The lab was quiet except for the hum of the containment tube.
Amelia stood in front of it, rubbing her temples.
Inside, suspended in hyper-oxygenated water, the girl slept like she had nowhere to be. White hair drifting. Massive tail curled slow and easy. The Trident's runes pulsed faintly on her chest — steady, patient, completely indifferent to the fact that Amelia had been staring at her for the past twenty minutes trying to figure out what to do.
She was a detective. Cold cases. Criminal syndicates. The occasional localized paradox. That was her lane.
Not sleeping shark-goddesses from sunken civilizations.
The klaxon hit like a physical thing.
Red light flooded the lab. The intercom crackled —
"Hull breach, upper deck — multiple hostiles, they're not made of— they're—"
Static.
Amelia was already moving.
She came through the bulkhead doors at a run and stopped dead for exactly one second.
The sky had been torn open.
Not metaphorically — actual rifts, jagged and bleeding at the edges, ripped through the storm above the deck. Things were pouring out of them. Shifting, hungry shapes that ate the light around them, leaving moving patches of absolute dark wherever they went. The crew was falling back hard, firing flares that the shadows swallowed without slowing.
One second. Then Amelia's hand was already in her coat.
"Hey."
A Void creature swung toward her voice. She flicked a card into the air between them, two fingers, easy as dealing from a deck.
"Ignis Veritatis."
The card ignited. She slapped it against the cylinder of her revolver mid-draw and pulled the trigger three times before the glow had even settled.
The shots hit like small suns. Each one detonated inside a shadow-form with a flash of pure white light — and the creatures didn't just die, they unraveled, screaming in a sound like grinding steel, dissolving to ash before they hit the deck.
She was already moving toward the sailors pinned near the lifeboats.
A pack of shadow-hounds had them cornered, circling tight. Amelia flicked a card overhead without breaking stride — it burst into a dome of heavy golden geometry, and the creatures inside it immediately slowed, movement dragging like they were pushing through concrete.
She hit the deck with her palm. "Murus Glaciei."
A wall of ice exploded upward between the crew and the horde — thick, immediate, final.
"Lower decks. Go."
They went.
Which left Amelia alone with the rest of them.
She rolled her neck once, ejected the spent cylinder, slapped in a fresh speedloader.
"Alright."
A shadow-brute charged. She dropped into a slide under its swing, fired twice up into the joint where its arm met its mass, felt the shots connect, grabbed a dangling crane cable off the guardrail and let her momentum carry her up and over the horde in a wide arc. At the apex she pulled a heavy card, let gravity do the rest —
"Aegis Pondus."
The card expanded into a slab of hardened gravitational force the size of a car door. She didn't hide behind it. She rode it down, using her whole falling weight to drive it like a hammer into the skull of whatever was directly below.
The impact cratered the deck plating. The creature under it stopped moving.
She landed in a crouch, one knee down, gun up.
Twelve left.
Then they stopped.
All of them, at once — a sudden, collective stillness that was somehow worse than the attack. Their forms liquefied, black tar running together across the wet deck, pooling, building. Bones assembled themselves from shadow. Multiple purple eyes opened in sequence like a machine powering up.
The Beast-class anomaly straightened to its full height and blocked out the sky.
"…Okay," Amelia said.
She started moving.
The Beast was fast for its size. Its first swing took out a steel smokestack — clean through, like it wasn't there. Amelia was already gone, rolling under the follow-through, firing at its eyes on the way up. The shots landed. The creature regenerated the damage before she'd finished pulling the trigger.
She filed that away and kept moving.
This was the part that looked like running. It wasn't.
She was counting steps, reading sightlines, and while she ducked under a cargo crane and vaulted a scatter of crates and kept the Beast's attention locked entirely on her — her free hand was dropping cards. Four of them. Silver-edged, placed without looking, each one hitting the wet steel at a precise corner of the space the creature kept charging through.
She let the Beast back her up against the bridge door.
Nowhere left to go.
It reared up, jaws unhinging into a vortex of absolute nothing — the kind of dark that wasn't dark, it was just absence —
She snapped her fingers.
"Murus Glaciei: Quadra."
All four cards went off simultaneously. The sound was like a building falling over — four glaciers erupting from the deck, slamming together overhead, sealing the Beast inside a perfect frozen vault before it had processed what was happening.
Amelia lowered her gun and let out a breath.
"Checkmate."
The ice started rotting from the inside.
She heard it before she saw it — a low vibration, then the hiss of frost burning away, shadows seeping through the walls like water through cracked concrete. The magic gave out in pieces and then all at once.
The vault exploded.
Ice shrapnel across the whole deck. Amelia got her gravity shield up but the force still picked her up and slammed her down, the shield shattering on impact, her gun skidding away across the steel.
She tried to move. Couldn't. The Beast's hand was on her, pinning her to the dented deck, its full weight behind it.
The jaws opened above her. That vortex of nothing, right there, close enough to feel the pull of it.
Then the ship shook.
Not a wave.
Something from inside.
A deep, structural boom from somewhere below — then the sound of metal giving way — and then the deck between Amelia and the Beast exploded upward in a geyser of steam and shattered iron.
The figure that stepped through the cloud wasn't the girl from the containment tube.
Same face. Same white hair. But the soft blue of the Trident runes was gone, replaced by a deep, pulsing crimson that bled into the steam around her like heat off a road. The white hair had taken on a blood-red gradient at the edges. Her eyes were open — fully, completely, terribly open — and there was nothing behind them that recognized the concept of mercy.
She wasn't awake. Something older than her was.
The Beast turned from Amelia. Threat assessment, instinct — it lunged.
She wasn't there.
No dodge, no sidestep — she simply ceased to be in that location and reappeared beneath the creature's jaw in the same motion, and the uppercut she threw carried the kind of force that didn't have a good frame of reference. Not a punch. A detonation. The Beast left the deck entirely, launched straight up into the storm like it had been fired from something.
She was already in the air after it.
Her tail drove off the deck hard enough to crack the plating, and she went up like a red comet, overtaking the Beast at the top of its arc. It was still tumbling, disoriented, when she got above it —
The axe-kick came down without hesitation.
The Beast hit the deck like a meteor. The impact carried it straight through — steel grating, support beams, lower deck plating, all of it giving way in sequence — and out the bottom of the hull into the freezing ocean below, where it came apart into sea foam before the water even closed over it.
Amelia lay on the dented, smoking deck and looked up at the rain.
She stayed there for a moment.
The crimson aura was already fading when the girl came back down — guttering like a candle running out, flickering from red to blue to nothing. Her eyes rolled back. Her legs gave out.
Amelia moved fast, got under her before she hit the steel.
She was ice cold. Already unconscious, breathing slow and even, like none of it had happened. Like she'd just been asleep the whole time.
Amelia looked at the hole in her deck.
Looked at the girl in her arms.
"I am definitely not getting paid enough for this."