Chapter 265: ××××××××××100

Si Hon stretched his back, leaning forward then back, the crack of it audible over the rain. "How exactly are you going to help me?"

「ACTUALLY.」 A pause. 「I DON'T KNOW. ಠ∀ಠ」

"HOLY SHIT YOU'RE STILL USELESS!"

「Oh, fuck you.」

He was already moving— a crewmember at the far railing getting swept toward the edge by a thin tentacle, Si Hon teleporting behind them and slicing through the appendage before it could complete the arc.

The crewmember stumbled, caught themselves, looked back at him with an expression that was equal parts grateful and confused.

Well, seems like he didn't give a fuck. Since He was already somewhere else.

Systemy drifted along behind him, unbothered.

「Host. I mean Si Hon.」

"Yeah?"

「Your speech pattern feels different.」

ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ.

「Anyway. You've been using Multi-Directional Movement wrong.」

Si Hon redirected another tentacle with a swing that sent it crashing into the railing instead of the deck crew. "What do you mean wrong? I've been using it fine—"

「You keep thinking the skill moves your body.」

"That's what it does."

「It doesn't.」

"What?"

「It changes direction.」

"Bitch, THAT'S what I said." He teleported three meters, blocked a whip-tentacle meant for someone's head.

「NO. YOU ABSOLUTE DUMBASS.」

"OH FUCK YOU—"

「FUCK YOU TOO—」

He landed on the deck, swung at a feeding tentacle's base, and something happened— thinking about changing direction rather than moving his body, the motion redirecting itself mid-arc, the sword going diagonal instead of straight. More force. Less effort. He blinked at his own arm.

「HOLY FUCK,」 Systemy said, with the energy of someone watching a toddler figure out walking. 「YOU'VE BEEN WASTING YOUR STRENGTH THIS ENTIRE TIME. Okay. I'll explain it properly. Hmmp. ಠ益ಠ」

"Please. I'm about to die."

"""*

(Jisoo Park)

Below deck, the bunk lurched sideways and Jisoo Park hit the frame with her elbow."WAT THE FUCK BUDLEHRIEOSHEHEVEIAJVSUWHWHEIROSJXHWIJ."

The ship shook again.

She sat up, rubbing her arm, looking at the ceiling. "What the hell— I just switched and this is what's happening?"

She checked the lower bunk.

Alex was gone.

She looked at the door.

"There's a party happening," she said to herself.

She went upstairs.

The door to the deck opened and she stood in the frame and looked at what was happening on the ship and on the water around the ship, she frown.

Something sniffled beside her.

Alex, back pressed against the wall beside the door, knees pulled up, watching the Leviathan swing tentacles across the deck. "Wahhhh," she said. "What is that thing. What the fuck is that thing—"

Jisoo watched Si Hon teleport from position to position, redirecting, deflecting, the crew moving in the spaces he was making.

She watched the Leviathan's tentacles, its asymmetrical bulk, misaligned eyes and the sections of it that weren't healing right.

She watched the cannon shots making slow progress.

She yawned.

Then she looked up, because something had changed in the shadow above her.

A wide tentacle, thick as a ship's mast, coming down directly at where she was standing. Moving fast. 3 seconds out, maybe 2.

She raised one hand. Barely— just a slight lift, almost casual.

The tentacle stopped.

Mid-air. Rain running down its surface and falling past it.

The thing frozen at the peak of its arc, every part of it motionless, the momentum simply gone.

「Temporal Lock — used.」

"I really want to get out of this trial," Jisoo said, to nobody. ಠ_ಠ

*""*

(Kim-Si Hon.) Oh

Systemy's explanation ran alongside the battle in real time.

「The skill doesn't move you. It changes the direction of whatever's already moving. Meaning: Si Hon/you swings → changes the direction of that momentum → changes it again → and again → and again. Each redirect adds to the accumulated force without you spending more energy on a new swing. You get it?! It's absurdly broken if you actually use it right.」

Si Hon was moving while processing this, the information arriving in pieces between positions. "So I've been— this whole time—"

「Wasting approximately s

60% of what the skill could do, yes.」

"Okay and you're only telling me this now because—"

「I was GONE. Doing my J*B. Traveling. JUMPING WORLDS. I didn't know you'd be in here doing this WRONG. AGH FUCK YOUUU HEREEE!!!」

A window assembled itself in front of him, formal and familiar:「[MULTI-DIRECTION MOVEMENT]

Optimization detected.

Current movement interpretation is incomplete.

Would you like to force a higher-output trajectory?

⚠ Warning: Current body may be insufficient to withstand resulting momentum.」

"Accept," Si Hon said, landing on the deck.

「COOL.」

"That's it?"

「Done.」

"That seemed fast."

「You want me to make it slower?」

He looked at the Leviathan. The tentacles still moving, the crew still engaged, the cannon making its slow progress against the armor plating.

"No." He raised the sword. "Let me test it."

