Free Web NovelKahn's corpse fell with a dull thud.
That once tall and strong body seemed to have its bones instantly hollowed out, crashing heavily onto the ground.
From the severed neck, a pillar of scalding blood hit the edge of the round table before splashing back onto the stone floor, quickly spreading into a crimson carpet.
The pungent smell of blood instantly overwhelmed the cloying, fishy sweetness of the sea beast oil lamps.
The hall was deathly silent. fгeewebnovёl.com
That head, claimed to be able to smash a mast, had been crushed far too cleanly.
He hadn't even had time to let out a single complete scream.
Kahn's eyes were still open, bulging eyeballs hanging out of their sockets; his pupils had dilated, frozen in a final expression of confusion and terror.
The remaining three moved almost instinctively.
Rosa, Sanders, and Moro—these three pirate leaders who usually wished to sink each other into the sea—showed surprising coordination at this moment.
In an extremely short time, they stood back-to-back in a stiff triangle, entrusting their most vulnerable backs to one another.
Dark red, dark green, and deathly white.
Three different colors of Battle Qi and Psionic Energy erupted violently within the narrow Council Chamber.
The auras of high-level Extraordinary beings clashed wildly, distorting the air.
The heavy stone table even emitted a piercing grinding sound amidst the vibrations, and the mold on the walls flaked off like falling gray snow.
They were using their power to forcibly maintain their sanity.
Before the battle even began, Moro broke; as a Spirit Medium, his perception was far sharper than a knight's, and because of this, he saw much more of the reality than the others.
"Get away!!" He clutched his head tightly with both hands, nails digging deep into his scalp and leaving bloody gashes. "Get out of my head!! Don't think you can turn me into water too!!"
While Rosa and Sanders were still trying to resist with their Battle Qi, Moro's mental defenses had completely shattered before his body did.
Under the gaze of that mass of pink brain tissue, he felt his soul being liquefied bit by bit.
Moro suddenly bit the tip of his tongue and spat a mouthful of scalding essence blood onto the Deep-sea Beast Bone Necklace on his chest.
The moment the blood touched the bone, it made a faint "hissing" sound, as if it had landed on a red-hot iron plate.
"Bang!"
The beast bones exploded. The fragments paused in mid-air for a moment before transforming into over a dozen pale phantoms of vengeful spirits.
They lacked complete human forms, their faces twisted and elongated with hollow mouths and noses, trailing long grayish-white wakes as they emitted piercing mental shrieks into the air.
"Wooo!!"
This was a shockwave capable of tearing consciousness apart; an ordinary Extraordinary Knight wouldn't even have the chance to scream under such an attack—their brain would turn directly into mush.
"Die! Just die—!!"
Moro roared hysterically, bleeding from his seven orifices as he poured all his remaining Psionic Energy into this suicidal strike.
The vengeful spirits lunged like a tide toward Balke, who was blocking the doorway.
However, Balke stood there without even raising a hand to defend; he merely tilted his head back slightly and took a deep breath.
In the next instant, an eerie suction, as if from a deep-sea trench, emanated from the depths of his mouth.
The dozen or so shrilly shrieking spirits, the moment they touched that suction, were like foam caught in a storm.
They struggled desperately, clawing at the air, yet they couldn't even find a direction to escape; their bodies were stretched into thin wisps of white smoke and dragged directly into Balke's not-so-large mouth.
"Gulp." It was as smooth as eating noodles.
All the shrieks, ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ curses, and mental shocks vanished completely the moment they entered his mouth.
Balke closed his mouth, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down, and let out a loud burp in front of everyone.
The mass of pink soft tissue exposed to the air quivered contentedly atop his head, secreting a layer of transparent mucus.
"Tastes good." He stuck out a crimson tongue and licked the corner of his mouth. "Just a bit salty. Old people's souls are always too bitter."
The madness on Moro's face froze; his brain felt as if it had been struck hard by a hammer, and all his thoughts turned into a blank slate in an instant.
