Chương 159: 13. Spear of Light 1

The boarding bridge groaned the moment we stepped onto it. Not loud—but enough to pull every nerve taut. Metal plating that hadn't been properly maintained in thousands of years trembled faintly beneath my boots, as though suddenly remembering it was centuries past its intended retirement date.

Below us lay a slab of water so black and still it seemed solid, without even a ripple—as if the entire dry dock had taken its last breath on some forgotten night long ago, leaving only two spectacularly unlucky survivors to go stomping down its throat. I walked half a step ahead, arms still full of the strange weapons I'd collected from skeletal hands, feeling increasingly like a thief who had blundered into the wrong temple. No—temple was too generous. This place was more like an ancient tomb.

And we were about to pry open the coffin. The circular hatch at the end of the bridge was considerably more unsettling up close than it had appeared from a distance. Its surface was thick and heavy, the outer ring fitted with layered mechanisms that resembled locks, gears, something uncomfortably between the two—nothing like any ship's hatch in the Kingdom. It didn't look designed to keep out wind and waves. It looked designed to keep something locked permanently inside.

"Just looking at this door," I murmured, "I don't exactly feel welcomed as a guest."

"If the ancients had been inclined to welcome visitors in places like this," Ignicia replied evenly, "they probably wouldn't have played the world into ruin." Entirely reasonable. Completely without comfort. While I was still studying the interlocking mechanisms, she'd already moved to the door's side and begun working through the corroded panels. She adapted to this "poke it until it reacts" style of archaeology far faster than I did.

Within a few heartbeats, she found a short lever half-buried in grime, pressed it downward—nothing—then pushed it inward. A deep, resonant clunk echoed from within the door. I instinctively stepped back, hand already halfway to my sword. But the hatch didn't explode outward or release poisonous vapor. It simply shuddered with extreme reluctance and cracked open a narrow seam. Cold air spilled through the gap. Not the damp chill of caves or the salt sting of sea wind.

Something sealed, dry, hard—the cold of metal that had been dead for a very long time. I couldn't help frowning. Ignicia and I exchanged a look, then I pushed the door wider. Behind the circular hatch wasn't the main compartment, but a narrow antechamber. Four walls of the same cold, unyielding metal. Barely enough space for four or five people standing. Mounting brackets and storage compartments lined the walls—their purposes completely opaque to me.

The floor was noticeably cleaner than the bridge outside, as though even dust had been compelled to lower its voice upon crossing the threshold. I'd barely stepped inside when something heavy hit my chest. Ignicia had tossed me a cloth bundle without warning. The weight nearly dropped me.

"Hold that," she said. I looked down. The bundle was full of small copper-grey objects—round at one end, tapered at the other, each shaped like a tiny metal peanut.

"And these are?"

"Probably food for those ancient murder tools you're carrying." She gave me a sideways glance.

"Since you're already holding them, you might as well feed one now. Better than trying to figure out the loading mechanism when you actually need it." I looked from the bag of metal peanuts to the strange short weapons in my arms and reflected that my life had taken a distinctly unreasonable turn.

"Your Highness, I am a noble of the Kingdom, not an ancient armaments technician."

"From the moment I dragged you onto my back," she replied, "you ceased to be simply a noble of the Kingdom."... Deeply unpleasant. Also nearly impossible to refute. I set the extra weapons against the wall racks and selected the most intact-looking one. Studying the grip the way the dead men had been holding theirs, I eventually found a slim metal box that slid out of the handle. Empty inside—but obviously designed to hold something. I held up one metal peanut and compared the dimensions. Perfect fit.

"... All right," I muttered.

"At least when it came to killing people, the ancients believed in intuitive design." If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. I pressed the small metal objects in one by one. The action was deeply unnerving—less like loading a weapon, more like spoon-feeding malice that should have stayed buried centuries ago. When the box was full, I pushed it back into the grip. A sharp click sounded, and the weapon suddenly felt... complete.

I tucked it behind my hip on instinct, freeing one hand, and felt precisely zero safer. Because the terrifying part was never the weapon itself. It was the fact that it could still be made to work. The far end of the antechamber held another door—smaller than the outer hatch but equally solid. Beside it, a cracked metal plate bore dense ancient script, and clipped beneath it was a sheet of yellowed, brittle paper. The paper hadn't completely disintegrated. Ignicia reached it before I could, easing it free.

Dust cascaded as she unfolded it. The page was covered in columns of ancient letters and tables—most typed, some lines scrawled by hand in urgent strokes, as if added under extreme pressure. Only a few elements meant anything to me. SSBN-831 And below that, in larger print: TEXAS"Is that the ship's name?" I asked. Ignicia frowned, scanning from top to bottom. She clearly didn't understand every word, but she was reading considerably more than I could.

"Possibly a designation," she said quietly.

"The vessel's classification, type, or... identity." She paused, fingertip moving to several other words.

