Chapter 264: Leviathan

"There's another one," the old man said, resting his axe on his shoulder, like he's just telling the weather. "Probably a Leviathan, but we still have the buffs from earlier. Should be manageable."

He looked at me. "Name's Micheal, by the way, kid."

I nodded. Looked at the water.

Then a THUD.

The thud came from below the hull— not an impact from outside but something beneath, something with weight enough that I felt it travel up through the deck and into my feet.

Micheal straightened slightly.

Around us, the crew moved toward the railings without being told.

Alex found my hand. I let her.

We looked over the edge together.

The water below was dark in the specific way it had been before the jellyfish and then it did something I hadn't seen water do before.

It withdrew, pulling away from the hull in every direction, the surface dropping in a shape that became a whirlpool, massive and sudden, and the ship tilted sideways as the water beneath it redistributed, the whole structure groaning.

Everyone grabbed something.

Then the water came back.

The wall of it hit the ship broadside with a sound like a cannon and the deck lurched and every person on it went sideways or down or both, stumbling, grabbing, a few going fully to their knees.

Then laughter, scattered across the deck— genuine, helpless laughter.

"Lol," someone said nearby, getting back to their feet. "This one's big."

"Big isn't the same as hard," someone else said. "We've done big."

"That whirlpool was a really big whirlpool though."

"It was a very big whirlpool," Micheal agreed pleasantly, hefting his axe back up.

Then the ship stopped tilting and started rising.

Not dramatically— just a slight, steady lift, the feeling of the hull no longer sitting in water but being supported by something.

Everyone went back to the railing.

The water below us wasn't gone, but it wasn't behaving the way water behaved when there was nothing underneath it.

Something enormous was underneath it.

Then a tentacle came up slowly.

Beside the starboard railing, rising from the surface with a pace of something that wasn't in a hurry— pale at the upper section, darkening where the water had been, the flesh of it was rotting.

A wound ran along the upper section, wide and deep, leaking something dark that wasn't blood.

Even as I watched, the edges of it moved toward each other, healing— but slowly, stopping before they closed, the wound refusing to seal entirely.

Like whatever had made it was still working against it.

The deck went silent.

"RANKED LEVIATHAN!" Kaia's voice cut through all of it from somewhere behind the crowd. "Everyone prepare! Right now!"

The response was immediate and it still wasn't enough.

The cannons opened up first, both at once, the shots hitting the tentacle at the railing and the portion of whatever body existed below the surface cracked— I could see the flesh responding, the armor plates cracking where the shots landed —but the healing came behind it, slower than instant but faster than sustainable, patching over the damage with each passing second.

The archers followed, the glowing volleys from Kaia's buff still in effect, hitting in a coordinated waves.

The Leviathan rose anyway.

Not fully.

It kept most of itself below, moving the real self of it underwater while extending tentacles above— and there were more than I'd counted, thick anchoring ones that wrapped around the hull and tightened, and long whip-like ones that moved fast enough that two crew members went over a crate before they could dodge, and broader ones with structures along the underside that I understood immediately were for feeding and tried not to understand further.

Its body wasn't symmetrical.

Armored plates covered sections of it at random, naturally grown, and the flesh between them was wrong— patches of rotting thigns running alongside patches of active tissue, the whole thing simultaneously dying and sustaining itself.

The eyes were the worst part.

Dozens of them, small, scattered across the visible surface of its body without pattern, each one oriented differently, nothing looking at the same place.

And then, when a cannon shot hit close to its center, the central eye opened— enormous, singular, the lid peeling back to reveal something that had no color I could name —and the ship shook with the force of whatever that eye was doing when it was open.

People stumbled.

The cannon crew caught themselves on the railing.

A tentacle came down at the port side in a sweep that cleared two crew members off their feet.

Calvyn was already moving, sword out, and she cut into the tentacle mid-sweep and it recoiled— but the recoil hit her too and she went sideways into a railing, her sword skidding across the deck.

I moved.

I picked up the sword.

Didn't think about it, just grabbed it, the weight of it landing in my hand and feeling like something I'd been holding for a long time even though I hadn't.

Pulse Step— five meters, the tentacle was already coming back around and I was somewhere else when it arrived, behind it, and I swung at the junction point where it connected to the hull.

The blade cut.

The buff from Kaia was still in me and the cut was deeper than it should have been, the tentacle recoiling hard.

I was already moving again.

M.D.M. (MULTI DIRECTIONAL MOVEMENT)

I appeared at the deck, the mast, the railing, the tentacle itself used as a platform for half a second before it tried to shake me off— I worked through the space available, not fighting the Leviathan directly but redirecting what it was trying to hit, putting myself between its attacks and the crew that couldn't move as fast.

