The explosion didn't crack the air—it ripped it.
The courtyard shook. Stone fractured. Smoke surged outward in a thick, blinding cloud, and the air filled with wet, shrill screams—not human, not even animal. Something worse. Something feral. The cries of a species unfamiliar with being prey.
The fishmen who stood closest to the blast were no longer standing.
They were burning.
One had already melted. His flesh turned to bubbling sludge, bones poking through as they disintegrated under the heat. Another flailed wildly, trying to beat the fire off his limbs as his webbed hands sizzled into useless flaps of skin. A third took a few steps before collapsing into a twitching heap, smoke rising from the crater where his face used to be.
The ones further from the blast weren't safe either. One flew through the air, arms flailing like a broken puppet before slamming into a tree with a hollow crack. Two others screamed as they slapped sand onto their burning comrades. Others dove toward the water, skin bubbling as thermite clung to them like vengeance.
It wasn't just destruction.
It was reversal.
Moments ago, they were feeding. Now, they were food.
And through the fire, something grew.
A small lump of charred flesh—shivering, blackened—twitched once, then again. Then it began to change. Bone extended from it like roots breaking through soil. Organs followed. Veins webbed out like frost over glass. Muscle wrapped everything in taut, shivering cords. Skin began to stretch over the top, wet and new like a newborn peeled from the womb of war.
And then I stood.
Fully formed.
Alive.
Again.
My first step out of the flames was not graceful. It burned. The fire licked at my legs. Skin blistered. Peeled. The blood answered harder. Healing met burning. Regeneration fought fire.
I kept walking.
The fire tore me apart, and the blood rebuilt me faster than the flames could keep up.
The surviving fishmen saw me.
And they didn't move.
They just stared—almost paralyzed.
A moment ago, they had tasted me.
Now they watched their own melting.
Flesh sloughing off in chunks. Skin crisping into ash. Flames turning bodies into puddles that hissed and steamed in the mud.
Even the octopus—stood frozen. His eyes wide, not just in grief but confusion. As if trying to understand what I was. Not who. What.
I took another step.
Then another.
The fishmen who hadn't jumped into the sea scrambled backward. They threw buckets of water onto the flames. One tried to shovel dirt over a burning body with his bare hands, sobbing as his fingers blistered. Another turned to run, only to slip in the blood of his own crewmate and crawl instead.
Lightning fell behind me, painting the courtyard in white light for a split second.
And in that second, they saw me fully.
What had once been a man. And what I had become now. A man? A killer? A devil? A god?
Did it matter?
Now wrapped in smoke, half-made flesh, eyes gleaming with something past rage. My feet moved.
Their knees weakened.
Some dropped to their knees without realizing it.
I moved slowly, deliberately, like a predator savoring the walk toward a trapped herd.
And then I saw him.
One of them hadn't made it to the sea.
He lay near the edge of the flames, half-consumed. His lower body was still on fire. The thermite licked through his spine. His upper body clawed weakly at the mud, as if movement might offer some hope of escape.
It wouldn't.
I knelt beside him—slow, gentle.
And I looked into his eyes.
They widened.
I didn't speak. My voice wasn't ready. My vocal cords hadn't finished growing yet. All I could do was laugh—but even that came out as a raspy wheeze, a newborn's giggle through torn lungs.
I reached into the burning mess that was once his stomach.
My fingers passed through fire, flesh, then found what I wanted.
His intestines.
Still warm. Still twitching.
The pain he must have felt—I couldn't even imagine. But I didn't stop.
I gripped the slick, coiled length and pulled.
He let out a gargled sound—a wet scream that barely left his throat.
Then I leaned down.
Bit into it.
The taste was foul. Bitter. Like bile mixed with ash and regret.
But I chewed.
Then spat the chunk into his face.
But I was a little more cruel.
I fed him a piece of himself. Then watched him die.
I turned slowly, deliberately, so that every fishman who could still see me—would.
My mouth opened in a wide, feral grin.
My teeth still held a few shredded strands of intestine.
They saw it.
They understood.
Words were meaningless now. They had heard rumors—maybe even witnessed violence—but this? This was the truth. Truth given form.
I had not just survived.
I had thrived in their chaos.
Matched their brutality.
Surpassed it.
Even animals knew when they'd been dethroned.
They saw it in my eyes. Saw the message written in blood and fire and muscle:
I was their reaper now.
Some wept. Some prayed.
Only one answered—and it wasn't a god.
It was my laugh.
The kind mothers would tell stories about. The kind no language could translate.
And I laughed in their home.
Their captain's kingdom.
Their sacred stronghold.
Now burning behind me.
I reached down and pulled another length of intestine from the corpse, tossing it at the feet of a nearby fishman.
He flinched.
The giggling started again, more stable this time.
My vocal cords were healing.
Soon, I'd speak again.
But for now, my body spoke for me.
My laughter—the gurgling, broken, unnatural sound of it—echoed off the stone and the flames, off the backs of those who still lived, but knew something inside them had died.
They didn't know what to do.
Fight?
Flee?
Beg?
None of it mattered.
There was no right answer.
Only the awful weight of inevitability.
Flames whispered beside me.
The wind howled above.
And I stood, laughing, as the last of Arlong's crew realized a simple thing.
I was.
Not a hero.
Not even a monster.
