Sea Battle

Before the lifeboat's davits were even fully released, Lohr had already jumped down.

He flipped directly over the edge of the deck, his military boots hitting the middle of the ropes. With a powerful kick-off, he landed steadily in the swaying small boat. Two sailors followed immediately after, their movements crisp and without a second of hesitation.

The lines were cast off.

Oars hit the water.

The moment the crane arms released, the boat shot forward.

Klein leaned over the railing to look down. Lohr was half-kneeling at the bow, one hand steadying the short mast while the other had already drawn the short sword at his waist. Battle qi spread along the blade, a deep gray glow enveloping the edge, humming in the sea breeze.

—Battle qi manifestation.

While far inferior to Ophelia, he seemed to be roughly at Raymond's level.

Klein retracted his gaze.

Diancie stood on the command platform at the bow of The Voyager, her right hand gripping the railing tightly while her left pressed against the communication stone at her waist. The wind made her cloak snap loudly, but she remained perfectly motionless.

“Port side, second battery, suppression fire. Do not hit the fishermen.”

“Yes, ma'am!”

Another magic beam shot from a muzzle. This time, it flew at a low angle across the sea surface, shaving the outer edge of the vortex and kicking up a wall of steam dozens of meters long.

The thing beneath the sea moved.

It wasn't retreating—it was enraged.

Six tentacles erupted from the water simultaneously, surging toward the sky amid seawater and splinters of wood. The longest one swept directly toward the direction of the last cannon fire, whipping through the air with a sharp crack. That tentacle was less than thirty meters from the side of The Voyager.

The hull shook violently.

Aphros was thrown off balance.

She grabbed a mooring post behind her with a death grip, hanging onto it with her feet dangling, her calves kicking frantically—those newly formed legs were completely inadequate in such extreme shaking.

Ophelia lunged forward, catching her by the waist and dragging her back.

“Hold on tight.”

Aphros nodded vigorously. Her vertical slit pupils constricted into thin lines, her gray-green irises reflecting the churning white foam and the gray-brown tentacles on the sea.

She didn't scream.

She didn't cry.

She simply hugged the mooring post even tighter.

Klein glanced at her to confirm she was alright, then turned back.

The lifeboat had approached the capsized fishing boat.

Lohr stood at the bow, battle qi focused in his legs as he kept his center of gravity extremely low. Even as the small boat tossed violently in the swells at the edge of the vortex, his posture didn't shift in the slightest.

The first fisherman was pulled onto the boat.

He was a young man, face pale as death, clutching a fragment of the hull with half his body soaked in water. By the time the two sailors worked together to drag him up, he was already coughing and choking.

“Three more!” a sailor shouted back.

Lohr didn't respond.

His short sword slashed to the left—an arm-thick tentacle was quietly coiling up from underwater, suckers facing up, heading straight for the bottom of the boat. The moment the gray light of his battle qi touched the surface of the tentacle, the cuticle was sliced open, and dark body fluids sprayed out, scattering into a murky cloud of ink in the seawater.

The tentacle retracted.

But a second later, two thicker ones surged up from another direction.

Lohr cursed.

He jumped out of the boat.

He jumped directly into the sea.

Klein’s brow twitched.

Lohr’s entry into the water was extremely decisive—his feet stepped onto the sea surface, battle qi spreading beneath his soles before he submerged completely.

Then he popped up again.

More accurately, he emerged while stepping on a severed tentacle.

Liquid was still oozing from the cross-sections of two tentacles. Lohr was soaked to the bone, his military uniform clinging to his body, but the battle qi on his short sword hadn't diminished in the slightest. His left foot kicked off the remaining stump of the tentacle, and his right foot trod the water, using the momentum to spring back to the edge of the boat, where he grabbed the gunwale with one hand and flipped himself back in.

The entire sequence of movements took no more than four seconds.

“Found the second fisherman!” a sailor's voice came from across the water. “He’s stuck under the keel—”

He didn't finish.

The entire patch of sea suddenly went quiet.

It wasn't a natural silence. It was an erroneous silence.

The swells stopped. The vortex stopped. Even the sea breeze stopped.

A layer of fine hair stood up on the back of Klein’s neck.

He looked down at the sea.

The water had turned clear.

No—the water had turned transparent.

That murky sea, stirred into a muddy soup by fluids and debris, became clear enough to see the bottom within two seconds. Through the surface, the entire silhouette of the creature could be clearly seen.

It was no longer deep underwater.

It was surfacing.

A massive, bloated main body was rising from the depths. In the area where only tentacles had been visible before, a gray-white shell at least one-third the size of The Voyager could now be seen, its surface covered in irregular protrusions and scar-like patterns.

It had no eyes.

It had no mouth.

But a rift had split open across the front of its shell.

The rift was widening.

Inside the rift was red. Not blood-red—it was a highly saturated, unnaturally vivid red. The crack tore open along the centerline of the shell toward both sides, and the tissue curling back from the edges was densely packed with hook-like horny protrusions.

