Chương 124: 4.14 The Sails of Charon - Scorpions (5:11)

Z3ke (Original Poster) Pure. Unadulterated. Chaos. That was what I was looking at, and for the first time since the Krill Kraken had shown up, I finally had enough distance from the battle to understand just how shit everything had become. Back on the Why Not, I'd been too busy trying to keep my face from getting eaten by zombie puppets or stop myself from getting crushed by flailing tentacles to pay much attention to anything beyond the next three seconds of life.

My whole world had been narrowed down to what was immediately in front of me, and if something wasn't actively trying to kill me I didn't have the time to care about it. But now Simon and I were on a different ship and we were slowly pulling away from the Why Not. That finally allowed me a chance to get a clearer view of the battle. The problem with that was my brain could barely make sense of everything I was looking at. The entire ocean had turned into a graveyard.

Broken planks and sections of railings bobbed on the waves alongside tangled ropes and shattered barrels and scraps of sail and other debris. The second fire ketch was gone and in its place was a puddle of flame burning on top of the water. That was all that remained after one of the Krill Kraken's tentacles had finally caught up with it. That wasn't even the worst of what I could see.

A few ships from the armada had broken away from the fight, although I wasn't sure if that was intentional or if the battle had simply beaten them to the point they couldn't move. One was drifting sideways through the water, turning slowly as if caught by an invisible current. It looked like the rudder had snapped or it had taken enough damage that the crew wasn't able to point the ship in the right direction.

Another ship was slowly sinking, and from where I was standing I could just barely make out sailors sprinting across its deck, throwing everything that had at it just to keep the thing afloat for a minute longer. All around me, the crew of the ship that Simon and I'd just landed on was fighting desperately to keep us all alive. We were slowly pulling away from the Kraken. Sailors were shouting from the rigging and others were hauling on ropes or adjusting the sails.

Every few seconds another gunshot cracked out through the air, letting me know that people were still taking potshots at the massive kaiju attacking us. I couldn't understand what anyone was saying because there were just too many voices overlapping and too many orders being barked at the same time and too much raw panic bleeding into everything for me to be able to separate one problem for all the rest. Someone was screaming about the sails. Someone was shouting for more ammunition.

A sailor nearby was dragging his friend away; a friend who was bleeding and screaming and panicking. Another sailor near the front of the ship was screaming at a group of his crewmates to move something. Somewhere close to me a voice kept shouting a name, over and over and over and over again until the noise of it all disappeared beneath the panic and fear that had gripped the ship. The whole ship had been swallowed by fear and urgency and nobody had stopped moving since Simon and I jumped aboard.

At the same time, nothing was really happening because everyone was pulling in different directions. Some of the sailors were desperate to put distance between us and the Why Not and the Krill Kraken. Others looked ready to lead the charge straight at the thing. The rest were throwing themselves into whatever work they could, trying to find something to keep them calm and steady and not have them lose their minds.

Our new ship had a name and someone had told me what it was at some point, but I honestly can't remember it now. It was one of the first ships to rejoin Simon's armada when we were gathering together to hunt the Krill Kraken. It was also one of the first ships where I'd laid down the Grip Glyphs before the battle had kicked off.

Even with the seawater and the ink and the rotten krill and God knows what else making the deck slick under everyone's feet, I could still see the faint glow of the glyphs beneath people's boots. That gave me a semblance of… I don't know, comfort? Pride? Relief? It was a small bit of something where I knew that at least one thing I'd done was still holding together in this fight. I knew that this ship wasn't supposed to be anywhere near the center of battle.

Its job had been to stay at the edge of the armada and provide artillery support once the Kraken showed itself. Obviously that plan had gone out the window. At some point, whoever was captaining this ship must have looked over and seen the Why Not getting absolutely wrecked. They'd seen the tentacles wrap around the hull, seen the decks get torn apart, and seen us getting swamped by zombie puppets and decided that staying safely at the edge of the battle was less important than getting close enough to do something.

