The cold water crashing into him made the held breath stutter violently in his lungs.
Turbulent currents slammed into his body from every direction, threatening to rip him straight off the stone platform. But just as Zachary managed to stabilize his posture by clinging desperately to the weathered rock, it hit him.
{_^_^_^_}
{_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_}
{_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_}
{_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_}
Danger Sense exploded through his entire being with an impossible, sickening intensity. The submerged world lost whatever little clarity it possessed beneath the deafening, frantic warning drumming directly into his core.
The sensation immediately took absolute control over his functions. His sharp Mind lost its focus, and his Body followed a fraction of a second later; it felt as though even his very Soul trembled under the agonizing strain of the alarm.
The breath he was holding so dearly nearly escaped his lips, a muffled, pathetic sound vibrating in his throat under the unbearable pressure of Cider Eyes. His muscles locked up entirely, his arms refusing to obey the commands of his brain. If not for the steel cables of Rising Attachment, he would have been swept away like a leaf in a hurricane by the raging, dark current.
Back when Zachary first arrived on the Forgotten Shore and plunged into the pitch-black waves, he had assumed that the violent, shrieking warning of Danger Sense had come from the collective gaze of the Deep Ones lurking in the lightless water. But after months of polishing his senses and facing countless Nightmare Creatures, the terrifying truth finally hit him.
The warning hadn't come from a horde of monsters. It came from a single entity...
It was the lingering attention of the Dark Sea itself.
It was so brutally obvious that a breathless, underwater laugh almost bubbled out of his mouth. How could a Great Titan possibly remain oblivious to a tiny, blasphemous existence swimming directly through its own body?
Then again, it was hard for a human mind to process that a sea the size of a continent was actually sentient.
Finally, as abruptly as it had descended, the terrifying gaze of the Dark Sea drifted away. Zachary's existence was simply too feeble, too small, and too utterly insignificant—and the Great Titan was far too vast, too powerful, and too aloof to spare more than a fleeting second of awareness on a parasite.
Zachary was profoundly, desperately thankful for that indifference.
As feeling and mobility gradually seeped back into his frozen limbs, he was forced to confront a bitter reality once again: he was still far too weak.
His continuous survival in this hellscape depended almost entirely on the fact that higher-ranked Nightmare Creatures didn't deem him worth the effort to actively hunt down, despite his [Blasphemer] Attribute. And that realization dragged a second, far more horrifying thought into the light.
The [Blasphemer] Attribute was merely tied to his unclaimed True Name—it was just the raw, unrealized potential to declare himself equal to the heavens. Yet even in its dormant state, Awakened and Fallen abominations lost every shred of rationality the moment he got too close.
If this was the terrifying reaction he triggered with an unclaimed True Name, what in the hell would happen once he finally claimed it and projected his blasphemous declaration across all the realms?
Zachary slammed the door shut on that thought. He really didn't want to think about it right now.
'First, let's just worry about surviving this dive and reaching the other side of the canyon in one piece—'
{_^_}
Danger Sense violently cut his internal monologue short. This time, the intensity was infinitely lower, but far more immediate. Zachary instantly tensed his entire frame. His enhanced senses were heavily muffled and distorted by the heavy black water surrounding him, leaving him temporarily blind to the angle of the attack.
He didn't have to guess for long.
Something slammed directly into his torso with the crushing force of a battering ram. The impact tore his body clean off the stone, sending him tumbling through the dark current along with whatever had tackled him—the pair kept from drifting into the endless abyss solely by the merciful, taut steel line of his Memory.
Zachary barely managed to trap the air forced out of his lungs behind his tightly clamped lips. But just as he was about to hurl a barrage of internal curses, he felt it—something long, wet, and muscular coiling violently around his torso with terrifying precision and malice.
A Nightmare Creature.
'Are you serious?! This is pure spawn camping! What are the fucking odds?!'
Zachary cursed violently in his head, thrashing his body to keep himself anchored near the statue's stone platform, but whatever had latched onto him was twisting and writhing just as erratically.
'What absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel luck!'
He felt personally insulted. Out of the entire vast, endless expanse of the Dark Sea, he just had to collide with the one stray abomination swimming by. It felt like crashing into an asian lady in an empty parking lot.
