Chapter 522 Corpse, Total Annihilation

The storm had little impact on the Blade of Vengeance Ship.

As an Adventurer vessel specially modified at the cost of a massive amount of gold, it could weather ordinary gales and giant waves without any help from the Class Holders on board. A few experienced sailors could easily steer it through the wind and rain.

The only reason they had struggled so miserably last time and needed to find a nearby island to rest was the abnormally frenzied Spiral-Toothed Shark School. Now, the leaden clouds dispersed to reveal a vast, clear blue sky; the fierce winds gradually died down, and the sea returned to calm.

Under Lorraine's command, the Blade of Vengeance Ship raised its sails once again, bearing nothing but a few water stains on the deck and not the slightest bit of damage.

Splash.

The Tabaxi Sasha looked like a drenched tabby cat. Bending his slender, padded legs and shaking his fluffy tail, he violently twisted his entire body from side to side.

His wet fur slapped together with thick smacking sounds, and the rainwater clinging to his body flung out in all directions as countless tiny droplets.

The Barbarian Aken happened to be standing next to him. Bare-chested and revealing his flashy tattoos, he was wringing out his soaked clothes.

Splashed by the rainwater flying off the Tabaxi, his freshly dried body was once again covered in water droplets.

Despite his ferocious face, he was always rough, straightforward, and informal around his teammates.

He didn't mind at all.

He simply reached up to wipe the rainwater from his bald head and grinned. "Have you not showered in a few days, kid? Now you've got me smelling like it, too."

Of course, this was just a casual joke to lighten the mood; he didn't actually care.

But for Sasha, the comment struck a vulnerable nerve.

With inadequate conditions while sailing, going several days without a proper wash was perfectly normal.

As a Tabaxi covered in fur, and in the muggy, humid environment of the Southern Archipelagos, it was only natural for Sasha to carry a bit of an odor.

Although the sailors wouldn't say anything, his sharp sense of smell meant he was well aware of his own scent, making him somewhat sensitive about it. Being called out by Aken just now, his previously apologetic gaze instantly vanished. He opened his mouth to hiss, glaring fiercely at the man, and even his long tail stopped swishing.

"Hahaha..." Aken's rough laughter echoed across the deck, having entirely anticipated the Tabaxi's reaction.

Already accustomed to how his teammates on the Blade of Vengeance Ship interacted, Xia Nan glanced in their direction before withdrawing his gaze. On the other side, although the Druid Hein had entered the cabin early and avoided the rain, the excessively humid environment on the ship seemed to be making the little silver-banded snake on her wrist, Ayin, uncomfortable.

At the moment, she was begging Lorraine to use her [Scale-Fire Scimitar] to start a small fire for warmth.

He had no idea why a silver-banded snake, a species that clearly lived in humid regions, would behave like this.

But judging by the expression on the captain's face, even if she agreed to the request, Ayin probably wouldn't like the temperature radiating from her blade anyway.

"Hey, Xia Nan!" Popping out from who knew where, the Halfling Alton stood by the railing at the edge of the deck, waving excitedly at him.

"Hurry over and drop your line!" he called out. "It's all big fish after a storm!"

'Oh?'

'Is there such a saying?'

Never doubting him, Xia Nan quickly entered the cabin and retrieved the fishing rod he had temporarily stored inside during the storm.

While sorting out his fishing line and bait, he asked Alton, "Help me pick a good fishing spot."

"Me? Sure!" The little guy's knowledge of fishing had long been surpassed by Xia Nan's, but he didn't shrink back from the request at all. After pondering for a moment, he pointed to a spot. "How about here?"

Completely trusting the advice of this favored of Tymora, Xia Nan powerfully cast out the hook, which gleamed metallic in the sunlight, right as the words fell. In the end, however, he still didn't manage to catch the big fish he had imagined.

It was just like the joke that circulated on the internet in his previous life: "A Fishing Enthusiast can catch anything but fish."

He didn't know whether the fishing spot Alton had pointed out was truly something special, or if he just didn't have any fishing luck today.

Barely ten minutes after casting his line, without seeing so much as the shadow of a fish, he efficiently reeled in his first harvest of the post-storm waters. Well... to be precise, he hadn't exactly caught it.

A half-orc corpse, bloated and pale from soaking in the seawater, drifted next to his bobber with the waves.

