beneath the surface.
The ship’s tilt suddenly eased—the monster had been forcibly torn from the keel. The tentacles clinging to the sides loosened one by one, and the mangled limbs on the deck retracted. The first mate finally managed to pull his short spear free. A glob of black slime was stuck to the tip; he shook it a few times but couldn't get it off, so he just threw the whole thing overboard.
Klein leaned over the railing to look down.
About seven or eight meters below the surface, Ophelia was using the flat of her blade against the monster’s ventral armor to push it away from the ship. The monster’s tentacles writhed frantically, each one trying to wrap around her limbs, but the golden battle qi batted them away one by one. Her movements underwater weren't as agile as on land, but her strength was undiminished—the monster was pushed back over ten meters, creating a safe distance from The Voyager.
Klein spread his palms.
The gravity field pinned the monster firmly in that position underwater, making it impossible for even a single tentacle to move.
The monster struggled a few times, the patterns on its shell flashing frantically with increasing speed. But the cage of the gravity field left it no room—every expansion was pressed back, and every tentacle that tried to stretch out was folded back to its original position.
Ophelia leaped back onto the deck from the water, seawater cascading off her. She shook her hair, droplets flying through the light of the lighting runic plates.
Just as this monster was about to be eliminated, several more signal sources appeared in Klein’s perception.
From the northeast, east, and southeast, at a depth of fifteen to twenty meters, six dark masses of varying sizes were closing in on The Voyager. The closest one was less than two hundred meters away.
Diancie’s voice came from the stern, steadier than Klein had expected.
“How many ballistae on the starboard side are still functional?”
“Two!” the first mate roared back, wiping blood from his mouth.
“That’s enough! Load one and two with armor-piercing bolts, aim five meters below the surface to the northeast. Wait for my command.”
Lohr had already taken his position at the port side. His blade was held in front of him, his tunic billowing in the sea breeze, and his trouser legs were still stained with the black pus from the previous tentacle. He scanned the water but could see nothing, yet his feet could feel the ship transmitting a continuous, increasingly dense vibration.
Something was approaching. Fast.
“Lohr,” Diancie’s voice came from behind.
“Here.”
“The port side is yours. How long can you hold?”
Lohr adjusted his grip on the blade, holding it in a reverse grip with the back of the blade against his forearm. Battle qi spread from the edge to his forearm in a thin layer, saving energy.
“Depends on how big they are.”
That was an honest answer.
The first one to strike came from the northeast. There was no warning when the surface exploded—a whole section of the sea was pushed up, shattering into a screen of water. Three tentacles lashed out from behind the water screen, bringing seawater and bubbles as they lunged straight for the bow of The Voyager.
“Fire!” Diancie’s voice cut through the sound of the waves.
Both ballistae fired simultaneously. The armor-piercing bolts left runic trails as they plunged into the water one after another. The first missed, wedging into the gap between the tentacles and the body, but the second hit the shell dead center. The force of the arrow’s impact brought the monster’s momentum to a dead halt for half a beat.
Half a beat was enough.
Ophelia charged out along the bowsprit. She didn't jump into the water this time—she chose to strike from above. Golden battle qi covered her blade as she flipped half a circle in the air, using the momentum of her dive to deliver a crushing blow.
The sea was sliced open by a twenty-meter-long crack of sword qi.
The monster was severed clean in two, its innards spilling out and dispersing into a murky cloud in the water.
But Klein didn't breathe a sigh of relief. He saw a problem—in the two seconds it took Ophelia to handle the northeast direction, the two signal sources from the east had already moved within a hundred meters.
The water on the port side bulged.
Lohr didn't wait for it to surface. He swung his blade, and a wave of battle qi swept across the sea, plowing a white furrow through the water. The blade qi entered the water and hit something—a muffled, dull thud echoed from below, and the color of the rising waves changed as black-red blood churned up with the seawater.
It was a hit, but it hadn't gone through.
The dark shadow beneath the surface paused for a moment, then continued to push upward.
Lohr took half a step back, his blade held back in front of him, his teeth clenched.
The second hit, he could take. The third, the fourth—it was hard to say.
While maintaining the gravity field on the monster beneath him, Klein diverted a thread of his perception to lock onto the positions of the other targets. Three sets of calculations were running in his mind simultaneously—the energy consumption curve of the gravity field, the approach speed of the monsters, and the time gap for Ophelia to return to the ship.
