The two ships groaned against each other, hulls grinding like teeth. The grappling lines that connected them creaked, straining under the pull of storm and current. Men shouted in panic, their voices raw, overlapping, and swallowed by the sea.

  Ryn gripped the railing tightly, trying to regain his balance.

  The Kraken's last strike had nearly torn both vessels in half. A tentacle as thick as a tower still coiled around the demon ship's midsection, squeezing, dragging it lower inch by inch. Water poured across its deck, swallowing the screams.

  It was supposed to be a clean takeover; all he had to do was cut down the first mate.

  "Captain!" his android called, metal slamming against the soaked planks as it approached. "Structural integrity critically damaged. This vessel cannot withstand the shared strain. Recommend retreat."

  Ryn's jaw clenched.

  On the opposite deck, it had very little damage. He turned and looked at one of the men, whose name was Theon, if his Identification spell was working correctly. Unlike him, he seemed natural despite the attack. He was still trying to capture the ship.

  "Hold, damn you!" Theon bellowed, rope cutting into his palms. "We can pull her up..."

  A tentacle shifted beneath the waterline, tightening. The far ship tilted, its bow dipping hard. Men slid across the deck, slamming into railings, into each other, into the waiting sea.

  "Captain," the android repeated. There was no urgency in its monotone, but it flickered a red warning light. "If we do not disengage, we will be dragged under as well."

  He knew that.

  Ryn ran back to his ship, and his hand hovered over the nearest line, the one that stretched to the sinking deck and vanished into the chaos of flailing limbs and splintering wood. The rope strained, humming like a bowstring.

  "Theon!" he shouted.

  The sailor looked up, eyes wide, desperation naked on his face.

  "Cut it!" Theon roared. "Cut the lines and live, Captain!"

  Ryn swallowed.

  There were others on that ship, not just his men, surrendered sailors, kneeling prisoners, wide-eyed boys who had dropped their weapons when he'd promised them mercy.

  He saw one of them now. The kid who'd hauled grappling hooks, preparing to board. I guess he is as much to blame as me. He clung to a spear as water surged past his chest, lips moving in silent prayer.

  Thunder rolled overhead.

  Ryn drew his butcher's knife.

  The blade hissed as it bit through the first rope. The line snapped back, whipping across the deck and leaving a bloody welt on a nearby sailor's face.

  The hull jerked, the strain easing slightly. He stepped to the next rope.

  The boy's gaze found him across the gap. For a heartbeat, the storm went quiet. No screaming, no crashing waves. Just two sets of eyes locked across the narrowing distance.

  He didn't beg. That made it worse; he was no older than thirteen. It was easy to forget that these people were just bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Ryn's throat grew dry despite the rain that ran cold down his back. The shirt clung to him, and his fingers felt numb around the hilt.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered. The words were lost to the wind.

  Steel came down hard, his clever meeting little resistance. The second rope parted, then the third, then the fourth. Each time, the gap widened. The far ship sagged, listing hard to one side as the Kraken's unseen weight dragged it down.

  Some of the men reached out as if they could span the growing void. Some had been on the ropes that he cut, lost to the void sea.

  The last line snapped, and the two hulls wrenched apart. The sinking vessel slipped away, sliding down the slope of a vortex.

  "Contact lost," the android reported. "Risk of secondary drag eliminated."

  Ryn sheathed his sword with fingers that didn't feel like they belonged to him.

  He'd survived. It still felt like betrayal; the men worshipped him almost as much as the crowd, and he let them down. Let's see if I am still the people's champion after this.

  The deck pitched. He staggered, catching himself on the railing as another tremor rolled through the sea.

  Somewhere out in the storm, a mountain of flesh rolled beneath the waves. The Leviathan was turning, not toward him. But it would.

  Ryn sucked in a breath that tasted like rust and rain and failure.

  "Ready what we have left," he rasped. "If that thing comes for us, we'll make it bleed."

  The android inclined its head. Around them, the tattered remains of his crew moved like ghosts, loading the few cannons still mounted, securing what lines remained, waiting for a death they had no hope of outrunning.