Its rough, greenish skin and robust, burly body had only a top half remaining. From the waist down, it looked as if it had been violently torn apart by something, exposing fragmented internal organs stuck with flesh and blood, along with a pale spine.

Two tusks protruded from its lower lip, and its face was frozen in an expression of sheer terror from its final moments, as if it had seen something terrifying.

Xia Nan recognized the guy.

Although it had been only a hurried glance, they hadn't parted ways that long ago, so he still had an impression of him.

This half-orc... seemed to be one of the Adventurers on the Black Tide Hunter Ship who had a brief confrontation with them just now?

But how had he ended up in such a mangled state in just a few dozen minutes?

What had the Black Tide Hunter Crew encountered?

"Judging by the torn muscles near the wound, he must have been ripped in two at the waist by some massive force," Lorraine deduced, looking at the half-orc corpse the sailors had fished out onto the deck.

Thinking back to the mission information the Black Tide Hunter Crew had revealed earlier—that they were tracking a certain sea beast—along with how fearlessly they had sailed straight into the core of the storm just now, she said, "It looks like their mission didn't go smoothly."

She wasn't gloating, but she wasn't sighing in sorrow either. Long accustomed to the deaths of her peers, Lorraine's tone was calm.

They had no relationship to begin with, so it wasn't worth investing any emotion.

Right now, she was mostly concerned about exactly what kind of danger the Black Tide Hunter Crew had encountered, and whether it could affect their Blade of Vengeance Fleet. In contrast, although Xia Nan similarly didn't care about the life or death of the Black Tide Hunter Crew, his sharp Perception allowed him to notice more details on the corpse.

What was worth noting was that aside from the massive severing at the abdomen, this half of the corpse had no other wounds.

This meant the half-orc hadn't faced a swarm of weak enemies, but rather a single entity with formidable combat strength.

And the half-orc hadn't even been able to hold out for a few exchanges before being directly grabbed and ripped in half.

His stiff, pained, and terrified expression corroborated this to some extent.

But it was only one corpse after all, and the Blade of Vengeance Ship didn't have a specialized Spellcaster like a necromancer, so the information they could obtain was limited. Throwing the half-orc's severed body back into the sea, Lorraine instructed the sailors not to let their guard down, and they continued sailing along their original course.

Since things had come to this, it was useless to be anxious or worried.

They could only take things one step at a time and hope trouble wouldn't come knocking.

But many times, especially in a fantasy world where Transcendent Tier powers existed, events didn't unfold as one wished. Even though they had actively avoided the direction the Black Tide Hunter Ship had sailed earlier, as the Blade of Vengeance Fleet continued its voyage, more and more debris appeared on the surface of the sea.

Shattered ship planks, severed limbs, floating wooden barrels...

The strange thing was, even though it looked like they had clearly suffered total annihilation, Xia Nan and the others didn't find a single corpse aside from that initial top half of the half-orc.

Before they had time to figure out why, an inconspicuous small dot suddenly appeared on the distant sea surface.

It was precisely the Black Tide Hunter Ship that had parted ways with them not long ago.

Xia Nan naturally remembered what this similarly modified Adventurer vessel used to look like, but right now, it had undergone an ordeal seemingly identical to the half-orc's.

It was obvious that the entire bow of the ship, along with the mast and figurehead, had completely vanished.

Only a third of the hull remained, relying on the inherent buoyancy of its materials to float at a tilt on the calm sea like a miniature wooden island.

Since they had bumped into it, for safety's sake, they had to at least figure out exactly what kind of enemy the crew had encountered. This way, they could make preparations and avoid being caught off guard.

They conducted a careful investigation to confirm there was no danger around.

The Blade of Vengeance Ship stopped a fair distance away on the sea, and Captain Lorraine brought Xia Nan and the Tabaxi Sasha over in a small rowboat. Judging by the fractured planks at the edge of the deck, the Black Tide Hunter Ship was destroyed in the exact same manner as the half-orc; it was snapped in half at the waist by some kind of tremendous force.

Of course, compared to the half-orc, the Black Tide Hunter Ship was clearly much harder to tear. The break wasn't clean, and traces left by multiple exertions of force could be seen. It obviously hadn't been accomplished in a single stroke.

This made Lorraine involuntarily breathe a sigh of relief.

Otherwise, if they really ran into the kind of behemoth that could rip an entire ship apart in one go, she reckoned their fate wouldn't be much different, given that the Blade of Vengeance Ship wasn't much larger than the Black Tide Hunter Ship.

