Twilight. Six hours after he captured the last of the crab tribesmen and had the boy tossed in a cage. The Marauder Captain sat atop his throne of crab shells in the harbor outpost, tapping his feet impatiently as he watched his crew toss the weakened and injured marauders onto their ship.

  They’d been stuck on this island for long enough. Their encounter with a patrolling Harbor Guard ship a year ago had ended in their devastation, forcing them to sail through a storm and beach their own ship just to throw the Imperators off. Sure, they were lucky there were tribesmen already living on this island with plenty of resources to harvest—that had significantly hastened their repairs—but it’d been a year since they razed that mangrove to the ground. The fun of the first pillage was long over, and he wanted nothing more than to sail off and resume his—

  “Captain,” one of his crew interrupted, coming up from behind. He turned around and glared at the short crab-headed man. “About that Hasharana girl ye let tossed to the waters…”

  “What about her?”

  “What we doin’ about her? Can’t very well let her be off, eh—”

  He clamped the man’s neck with a giant pincer, throwing him twenty meters across the outpost and straight through one of the ship’s upper gunports. The man crashed through wood and barrels with a loud bang. The rest of his crew and the tribesmen children they were loading onto the ship turned to look at him.

  He glowered at all of them in turn, making them jolt and resume their normal activities.

  It didn’t matter one single bit whether the girl he’d dropped off the cliff survived the fall or not. She may have one of those ‘Altered Symbiotic Systems’ in her neck, but she was no Hasharana. He’d had his suspicions when she first said she was one, but he should’ve immediately known—there was no such thing as a weak and young Hasharana. If she really a wandering bug-slayer, she would’ve slaughtered the lot of them in the forest right there and then. It was more likely she was just some castaway caught up in a freak accident and ended up on this island, just like them.

  That didn’t mean she valuable, of course. That Altered Symbiotic System would sell for several fleets’ worth of gold if extracted correctly. It just meant nobody would be coming to her aid while they marooned her on this island. They could come back for her whenever they wanted. There was no rush to capture her as long as she was stuck here, but he to report to his boss after he’d seemingly disappeared from the maps for so long. One matter was decidedly more urgent than the other.

  So, he’d begrudgingly let his walking gold run around a bit longer. He’d be back in a month, maybe two, and drag her out of the forest kicking and screaming like the bug she was.

  He rubbed his chest as he watched the last of the cages being loaded into the slave galleys. The girl may not be a Hasharana—lacking in ferocity and killer instinct, for sure—but she definitely had the makings of one. Only the knew just how tough his first ‘battle’ on the open seas was. He’d been a nervous wreck, barely able to keep his cutlass from falling out of his hands as he faced down a marauder boarding his simple trading carrack. That day, ten years ago, was when he’d killed his first man and joined the marauders in order to survive. Since then, he…

  He didn’t remember much else about his human life.

  Maybe he did a few dozen raids with his boys in the first few years after he joined, but the day they’d all shared flesh from a giant lightfoot crab, trawled up from the ocean floor was the first day he mutated: chitin over his chest, one claw over his left hand, and bulging arm muscles to boot. The rest of them quickly realized they’d come upon an incredible power and plunged in. By the end of the day, they’d all set foot on the path of no return. Even after they stole their systems from a passing Harbor Guard ship and obtained their Lightfoot Crab Classes, their human instincts became weaker and weaker as the years went by. The more crabs and humans they devoured, the stronger they became—the stronger their beastly yearnings, the less they remembered.

  He was the ‘captain’.

  His boys were his ‘crew’.

  Together, they were the ‘Blackclaw Marauders’, and those were the only names he remembered.

  Did he feel like remembering more?

  Absolutely not.

  Would he go back to being a pure-blooded human if he had a chance?

  Absolutely not.

  There was fun that could only be had as a marauder, and he wouldn’t give up his strength for anything.

  So, he’d done a lot of ‘reflecting’ this past year. That was a human thing, and the last he’d ever engage in. His plan was simple: he’d meet the boss, tell him what he saw, and the moment the boss lost interest and stopped paying attention, he’d run his pincers through and take control of the larger Whitewhale Marauders. That’d put his power and reach up there with the Five Marauder Fleets, which meant he could start raiding in their territories as well without significant push-back.