'Focus!' Zachary yelled in his mind, wildly contorting his body along with the Nightmare Creature.
The absolute worst-case scenario had just unfolded, and a horrifying truth hit him a second too late: fighting underwater was the single worst terrain he could ever step into.
Balance Control granted him absolute authority over his own Body while significantly enhancing his physical limits. Combined with his altered metabolism and the unnatural tenacity Blood Weave pumped into his circulatory system, he was more than capable of surviving on a bare minimum of oxygen. Furthermore, his physical control allowed him to move smoothly through water, giving him the natural grace and speed of an Olympic swimmer.
Yet, no matter how impeccably his Body performed in the water, it didn't change the tyrannical reality of hydrodynamics. The sea didn't care about his grace; the violent physical currents pushed him around with absolute indifference.
And that wasn't even the worst part.
Through endless, life-or-death battles, Zachary had refined his combat style into an evasive, high-precision rhythm that relied almost entirely on his hyper-sharp perceptions. Now, for the first time in a very long time, he was essentially blind, deaf, and mute.
While his eye could effortlessly pierce the dark, the black sea acted as an impenetrable veil, reducing his vision to fleeting, distorted silhouettes barely an arm's length away. His hearing was almost entirely suppressed by the immense water pressure assaulting his eardrums, his sense of touch was dulled by the numbing cold of the current.
And he obviously couldn't sense shadows to discern shapes.
Granted, he had prepared for sensory deprivation by "sparring" against the Forsaken Knight in the True Darkness of the Ruined Cathedral. He had trained Danger Sense to act as an infallible compass when all other senses failed.
But right now? That vital sixth sense was still wildly erratic, trembling from its recent encounter with the terrifying gaze of a Great Titan.
His frantic lamenting was cut short as the creature coiled around him with sudden, sharp intent. It stopped thrashing randomly and instead began wrapping its slimy appendages around his torso.
'One... two... three... four...' Zachary counted every crushing point of contact pressing through the soaked fabric of his mantle. When he hit seven, horror struck him: the stray abomination that had tackled him was a massive, tentacled monstrosity.
'Oh, fuck no!'
He screamed silently, tightly sealing his lips to suppress a pained groan. The thick tentacles tightened around his ribs, constricting with bone-crushing force. His lungs screamed in agony as the remaining air was violently compressed within his chest, held in place only by sheer willpower and clenched teeth.
With rising terror, he felt the heavy main mass of the monster shift, locking itself firmly onto his back. He still couldn't discern its exact anatomical shape, but its appearance was the least of his immediate problems.
Dark sparks condensed over his right fist, manifesting the dark form of Ender's Solace.
He fed a surge of soul essence into the blade, and with as much speed as the thick water resistance permitted, he drove a sharp slash toward the appendages crushing his ribs. But before the edge could cut deep, a slick tentacle slithered under his shoulder, wrapping tightly around his wrist and locking the jian uselessly out of reach.
'Shit!'
As if anticipating his retaliation, the monster erupted into motion behind him. Its tentacles writhed in a sickly, unnatural rhythm that made his stomach turn. The sudden violent thrashing and immense added weight caused the steel cables of Rising Attachment at his waist to groan under the tension, signaling that they wouldn't hold out much longer.
Before he could even worry about the Memory snapping, another appendage shot upward, coiling violently around his throat with suffocating strength.
Zachary instantly raised his left hand, grabbing the bulbous tentacle just in time. His fingers dug deep, barely holding the crushing pressure millimeters away from snapping his neck like a dry twig.
Without a second's hesitation, he clenched his fist with every ounce of force he could muster. The creature's dense, leathery flesh resisted at first, but slowly began to yield under the superhuman grip of a fully saturated Soul Core.
Yet the creature only grew more enraged by the pain, responding in kind by constricting its remaining tentacles around his chest with terrifying fury.
His ribs began to groan under the strain.
'Shit, shit! Do you think I look like a Japanese schoolgirl for you to be clinging to me like this?!' Zachary screamed internally with a mix of incredulous mockery and absolute despair.