"This recurring sequence looks like it refers to a 'class' or tier. And this... reads like 'strategic.' That one resembles 'ballistic'..." With every term she deciphered, the weight in my chest grew heavier.

"Doesn't sound like a cargo vessel."

"It was never going to be." She handed me the paper, her expression cooling by several degrees.

"And if I'm reading this correctly, this thing wasn't built for conventional naval warfare." I stared at those lines of text that had no business existing in this era, and my stomach settled into a solid knot. Black Dragon Pass. The Blazing Yanxia Empire. The sea-dragon clans. This island, the outer supply depot, this underground dock—until now, every thread had pointed to conspiracy. Shipping routes. Coordinated positioning.

But if this ancient monstrosity was itself a delivery mechanism for those "glowing spears"— Then we weren't looking at a conspiracy. We were standing inside a catastrophe. The kind that drags itself out of legend and back into the present. I folded the paper and slipped it into my inner pocket, throat tight.

"Your Highness."

"Mm."

"Are you having a very unpleasant thought right now?" Without glancing at me, she answered flatly: "The Blazing Yanxia Empire intends to use the ancients' light-spears." I fell silent. Because that was exactly the thought I'd been trying very hard not to articulate. After a few heartbeats, I managed a strained laugh.

"Wonderful. Now even my worst-case scenario generator is synchronized with yours."

"That is not good news."

"This humble servant wholeheartedly agrees." I glanced back at the circular hatch we'd entered through, then at the inner door ahead, and the deck felt colder under my boots.

"If that's where this is heading," I said quietly, "then we only have two choices. Either we figure this thing out completely, or—""Destroy it," Ignicia finished. Her tone didn't waver—as though she were suggesting we overturn a poisoned table, not discussing the annihilation of an ancient strategic weapon. I nodded.

"If we can't take it, we break it." She didn't respond. She simply pushed open the inner door. Beyond was a narrow internal corridor. For the first time, I truly understood what it meant to step into the belly of a ship. The passage was claustrophobic—two people walking abreast would have been uncomfortably close. The ceiling pressed low, walls curving inward; the whole route felt like being inserted into the hollow of an enormous metal bone.

Small doors branched off like capillaries, each marked with faded labels and alphanumeric codes. The deck bore remnants of dark rubber non-slip patterning, worn rigid by time. The air carried iron, oil, salt, and an arid dust that worked under the scalp—heavier than the living quarters, more invasive. I walked half a step ahead, hand never straying far from the newly-fed weapon at my back. Not because I suddenly believed I could use it effectively.

Because this corridor felt uncomfortably like the esophagus of some vast beast, and my body wanted something to hold on to—anything that might convince it I was not, in fact, food. Ignicia followed, occasionally touching door labels or wall markings. She read fragments under her breath.

"Control..."

"Command..."

"Crew..."

"Missile..." I stopped at that last one. Turned. She looked up at me, and neither of us spoke. The silence was clear enough. We'd found exactly the right place. Or more precisely: the one place the Blazing Yanxia Empire should never be allowed to reach. Faint sounds occasionally stirred deeper in the vessel—condensation dripping, metal contracting far away, some system long since shut down still twitching in its sleep.

Each noise made me step lighter, listening for boots or the grind of a door sliding open to swallow us into something worse. After two corridor segments, the space finally widened. A short ladder rose ahead, with a larger indicator panel beside it. Most of the symbols and arrows meant nothing to me, but one section had been circled aggressively in red—as though someone long ago had urgently needed to emphasize a critical location. Ignicia looked up the ladder.

"Up."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because if I were the captain," she said, "or anyone who needed control of this entire vessel—I'd put the nerve center on the upper level." I stared at her and had the distinct sensation of exploring with a highly educated dragon who had taken conspiracy theory as an elective. Unfortunately, she was probably right. Again. We climbed. The metal rungs were bitterly cold, every step amplified to maddening degrees in the narrow shaft.

As I ascended, I couldn't help thinking: from above, we must look like two very stupid rats climbing deeper into a coffin. When I pulled myself through the hatch at the top, the space changed again. No longer the simple narrowness of below. This felt like the perimeter of something central. More doors. More dead panels embedded in the walls. The flooring here was suspiciously clean.

Ahead, a heavy door stood half-open, and beyond it I glimpsed curved rows of seating, upright control stations, equipment I couldn't identify but instinctively recognized as vital. No windows. But a pressure that said unmistakably: this is where the ship sees and thinks. I stopped, throat dry. Ignicia came beside me, her gaze sliding past the door into the dim interior beyond.

"It appears," she said quietly, "that we've arrived." I stared into the darkness beyond that hatch, feeling something in my chest sink by degrees. Because I understood that what lay beyond was likely not just the command center of an ancient vessel. It might also be the place where the ancients had pressed certain things for the last time, before pushing the world into the fire.