Thank God they did because if they hadn't I would have still been on the Why Not. A crack split the ocean and I turned towards the sound just in time to see the mast of the Why Not break. The noise was loud enough that I could feel it more than hear it. The mast broke and toppled and the tentacles that surrounded the Why Not squeezed and the whole ship folded in half. There was no graceful sinking or slow, cinematic moment where we got to watch the ship slip quietly beneath the waves.

The center of the hull gave way and everything twisted in opposite directions as the ship bent around the three tentacles squeezing for everything they were worth. I saw pieces of the deck where I'd been standing on only minutes earlier quickly get drawn into the ocean. Simon watched the last pieces of the Why Not disappear beneath the waves for maybe half a second before he snapped back into motion.

Whatever attachment or love he might have had for his ship apparently didn't outweigh the fact that we still had a giant sea monster to kill.

"Turn us about!" he shouted, pointing towards open water.

"Get us clear of that thing and tell the other ships to keep their distance!" I'm not gonna lie, the fact that Simon was guiding us away from the fight caught me off guard. The man still had that ridiculous grin plastered across his face and I fully expected that he'd order us to race straight at the Krill Kraken so we could get close enough that he could hack away at it himself. But instead our ship turned and pulled away.

The sailors who'd been staring at the wreckage of the Why Not suddenly had something else to focus on and they snapped back into action, working to put as much distance between us and the Kraken as they could manage. Something moved in the chaos of the battle and it drew my focus to the third and final fire ketch that we'd prepared. It was picking up speed, racing towards the Krill Kraken, and that suddenly made Simon's orders make complete sense.

I understood exactly why he wanted to put as much ocean between us and the Krill Kraken. The third ketch wasn't like the other two that we'd prepared. Each of them had their own role in this fight. The first had been loaded down with anything magical that Simon could get his hands on with the idea that it would be the bait for the whole fight. The Kraken would chase it and, hopefully, the first ketch would keep just outside the monster's reach and allow us to kite it around the battle.

The second fire ketch had been meant to draw attention and keep the Krill Kraken from completely annihilating the first. We lit it up, made it as bright and as obvious as possible, and hoped that it would buy the first fire ketch enough breathing room to stay in the game. But the third ketch? That one was built differently. It had been built as a weapon. Simon had hand-picked the skeleton-crew sailing it, and I don't know exactly what he told them when he gave them the job.

I don't think he hid much from them though. Even if he did, they should have known what the job was once they set foot on the boat. The ropes of the third ketch had been greased with fat so the fire would spread through the rigging as fast as possible once it caught.

Barrels of oil and explosives had been packed below deck, and almost every surface on the ship had been drenched in oil, leaving only a handful of relatively dry spots where the skeleton-crew could move around without immediately falling on their asses. Their job in the whole clusterfuck of battle was simple: sail straight at the Krill Kraken, get as close as possible, light the fires and then abandon ship before the boom. That was the plan anyway.

From where I was standing, I was able to watch the whole thing play out and slowly unravel. The third fire ketch cut across the Kraken's path and someone onboard lit the first flames. Fire raced through the rigging and climbed the mast, spreading along the fat-soaked ropes so fast that it looked like the whole shit caught on fire all at once. Within seconds it was the brightening thing in the ocean, and against all the dark water the flames were almost painful to look at.

The Kraken turned and an enormous tentacle shifted beneath the surface, its outline just barely visible beneath the waves as it tracked the burning ketch. Our ship kept pulling away while the crew put as much water as they could between us and what was about to happen. A tentacle rose up out of the ocean and smashed down across the fire ketch's deck. It tore through the rigging, sending burning ropes whipping through the air.

Pieces of the mast shattered, wood exploded outwards, and the whole ship lurched hard enough that the skeleton crew all lost their footing and went sliding across the deck despite the fact that I'd covered the whole thing in grip glyphs. Before they could recover, another tentacle rose up out of the water and wrapped itself around the hull. The Kraken's grip tightened and the burning vessel was slowly dragged towards the glowing mass beneath the surface.