This was his strongest trump card, a finishing move obtained at the cost of overdrawing his life.
Yet it had become the opponent's... appetizer?
At that very moment, Balke moved, and the five or six meters between them was erased in an instant.
A hand gently covered the crown of Moro's head.
"Thud!"
The sound wasn't loud, but it was exceptionally clean.
The headless body swayed like a puppet that had lost its strings, sliding down limply and blocking the only exit.
At the exact moment Balke crushed Moro's skull, Sanders and Rosa moved simultaneously.
This was the best opportunity; without any eye contact, those who had survived on this man-eating sea until now all understood when to bet everything.
Sanders' figure was the first to disappear.
Dark green Battle Qi burned wildly on the surface of his body, and he seemed to be compressed into a thin line barely visible to the naked eye, moving so fast that even afterimages couldn't form on the retina.
He swept across the blood-stained floor, the bone-corroding poisonous dagger in his hand thrusting forward, aiming straight for the back of Balke's heart.
Simultaneously, Rosa took a step toward the flank.
Pale blue Battle Qi wrapped around her rapier like a thin layer of ice, locking onto the most vulnerable bloodline on the side of the neck.
She abandoned the fantasy of a one-hit kill and chose the most reliable route of weakening: severing nerves and blood supply.
The dagger was already closing in on the fabric.
Just as Sanders was certain he would pierce the heart in the next instant.
Cracking sounds of grinding bones rang out in quick succession.
Balke's lower body remained motionless, while his upper body rotated 180 degrees backward in a way that completely defied human spinal structure.
That face, wearing a stiff smile, instantly appeared before Sanders.
That large hand, still stained with Moro's red and white brain matter, reached out as if with foreknowledge.
It accurately clamped onto Sanders' face.
The speed was so fast that the word "extreme" couldn't even describe it.
Sanders only had time to meet a pair of hollow, deathly eyes.
"Too slow." The voice had no inflection, as if evaluating a crawling snail.
In the next instant—Bang!
The dark green protective Battle Qi shattered like a brittle sugar shell.
The skull disintegrated directly under the irresistible, massive force, and a mist of blood bloomed gorgeously in the air.
Sanders' headless corpse continued to rush forward due to momentum, slamming heavily into the stone wall and dragging out a long, slick bloodstain.
Almost at the same time, Rosa's rapier struck its target.
The tip of the sword sank into Balke's left chest.
However, there was no sound of metal tearing through flesh, nor was there the expected resistance.
The sensation was so strange that her heart sank; it didn't feel like stabbing a human body, but more like plunging into a mass of over-fermented dough or a bucket of thick glue.
Her Battle Qi was quickly swallowed up without even triggering a hint of recoil.
Balke looked down at the sword in his chest as if confirming an inconsequential trifle.
He waved his hand casually, as if shooing away a fly.
Snap!
A massive force rebounded along the blade, and the steel rapier snapped into several pieces on the spot.
Rosa was swatted away by this terrifying power like a broken kite, crashing heavily into the wreckage of the round table.
Wood splinters flew, and stones cracked.
The Council Chamber fell silent once more.
Rosa lay on the ground, coughing violently, her throat filled with the churning taste of blood. Her vision was shaking wildly as she forced herself to look up.
Three headless corpses lay on the ground.
Kahn, Moro, and Sanders.
In less than a minute, the top combat forces of this sea region were wiped out.
Heavy footsteps approached.
Balke walked up to her and slowly crouched down. At close range, the pink Parasitic Brain atop his head writhed violently, its tentacles probing the air with faint, sticky "squelching" sounds.
"Only you are left at the end, Ms. Rosa." His tone carried a hint of eerie approval. "Then I shall give you a little reward."
He reached out and gently cupped her cheeks. His palms were cold and slick, yet they possessed an indescribable suction.
A cloying scent so sweet it caused dizziness instantly entered her nostrils.
The remaining Battle Qi in Rosa's body dissipated in an instant, and even the thought of resisting became distant and blurred.
