Pain

The thick fog once again swallowed the shattered silhouettes of the ships. On the deck of The Voyager, only the wreckage left in the wake of the storm remained—snapped cables, splintered planks, scattered swords, and bodies strewn everywhere.

Seawater mixed with blood flowed slowly through the seams of the deck, staining the dark, weathered timber a jarring, dark red.

“Retrieve the hooks! Don't let the cables get tangled in the propeller!!”

“Carry the wounded to the lower deck! Move fast!!”

“Assess the damage!”

First Mate Evans's hoarse roar echoed through the wind and rain once more. With the battle over, the first mate seemed to have reverted to the experienced, steady, and cold veteran sailor he was.

The crew began to busy themselves. Some silently cleared the scattered gun ports, others climbed the masts to patch the torn sails, while others began to laboriously drag the corpses off the deck.

The entire ship was running smoothly once again.

Ryan stood high on the poop deck. In the distance, the grayish-white sea still surged with raging waves; the storm was far from over.

But at least they had survived.

“First mate,” Ryan said, adjusting his glasses. “Casualty report.”

Evans looked down, flipping through the grease-stained clipboard in his hand. After a few seconds of silence, he spoke in a heavy voice, “Thirty-four dead, eleven heavily injured, twenty-seven lightly injured. And four missing.”

Missing. Everyone knew what that word meant at sea. Falling into the pitch-black ocean in this kind of weather was no different from death.

Evans paused, then added, “The pirates left behind over twenty corpses.”

Ryan nodded calmly. “Dispose of them according to the rules of the sea.”

“Aye.”

The crew began to move the pirates' bodies. The heavy corpses were bound with pig-iron chains and pushed over the bulwark one by one.

Splash, splash.

Dull splashes echoed in succession. The pitch-black sea quickly swallowed the sins and blood, returning to its original raging state as if nothing had ever happened.

Simon had also joined the team moving the bodies. The earlier melee had left him covered in blood, both of his enemies and his own. However, his spirits seemed remarkably high, and he even had the energy to curse loudly.

“Damn it, if I run into those raw-fish-eating bastards again, I'll hang them from the masts and dry them like jerky.”

Hearing his words, the few phantom crew members nearby actually cracked stiff smiles on their dull faces. The atmosphere on the deck lightened considerably.

Down in the lower gun deck, Alvin was crouching beside a severely damaged smoothbore cannon, carefully inspecting its cracked wooden carriage.

The previous round of close-quarters exchange had pushed the gun deck to its absolute limit. The tracks were warped, the cast-iron bearings reeked of acrid burning, and several gunners were using rags to clean out the residual black powder.

Alvin ran his rough fingers over the mottled black iron barrel, his brow furrowing. The damage was more severe than he had anticipated, but it was still within his capability to fix.

“Still fixable,” he muttered to himself, spitting out some tobacco residue. “Just give me two hours.”

...

Simon was dragging a heavy pirate corpse toward the ship's side.

Suddenly, a sharp, sudden spasm of pain shot through his chest without warning. The sensation was incredibly abrupt, like a rusted iron nail being driven deep into his heart.

His movements faltered, and the corpse in his hands nearly slipped from his grasp.

Frowning, Simon looked down at his chest. Aside from his torn clothing, he didn't find any fatal wounds.

“Damn it... did that blow from the club have this much of a delayed kick?” he muttered, assuming it was just a pulled muscle. He spat on the deck and prepared to take another step forward.

But as soon as he took his second step,

A heavy, bone-chilling sound suddenly echoed from deep within his chest.

Thump.

Simon froze instantly on the spot, every hair on his body standing on end.

In the next second,

Thump.

The sound echoed again, heavier and deeper than before, carrying an irresistible rhythm of life. When the third heartbeat exploded, Simon's face finally contorted in sheer horror.

Thump!!

The blood in his entire body boiled like scalding water, surging wildly through his limbs under an unventable, terrifying high pressure. The wound that had previously stopped bleeding under the healing of the 【Heart】 Principle ruptured again without warning under the immense blood pressure, a jet of blood instantly staining his entire sleeve crimson.

“Ugh... ah!!”

Simon grabbed the freezing bulwark, doubling over in agony as his breathing instantly grew incredibly heavy. The fatigue, fear, hidden injuries, and all the physical impacts that had been forcibly suppressed and delayed during the battle now returned with a vengeance, crashing over him like a tidal wave amplified a thousandfold.

He felt as if every single one of his blood vessels was about to burst.

...

On the other side, down in the gun deck, Alvin was just about to stand up and head toward the next cannon.

Suddenly, the heavy iron wrench in his hand slipped and fell without warning.

Clang.

The cold metallic clash sounded exceptionally sharp in the dead silence of the gun deck.

Alvin froze, looking down at his right hand, only to discover with shock that his arm had completely lost all sensation at some point.

The skin had turned a bizarre, deathly iron-gray. Tiny, irregular black patterns were even beginning to surface from the pores on the back of his hand.

Alvin gritted his teeth, attempting to command his fingers to move. However, the feedback from his five fingers was alarmingly sluggish and stiff, producing a dry, clicking sound of rubbing bones when they moved.

During the battle, under the empowerment of the 【Forge】 Principle, he had felt omnipotent, capable of forcibly reshaping thousands of pounds of black iron.

But now, his body was being reshaped into a soulless, unfeeling tool. The greater the power the Furnace had lent him, the deeper the humanity it now stripped away.

...

And high on the poop deck, Ryan still stood quietly.

The cold sea breeze whipped his soaked clothes. No one noticed a thin trail of blood slowly trickling down from the corner of his left eye, leaving a dark red stain on his pale skin.

In that instant earlier, through The Glory, he had seen far too much.

The movements of the pirates, the trajectories of the cannon fire, the microscopic wind patterns of the waves, and the filthy fragments of thoughts in the minds of the mortals whose sanity had been incinerated... all this redundant knowledge that did not belong to him was forcibly crammed into his cognition by the 【Lantern】 Principle in an almost brutal manner.

During the battle, this information was an all-powerful computational strength.

But now, they had turned into a mountain of mental debris, threatening to crush his mortal sanity.

Ryan reached up and pressed hard against his throbbing forehead. His vision began to blur in a brief, bizarre way. The splashing water droplets were no longer water in his eyes, but countless complex geometric refraction surfaces.

There were the sounds of waves, the lingering echoes of gunfire, the cries of the living, and obscure ravings that did not belong to this ship at all, drifting down from the higher levels of the Mansus.

It was as if thousands of people were huddled inside his brain, all talking frantically at once.

Ryan slowly closed his eyes, leaning against the wooden bulkhead as his breathing slowed to an absolute crawl.