The crew was still desperately trying to escape, which meant the part of the plan where everyone had safely got off the ship had officially gone to hell. The deck of the fire ketch had become a nightmare. Oil was burning across parts of the ship and it was heaving and rolling in the Kraken's grip. Every few seconds another sailor lost their footing and went sliding towards either the flames or the giant tentacle crushing the hull.

And that's about the same time that the zombie puppets came spilling out onto the deck. Their waterlogged bodies scrambled across the burning ship and immediately went for the sailors. None of the skeleton crew stopped to fight them. There wasn't any time for that. They just tried to run around them and reach the railing of the ship before the Kraken dragged the whole thing underwater. I watched as one sailor sprinted for the side of the ship. He cleared the flames and launched himself over the railing.

He hit the water clean and then immediately started swimming as hard as he could to get away from the burning ketch. Another sailor followed him but something must have gone wrong with his jump. I don't know if he slipped or simply panicked because, instead of diving, he stumbled over the railing and hit the water in a belly flop. A third sailor got as far as the ship railing before one of the zombie puppets finally caught up with him.

I saw him struggle to pull himself free but the creature dragged him back, and then more and more of the zombies rushed him until they dogpiled him and I saw tearing and clawing and ripping as he disappeared under the mass. Even from where I was standing, with the battle still raging all around us, I could hear his screaming. The sound of it carried over the water and cut through everything else, and there wasn't a damn thing that any of us could do about it.

And somehow, through all of that, the fire ketch was still holding it together. Flames had swallowed most of the rigging and black smoke was rolling across the deck while the Kraken's tentacles kept the ship pinned in place. The handful of sailors still aboard were scrambling for any way off. Then everything exploded. A section of the ocean disappeared behind fire and smoke and splintering wood and a shockwave that hit hard enough to knock me flat on my ass.

I hit the deck and slid to a stop around the Grip Glyphs which caught me and held me there. I've said before that there's a difference between silence and quiet. Quiet is usually peaceful. Quiet is calm. Quiet is absolutely NOT what you get when an explosion has just rocked the center of an armada fighting an ocean kaiju. That's where silence comes into play.

Silence is what happens when the world keeps going on around you but something has gone so catastrophically and horrifically wrong that you brain just quietly disconnects. You've all seen Saving Private Ryan, right? There's that one scene where they're on Omaha Beach and Tom Hanks gets hit by a mortar or something. He's just sitting there all dazed and dumbfounded, watching the chaos happening all around him in total silence.

He doesn't know where he is and the noise has cut out and you get a brief view of the whole of the battle. Yea. So apparently that's a real thing that happens to people. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. My ears were… to say they were ringing would be doing that a serious disservice.

My skull felt two sizes too small and every sound in the world had been turned down to almost nothing until it was like hearing everything from behind a thick wall. People were shouting and I could tell because I could see their mouths moving. Simon was a couple feet away giving orders and gesturing wildly at the Krill Kraken, but I couldn't hear a damn word of any of it.

I grabbed the nearest railing and pulled myself upright, and when I finally got my feet underneath me I looked over to where the third ketch had been. There wasn't anything left to see. All that was there was chaos and smoke and fire and bits of burning wreckage raining back down into the ocean. And the Krill Kraken. The fire ketch had been held in the Kraken's grip when the explosives went off, and the blast had torn through EVERYTHING. The tentacle that had been wrapped around the hull had been blasted in half.

An enormous chunk of it was slowly sinking beneath the waves while the Krill Kraken was waving the charred stump of what remained through the air. The explosion had done so much more than just take out that single tentacle. Something about the blast had hurt the Kraken itself. Look, I'm not an expert on naval warfare or underwater physics or any of that, so this next part is probably gonna be stupid until one of you guys writes a very long comment explaining exactly what happened.

