Ryn wasn't sure he'd ever felt fear this sharply before.

  He'd lived through street ambushes, gang hunts, nights where survival was a coin flip, but this was different. This fear pressed in from the depths below, a predatory awareness that made his mind race and his blood turn cold.

  Something down there was hungry.

  If he intervened now—if he threw himself into whatever nightmare waited beneath the surface—he'd die. There was no glory in it. No audience. Just darkness and teeth.

  But through that dread, a flash of violet cut across the waves, an arc of mana flaring from the Demon's unmanned ship.

  There's my opening.

  "Hard to port!" Ryn barked. "Ready the cannons… prepare to board!"

  His android repeated the orders in a cold, monotone voice. The crew scrambled. Powder chests slammed open. Ironshot thudded into long-barreled cannons with wet metallic clunks.

  A boy no older than thirteen tugged a rope over his shoulder, gathering grappling hooks one by one with trembling hands. Ryn drew in a deep breath, salt stinging his lungs. As he exhaled, the enemy ship rolled into clear view through the rain.

  The Demon had left the robot in charge.

  He could see it in the crewmen's faces; these men didn't want to fight for a captain who would abandon them in the middle of a trial.

  "Hold your fire," Ryn said. "I'm going aboard."

  The storm seemed to hold its breath as he stepped onto the railing, rain plastering his hair to his skull. Grappling hooks bit into the other vessel's railing. Ropes pulled taut. The gap between the ships narrowed until the hulls groaned against one another.

  His android's voice carried over the wind.

  "Captain, tactical models advise ranged combat. Boarding exposes you to melee risks."

  Ryn didn't look back.

  "Your combat models only see the numbers," he said. "Trust me."

  He leapt.

  Boots hit the Demon's deck with a wet crack. He landed in a crouch, blade already drawn, but there was no charge to meet him, no defiant roar from the opposing crew.

  Just silence.

  Men flinched away from him rather than advance. Some held spears loosely, others clutched nothing but soaked rope and fear. Their eyes flicked to the empty helm, then to the sea, waiting for a captain who wasn't there.

  "He left us!" one sailor spat, voice raw.

  "He dove into the damn ocean!" another shouted, knuckles white on the railing. "We are not dying for that monster!"

  Ryn straightened slowly, lowering his weapon but not sheathing it.

  "You don't have to," he said. "Stand down, and no one here dies today."

  A few exchanged glances, fear first, then, slowly, relief.

  One of the men dropped his sword. Another let a spear clatter to the deck. A third fell to his knees, whispering thanks to gods Ryn didn't believe in.

  But not everyone surrendered.

  From the stairwell below, chains rattled. A voice like broken glass tore through the rain.

  "You cowards!"

  Ryn turned toward the sound.

  "You think surrender saves you?" the voice snarled. "They'll execute you all. Nobody walks out of this place. It's a death sentence."

  Ryn descended two steps, enough to see iron bars glinting in lightning flashes. Inside sat a man bound at the wrists, hair matted to his forehead, a faint violet aura blooming around him like bruised starlight.

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  He smiled, slow and feral.

  "You think he abandoned you?" Clay hissed. "He's down there fighting a titan, so you don't have to. And you fold the moment he's out of sight."

  "It doesn't matter what he's fighting," Ryn said, meeting his gaze. "We were only ever supposed to be the last ship standing."

  Clay laughed, a low, bitter sound.

  "Last ship standing," he echoed. "Spoken like someone who only cares for himself."

  Before Ryn could answer, a vibration rolled up through the hull, hard enough to rattle the planks beneath his feet. Lanterns swung wildly. The sea outside the rails grew violent, waves striking at odd, staggering angles, as if something enormous was turning over in its sleep.

  The men on deck froze. Ryn's android looked out across the water, lenses widening.

  "Captain…" it said, voice losing some of its detached edge. "Something is ascending."

  The Kraken convulsed.

  Its massive body twisted in a spiral that churned the sea like a storm trapped beneath glass. The shattered rune along its underside bled light into the water, molten fragments of glyphs drifting upward like dying stars, each one dissolving before it reached the surface.

  Dane's lungs burned.

  Being B-rank meant his body endured more than it should have, but it didn't make him immune. Drowning was still very much on the table.

