Chapter 27: The Conductivity of Water

The water around her was no longer freezing; it was simmering, turning into a scalding, suffocating soup that blistered her skin through her clothes.

The Titan—The Burning Man—raised its massive head and blinked. The action was slow, almost bored, like a dragon glancing down at a speck of ash falling through its lair. Turning its burning gaze away from Rain, it looked back toward the orb in its colossal hand.

That was when Rain saw them.

Thick, black, rusted chains, each wider than a house, emerged from the center of all five glowing orbs. They wrapped tightly around the Titan’s neck, wrists, and massive torso, anchoring the Azure Calamity to the ocean floor and binding its true power.

It’s chained, Rain realized, her heart hammering against her ribs.

But there was no relief in that thought. Bound or not, the sheer passive heat spilling off its body was rapidly boiling the deep sea. Just sitting in its presence was going to burn her alive underwater.

Her mind raced in a blur of panic and calculation. As an Emerald Eclipser, Rain could fight a standard Calamity-rank beast if she had to—she might even defeat it. But this wasn’t just a Calamity. It was an Azure Class Calamity Dark One—an entity occupying a realm of attunement quality far above her own Emerald standing. An Azure Ravager on Island Three had already pushed her and Sen to the absolute brink of destruction; what would an Azure Calamity do to her?

She was in no mood to find out.

Move. I have to move!

Rain fought the paralysis with everything she had, screaming internally at her unresponsive muscles as she sank lower, the water growing violently hotter by the second. Ten meters. Five meters. Her skin was beginning to redden and peel.

Then, she felt it.

A sharp, electric prickle at the base of her spine. A tiny, needle-like spark jolted through her fried nervous system—a tingling sensation spreading outward into her limbs. The overstimulation was wearing off. Her lightning was returning.

Yes!

She primed her Astral Tether, preparing to channel her Eclipser speed and detonate a path upward out of the abyss.

She raised her hand to unleash the charge—and froze.

A sudden, horrifying realization hit her like a physical blow. A truth so blindingly obvious that her battle-frenzied, terrified mind had somehow overlooked it until this exact microsecond:

She was completely submerged in a dense, volatile ocean.

If she unleashed her Lightning Space or channeled high-voltage electrical energy right now, the conductive water wouldn’t just blast her upward—it would instantly loop back through the liquid environment and incinerate her own internal organs, frying her from the inside out before she ever reached the surface.

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Meanwhile, high above the abyss, Sen was in a dead free fall, tumbling through the turbulent air while the sky burned around him.

The catastrophic backlash from his broken Tier-3 Katana had done severe damage. The repelling force from the cursed ocean had shattered his weapon, crushed his chest, and sent a shockwave straight through his brain, knocking him completely unconscious mid-air.

His limp body plummeted past the broken, floating landmass of Island Two. But Floating Island Three—the three-hundred-meter mountain of rock they had just fought on—was descending right behind him like a falling sky.

CRASH!

Third Island slammed directly into Second Island with a sound that tore through the atmosphere. The collision created an apocalyptic doom, detonating both landmasses into a cascading field of burning rubble, shattered cliffside, and blinding dust.

The impact obliterated Island Two’s gravitational core completely, sending both ruined islands collapsing downward in a massive, unified avalanche of rock.

SLAM!

Sen’s body violently hit the surface of a lower landmass, bouncing off the scorched dirt and skidding across the stone. The brutal impact jarred him back to consciousness, his lungs screaming as he coughed up a mixture of blood and dirt.

Groaning in agony, Sen dragged his blurred gaze upward—and his blood ran completely cold.

Shadows engulfed him. The combined mass of both three-hundred-meter islands, shattered into giant, jagged continental plates, was hurtling straight toward his position. Hundreds of thousands of tons of rock were seconds away from flattening him into paste.

He had no time to bleed, no time to hesitate.

"System—weapon!" Sen roared through gritted teeth.

With a flash of pale interface light, a fresh, long katana materialized directly into his trembling hand. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the agony in his ribs, and gripped the hilt with both hands.

He poured every remaining drop of his Eclipser Astral energy into the steel. Spatial distortion warped the air around the blade, making the metal vibrate so violently it looked like a shimmering illusion.

I hope islands count as non-living things, Sen thought bitterly, recalling the strict limit of his Resonance-tier Spatial Tear.

As the titanic mass of rock slammed into his field of vision, Sen took a deep breath, centered his weight, and slashed.

He didn’t just swing at the air—he targeted the localized space containing the two falling landmasses, unleashing his Spatial Tear across the entire sky.

A sound like silk ripping on a cosmic scale echoed across the realm.

A massive, jagged line of severed space cut directly through the falling mountains. The absolute spatial force cleaved the hundreds of meters of falling rock cleanly down the middle, bisecting the descending islands in an instant.

The two halves parted violently in mid-air. One gigantic section crashed down to the far left with an earth-shattering thud, while the other half plummeted past his right, missing him by mere inches and showering him in a storm of dust and sparks.

Sen stood alone in the center of the clearing, panting heavily, holding his vibrating katana as smoke rolled over his boots. He turned his eyes back toward the dark ocean, where Rain had disappeared.