His dark humor died instantly as a wave of crushing terror hit him. The tentacle coiled around his neck began to twist and churn gruesomely against his palm—opening up.
Because he was gripping the appendage directly, every nauseating detail burned into his tactile senses with horrific clarity. He felt the inner fleshy underside split wide open, revealing a warm, pulsing cavity lined with countless writhing protuberances and thousands of tiny, needle-sharp teeth.
A frigid chill raced down his spine as he finally deduced what was latching onto him: it was a twisted, corrupted, overgrown nightmare of a starfish.
The realization did nothing to alter his dire predicament. The tentacle around his neck surged again, constricting with ferocious strength. Zachary strained every muscle in his left arm to keep the fleshy maw off his throat, but there was only so much he could do with a single free hand.
Despite his crushed grip, the appendage managed to press against his neck. The carpet of miniature teeth immediately began to grind, shredding through skin and flesh.
A choked sob bubbled up in his throat, violently suppressed behind his clamped jaw. Though he was managing to keep the tentacle from encircling his neck entirely—preventing the bite from tearing out his carotid—that did nothing to dull the searing, agonizing pain.
All around them, the headless statue continued its steady, mechanical march through the canyon, battling the turbulent currents of the abyss while the rest of the cohort clung desperately to the stone for survival. There was no rescue coming. Zachary had to claw his way out of this on his own.
His left arm was completely occupied shielding his throat, while his right arm—and Ender's Solace—remained pinned down by another crushing limb. The abomination held every advantage in limbs and leverage, a brutal fact highlighted as the coils around his chest constricted even further.
CRACK.
A rib snapped under the relentless pressure. The sharp, blinding bolt of pain forced a scream from his throat, sending a thin stream of silver bubbles escaping past his lips before he clamped his teeth back down with ferocious intensity.
Zachary thrashed Ender's Solace wildly, trying to force the blade toward the mass behind him, but the heavy water resistance and the tentacle locking his wrist kept his sword uselessly out of range.
Meanwhile, the tentacle at his neck continued its grinding assault, taking tiny, agonizing bites wherever his left hand couldn't block it. Suddenly, the crushing weight on his back lightened slightly—only for the steel cables of Rising Attachment at his hips to groan violently under immense new strain.
His sharp Mind instantly pieced the shift together.
The creature had uncoiled several of its tentacles from his torso and anchored them directly to the stone of the statue. It wasn't just trying to crush him anymore; it was trying to pry him off the construct and drag him down into the lightless depths of the sea.
Urgency spiked through his chest like liquid fire. Before he could formulate a counterplay, the tentacle thrashing against his neck suddenly unwound.
Before he could even register a split-second of relief, the appendage whipped forward with the terrifying speed of a deep-sea predator. It slammed around his left forearm, its carpet of tiny teeth grinding like a chainsaw—shredding the fabric of Witness's Mantle and the flesh beneath it in a single motion.
As another spray of bubbles erupted from his lips in a silent scream, Zachary instinctively yanked his arm back, trying to break the creature's grip. But the monster pulled back with equal ferocity. In their violent tug-of-war, his already strained joint gave out first.
POP.
With a sickening crunch that resonated directly through his skull, his left shoulder dislocated. The starfish monster didn't waste a microsecond, tightening its grip and tearing even deeper into the raw flesh of his arm.
His head throbbed violently. The agony, the lack of air, his disoriented senses—everything was screaming at him, threatening to collapse his Mind and shatter his Body. Yet, the unyielding clarity he had forged through countless near-death encounters refused to break.
The right cable finally gave out with a sharp vibration, retracting back to his hip. Zachary had to move now or never.
He couldn't swing Ender's Solace behind his back... but he still had a narrow range of movement directly in front of him.
In a move born of sheer, unadulterated desperation, Zachary reversed his grip on the hilt. Without a second's hesitation, he thrust the blade straight into his own abdomen.
The dark edge of the jian pierced clean through his stomach, emerging out his back and plunging deep into the soft, writhing mass of the abomination pinned behind him.
The monster shuddered violently in pain, its grip wavering for a fraction of a second. But the blow wasn't lethal—and as the creature began to twist with renewed, venomous fury, Zachary realized he had only succeeded in making the nightmare very, very angry.