I caught a crewmember by the collar before a whip-tentacle swept through where they were standing.

Pulse Stepped a cannon crew member out of the path of a feeding tentacle.

Deflected a smaller tentacle away from where Micheal was reloading his axe-strike sequence, the vibration of the impact running up through the blade and into my arms.

They were watching me.

I could see it— the crew, between their own actions, catching the teleports and the Pulse Steps and the impossible angles, the looks of 'what is that'— but they were professionals and they went back to their jobs, which was the right call.

The ship was still losing.

Micheal was strong— genuinely, the axe cuts going deep enough that the Leviathan pulled back slightly when his axe connected —but the regeneration kept pace.

The cannon shots were doing cumulative damage, small patches of the armor that weren't healing at the same rate as the flesh, but small.

The archers were good and coordinated and the buff was making their shots count more than they normally would.

Still losing.

I landed on the deck, breathing hard.

My legs knew what the Pulse Step cost and were already feeling heavy.

The Multi-Direction Movement reserve was lower than comfortable.

I could keep going for a while yet but a while wasn't the same as indefinitely.

Behind me I heard Calvyn shout: "Captain, stop!"

I turned.

Kaia was standing at the center of the deck, and the glow that had been distributed across the crew was building again— not distributed this time.

Concentrated.

Coming up from her, through her, the light of it moving through her arms and into the air around her in a way that wasn't gentle.

Her face was set with the expression of someone who had made a decision that wasn't comfortable and had made it anyway.

"No," she said.

"Kaia—"

"No."

The light built to something that was massive to the point it lit the whole ship. Then it released— not in a wave, in a push, directed outward through every crew member on the deck simultaneously.

I felt it hit me like a physical thing, the buff from before amplified, my body going sharper and faster and stronger than the first one had made it.

Beside me a crewmember straightened and looked at their hands like they didn't recognize them.

Kaia fell.

Calvyn caught her before she hit the deck, going to her knees under the weight of it, and Kaia's head dropped back, eyes closed and wasn't moving.

But the light remained— still in all of us, still running through the crew, still active.

She'd put it out before she went down and it wasn't going back just because she had.

"Captain—"

"Keep fighting," Micheal said, from across the deck, quiet and absolute. He raised his axe. "She didn't do that so we'd stop."

And we didn't stop.

The difference was immediate and enormous.

The archers' volleys hit the Leviathan's armor and cracked it, whole plates shearing off under the impact, the flesh beneath exposed.

The cannons punched through armor sections that had been deflecting before.

Micheal's axe took a tentacle at the base and the regeneration, for the first time, stopped.

The severed end hit the deck and didn't reconnect.

It was still enormous. Still fighting.

I moved through the deck with everything I had left, the buff carrying me further than my stamina would have allowed on its own, P.S between positions, the sword connecting where it could do the most— joints in the armor, the base of tentacle connections, the sections where Micheal's axe cuts had actually just slowed the healing and made the flesh vulnerable.

The crew moved around me, so I moved around the crew, it was messy and loud, the rain kept coming and the ship kept being held in the Leviathan's grip.

But it was giving back what it was taking now, for the first time.

I landed on the deck, breathing properly hard, and leaned against the railing for a moment.

My legs were at the line between still functional and completely going down seriously.

The sword was still in my hand.

The Leviathan was still there, its central eye open, 3 of its major tentacles still engaged with the hull, the crew pushing back against all 3.

But, then… I noticed, everyone was still losing.

The crew that was pushing against the 3 tentacle got pushed by one of the coming Tentacles.

Michael lunged forward to its head and suddenly pushed back by the supporting tentacles and was thrown back.

I prepared myself again, stood straight.

Then, in the space of a moment of stillness between one position and the next, something appeared at the edge of my vision.

Familiar. Pale blue. Floating. Smug.

「Si Hon.」

I looked at it.

「Systemy is back. Actually— I've been back for a few days, but I couldn't find you, so I just jumped world to world for fun and looked around and then I finally got the signal and… what the FUCK.」

A pause.

「How are you in a world that isn't a real world but if you go to the other world it'll still wouldn't be real and you wouldn't be in Snowfall Mountain?! What did you DO? I was gone for like two weeks?!」

I looked at the Leviathan. Then at the system window.

"Help?" I said.

The window was quiet for exactly one second.

「Gladly.」

A warmth arrived in my chest that had nothing to do with Kaia's buff— something familiar, something that had been absent for longer than I'd tracked, slotting back into place like it had never left and was annoyed about the gap.

「MY FAVORITE HOST.」

I pushed off the railing.