But a reckoning.
Born of flesh, flame, and fury.
And Madness.
---------------
The first bullet left a dent.
It struck the fishman dead-center in the chest, right where the heart should be—but it didn't go through. His skin rippled from the impact. Thick, armored muscle absorbed most of it. He let out a low, snarling groan, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth, but he didn't fall.
Not a big issue.
I'd fired one. I had more.
I reloaded—quick and mechanical. The rifle clicked as the bolt slid home. I raised the barrel again, took a half-step forward, and fired once more.
This time the bullet bit deeper. Not a kill shot. But the force of it staggered him. It drew blood—bright, arterial red. His body jerked backward as he clutched at his chest, teeth bared in pain.
A third shot followed.
I didn't wait for him to recover.
The bullet sang through the smoke and struck true. This one entered, burrowing past scale, past bone. The fishman let out a choking gasp as it punched into his heart.
He dropped to his knees.
But I wasn't satisfied.
Not yet.
I walked toward him slowly, watching his body twitch like a dying engine, hands clawing weakly at the wound.
Then I crouched beside him.
The wound was still open. Warm. Pulsing faintly.
I pushed my fingers inside.
The heat, the wetness—everything about it was horrible. His chest convulsed as I slid deeper, feeling around for the bullet. My fingers tugged at tissue, tearing through arteries, snapping through blood vessels. I wasn't careful. I didn't need to be.
The fishman twitched violently as I found the slug, buried deep in the collapsed chamber of his heart. I gripped it and pulled.
When my hand came out, it was dripping—blood, muscle, blackened fragments of skin. The bullet gleamed dark red in the firelight.
And somehow—somehow—he was still breathing. Still alive.
I stood, loaded the blood-wet bullet into the chamber, and fired point-blank into his wound once more.
This time, he stayed down.
His hand dropped like a felled tree.
I exhaled, letting my shoulders relax for the first time in what felt like hours.
The octopus had already vanished—slipped into the sea while the thermite burned.
Now only the dying remained.
The courtyard was chaos.
Fire flickered against collapsed walls. Smoke danced in thin ribbons across the bodies that littered the field. Some fishmen still tried to crawl away, but most were too far gone to move. Their skin blistered. Their lungs filled with smoke. Their pride had died long before their bodies.
And I stood alone.
I giggled.
Once. Then again.
I'd done it. Killed most of them. By myself.
Me.
I looked down at my hands, caked in ash and blood, flesh still red from the fire. They trembled—not from fear. Not anymore. But from a kind of joy I didn't want to name.
All that was left now was confirmation.
I had to make sure.
I began to walk.
Stepping through the smoldering wreckage, through the curling tendrils of thermite flame still clinging to the stone.
I started flipping bodies.
One after another.
Looking for a shape that wasn't there.
A snout like a blade. Teeth like knives. That massive dorsal fin.
Arlong.
Where was he?
He was not here. Not among the dead. Not among the burned.
He'd escaped.
Of course he had. A normal fishman could terrorize a village. Arlong was beyond that. An island-level threat. A creature born of fury, built of muscle, sharpened by ideology.
He wouldn't die in a blast—not like this.
If anything, he ran. Regrouped. Waited.
I turned toward the sea.
The back of the park opened to the ocean, as it always had. A private gateway for Arlong's kind. Water lapped quietly against the edge of the stone platform. Peaceful. Still.
Too still.
I moved.
Found the remains of their armory—burned, broken, but not empty. Some rifles remained, untouched. A few crates of grenades. I pried one open, found the old fuses, and grabbed a handful.
Then I went to work.
Grenade. Fuse. Spark.
I lit one and threw it into the sea.
A second later: boom.
Water erupted upward in a violent column, a burst of steam following close behind. I watched the plume settle.
Nothing.
So I did it again.
Grenade. Light. Throw.
Over and over.
The explosions echoed through the courtyard like thunder. Water blasted upward, then fell back in broken waves.
Still nothing.
Until I was down to one last grenade.
I lit the fuse with a smoldering piece of firewood—held the flame against the fuse until it hissed—then tossed it underhand into the surf.
It vanished with a hiss.
Then erupted.
A wall of water shot skyward and landed hard. It drenched me from head to toe, salt stinging my half-healed skin. I spat blood, wiped my face with the back of my wrist.
Silence followed.
I stared at the surface, now rippling, broken by my search.
Then the water stilled.
My reflection returned—distorted in the flickering light and the rain, but visible. Me.
I stared at myself.
"Here, fishy. Fishy…"
"I'm right here."
The sea didn't answer.
It just breathed.
Calm.
Silent.
Mocking.
Arlong had built this kingdom with blood and fear. His name had weight. His presence was godlike among his crew. If he ran, all of it—his rule, his message, his terror—would unravel.
He couldn't just leave, could he?
"So where are you, fishy?" I said, more to myself than anyone.
And then the world answered.
A shadow fell across me—not from the moon, not from the trees. It came from above.
Large.
Fast.
Wide enough to block the firelight.
I looked up.
And there it was.
A monster falling from the heavens.
The sea king of The Arlong Pirates.
It had launched himself from the water in a full-body arc. It's muscles coiled mid-air, teeth bared in a snarl that was more instinct than thought.
He dropped from the sky like judgment.
I welcomed him with fire.