The Leviathan drew back and then drove forward— the thick anchoring tentacles tightening on the hull, the whip-arms sweeping the deck level.

The crew braced.

Si Hon stood in the center of the open space and didn't move.

「Multi-Directional Movement — activated.」

He didn't disappear.

That was the first thing the crew noticed— the skill that had been making him vanish and reappear was doing something different now.

He was still there, standing, the sword raised. But his body was— wrong.

Moving, but not the way bodies moved. His position kept shifting, small and rapid, each change happening before the previous one had finished, and each change was adding to the motion of the sword.

Forward.

The sword angled.

Sideways.

The angle sharpened.

Downward.

Backward.

Forward.

The momentum stacking with each redirect, nothing being lost between changes, all of it accumulating in the single point of the blade's edge.

The sword began to make a sound— a whistle first, then something closer to a scream, the air around it compressing and deforming under the speed of what it was being asked to do.

The rain within a meter of the blade stopped falling straight.

System windows began appearing and stacking in the air, rapid-fire:「DIRECTIONAL LIMITER REMOVED」

「MOMENTUM REDIRECTION ×2」

×4

×8

×16

×38

「ALRIGHT,」 Systemy said. 「SI HON. Stop adding stacks.」

"How many is good?"

「I genuinely don't know.」

"Cool. We're going to a hundred."

「...fuck.」

×49

×67

×89

His whole body was vibrating. Not painfully— or it was painful but the information was arriving slower than the sensation, which was possibly worse.

The sword was screaming.

The air around his arm was not behaving like air.

The rain was curving away from him in a visible arc.

×100.

He stopped stacking.

And then, at the far edge of the deck— near the railing, partially shielded by a piece of fallen rigging —he saw Sarah.

The old man's daughter.

Somehow awake, somehow up here, alone, and the Leviathan had moved one of its thick secondary tentacles into a position above her, coming down, and she wasn't looking up.

He couldn't move.

Not without releasing everything.

Not without that ×100 worth of accumulated momentum going nowhere instead of somewhere.

He watched the tentacle fall.

And then every tentacle on the deck stopped.

Every single one— the whip-arms, the anchoring tentacles, the one above Sarah —frozen in place, mid-motion, the entire Leviathan locked at the exact moment it had been a quarter-second ago.

"Si Hon!"

Jisoo's voice. From the door. Her hand still slightly raised, the Temporal Lock holding.

"What are you doing…? ಠ⁠_⁠ʖ⁠ಠ Whatever it is, go."

He laughed. W speed.

He looked at the Leviathan. At the central mass of it, the torso, the place where everything connected.

He swung.

The sound was the first thing— the blade moving through air that had been compressed to its limit, a tone that wasn't a whistle anymore but something lower and wider, something that the body felt before the ears hesrs it.

The ×100 of redirected momentum released all at once into a single arc that went diagonal, downward-left, the angle cutting across the full width of the Leviathan's torso and continuing.

The rain parted.

A line through the rain, visible for half a second— a space where the droplets were simply not, cut aside by something moving faster than they could fall.

The fog behind it opened the same way, a corridor through the grey.

And somewhere in the distance, a crack of thunder that hadn't been building, that arrived at the wrong time, like the atmosphere itself had responded to something disturbing the air. Was CUT INTO 4 PARTS.

The Leviathan was still for one full second.

Then everything above the cut line separated from everything below it.

Slowly.

The tentacles, severed diagonally, fell in sections.

The torso divided, the armored plates along the cut line cracking and splitting apart.

The central eye, bisected by the angle of the cut, closed for the last time. Everything that had been above the line moved in one direction; everything below moved in the other.

The Leviathan fell.

The rain came back.

All at once, the corridor through it closing, the droplets resuming their straight fall, the fog rolling back into the space it had briefly vacated.

The thunder that had cracked wrong resolved into a distant rumble moving away. The sound of the rain on the deck returned, steady and soft, the same as it always was.

Si Hon stood where he'd been standing.

He looked at his arm, shaking. At the sword, still in his hand, still vibrating slightly, the edge of it doing something that edge-of-a-blade shouldn't do unless someone had put ×100 of redirected momentum through it… lol.

"Huh," he said.

「That was significantly more than I expected,」 Systemy said, very quietly. 「you're probably dead. ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ.」

"Yeah."

「Are you okay?」

He checked. Arm: functional.

Legs: present.

Everything else: approximately attached.

"I think so….?"

The Leviathan's remains were disappearing into the water around the ship, slowly, the BODY of it sinking with.

The crew stood where they were.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then Micheal's voice, from somewhere behind Si Hon:

"Kid."

Si Hon turned.

The old man was looking at him the way he'd looked at the axe at the start— with the recognition of someone who understood weight and force and the proper use of both.

He wasn't surprised exactly. "Good swing," he said.

The rain kept falling.

And Si Hon fell in forward with a thud and his pupils dilate.