  Ryn didn't look back at the empty stretch of water where the other ship had been—an absence, heavy as a stone in his gut.

  Wind screamed in Dane's ears, whipping past in sheets that stung his eyes. His wings beat against the storm, each stroke a jarring shock up his spine as cracked glass met unyielding air.

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  Lines of molten gold pulsed through the fractures in his wings, brightening every time he forced more mana through them. It hurt. But he pushed through.

  The Leviathan cut through the ocean ahead of him like a shadow under froth, its bulk so massive that waves rolled out from its passage in rings. Each tentacle's rise and fall sent spray into the sky, towering walls of water that blurred the horizon.

  Between those walls, he saw ships.

  Wooden skeletons clinging to the surface of a hungry sea. His ship.

  Another tentacle rose, slick and glistening, shedding waterfalls as it reared back. Lightning carved across the sky, throwing the world into stark black-and-white. In that frozen instant of light, Dane saw the deck. Bodies. Too many bodies.

  He folded his wings, turning his flight into a dive.

  The wind became a roar. Gravity seized him by the ribs and hauled him downward, the storm stretching into a tunnel of spinning clouds and spray.

  The tentacle came down.

  It hit the joined decks like a god's hammer.

  Wood splintered. Men vanished, some thrown, some crushed, some gone as the sea surged up to swallow them. Masts snapped, rigging snapped, and the two hulls twisted around the impact like broken toys.

  Dane's heart lurched into his throat.

  He forced more mana, dragon essence, even stamina, everything that he could into his wings, flaring them at the last instant. The air bucked, catching him, redirecting his fall into a violent arc. He skimmed so close to the water that spray lashed his face, then shot upward again, climbing straight into the path of the retracting limb.

  One of the ships failed to rise with the swell.

  It just… folded, vanishing under the churn of foam and wreckage.

  "Clay!" he shouted, voice ripped away by the wind. "Hold on!"

  If anyone heard him, he couldn't tell.

  The Leviathan surged, dragging half the sea with it. Its body rolled beneath him like a continent, tentacles slamming against shattered masts and hulls. Lightning carved across its skin, tracing the broken binding rune along its underside.

  Dane dove.

  He summoned mana into his hand, shaping a weapon out of raw force. At first, it formed an axe, the simplest expression of violence. But as he accelerated, his mind snapped to another shape entirely.

  Amelia's bow.

  The precision she embodied. He folded the construct, slimming the blades and expanding them to encompass his body. He drew the edge into a tapered, barbed point. The weapon became an arrowhead of pure force, long enough to pierce mountains.

  Air peeled away from him in sheets as he pushed faster.

  He hit the beast.

  Dane expected resistance, but instead he slid through the membrane and muscle as if it weren't even there. He drove straight through the Leviathan's core, tearing a glowing seam the length of its body. Light pulsed along the wound. The creature didn't even scream. It just… went still.

  Its tentacles fell slack, waves rolling off its sinking weight. The entire sea seemed to exhale as its bulk slid back into the deep.

  This should've been a battle. Instead, it was execution, and only because he'd hesitated earlier.

  If he'd struck instead of talked… If he hadn't searched for a solution that spared the creature… Then the decks below might still hold the living.

  Casualties still weren't normal to him. He counted every face. Every life. The Shade's attack had carved a number into him, and now the sea doubled it.

  He had grown strong enough to kill titans. But not fast enough to save his people.

  Dane hovered above the settling carnage in the water; his body had reverted to its base form. His mana had bottomed out; he should have been mana-starved. Maybe it was the ascendents' core. Perhaps it was the Dragon Essence; he didn't have time to think. Clay was still down there.

  He sank, letting out air to decrease his buoyancy.

  A sailor floated past with a face the proper shape, but the hair was wrong. Another body wore torn chains, but the wrists were too thin. He pushed them aside and kept going, faster now, movements jerking, frantic.

  "You should've kept your luck, old man…" he muttered, the sea taking the words as he formed them and floating them toward the surface.

  Waves slapped against him. The storm quieted. The bodies didn't stop.