She heard the faint cracking of her own skull.
"Crack."
She closed her eyes, waiting for the intense pain to descend.
But the pain didn't come; instead, a warm, viscous fluid was forced through the cracks into her brain.
Pleasure exploded instantly; her soul was gently enveloped, and her consciousness rapidly melted within the pink torrent.
In the final second before her consciousness completely collapsed, the corners of Rosa's mouth curled up uncontrollably into a rapturous smile that looked worse than weeping.
What she let out was not a scream, but a sigh of satisfaction.
The next instant.
Bang!
Her head exploded in ecstasy.
There was no pain, only liberation; a seductive mist of blood slowly drifted under the sickly green light, bringing this massacre to an absurd conclusion.
The hall fell into an eerie stillness, with four headless corpses lying scattered across the floor.
Strangely, the pools of blood on the floor stopped spreading.
The severed neck cavities seemed to be instantly sealed by some invisible force, and the gushing blood came to an abrupt halt after its initial burst.
The heavy scent of blood in the air was being rapidly replaced by another odor.
It was sweet—a cloying sweetness mixed from the saltiness of the deep sea and the fermentation of rotting flesh.
A few seconds later, the transformation began.
The first to show movement was Kahn's massive body.
Deep within his jagged, severed cervical vertebrae, countless tiny pink buds of flesh began to writhe frantically.
They were like seeds buried in the bone marrow beforehand, finally welcoming a carnival-like growth once the host lost the suppression of their head.
The flesh buds rapidly divided, extended, and intertwined, their surfaces glistening with a sickly, oily sheen.
"Squelch."
Accompanied by a wet, muffled sound, a mass of translucent pink soft tissue suddenly bulged out from the neck cavity.
It had no distinct facial features, only a vague, translucent outline resembling a jellyfish or an octopus.
Its center pulsed rhythmically, like a heart exposed to the air, or perhaps a lung breathing.
Then, the severed necks of the other three corpses completed the same supplementation at the same time.
The blood no longer flowed; the heads were replaced by foreign objects.
With a series of teeth-gritting bone-grinding sounds, the bodies that were originally dead began to twitch slowly.
"Crack, crack."
Joints let out stiff cracks, spines straightened once more, and the four headless bodies stood up unsteadily.
Balke bent down and picked up the tricorn captain's hat that had been knocked off from the floor covered in wood chips and bloodstains.
The black felt hat was stained with dust and speckled with dried brain matter.
He pulled out a handkerchief and patiently wiped away the stains bit by bit, his movements gentle and meticulous, as if he were cleaning a rare treasure.
Then, holding the hat with both hands, he placed it back onto his head.
The wide brim hung down, casting a shadow.
Balke straightened his collar, looked up, and gazed at the four newborns before him.
From his smile, the hypocritical emotions he had previously used to deliberately imitate humans had completely faded.
In its place was the pure satisfaction of a creator.
"Look." His voice echoed in the empty Council Chamber, carrying a moist resonance as if it were filled with seawater.
"Without those brains filled with distracting thoughts, fears, and foolish desires... you have become so... perfect, so joyful."
The four headless figures did not respond, but the masses of pink soft tissue all quivered slightly at the same time, secreting a layer of excited mucus.
It was as if they were nodding, or perhaps cheering.
Balke turned around, his crimson cloak sweeping across the blood-spattered floor behind him.
"Let's go, assemble the fleet." His pace was steady. "We are going to the sea to give this dying world..."
He paused for a moment, his mouth splitting open all the way to his ears. "A grand banquet."
The green flames of the oil lamps moved without wind, casting five elongated shadows onto the wall, clawing and thrashing... Late at night.
The sea was like a pool of thick, dead ink; even the starlight was completely swallowed by the heavy gray fog.
Miller stood at the door of the captain's cabin, where only a single storm lantern swayed, wiping his scimitar for the tenth time.
The blade reflected half of his gloomy face, yet it showed not a hint of color.