But he didn't care. After all, Zachary only needed to force direct contact between the monster and Ender's Solace.
A microsecond later, he shifted the shape of his Soul, activating Thunder Song.
Zachary had hesitated for a fraction of a second about releasing electrical energy underwater. Saltwater was highly conductive, and the rest of the cohort could easily be caught in the crossfire.
But his analytical mind quickly rationalized the physics: thanks to that same high conductivity, the voltage would dissipate exponentially outward into the mass of the sea, dropping in potency by the time it reached the cohort a meter away. It was the same reason lightning striking the ocean didn't fry marine life miles around.
Thunder Song would devastate whatever was in direct, physical contact with the source.
As the cold steel of Ender's Solace vibrated with a sharp, blinding cry of white arc-lightning, Zachary realized something crucial: he was fundamentally immune to the external damage of his own element.
The agonizing strain he usually suffered when channeling Thunder Song was purely from his inability to control the raw, arrogant force surging inside his own pathways.
The abomination pinned to his back, however, enjoyed no such immunity.
The tentacles coiling around his chest violently spasmed and convulsed, their muscular grip instantly failing as intense current fried their nerve centers. Zachary thrashing free, kicking away from the thrashing mass. He immediately willed Thunder Song to deactivate... or at least, he tried to.
His eye widened in sudden panic. The high conductivity of the surrounding saltwater acted as a constant, greedy sink, pulling violently at the voltage source. It forced Thunder Song to stay engaged, siphoning soul essence directly out of his Core at a catastrophic rate.
'Dangerous!' Zachary thought, panic spiking through his chest as he tried to force his soul back into its natural shape. But the seawater kept drawing the lightning out, keeping his Legacy continuously flared.
He instantly took the only other option available: dismissing Ender's Solace back into his Soul Sea. The dark jian was the only safe medium through which he could project the arc-lightning, and breaking the manifestation cut the conduit.
With his soul returning to its natural state and the essence drain stopped, Zachary turned in the turbulent water, anchored in place by the steel cables of Rising Attachment. His single crimson eye strained against the impenetrable black veil, discerning the frantically spasming shape of the starfish monster.
The dark sea was turning even darker around the creature as black, putrid blood spewed from the stab wound, diluting into the freezing liquid.
'If it bleeds...' Zachary thought, a dark, murderous clarity washing over his mind as the agony in his neck, arm, and dislocated shoulder burned away any remaining hesitation.
Ender's Solace materialized once more in his right hand. Grabbing the steel cable, Zachary pulled himself forward, preparing to plunge the blade through the monster's core and end it—only to slam violently into a wall of crushing stone.
Or rather, the flat surface of the statue's severed neck.
The Builder Statue had finally reached the far edge of the canyon, and it was beginning its sudden, violent ascension up the cliff face.
'S... shit,' Zachary thought, dazed by the sudden shift in force.
The extreme hydrostatic pressure of the rapid ascension pinned his broken body flat against the stone like an iron press. The sheer weight of the acceleration forced the last bit of air he had been desperately holding to escape his lips in a silent, bubbly groan. His lungs burned like molten lead, and his vision began to spot with dark, dizzying blurriness.
'I... can... still... hold...' Zachary gritted his teeth, fighting to stay conscious.
Then, to his utter horror, the starfish monster stopped spasming.
Having absorbed the brunt of the electric shock, the abomination was slowly recovering. It began to flex its nightmarish, writhing appendages, turning back toward him. The extreme pressure of the rapid climb barely seemed to faze its bulbous, deep-sea anatomy, which was built to withstand the crushing depths of the abyssal plain.
The creature drifted closer, its fleshy maws opening in the dark. Zachary tried to twist his body, straining with every muscle against the crushing weight pinning him down, but his dislocated shoulder and cracked ribs refused to yield.
Right then, something flickered at the edge of his failing perception.
Turning his head slightly through the dark water, Zachary barely caught sight of a limp silhouette being swept away by the raging current, detached from the statue.
Kai had finally reached his limit.
'You must be fucking kidding me...' Zachary thought as his lungs burned like open furnaces, screaming for a single molecule of oxygen.