But the whole thing kinda reminded me of how ships use depth charges against submarines. The third fire ketch had been so loaded down with oil and barrels of explosives that I'd honestly wondered whether it would be able to sail at all. It had sat noticeably lower in the water than all the other ships around, and it looked ready to sink the moment a single wave hit it.

So when it exploded, I'm guessing that most of the force from the blast went down into the ocean rather than up in the air, and that was enough to do something the rest of our attacks failed to do. Maybe it was pressure waves or vibrations moving through the water or some explanation that I'm not gonna understand completely. Let's just call it "mystery explosion" and be done with it. Whatever it was, it hurt the Krill Kraken.

The water all around the creature had erupted and the shockwave seemed to (again, this is going to sound crazy and I have no clue how this shit happened) push enough of the creature's mass upwards to let us all finally get a view of the creature. I'm not talking about just seeing the isolated tentacles or that weird glowing green pattern just below the waves. I mean we got to see the actual Krill Kraken. Taking it all in for the first time was a different experience.

You know when people visit the Grand Canyon for the first time? They always marvel at the size and beauty and say that most things in life don't live up to the hype but the Grand Canyon actually does. You've all talked up a lot of the monsters to me over the past few months… but the Krill Kraken is so much more than any of them. It kinda reminds me of the first time I saw the Reclaimer and my brain just broke trying to understand the size of it. But the Krill Kraken was so much more.

I couldn't measure the size of the thing. At least with the Reclaimer I could look at it next to the broken buildings in the Research district. But with the Krill Kraken? What rose up out of the sea was still only a fraction of the thing. Green patterns of bioluminescence stretched across a body so large that all I could do was gape at the thing. Even trying to compare it to the ships all around us made it worse, because the ships suddenly looked like bath toys and I couldn't adequately get a size from it. It was…

fuck. It was big. It was big and we're just gonna leave it at that. It was big and… it was big. I'm babbling and 'big' doesn't do it justice but looking back and remembering it and trying to describe it all to you now, the only word that comes to mind is 'big.' Big and furious. The Krill Kraken didn't like that we exploded a ship at it. The charred stump of the destroyed tentacle slashed through the air and it wasn't the only one that was moving.

The others thrashed against the surface of the ocean, slamming down hard enough to send enormous plumes of seawater blasting upward and rocking every ship in the armada. If my hearing had been working properly… no. I was gonna say that if my hearing had been working properly I would probably have been half-deaf from the tentacles slamming into the ocean. Instead, I'll say that even with my hearing fucked up - all muffled and distant and wrong - I could still hear the chaos of that moment.

I felt every single impact through the soles of my feet and up through the deck beneath me. The sight of the Krill Kraken stopped the battle. The gunfire slowed and people stopped shouting and every ship in the armada that was still sailing and not desperately trying to keep from sinking into the ocean all paused and went quiet because we were all looking at the same thing. The Krill Kraken was hurt. It was still enormous. It was still surrounded by tentacles that could tear a ship in half without trying.

It was still absolutely and obviously capable of killing every person in the armada if it decided to keep fighting. But it had finally stopped looking untouchable. Which fucking sucked. Simon Pucco raced to the side of our boat and put a foot on the railing and thrust his sword out at the Krill Kraken and shouted.

The man had spent the last several minutes watching ships get torn apart, sailors get dragged into the ocean, and his own ship folded in half beneath the Kraken's tentacles, and somehow none of it managed to wipe the grin off his face. If anything, seeing the monster hurt seemed to have made him happier and I got the distinct impression that this was exactly the part of the battle he'd been waiting for. My hearing must have been coming back because I heard the order he shouted out to the rest of the boat.

"Run her in!" Everyone on the ship reacted and jumped to obey. Sailors pulled in rigging and the ship slowly turned to face the massive sea beast. The rest of the armada seemed to understand what he was doing, or maybe they saw the same thing: that the Krill Kraken was finally hurting and this was the part of the battle that would decide whether we won or lost. Ships that were still capable of fighting poured everything that had into the wounded Kraken.