They still didn't find any corpses.

Even though traces of battle could be seen everywhere on the deck, including coagulated, blackened blood and shredded viscera, not a single corpse was left on the ship.

This was quite unusual.

Relying on [Tidal Stabilization] and [Gravity Control] to leap from the small boat, he landed steadily on the tilted and broken deck of the Black Tide Hunter Ship. As if discovering something, Xia Nan leaned over and pulled out a cracked scale from the gap between some planks. He gently rubbed the fluorescent blue blood crust on its edge with his fingertip, a thoughtful expression appearing on his face.

He turned around, just about to say something to Lorraine and Sasha, who had also boarded the ship.

However, he suddenly paused, his gaze subconsciously shifting toward the deck's entrance leading to the cabin.

"What's wrong?" Lorraine asked, noticing Xia Nan's strange behavior.

His sharp Perception silently took effect.

"It seems like there's..." Xia Nan did not give an exact answer directly. He had only vaguely sensed the existence of something under the effect of his Perception.

Worried that it might be a trap, he didn't approach rashly out of caution. Instead, he casually grabbed the nearby railing and snapped it hard, breaking off a small block of wood.

Then he threw it toward the cabin entrance.

"Whoosh... clack."

The block of wood traced a light parabola in the air. Just as it was about to land on the deck, it abruptly seemed to hit some nonexistent solid object in mid-air, making a collision sound.

It bobbed once, and only then did it follow its momentum and fall back to the deck.

Hum—

The magic particles in the air suddenly became turbulent, and the humid moisture rapidly condensed.

Visible to the naked eye, the originally empty deck at the cabin entrance suddenly distorted. Like flowers in a mirror and the moon in water, ripples surged in the void, transforming into a blurry humanoid outline.

He already had a guess in his heart.

Across a certain distance, Xia Nan secretly manipulated gravity, giving a gentle stir toward that humanoid outline.

"Crack."

Already on the verge of collapse, the condensed, obscure magical glow turned into countless wisps of vapor and vanished into the air.

The originally blurry and transparent figure finally revealed her true body.

A bloodstained platinum ponytail, a stringless Metal Longbow tightly gripped in her hand, a tall and slender physique...

It was precisely that human ranger from the Black Tide Hunter Crew whom Xia Nan remembered!

She was unlike the half-orc they found earlier, who was dead beyond dead.

This ranger's body was largely intact, and her faintly rising and falling chest proved she still had signs of life.

But at the same time, the massive caving at her ribs, along with the fresh blood constantly spilling from her mouth and nose with every breath, indicated she was in a heavily injured state. She had entered a state of concealment through some method. If Xia Nan had discovered her a few minutes later, her soul probably would have returned to her divine kingdom. He made no move.

To Xia Nan, this was just a stranger of an Adventurer whom he had only crossed paths with once and hadn't even conversed with.

He truly didn't care all that much whether she lived or died.

Not to mention that in the current situation, he wasn't the one making the decisions.

Xia Nan turned his head to look at Lorraine, the captain, by his side.

With her fiery long curly hair fluttering in the sea breeze and holding the [Scale-Fire Scimitar] in one hand, a thoughtful look appeared on Lorraine's face.

Weighing the pros and cons, it actually wasn't hard to decide.

Not saving her—she wasn't a member of their team, so there was no reason to treat her to begin with. Even if this ranger died in front of them, it wouldn't cause any loss to their Blade of Vengeance.

Of course, there were no benefits either.

Saving her—considering the worst-case scenario where the other party, upon escaping her near-death state, bit the hand that fed her and attacked them, Lorraine didn't think her strength was enough to handle the siege of several Blade of Vengeance Squad members barehanded, provided they confiscated her weapons in advance.

And if this ranger was willing to cooperate after regaining consciousness, she could learn from her exactly what the Black Tide Hunter Ship had encountered. This way, she would at least have some idea and wouldn't be completely ignorant of the dangers that might exist in the nearby sea, allowing her to prepare in advance.

Thoughts flashed through her mind.

Lorraine lightly brushed her free left hand over the fanny pack at her back. In the next second, a vial of healing potion that flickered with a faint light as it swayed appeared between her fingers, and she was just about to step forward and pour it down the other party's throat.

She saw the ranger lying on the deck ahead suddenly jolt. Choking up a mouthful of fresh blood, she unconsciously muttered, "Fish... fishmen..."