  But then he heard coming up behind him.

  A wave.

  A wind.

  He whirled, pincer snapping back preemptively to grab another one of his crew’s neck, but there was nobody standing right behind him. There was only his crew of about twenty healthy men, rolling barrels up ramps and dragging crates along the floorboards—none of them were moving, either. They’d all heard the same sound and were staring back at the forest, trying to squint through the gargantuan trees, but evening twilights were dark on the open seas. The sun was just about to set behind them on the distant horizon; the only source of light they had were the few torches they’d stabbed into the giant walls surrounding the harbor outpost.

  He rose from his throne of shells, lifting his head and staring into the shadows of the forest. He closed his eyes. He listened. It was… the sound of giant roots wriggling. It was the sound of canopies rustling, earth softening, the ground quaking and rumbling beneath the footsteps of a titan. Twilight gales howled through the forest, washing down the beach, making their rags ruffle and his crew brace their heads against the cold winds—it was the sound of rushing , and lots of it at the same time.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Then, there a roar.

  The gargantuan trees at the edge of the forest were kicked down, and a massive tide of water washed out of the island. Birds took flight. The ground trembled with might. The behemoth of a wave surged across the beach and slammed into the walls of the harbor outpost before he could even bellow at his crew to hurry up with the last of the loading.

  Decimation.

  The harbor outpost was a fragile thing of wood, reeds, and rope. The timbers supporting the harbor snapped under the onslaught. The wooden walls splintered and shattered under the weight of water. It was hard to tell from afar, but up close, the wave was a ten-meter-tall monstrosity that everything in its way, and as it washed over him and his crew, too, all sounds became muffled. All light became void. There was darkness in that split second between being on land while being crushed underwater—then he was slammed onto his back, grunting hard as the wave washed out onto the open seas behind him.

  It was just one minute. Maybe even two. Eventually, the crest of the wave moved past the harbor and left only debris floating on the flooded beach. The whole outpost was destroyed in an instant; the ship was the only construct that had survived , though in obvious disrepair with the mast broken and more holes in the hull than when they’d beached it a year ago. The air hung with a tang of crystalline fresh water as his crew rose from the shallow water one by one, injured, but not dead. He was completely fine as well—it’d take more than a wave that size to hurt him through his chitin.

  More important than his crew and his ship, though, was the girl who’d rode the wave out of the forest; standing atop the water now in the center of where the harbor outpost once stood, surrounded by him and his crew in every conceivable direction.

  The retreating light gleamed off her glaive-like legs like the sun, and while she was spinning slowly around to look them all in the eye, it was his face that she lingered on for the longest.

  There was in her eyes.

  … If Marisol were stronger, one single stab would’ve been enough to shatter the floodgates, but multiple consecutive stabs did the trick just as well.

  She’d spent more hours roaming the forest and trying to figure out if she could control the wave’s direction than she did preparing to ride it, but, in all honesty, she knew there was a rat’s chance in hell she could control where the wave would go after she broke the floodgates. The flow of water wasn’t something she could determine. She knew that much from skating through the storm—and she had full confidence the massive wave would flow towards the harbor outpost, because she wasn’t alone in this battle.

  The island’s Crab God was on her side, whatever he was, wherever he was—and now she stood in the middle of two dozen standing marauders, iron sand crunching beneath the shallow waters of the flooded beach.

  Strangely, she didn’t really feel nervous at all.

  Maybe it was because she’d spent the past six hours going over her stomach limit, devouring the rest of the crabs in Kuku’s hut.

  She’d one hundred percent get food poisoning tomorrow, but that was a problem she’d deal with tomorrow.

  She would to see tomorrow.

  [Strength: 3 → 4]

  [Aura: 617 → 644]

  [Points: 28 → 1]

  As she sucked in a deep breath, three marauders on the left jumped the gun and spit a stream of blood at her. She dodged and blitzed—less friction on shallow waters meant she could skate nearly twice as fast and four times as hard. Their ribs cracked as she kicked them all in the chest, sending them flying back several meters.