For some bizarre reason, unlike the events of the original timeline, the archer hadn't secured himself to Cassie with the Golden Rope. Left without an anchor, his limp form was beginning to drift freely into the lightless abyss.
'You just always have to be the center of attention, don't you?'
He clicked his tongue in silent, sarcastic resentment, but immediately forced his battered body to twist in Kai's direction. A fraction of a second later, at the command of his mind, the right steel cable of Rising Attachment shot forward like a harpoon.
The line cut through the heavy water, piercing straight through the archer's leg and locking him in place before the current could drag him into the dark depths.
'You can thank me later, man.' His consciousness was rapidly fraying under the severe lack of oxygen, yet his unyielding Mind remained rigidly anchored to the present.
{_^_}
Danger Sense flared frantically, urging him to turn around. The tentacled monstrosity was still surging in his direction.
Gritting his teeth against the sheer persistence of the abomination, Zachary once again fought the crushing pressure pinning him to the stone. He contorted his frame until his left side faced the incoming predator. Recalling the steel cable currently anchored to the stone, he re-aimed the moment it retracted and fired it point-blank into the bulbous, squelching mass of the creature.
Zachary didn't hesitate. As his arms began to involuntarily twitch from oxygen deprivation, he grabbed the taut line attached to the deep-sea monster and hauled himself straight toward it.
The creature welcomed his suicidal charge, all seven of its writhing appendages fanning out to reveal their horrific, tooth-lined maws. But right as they snapped shut around him, Zachary thrust his right arm forward—driving the dark edge of Ender's Solace directly into the main body of the beast.
Using the unrelenting momentum of the statue's rapid climb, he stopped fighting the crush of gravity. He let the violent acceleration slam him down into the stone, only this time, the starfish monster was trapped beneath him—his dark sword driven clean through its core, pinning it like a bug to the ground.
'Just die already, you fucking Patrick!' Zachary screamed in his head as his body entered its final, violent spasms.
His grip on the hilt was slipping. His lungs twitched helplessly in a desperate search for air that wasn't there. His vision tunneled into blurry blackness while a deafening, high-pitched ringing invaded his ears. Even his dulled physical senses were collapsing as his brain began shutting down.
And yet, his Mind refused to yield. In an ultimate act of unadulterated defiance, he altered the shape of his Soul once more.
Thunder Song erupted.
Blinding arcs of white lightning coated Ender's Solace, surging down the dark blade and straight into the dense, wet tissue of the abomination. The creature thrashed violently, its appendages spasming erratically as the high-voltage current fried its nervous system, preventing the maws from clamping down on Zachary's throat.
The saltwater's high conductivity began frantically siphoning his soul essence, but Zachary didn't try to stop it this time. Instead, he forced even more essence through the circuit.
He gritted his teeth as his Mind teetered on the very edge of unconsciousness—and right at that terrifying precipice, the colossal statue finally broke the surface of the Dark Sea, bursting out of the water and into the open air.
Zachary's mouth snapped open instantly, desperately gulping down massive, ragged lungfuls of air. Balance Control immediately kicked in, forcing his oxygen-deprived Body back to full operational capacity.
With renewed, terrifying vigor, he leaned his weight into the sword, driving it deeper into the construct.
"Die, for fuck's sake!"
His scream was nearly drowned out by the chaotic, deafening roar of Thunder Song. Free from the muffling sea, his Legacy sang its arrogant, prideful hymn for the world to hear. White-hot electrical arcs illuminated the dark, casting frantic shadows across his face as his single crimson eye blazed with a manic, terrifying intensity.
The creature's tentacles tried one last time to curl around his ankles, but failed to grasp anything as the electrical current shattered their structure. Finally, accompanied by the sharp, metallic stench of scorched flesh, the appendages went limp, flopping uselessly onto the stone.
A second later, the indifferent voice of the Spell echoed coldly in his head:
[You have killed an Awakened Beast, Surface Lover.]
Hearing the kill confirmation, Zachary cut the flow of Thunder Song, plunging the severed neck of the statue back into pitch-black silence. He collapsed backward, landing flat on his back right next to the smoking corpse of the starfish and its pool of putrid blood.