The numbers didn't look good.
He cursed under his breath.
Then he made a decision. He suddenly increased the pressure of the gravity field, and the shell of the monster beneath his feet collapsed entirely, giving it no room even to struggle. Flesh, shattered shell, and body fluids were all compressed into a single mass within the gravity field—he didn't have time for a full material erasure, but he could at least resolve this threat and free his hands for what was coming next.
The Voyager rocked violently in the waves. The runic detector at the top of the mast shrieked again, sharper than the last time.
...
...
Defeating these monsters wasn't difficult; rather, they didn't actually pose much of a threat.
Klein stood on the deck, watching the remains of the last monster sink toward the seabed, belly up. Its tentacles hung limp, and black body fluids were still seeping from the cracks in its shell, trailing a thin dark line in the light of the lighting runic plates as it sank deeper and deeper, finally swallowed by the darkness.
He wiped the seawater from his fingers and stood still.
There was nothing much to say about the battle itself—this batch of monsters was smaller than the ones from the afternoon, their shells were thinner, they had fewer tentacles, and even their struggle was significantly weaker.
It was as if they hadn't come to fight.
They had come to die.
He looked down at the sea outside the railing. Six corpses were sinking, blood and shredded meat dispersing in the water, black-red clouds rolling and spreading at the edge of the halo of light.
Further away—in the dark waters where the light couldn't reach—there was the reflection of fish scales.
A flash. Another flash. Then a dense, massive swarm.
The fish were already gathering.
Klein cursed.
Ophelia stood to his left, her sword still out of its scabbard.
“There’s no point in dealing with them,” Klein said, staring at the increasingly dense reflection of fish scales. “This is likely His choice to squander what remains.”
Lohr walked over, leaning on his blade and breathing heavily. The right sleeve of his tunic had been torn away by a tentacle, revealing his forearm coated in black pus. He had caught the tail end of the conversation, and his expression was grim.
“Are you saying these things... did this on purpose?”
“To be precise—it wasn't their choice.” Klein’s gaze moved past Lohr, past the railing, past the dark sea, and landed on a point very, very far away. “It was His.”
No one replied.
On the deck, the sailors were still cleaning up the aftermath. The broken railing, the slime on the deck, the scattered wood and nails. The first mate poked at the severed tentacle limb with a mop, hesitated for a long time, and finally kicked it into the sea with the tip of his boot.
In the distance, the fish swarm had reached the area where the corpses had sunk. The silver points of light beneath the surface merged together, so dense that individuals couldn't be distinguished, and the entire surface was churned into fine white foam.
And then—just like during the day—the fish swarm would scatter. In all directions. Carrying new anchors.
Klein didn't look anymore.
He turned around, facing the west.
In that direction of the night sky, the shape of the clouds was wrong. Low, too low, and not the kind of low that was pressed down by the wind—they were falling of their own accord. The bottom of the clouds had an abnormal color; it wasn't gray, it wasn't black, it was something indefinable, somewhere between deep blue and dark green. That color did not belong to any normal weather phenomenon.
A new frequency had appeared in the air.
An extremely low hum, barely caught at the edge of human hearing. It wasn't the wind, it wasn't the waves, it wasn't the ship’s vibration. That frequency came from far away, transmitted up from beneath the sea, passing through the water, through the air, and laying thinly over everyone’s eardrums.
The sailors didn't notice. Lohr didn't notice. Diancie frowned, likely feeling a bit of pressure in her ears, but unable to explain why.
Klein noticed.
Ophelia noticed as well.
She slowly turned her gaze to the west. Her wet hair clung to her cheek, obscuring half her face, but in her visible eye, the golden pupil constricted.
She had seen this before.
Last time, at the coastal battle, she had faced this alone.
The sky changing color, the water turning toxic, the air filling with sounds that shouldn't exist in the mortal realm. It was the omen of one world being overwritten by another.
“How long?” Ophelia asked.
Klein closed his eyes and spread his perception. He pushed it far, so far that his temples began to throb with pain. Information surged in—tens of thousands of anchor signals, like a web being woven, every node sending coordinates in the same direction.
The coordinates pointed west.
Something was sinking there. Or rather—it was rising. From a dimension beyond human cognition, slowly and irreversibly, it was pressing a part of itself into the cracks of this world.
Klein opened his eyes.
“Right now.”
Rate on N.U.