  The rest of the marauders were disoriented, and didn’t bother waiting for orders from their captain. She dodged and spun and danced in a wide circle. She sliced through steel cutlasses with her glaives and smashed through weak crab chitin with her knees, throwing them to the ground one by one before finishing her routine at the same spot she started.

  Twenty-one marauders down. Only one remaining.

  While the captain glared at her, she glanced over at the ship sitting off to the side and felt a little relieved. There were dozens of tattooed children peeking out the gunports of the slave galleys, staring at her with weary, beady black eyes. Under normal circumstances, she’d be a bit unnerved knowing she was being stared at by so many children, but… it wasn’t like she had no practice entertaining a crowd before.

  Without a word, she skated in and jumped, launching a double-spin kick into the captain’s chest. Her glaives didn’t cut. Her attack did zero damage. While he simply frowned and watched her skid back, she clenched her jaw and held onto the rippling pain reverberating from her glaives. She let herself feel the pain through her entire body, vibrating every muscle in her body.

  This was just the warmup.

  “... Yer some sort of water strider, aren’t ye?” the captain grunted, popping his shoulder as he stretched his arms, advancing slowly towards her. “A useless class. I’ve seen men twice yer size fall twice as hard with legs made of blades. Watchin’ ye dance through my crew was pretty, I’ll admit, but that’s about it. Yer barely even able to scratch–”

  She darted back in, he was twenty meters away. She launched off the ground ten meters in.

  When she launched off the water, she became weightless. Air escaped her lungs, the world around her turned into blurry lines of light.

  Her arms were crossed over her torso. Her glaives were crossed over each other. The winds, the light, the overload of sensations, the carving circles around her skin as she spun, spun, and spun—what was there to fear, after all?

  She was a Sand-Dancer, and she loved this speed. This . The feeling of dancing on the very edge of her life, where no misstep could be allowed—it was the pride and joy of a Sand-Dancer to be graceful on this edge where most men would falter.

  There was to fear.

  She kicked her glaive out at the moment before landing, bladed-edge aimed straight at the captain’s bicep, and jerked her glaive forward.

  The attack was a loud , and it split a massive crack in his chitin as she skated past him. She slowed to a complete halt ten meters away.

  “... ‘And there is no wall that can stand in your way’,” she finished, reciting under her breath, pulling one glaive back as she leaned her body forward again, narrowing her eyes on the panicked captain clutching his half-broken arm in surprise.

  “What… in the name did ye do?” the captain growled, raising his other pincer as he glared at her. “A fuckin’ water strider, barely able to walk straight on rough land, chargin’ like that into Captain of the Blackclaw Marauders? Fuck off. I’ll show ye—”

  Exhaling sharply, she darted forward and launched into a triple-spin, turning faster and harder. Stronger than she’d ever turned before. For a brief second, it was as if the light faded from the world—there was a void around her. Dark and cold. Empty and quiet. The only thing she could see was a human-shaped ghost spinning around her, and the only thing she could hear was her heart pounding in her chest as fear took hold… but then she remembered that word again.

  ‘Explosive grace’.

  What came to mind when she thought of the word ‘explosion’?

  She thought of rage, defiance, desperation, all of it—she thought of , pure and simple. She aimed it at the captain with the intent to hurt as she kicked her glaive out again at the moment of landing.

  This time, her glaive cleaved through his right arm, the shock of the blow rippling through the rest of his body and making him crumble.

  she heard her mama whisper.

  So she landed on one glaive, pivoted, held her kicking leg perpendicular to the water, and then bowed—not to the captain who was falling to his knees, no, but to the children in the slave galley cheering for her victory. They were the voices she wanted to hear, not whatever the captain had been rambling on about before she jumped on him.

  After all was said and done, she hadn’t heard a single word he said.

  The Archive snorted.

  The Archive snorted again.

  [Objective #6 Completed: Destroy the Blackclaw Marauders]

  [Reward: A promise fulfilled]

  [Grade: F-Rank Giant-Class → E-Rank Giant-Class]