Heavy, ragged gasps tore from his throat, his chest heaving violently. All around him, the rest of the cohort were making the exact same sound, drawing in desperate gulps of air after being trapped beneath the dark waves for far too long.
'A Beast... A fucking Beast almost finished me off,' Zachary wheezed internally, without an ounce of amusement.
During his months in the Dark City, he had slaughtered creatures of this class by the dozen. He had grown into a lethal, experienced hunter, leveraging his advantages so thoroughly that Awakened Beasts were little more than passing prey.
Yet here, stripped of his senses and trapped in unfavorable terrain, he had nearly met his end at the hands of a single stray monster. It only proved how brutally accurate Nephis's words had been: Awakened combat was entirely dictated by matchups and advantages.
It had taken just one bad matchup to drag him all the way back down to the reality of a fragile, vulnerable human.
"Zach... are you okay?" someone finally asked, their voice raspy and choked with saltwater.
Zachary didn't have the energy to push his body up, and the persistent ringing in his ears made it impossible to recognize who had spoken. Coughing painfully as his cracked rib sent a sharp volt of agony through his chest, he merely raised his uninjured arm into the air, awkwardly flashing a thumb up.
A second of total silence passed before Zachary remembered that no one else in the group could see in the pitch-black darkness. But just as he opened his mouth to force out a vocal answer, the ringing in his ears receded, revealing a sound that made the hair on his arms stand on end.
POP. POP. POP.
It was the wet, rhythmic sound of suction cups latching and unlatching against smooth stone. Zachary didn't need vision to identify the source—Danger Sense chimed in his mind with immediate, ominous clarity.
"Jesus Christ..." Zachary muttered, forcing his battered frame off the stone as his dislocated shoulder and fractured rib violently protested the effort.
'Of course this fucking thing had to show up too.'
Stepping carefully across the platform with heavy, exhausted strides, Zachary surveyed the cohort. Effie and Caster were recovering side by side, both flat on their backs. A few paces away, Kai lay resting his head on Cassie's lap while Nephis tended to the bloody gash on his leg with her flame.
Zachary scrunched his nose at the sight. 'Lucky bastard.'
With a quiet thought, he recalled the bloody steel cable anchored near the archer's leg. The line snapped back with a sharp metallic hiss, coiling safely back onto his hip.
At the sound, Nephis turned her head in his direction. Strands of wet silver hair clung messily to her pale, exhausted face, her usual calm demeanor worn thin by the ordeal.
"What happened, Zach?" she asked, her flat tone contrasting sharply with the visible strain on her features.
He offered a dismissive wave of his hand as he kept walking toward the edge. "Don't worry about it."
Without another word, he stepped off the platform and dropped onto the massive shoulder of the giant statue. The cables of Rising Attachment shot out with a sharp thwip, anchoring into the stone to keep his footing secure against the movement.
A heavy, tired sigh escaped his lips as he peered down into the darkness.
Crawling up the colossal statue's swinging arm was a single, monstrous shape, slowly hauling itself upward toward the commotion above. Zachary's lip curled in disgust as his single eye locked onto the creature's translucent, jelly-like hide—a nauseating fusion of eel and jellyfish.
"I don't think I'm ever going to be able to look at seafood the same way again..." he grumbled under his breath.
With their ascent out of the water, Cinder Eyes was fully operational again, complementing his Danger Sense.
'A Fallen Creature, mere seconds away from entering the aggro radius of the Blasphemer Attribute,' he thought with a dark, humorless smirk.
"You know what, pal? I am way too tired to deal with you properly today."
The nightmarish eel snapped its translucent head in the direction of his voice. A second later, its tentacles slammed into the stone, dragging its slick, massive body rapidly toward him.
'I really fucking hate tentacles,' Zachary thought as sparks condensed in his right palm, taking the humble shape of an Ordinary Rock.
He didn't waste another second. Gripping the stone tightly, he rubbed its rough surface directly against the shredded flesh of his wounded left forearm. A pained hiss escaped his teeth as the jagged rock scraped across the raw injury, coating itself in his crimson, blasphemous blood.