Flashes of gunfire cut through the smoke while sailors chucked molotov cocktails at whatever tentacle was within range. All across the ocean the ships were firing at the beat from whatever angle they could find. The ocean lit up around us. Burning debris was still floating on the surface and every few seconds I heard explosions elsewhere in the distance and I knew that, while the Krill Kraken was still fighting, it was getting punished too.

Our ship pushed in closer to the enormous writing mass rising up out of the water, and all the while Simon just kept grinning. It was that grin that the Kraken noticed. Okay, probably not. I mean, if you're that big you're probably not gonna notice a small pirate racing at you. Shit doesn't work like that. This isn't the movies where the Krill Kraken would have pegged Simon as his nemesis and the leader of this battle. But… let me have this.

It was that grin that the Kraken noticed and I realized that whatever tiny amount of peace we'd gotten from the explosion was officially over. Two of the tentacles reached out to us and I grabbed the railing just before the first one slammed into the deck. The impact threw people everywhere, but the tentacle didn't just hit us and pull away.

It disgorged a flood of waterlogged bodies across the deck and zombie pirates came tumbling out in a tangled mess before reforming and scrambling to their feet and throwing themselves at the nearest sailors. The second tentacle followed almost immediately afterwards and more puppets spilled out onto the deck. In seconds the whole ship had gone from preparing to charge down a wounded sea monster to fighting for its life against another swarm of the undead.

I barely had time to get Searfang up before the first one reached me. The heated blade cut into the zombie's shoulder and I sent the thing stumbling back as black water spilled from the wound. A gun went off somewhere close enough to make me flinch. I ducked as something flew over my head, turned, and found another puppet reaching for me.

I stabbed it through the throat and shoved it away and before the body had even hit the deck another sailor had slammed into my shoulder and I spun around just in time to see a zombie get its head removed by an axe. Everything turned into motion. Sailors fired pistols and rifles and shotguns before dropping their guns and switching to swords and axes and knives and whatever else they could get their hands on. My searfang wasn't the only "unique" blade on the battlefield either.

Swords lit up with glyphs and inscriptions. I saw green flames engulf a sword that carved through three zombie puppets in a flash. Another one was a weird whip-like sword that was solid one moment and then the sailor drew back his hand and flung it forward and the blade went all liquid until it decapitated another zombie. Zombie puppets were crawling across the deck while people screamed warnings and everyone was getting jumbled up in the riggings and chaos reined.

Once more the whole of the battle devolved to whatever I could see right in front of me. I planted my feet and stabbed out with Searfang and killed another puppet. And when I pulled back some small part in the back of my head was thinking about how much easier things were going than when I'd been fighting on the Why Not, which was an insane thought to have while I was surrounded by zombies and standing on a ship charging a Kraken. The grip glyphs were still holding.

The deck was covered in saltwater and all the gunk and mess and trash that was spewing from the zombies, but I wasn't slipping every time I tried to move. A puppet slammed into me and the glyph beneath my boots flared and held me in place long enough for me to drive Searfang into its chest. There was a blinking notification in the corner of my eyes and I knew that if I took my attention away from the battlefield to check it out, that would likely be the last thing I did.

Sailors were getting shoved aside and knocked into each other and thrown off balance by the movement of the ship, but the glowing glyphs kept catching beneath their feet and giving them just enough stability to fight back and I couldn't help but smile a little at that. Something I'd done had worked. The plan had worked. Shit wasn't too chaotic. I slashed across another zombie and stepped over its body and immediately had to turn towards one of the tentacles hanging over the side of the ship.