Exactly like the protrusions on the edges of the suckers on the tentacles.

“What is that...” Diancie’s right hand instinctively moved to her sword hilt.

Klein stared at the rift.

A thought was taking shape in his mind. Those sucker arrangements that didn't match any known cephalopod, those fluids that could change the direction of surrounding currents even after being severed, that body structure with its heavy sense of being stitched together—

As expected, it wasn't a product of natural evolution, was it?

The red rift opened completely.

An extremely low-frequency vibration emanated from within. It wasn't a sound, but a resonance that directly penetrated bone and viscera. Everyone on the deck doubled over simultaneously. Some sailors fell to their knees, clutching their ears.

However, those on The Voyager were, after all, veterans who had experienced the west coast battlefields.

When the low-frequency resonance swept across the deck, Diancie’s legs went weak, and her knees nearly struck the railing. Her hand still gripped the iron rod of the command platform; her fingers were trembling, and her face had turned white.

But the gunner behind her had already stood up.

“Your Highness! Requesting suppression fire!”

The voice was loud, carrying the coarse rasp found only on a battlefield. The speaker was the gun captain of the second battery on the starboard side, a middle-aged man with an old scar on his left cheek. He didn't even wait for Diancie to turn around before his hand pressed back onto the array core.

Diancie opened her mouth but made no sound.

She bit the inside of her lip.

“All batteries, judge your own timing and angles for fire,” she said, her voice low but audible to everyone on deck. “Prioritize ensuring the people on the sea are not caught in the crossfire.”

After a pause, she added: “You do not need to wait for my command.”

The moment those words left her mouth, her own shoulders relaxed.

The gun captain acknowledged with a grunt and turned to gesture to his colleagues: Low trajectory, interval fire, gradually closing in.

The port and starboard sides of The Voyager began to alternate fire. The angle of each magic beam was different; some shaved across the sea surface, while others were fired in high-arcing 45-degree trajectories, their landing points scattered around the monster’s shell.

It wasn't meant to kill.

It was meant to force it back down.

Klein watched for a moment and whispered something to Ophelia beside him. Ophelia nodded, her hand releasing her sword hilt to instead grip the railing at the deck's edge—she was observing and preparing to act.

But for now, it wasn't necessary.

Out on the sea, Lohr’s situation was far worse than those on deck could see.

The Voyager’s cannon fire was indeed suppressing the thing, and the activity range of the tentacles was being gradually compressed. But the aftershocks of the cannon fire also made the sea surface even more chaotic—broken waves surged from all directions, without rhythm or direction, and every piece of debris beneath his feet spun violently.

Lohr stepped onto a fragment of a broken mast, his gaze quickly scanning the surrounding waters.

The second fisherman was stuck under the keel of the capsized boat, and two sailors were trying to figure out how to get him out. The third—Lohr hadn't found him yet.

“Where’s the fourth person?” he shouted at the young fisherman who had already been rescued in the boat.

The young man coughed up a mouthful of seawater, his voice broken: “The... the captain is still underneath—he’s tangled in the ropes—”

Underneath where?

Lohr didn't ask further, because a tentacle silently emerged from the water to his left.

There was no warning. No splash. The tip of the tentacle slid across the sea surface, suckers down, unnaturally quiet.

Lohr’s short sword slashed out horizontally.

Battle qi sliced across the surface of the tentacle, the cut clean. But this time the tentacle didn't retract—the severed front end twisted twice on the sea surface before catapulting toward the small boat.

“Block it!”

A sailor drew his blade and parried the severed limb. Viscous body fluids splattered across the boat, a fishy stench rushing into their nostrils.

Lohr had no time to worry about that. His attention was entirely underwater—through the clear sea illuminated by the cannon fire, he saw the fourth fisherman.

An older man, with the thick ropes of a fishing net coiled around his waist, was suspended between the bottom of the capsized boat and the monster’s shell.

He was still moving.

Lohr took a deep breath and clamped the short sword between his teeth.

Then he jumped into the sea for the second time.

The moment Lohr entered the water, the situation beneath the surface was worse than he had anticipated.

Visibility was extremely high—the seawater illuminated by the cannon fire was impossibly clear, and every texture on the tentacles could be seen vividly. The old fisherman, tangled in the net ropes, was suspended seven or eight meters directly below him, his body slowly rotating with the current.

He was still struggling. He was still alive.

Lohr bit down on his short sword and paddled downward with both arms. Battle qi enveloped his entire body, barely isolating him from the sea's resistance. His vision held only the old fisherman and the ropes coiled around him—everything else, including the monster’s gray-white shell, he chose to ignore.

He could not afford to be distracted.

He reached the old fisherman. The rope was coiled three or four times around his waist, tangled around a broken rib at the bottom of the capsized boat. Lohr steadied the old man’s shoulder with one hand and took the short sword from between his teeth with the other, making two cuts at the base of the rope.

The first cut severed two strands.

The second cut—

The vibration came.

Without any warning, the low-frequency resonance emanated from the center of the monster’s split shell, passing through the seawater and Lohr’s battle qi protection to strike directly into his chest cavity.