Rosa had been inside for a full eight hours.
The distant castle had completely melted into the night, like a giant beast lurking at the mouth of an abyss, without even a flicker of light showing through.
Only the smell had changed.
As the night wind grew colder, the cloying scent in the air became increasingly intense.
It was like a cold, damp snake's tongue, slithering through the nasal cavity into the lungs, bringing a drowsy sense of hallucination.
The deck was deathly silent.
By the dim lantern on the mast, Miller saw the sailors on night watch all slumped on the ground.
They were twisted in strange postures, like a pile of discarded rotten meat.
Some let out foolish laughter in their dreams, while others had glistening saliva dripping from the corners of their mouths, glinting eerily in the night.
“A bunch of useless trash.”
Miller cursed under his breath, but his heart was pounding violently against his ribs.
A chilling sensation of being watched by a predator made the hair on his body stand on end.
Just then.
“Splat.”
A wet, sticky sound echoed in the dead of night, as clear as a clap of thunder.
That wasn't the sound of boots on wooden planks. It was the sound of some wet, soft mass of flesh slapping onto the deck.
Miller whipped his head around, his pupils shrinking.
In the darkness at the edge of the gunwale, a slimy hand reached out silently.
Its grayish-green skin gleamed oily under the lantern; translucent webbing grew between its fingers, and curved, blackened claws dug deep into the wooden gunwale.
Immediately after, countless pairs of eerie green eyes lit up in the darkness.
They made no roar, appearing like a group of ghosts emerging from ink.
A second, a third, a tenth... a dense swarm of slimy black shadows was crawling silently up the hull.
Before Miller could even draw his blade, the nearest Deep One had already pounced on the sleeping Boatswain.
It moved as fast as a bolt of black lightning.
The monster straddled the Boatswain, brutally prying open his lower jaw with enough force to crush his teeth instantly.
“Crack.” The Boatswain woke in agonizing pain but could make no sound.
The monster's face split open, and a shimmering, mucus-covered pink tubular proboscis thrust out from deep within its throat, stabbing violently into the Boatswain's mouth and straight down his esophagus.
“Mmph—!!!”
The Boatswain convulsed violently in the dark, his legs kicking wildly, his heels venting his agony through the sound of frantic friction against the deck.
By the faint light, Miller clearly saw a pink fleshy egg being forced through that transparent tube into the living man's stomach.
The convulsing stopped abruptly.
The Boatswain's eyes rolled back, then turned a dull ashen gray.
A second later, he sprang up like a marionette, grabbed a nearby cable, and joined the monsters' ranks with a non-human low growl from his throat.
“Enemy attack!!!” Miller finally roared, his voice cracking shrilly in the night.
Without hesitation, he raised his flintlock and pulled the trigger at the nearest shadow.
“Bang—!” The tongue of flame from the muzzle instantly tore through the darkness.
That moment of intense light illuminated a suffocating scene on the deck... a dense swarm of Deep Ones had already covered the deck, crouching over every sleeping pirate, performing that nauseating feeding ritual.
“Aaaaah!!” A pirate awakened by the gunshot let out a desperate scream.
But just as he tried to scramble up, a Deep One stepped on his chest, its claws instantly tearing open his throat.
Hot blood sprayed, staining the monster's scales red.
The slaughter began; the midnight deck turned into a meat grinder.
The awakened pirates had no time to find weapons; they blundered around like headless chickens in the dark before being dragged into the shadows to be dismembered or pinned down for forced parasitism.
“Wake the hell up! Kill them!!”
Miller kicked aside a recruit blocking his path, his cutlass wrapped in Battle Qi as he slashed wildly in the dark.
A massive Deep One leader pounced from the mast, aiming straight for Miller's head with a stench-filled wind.
Miller's eyes were cold and ruthless; without a second thought, he grabbed the screaming helmsman beside him and shoved him out forcefully.
Pfft!
The helmsman's chest was instantly skewered by claws, leaving him hanging from the monster's talons.