  There were too many.

  He pulled out the dog tags and noticed a faint violet glow around them. Dane pushed in some of his Dragon Essence and felt the world slip away from him.

  "Discipline," someone said, voice dripping with disdain. "That's what he lacks."

  Tormund Ironwood sat with his elbows on the rail of his private booth, broad shoulders relaxed, both feet planted firmly on the ground. The arena spread out beneath him, a ring of steel and stone wrapped around a view of the storm-torn sea.

  The scrying image in front of him flickered, showing the Demon as he rose from the waves; he looked like a normal man, except for the eyes. True, they weren't the same as a human, but he saw a fire in them that few men possessed.

  "Raw power, yes," the man behind him went on. A minor lord from one of the lesser camps, armored in polished steel that had never seen real mud. "But he wasted it. Arrived late. Let the beast butcher half the field before he even engages. If he were mine, I'd break that wildness out of him before I called him warrior."

  Tormund's gaze didn't leave the scrying projection.

  He watched the Demon. Watched the line of his shoulders, the set of his jaw, the way he didn't look back at the bodies floating behind him.

  Wildness, the noble had called it.

  Tormund had another word for it.

  Desperation.

  "He commands space, does he not?" another voice ventured. One of Tormund's own captains, quieter, more cautious. "That's what the commentators say... That he can be anywhere he wants to be the moment he blinks."

  "So they claim," Tormund said.

  "And yet he was late," the lesser lord scoffed. "Some 'Dragon' he turned out to be."

  The sound that followed was not loud.

  A shift of weight on a stone. The creak of leather. A choked, wet gasp.

  Those nearest turned just in time to see Tormund's hand around the noble's throat, fingers sunk deep as if into soft clay. He hadn't bothered to stand. He'd just reached back, caught the man mid-word, and squeezed.

  Bones cracked under his grip.

  The noble's eyes bulged, hands scrabbling uselessly at Tormund's forearm. His boots kicked once against the floor, then went still.

  Tormund held him there a moment longer, as if considering, then let the body drop. It hit the metal decking with a dull clang.

  Silence rippled through the booth.

  Nobody moved to drag the corpse away. Nobody spoke.

  Tormund flexed his blood-spattered hand once, then rested his elbow back on the rail.

  "You mistake the lesson," he said mildly, as though continuing the conversation without interruption. "Space did not fail him."

  He nodded toward the fading image of the Demon in the scrying pane.

  "Mercy did."

  The captain beside him swallowed.

  Tormund's eyes were a hard, thoughtful green, like old bronze. He watched the point where the Demon vanished into the superstructure of the Crucible, gaze tracking him as though through sheer will.

  "That was not a display of dominance," he went on. "It was not a spectacle. It was a man who had already learned what it is to be too slow… and refuses to stop moving anyway."

  A muscle jumped in his jaw.

  "I have marched with men who can recite a hundred forms and falter when their blood hits the ground. I have seen duelists with perfect footwork die screaming because they did not know how to lose an arm and keep fighting. Technique is a tool." He flicked a glance at the dead noble on the floor. "And tools can be replaced."

  His gaze returned to the scrying field one last time before it winked out.

  "Instinct like that," Tormund said softly, almost to himself. "Is earned only through battle."

  He lifted two fingers.

  One of his attendants stepped forward, bowing deeply, careful not to look at the corpse they had to step over.

  "Find out everything you can about him," Tormund said. "Name. Origins. Every trial he's fought, every man he's killed, every beast he's faced. I want to know where he learned to move like that."

  "Yes, my lord."

  "And," Tormund added, leaning back in his seat, "if any among our ranks speak of him as a beast, or as a creature to be 'broken'…"

  His eyes slid to the body cooling on the floor.

  "Remind them they are not yet fit to judge the predators of this world."

  The attendant bowed again, paler now, and retreated.

  Tormund Ironwood folded his hands, fingers interlaced, and smiled a slow, hungry smile.

  "A man who commands the fabric of space," he murmured. "And still finds himself in the wrong arena."

  His smile widened.

  "Interesting."