Taking this hit in the water was a completely different matter from being on deck.

Water is a medium. The efficiency of sound wave transmission in water is much better than in air—this was common knowledge to anyone who had served in the Imperial Navy. Lohr knew this. But knowing it and enduring it were two different things.

His hand spasmed, and the short sword nearly slipped from his grasp. Everything in his vision was shaking, not because of the current, but because his eyeballs were vibrating in their sockets. For a moment, he could hear nothing in his ears, replaced instead by a sharp, continuous ringing.

The old fisherman’s condition was even worse. He was already on the verge of death, and with this wave of resonance, red threads emerged from his mouth and nostrils simultaneously—blood diffused rapidly in the water, coating half of Lohr’s face in an instant.

Lohr gritted his teeth.

He clenched his jaw so hard he tasted his own blood. His tongue had been cut. But this bit of pain instead allowed his consciousness to pull back together.

He ignored the remaining ropes and simply grabbed the old fisherman by the waist, focused battle qi into his legs, and kicked upward.

This kick didn't move him.

A tentacle.

A tentacle had wound around his ankle at some point, its suckers pressed against the outside of his military boot, tightening.

Lohr reversed his grip and stabbed downward.

The sword tip plunged into the cuticle on the tentacle’s surface, and battle qi forced the cut open as dark fluid gushed out. The tentacle loosened, but only for a moment—something else was approaching from another direction.

On the deck of The Voyager, the soldiers also felt the resonance again.

This time they reacted faster, because Lohr was underwater, and they had to be fast.

Four magic beams shot out almost simultaneously, two hugging the sea surface and two in high arcs. The landing points precisely covered the areas of the monster’s shell exposed near the surface, carefully avoiding the position where Lohr was.

The experience of these gunners was fully displayed at this moment—the flashes of underwater explosions pulsed four times in succession. The shockwaves stacked on top of each other, and the creature’s shell shuddered violently as the previously open red rift slammed shut.

The resonance broke.

That bone-penetrating, soul-searing low-frequency vibration stopped abruptly, and the air on the sea surface began to flow again.

There was a window of only a few seconds.

Lohr did not waste it.

He dragged the old fisherman and broke the surface. When the two of them emerged from the water, Lohr’s mouth was full of blood—his own and the old fisherman’s mixed together, salty, fishy, and metallic, impossible to tell whose was whose.

“Pull them up!”

The sailors on the small boat immediately reached out. Two pairs of arms grabbed the old fisherman by the collar and hauled him onto the boat. Lohr flipped himself over the gunwale and knelt on the boat’s boards, gasping for air.

His ears were still ringing.

“Back to the ship!” he roared, his voice sounding like it had been scraped by sandpaper.

The small boat turned around. The oarsmen rowed with everything they had. The Voyager’s cannon fire continued its suppression, carving out a barely safe retreat path for the boat.

The monster did not pursue. The pain from the four volleys made it temporarily abandon its targets on the surface; its tentacles retracted into the water one by one, and its gray-white shell also began to sink slowly.

The red rift closed completely.

When the small boat pulled up alongside The Voyager, the davits were lowered, and the sailors first sent the four fishermen up. The first three were in decent shape—choking on water, scraped up, and over-shocked, but with no life-threatening injuries.

The fourth was not.

When the old fisherman was hoisted onto the deck, Klein was the closest. He saw the problem at a glance.

Blood was seeping from the corners of the old man’s eyes, ear canals, and nostrils. It wasn't external bleeding—there were no wounds, no tears; the blood was seeping out from beneath intact skin and mucous membranes.

Resonance-induced internal bleeding. Internal organ shock.

Klein knelt down and placed two fingers on the old man’s neck. There was still a pulse, fast and weak, jumping without any rhythm.

Diancie ran down from the command platform.

“Ship’s doctor!”

Her voice finally carried a sense of urgency.

The ship’s doctor rushed up from the lower cabins, his medical kit hitting the deck with a clang as the lid popped open, sending the bottles and jars inside rattling. He knelt beside the old fisherman, peeled back an eyelid to check the pupil, then pressed his ear to the chest to listen for two seconds.

“Resonance-induced internal bleeding, organ shock.” The ship’s doctor looked up at Diancie, speaking rapidly. “The lungs and liver are in the worst shape, and there is only so much I can do—Your Highness, we need a high-tier healing spell.”

Diancie’s lips thinned into a line.

There was no high-tier priest on The Voyager. This was a combat reconnaissance vessel, not a hospital ship.

“Stabilize him first,” Diancie said.

The ship’s doctor nodded, his hands already pressed against the old man’s chest as a faint healing light seeped from his palms. The light was very dim, barely enough to stop the most superficial bleeding.

Lohr was the last to climb onto the deck. He was as wet as if he had been fished out of a river, his military uniform clinging to his body and water pouring out of his boots. His gait was a bit light—the resonance had affected him significantly as well, but he held himself together and didn't show it.