  He kicked off a shifting tentacle, using the recoil to jet upward. The water dragged at him, thick as syrup. Every stroke felt heavier than the last. His oxygen counter flickered in the corner of his vision, its numbers dim and unsteady.

  Ten percent.

  The Kraken's eye rolled toward him again.

  The wound where the rune had been seethed with light, leaking mana into the sea like blood from a severed artery. Pressure surged outward in waves, each pulse strong enough to shove Dane sideways in the current, as if the ocean itself were breathing around the monster.

  The beast wasn't just free.

  It was unbound.

  A massive tentacle coiled beneath him and launched upward like a catapult. Dane inhaled on instinct, burning his lungs further with the salt from the water.

  He Blinked.

  Instead of teleporting away, he forced the movement through the water column, riding the Kraken's own updraft to steal its momentum. The world stretched, blurred, snapped. The pressure was tearing at his armor. The ocean fell away beneath him into thick, suffocating darkness.

  He didn't escape unscathed.

  The armor's ward had already failed. Now cracks spiderwebbed across the plating, and frigid water rushed through, biting into his ribs with ice-teeth pressure.

  Four percent.

  He gritted his teeth.

  You gotta move.

  The next pulse from the Kraken hit harder. His ears rang. The water lifted around him rather than pressed, and he finally understood what was happening.

  It wasn't rising.

  It was pushing.

  The Kraken, even untethered, was dragging the sea upward with it—surfacing not to escape, but to kill. To consume whatever waited above.

  Dane clenched his fists and kicked harder. His muscles screamed. His vision tunneled at the edges.

  He could feel the storm now, the water warming by degrees. He saw the first threads of light filtering down through waves thick with blood and plankton, the shadow of ships flickering somewhere beyond reach.

  Below, he felt the pressure of the beast's roar. It vibrated through his bones, through the broken plates of his armor, through the last stubborn pocket of air in his lungs.

  Dane didn't look back.

  He punched upward, blinked again, and broke the surface like a spear driven from the deep.

  Cold air slammed into him. The world exploded into sound, wind howling, waves crashing, the distant roar of a crowd layered over screams closer to hand. He barely heard any of it.

  He channeled the rest of his mana into his transformation. His black glass wings tore free from his back, shards unfolding into a dark, jagged span, spreading wide like a demon ready to claim the sky. He lit his Dragon Essence flow, and lines of molten gold spread through the cracks in his leathery wings, filling each fracture with light.

  The arena fell quiet.

  Not entirely, the storm still raged, the sea still churned, but something in the air changed. The Kraken, once a mass of writhing limbs and bloodshot madness, curled inward as though bracing against a memory. Its massive eye fixed on him, not with hatred, but with a recognition that made his wings falter mid-beat.

  The water thrummed with a low vibration, less a sound than a force impressed into his bones.

  Dragon-god…

  The word wasn't spoken aloud. It arrived beside his thoughts.

  The Kraken sank a few yards, lowering its immense head beneath the waves. For a second, it almost looked like it bowed.

  But it wasn't a bow. It was looking for easier prey. The reverence passed. And hunger remained.

  A pulse rippled outward. This time when the beast turned, it wasn't downward, not toward him, but toward the ships clustered on the surface like toys. Toward the tangled hulls where his crew and Ryn's men clung to wet planks and fraying ropes.

  Toward the people he'd left behind.

  Dane's heart sank.

  No…

  The ocean bulged. A wall of water rose, dragging up the Kraken's full mass. Tentacles broke the surface like the roots of a world-tree, tearing free from some unseen earth. The storm-winds died before the typhoon it unleashed. Lightning flashed across the sky, outlining the creature's silhouette in stark, impossible scale.

  Dane heard the screams from the two interlocked ships: sailors, slaves, prisoners, men who had just surrendered, and men who hadn't had the chance yet. The sound reached him layered and distorted, carried on the air, and echoed up from the water.

  The Kraken lunged.

  A tendril, thick as a tower, slammed down toward the joined decks. Toward his ship, toward Ryn's, toward everyone too small to matter in the eyes of a titan.

  Dane dove.

  His wings flared wide, gold burning through every crack, mana roaring through his veins until his nerves felt like they were catching fire. He drove himself forward with everything he had left, a streak of black and gold cutting across the boiling sky.

  He already knew he couldn't make it in time.

  And he went anyway.