“First Mate, you...” Using the single second of breathing room bought by the human shield, Miller roared and slashed down.
Half of the monster's head was sliced off, and foul-smelling black blood splashed all over Miller's face.
He didn't care at all if the helmsman lived or died, kicking the corpse and the monster away together.
“Out of my way!” Covered in blood, he charged toward the cannon positions on the broadside like a madman.
If he wasn't going to survive, then no one would have it easy.
Rosa's command echoed in his mind.
Muddy the waters!
“Load! Load the damn guns!!” Miller rushed to the cannons and cut down a loader who was in the middle of mutating.
The remaining two pirates were scared out of their wits, fumbling in the dark to stuff powder bags and solid shot into the bore.
The air was filled with screams and the sound of chewing; the wet footsteps of the monsters drew closer and closer.
Miller could even feel the foul breath coming from behind him.
Grinning savagely, he jammed the torch against the fuse.
The fuse hissed as it burned, the light illuminating his twisted face.
“Boom—!!!”
The first cannon blast exploded in the night.
The massive recoil sent splinters flying from the deck.
The white-hot muzzle flash momentarily illuminated the sea for dozens of meters around, as well as the terrified, recoiling faces of those monsters.
“Boom! Boom!” Then, the second shot, and the third.
The cannonballs, trailing red-hot streaks, tore through the pitch-black night sky and slammed into the distant castle.
Explosions of fire rose from the fortress, standing like a burning lighthouse in this dark night.
All the monsters stopped.
Instinctively fearing the loud noise and bright light, they turned their heads toward the direction of the explosions.
“Cut the anchor! Full sails!” Seizing this brief opening, Miller's voice boomed across the deck, snapping like a whip in everyone's ears.
There was no nonsense, and no one dared to double-check.
A Boatswain swung a battle-axe, and the iron chain snapped amidst a shower of sparks, letting out a tooth-aching crack.
The scorpion shuddered violently, its bow struggling to turn toward the open sea amidst the swells.
Too slow.
The deck beneath Miller's feet was shaking; the ship felt as if something was dragging at its ankles, groaning with every step forward.
He looked grimly over the side of the ship.
People were hanging all over it.
The pirates who hadn't managed to squeeze onto the ship were clinging desperately to the rope nets, like clusters of rotting grapes.
Some had half their bodies in the water, their legs already torn to a bloody pulp by the dark shadows beneath the surface, yet they still didn't dare let go.
“Give me a hand!”
“First Mate! I can still work! Don't leave me!”
Cries and pleas mixed with the wind, pouring into his ears.
Miller walked to the gunwale and looked down at them.
He knew these faces well; just yesterday they were drinking at the same table, sharing gold coins, and tying merchant ship captives to stones to sink them into the sea.
But at this moment, his gaze was like he was looking at a bunch of barnacles.
“Overweight,” he said softly. No one heard him, and no one needed to.
His cutlass left its sheath, a cold light sweeping along the gunwale as a rope snapped.
The cluster of people hanging from it didn't even have time to scream before they crashed directly into the churning seawater.
The mermen below swarmed instantly, red foam bubbling on the surface.
Then came the second rope, the third... Miller's movements were steady, like he was pruning excess branches.
One agile pirate had already gotten a hand on the railing and poked half his head up, face covered in blood: “Miller! I...”
The sole of a boot stamped directly onto his face.
“Don't dirty my deck.” Miller applied force with his foot.
The man fell backward, dragged into the deep water by three mermen the moment he hit the sea.
The deck wasn't much better.
Low-level sailors, loaders, and idiots who hadn't had time to drop their rum barrels were all crammed together in a chaotic mess.
Some were even deathly clutching small chests of silver coins—their life savings.
Miller scanned those pairs of terrified eyes.
There was no emotion, only calculation.
“Clear them out.” He pointed at the redundant cargo.
Before those people could react, his confidants had already drawn their blades and charged forward to clear the hold.