Thanks to Blood Weave, getting his body to bleed on command was a tedious and agonizing process, but within seconds, the Ordinary Rock was thoroughly drenched in his crimson ichor.
Zachary shifted his stance, turning his injured left side toward the oncoming horror. But right as he raised the stone to throw, a sudden, absurd wave of playfulness washed over his exhaustion, taking firm hold of his mind.
He brought the blood-soaked stone up to his mouth, carefully draping his injured left hand over his right like a pitcher concealing his grip inside a glove. He locked his single crimson eye onto the creature over his clasped hands, leaning in to whisper a quiet, single word to the Ordinary Rock.
Then, coiling his body to the right, he brought his left knee high up toward his chest, using the taut steel cables to anchor his balance on the precarious ledge. Zachary squinted through the dark, zeroing in on the Fallen Creature's head.
An instant later, he uncoiled with explosive grace, whipping his arm forward and driving a blazing fastball straight at the monster.
"Ohtani!"
The jellyfish-eel snapped its head upward just as the blooded rock entered its perception radius. Before it could process the temptation of the blasphemous blood, the pitch struck it square between its dead, gelatinous eyes, ricocheting uselessly off its slick hide and plummeting into the dark sea below.
Driven by pure, uncontrollable instinct to consume the blasphemous essence, the Fallen Creature didn't hesitate. It released its grip on the statue, lunging blindly off the arm to chase the falling rock into the abyss.
Mid-air, the Ordinary Rock dissolved into a burst of faint white sparks—returning to his Soul Sea—leaving behind only the single word Zachary had whispered to it.
"Strike!"
Zachary watched the monstrous silhouette splash violently through the dark surface of the sea, raising his healthy fist and pumping it beneath his waist as he shouted into the night:
"Out!"
He regretted the celebration a microsecond later as his cracked rib flared with a blinding flash of agony. Wincing, he cast one final glance at the dark water below, half-expecting the creature to realize it had been tricked and come roaring back. Fortunately, nothing disturbed the surface except the massive, steady wake of the Builder Statue.
'Baseball, huh?' he thought, a tired, faint grin tugging at his lips.
Shaking his head, he turned and hauled himself back up to the main platform. The cohort had finally caught their breath, sitting together in a tight circle as they looked up at his approach. Everyone looked utterly wretched—damp hair plastered to ghostly pale faces, their hollow, bloodshot eyes proof that they had survived an absolute nightmare.
Zachary didn't even want to imagine what he looked like.
The shredded flesh on his left arm burned like liquid fire against the soaked, heavy fabric of Witness's Mantle. His dislocated shoulder throbbed with every step, his cracked rib remained a constant source of sharp agony, and the mangled skin on his neck stung violently from the drying saltwater.
He was profoundly grateful that he was the only person present who could actually see in the dark.
Kai turned his head toward the sound of Zachary's measured footsteps, offering a weak smile. "Thanks for catching me, Zach... Though you could've been a little more careful with the harpoon."
Zachary scrunched his nose, marveling at the archer's ability to deliver such a line with a pristine, handsome expression despite looking like a drowned cat.
"Sorry about that. I'll just let you float into the void next time."
Kai's face instantly went pale as his Flaw confirmed the absolute sincerity behind the response.
"Are you alright, Zach?" Nephis asked quietly from beside the archer. She had swept her wet silver hair back off her face, leaving her forehead clean and glistening with stray drops of water.
Zachary didn't reply immediately, staring down at his mangled left arm instead.
"Next time you invite me somewhere..." he began in a measured, dangerously calm voice. He grabbed his left wrist with his right hand, bracing his stance, and violently shoved the arm upward.
CRACK-POP.
The joint snapped back into its socket with a brutal shock that sent a violent shudder down his spine.
"...remind me to decline."
Without waiting for a response, Zachary turned and walked away, his heavy steps echoing against the cold stone.
The first leg of the treacherous trek was finally behind them. They were riding high atop the giant statue, steadily approaching the southern reaches of the Forgotten Shore.
Yet Zachary's mind remained tightly wound, devoid of any relief. Because deep down, he knew the truth...
The worst was yet to come.