Somebody had hacked into it and black water mixed with rotten krill poured across the deck. I drove Searfang into the tentacle when I got close enough but I don't know how much damage I was actually doing to the thing. The heated blade cut into the thick, rubbery flesh but it was probably like a paper cut to the Krill Kraken. I finally had a moment to look up and didn't notice how close we'd gotten until the Kraken filled my entire field of vision. It was too big and…

okay, I know a bunch of you guys are gonna say "of course the giant Kraken was big." But… fuck man. I looked up and saw the eye and that was larger than the entire ship we were on. I'm not exaggerating when I say that either. We were close to the eye of the creature and it looked at us and the eye was so enormous that I could see the reflections moving across its surface. They were distorted images of flames and waves and tiny ships that were insane enough to charge directly at it.

Simon saw it too because of course he did. He moved towards the bow (is that the front of the ship?) and ordered us even closer and I remember looking at him and thinking that this was the moment where he'd do something dramatic. He was a pirate captain charging a sea monster. The creature's eye was bigger than his ship and somewhere in the back of my mind I was expecting him to jump on the beast and shout something like "from hell's heart I stab at thee." But instead, the jackass started laughing.

He laughed like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him, and the grin on his face was so wide and so manic that just looking at him made my own face hurt. There wasn't any rage on his face. Hell, there wasn't even any fear. The man just looked like someone who'd spent his entire life waiting for the chance to do something monumentally stupid and had finally been given this opportunity.

I didn't get to see exactly what he did because another zombie came at me and I had to turn and put Searfang through its skull before it could get its hand on me. When I looked back, Simon wasn't anywhere nearby and the railing cracked and shattered and where Simon had been standing was what looked like scorch marks. I… I don't know what he did and maybe you all can tell me. Did he fucking launch himself? Did he fly? What the hell?

Simon was gone and there was a flash of ruby red light and a scream and the Kraken rose higher up out of the water. The displacement of the water pulled us closer and then pushed us out. Everyone fell onto the deck. Some of the zombie puppets tumbled over the railing but others just collapsed and attacked the sailors who'd lost their footing. The grip glyphs had been overcharged or burned out or whatever at the sudden movement of the ship.

We were sent spinning away and it was only my spot near the railing that kept me onboard. Then one of the tentacles jerked violently, followed by another and another. There was a roar and I didn't even know that Kraken could roar. I don't even know if it was a roar. It could have just been a displacement of air or something. But it was loud and it was painful and I stored Searfang in my storage space and clapped my hands to my head and prayed that the sound would stop.

The glowing green patterns across the Kraken's body flared with enough intensity that the entire creature lit up beneath the water and I was able to get a brief understanding of its size and… again, big. The light raced across its exposed mass in violent pulses and every remaining tentacle began thrashing all at once. The deck beneath us shook as a tentacle hit the water. Another slammed down close enough to send a plume of seawater crashing against the ship. Then the tentacles all went still.

One stopped thrashing, then another, and another. I watched the remaining zombie puppets collapse onto the deck as if someone had cut whatever strings had been holding them up. The first tentacle fell into the water, followed by the second and the third and the fourth and… you get the idea. One by one, the enormous tentacles that had been tearing ships apart, dragging sailors beneath the waves, and tossing zombie pirates onto our decks went limp and collapsed into the ocean.

The final one came down hard enough that I felt the impact of it rattle my body. A wall of seawater rolled over the deck and soaked everyone all over again, which almost felt insulting because there wasn't a single person aboard who hadn't already been drenched about fifteen different times. When the water finally cleared enough for me to see, the tentacles were floating motionless on the surface. The glowing green patterns across the Kraken's body had begun to fade.

There was smoke and bodies and wreckage all around me, and I was surrounded by sailors who looked as confused as I'd felt. What the hell had happened. That question actually isn't rhetorical. I'm asking all of you. I honestly have no clue what the hell happened. One moment we were racing into the belly of the beast and the next thing it's like it was having a stroke or something and keeling over all by itself.

The whole ocean was completely still and we all just stood there, adrenaline and fear and panic and every other emotion that has ever existed coursing through our bodies. And none of us knew what had just happened.