Anyone who couldn't wield a blade, was wounded, or was holding heavy objects was pushed to the gunwale.
“No—!”
“This ship can still hold more! I have strength!”
Wails had barely begun before they were stuffed back into stomachs by hilt and boot.
Chests full of silver were kicked over, coins scattering like raindrops into the pool of blood, followed by the owners of the chests being thrown overboard.
Freshwater barrels, spare canvas, companions with broken legs.
The scorpion was like a drunkard vomiting filth, slowly purging the burdens from its belly.
The hull finally lightened.
A gust of wind pushed the scarred ship to ram through the wreckage ahead, forcibly carving a blood-soaked path out of the chaotic inner bay.
It wasn't until the screams were left behind in the mist that Miller finally exhaled the foul air from his lungs.
He turned to look back, and the sight there made a layer of cold shivers erupt across his scalp.
The sound of flintlocks had sputtered to a stop, and the shouts of battle were silenced as if by a hand around a throat.
By the faint light of the approaching dawn, he saw Kahn's massive flagship, the Bonecrusher, covered in a dense swarm of those slimy black mermen.
They weren't in a hurry to kill.
The pirates on the deck were pinned down; no matter how they struggled, those mermen held their limbs in a death grip.
A merman pried open a burly man's mouth, its body twitching eerily as it spat something soft and limp into the man's throat.
The pirate gagged and rolled violently, his fingernails leaving bloodstains on the wooden planks.
A few seconds later, he stopped moving.
When he stood up again, those eyes held nothing but a dull, ashen void.
No orders, no communication.
The resurrected pirate turned and walked toward the capstan, his movements stiff yet precise.
Then came a second, a third... the once chaotic deck became orderly.
Hundreds of pirates who had been fighting for their lives moments ago were now like a group of marionettes, silently pulling sails, turning the rudder, and adjusting the rigging.
Their movements were nauseatingly synchronized.
Splash—!
Following some invisible signal, hundreds of pirate ships in the harbor adjusted their courses simultaneously.
That uniform sense of oppression was more despair-inducing than the chaotic slaughter.
The entire fleet seemed to have been taken over by a single brain, becoming a massive, silent colony of monsters.
Miller felt his throat go dry.
Is this the truth of these waters?
“Go... get us out of here!”
He turned back and roared at the helmsman, his voice slightly out of tune.
Whatever that hellish thing was, he didn't want to look at it a second time.
Even escaping to the ends of the earth would be better than becoming one of those walking dead.
The scorpion fled toward the open sea with all its might.
The east began to show the pale white of dawn.
The sea breeze dispersed some of the mist, and Miller instinctively looked north.
There was a dark shadow there.
At first, he thought it was a dark cloud, or a moving island.
But the thing was moving.
A low rumbling sound traveled across the sea—not the whistle of sails catching the wind, but a heavier, more rhythmic vibration.
“Thump, thump, thump.”
Like the heartbeat of a giant.
Two pitch-black pillars of smoke pierced the morning mist, looking exceptionally stark against the grayish-white sky.
Then, it smashed through the mist.
A steel giant of a ship, without any sails.
It was too massive; that dark, heavy steel hull was like a fortress moving on the sea, cold and rugged, carrying a domineering industrial aura.
Two rear-tilting funnels were spewing thick smoke into the sky—the smell of burning coal mixed with sulfur, instantly overpowering the briny scent of the sea.
It didn't need a tailwind, nor did it care about the waves.
The sharp ram at the bow plowed straight through the sea, white waves being crushed by the steel hull on either side.
Around it followed over a dozen frigates also spewing black smoke.
There were no redundant decorations, no fancy figureheads.
They were arranged in an absolutely precise wedge formation, the distance between each ship looking as if it had been measured with a ruler.
That overwhelming sense of suffocation was fundamentally different from the eerie mermen behind them.
This was a wall—a moving high wall forged of steel, steam, and cannons.
Miller forgot to breathe for a moment.
That was the flag of the Red Tide Territory; Louis's army had arrived.
