Chapter 8 v3
Hanged
"Whe…re… am I?"
The thought didn't emerge as a shout or a whisper: it vibrated inside his skull, reverberating between his temples as if someone else had said it aloud.
Kaep cracked his eyes open. Darkness enveloped him, and for a moment he thought he was still dreaming. But the wind whipped his face with the abruptness of an icy lash and his body answered for him: he was awake.
He realized his arms were stretched upward, rigid, as if trying to reach a sky he couldn't see. He hadn't put them there by choice; his own weight was pulling them. The swaying was gentle at first, a barely perceptible rocking, until a stronger gust shook him and he understood: he was hanging.
The rain fell relentlessly, each drop piercing his clothes and sliding down his skin until his bones were frozen. The cold wasn't mere discomfort; it was a stabbing pain that settled into his muscles, that made his jaw tremble involuntarily.
Kaep tried to focus his vision. In front of him, very close, a metal wall glinted intermittently under the lightning flashes. His still-clouded mind wondered if it was real or a hallucination. He craned his neck, looked down, and there he discovered his legs were protruding from an irregular hole. The position explained why he was upside down, trapped like an insect hanging from a crack.
His heart raced as he noticed a different pain, sharper than the cold. A burning in his head. He clumsily brought a hand to his forehead and his fingers touched something wet and thick. It wasn't water.
His eyes flew open. He raised his hand to check. In the light of another lightning flash, he saw the dark stain on his palm: a thick red, almost black.
—"Blo…od? My blood?"— he stammered, though his voice was lost in the roar of the waves.
His hand fell again, but instead of lowering, it rose once more, following the rhythm of his body's sway. Confused, he looked up: his arms weren't responding firmly; they dangled at the mercy of the rocking, just like the rest of him.
Beyond, the waves rose over one another, enormous, devouring each other in brutal crashes against the metal wall. They were so high that for a moment he feared they would reach him… but no, the structure rose high enough that they couldn't.
Then, a different movement tore him from his thoughts.
A hand emerged from the water. A hand that wasn't human.
…
A metallic snap jolted him from his stupor.
Kaep fixed his gaze and saw it: a bony, elongated hand was digging into the steel wall, as if it had sprung from nowhere. The webbed fingers clenched with force, scraping sparks from the metal as they gripped.
'What the hell…?' he thought, his mind still too slow to react.
From this height, the silhouette seemed small, insignificant. But something about the twisted angle of those fingers, the unnatural way they bent, made his skin crawl.
A second hand emerged, this time higher up, hooking onto a plate with a dry impact. And then the body appeared.
The salty air brought the stench to him in a wave: a grotesque creature, its skin covered in wet scales, muscles twisting under a viscous layer. The head was a nightmare horror: a deformed fish with bulging eyes that shone with a sickly light, needle-like teeth protruding from a twisted jaw.
Kaep held his breath. The monster wasn't climbing; it was clawing. Every time it sunk a claw into the metal hull, the screech propagated through the entire structure, like nails on a chalkboard multiplied a hundredfold. The vibration reached his bones.
Suddenly, instead of climbing, the being raised its arm and drove it in violently. The claw tore through the wall with a metallic crash. Then it slid it horizontally, ripping a jagged line of sparks.
Kaep was paralyzed, watching as the monster forced the opening wider with its other hand, battering it until the plate gave way with a groan. In a matter of seconds, where there had been a solid wall, there was now an irregular gap.
The monster turned its fish-head toward the darkness inside and, without hesitation, slid into the ship. The scaly tail disappeared last, dragging like a viscous serpent before being lost behind the metal.
Kaep remained hanging, swaying, the echo of the screech still in his ears and the bitter certainty that this was no delirium.
A shiver ran down Kaep's spine. Not from the cold of the rain, but from a bitter intuition. -he swallows saliva-
He turned his head to the left, careful not to lose the precarious balance holding him in the hole. His heart froze.
On the metal surface, dozens of silhouettes repeated the same movement. Webbed hands digging in, viscous bodies ascending, eyes gleaming in the gloom. It wasn't an isolated intruder. It was an invasion.
Each new impact of claw against hull resonated like a maddened drum. Clang! Screeech! A dozen metallic shrieks at once, each one opening a gap, each one announcing another hole in the ship. The steel was no longer a wall: it seemed like Swiss cheese, weakened everywhere.
—"Fish…?"— the word came out as barely a breath, but it was all he managed to say.
The image hit him suddenly: a half-remembered memory clouded by pain. The flash of a coral spear flying toward him, the reflexes that had made him react, the electricity concentrating in his arm, the lightning bolt shooting out in retaliation. The crunch of impact. The smell of charred flesh.
—"Fish…"— he repeated, this time with his eyes wide open.
His inner voice thundered like a crack of thunder in his head:
"Fish!"
The mental shout shook him, breaking the fog that had enveloped him since he woke up hanging. His muscles tensed at once. The confusion dissolved, replaced by the brutal awareness that he was in the middle of an attack and, worse still, in a horrible position.
And with it, the pain.
A lightning bolt of fire shot through his skull, so intense that for a second he thought the thunder had struck inside his head. The world narrowed to that unbearable stabbing, to the uncontrolled drumming of his heart.
A groan escaped through his clenched teeth. Instinctively, he brought his hand to his forehead, his fingers probing the wet skin. The contact was agony: burning, sensitive flesh, and immediately the viscous slide he'd felt before.
He lowered his hand in front of his eyes. Another lightning flash illuminated the sky and left no doubt: his palm was covered in blood. His blood.
Kaep gritted his teeth. He couldn't even think about how he'd gotten that wound; the only thing clear was that he was hanging upside down, bleeding, surrounded by creatures climbing the hull.
Then thunder tore the sky. The discharge illuminated the entire horizon for a blink. And in that instant, he saw it clearly.
The entire ship.
The steel mass in the middle of the raging sea. The storm lashed it mercilessly; each wave hit the structure with such force it seemed the entire hull would split in two. Everywhere, dozens of gaping holes. In each one, fish-creatures slipping inside.
The glare vanished as quickly as it came, returning him to darkness. But the image was already etched in his mind: the ship wasn't being attacked by a handful of monsters. It was being taken over.
A shiver ran through his entire body, colder than the rain.
Kaep breathed raggedly. He tried to stretch toward the window frame from which he was hanging: if he could grab it, maybe he could climb back inside.
He raised an arm, forced it to reach the edge. His fingers barely brushed the wet metal before slipping.
—"Tch!"— escaped through his teeth.
He tried again, arching his torso to gain a few more centimeters. The pain in his head hammered fiercely, making him lose precision. His hand failed again, scraping against the wall without finding purchase.
A third time. This time he tensed his muscles until his back cracked. His arm stretched out in desperation… and again, nothing. The frame was just out of reach. Too far.
The swaying frustrated him: each oscillation moved him a little further away, as if the ship itself was mocking him. Kaep lowered his head, gritting his teeth in rage. The moisture covered everything; even if he touched the metal, his hands would slip as if on greased glass.
'Not like this…' he thought. 'I'll never make it.'
The idea slipped in like lightning: the fish. They didn't climb with useless effort. They made their own handholds.
'Maybe… maybe I can make a hole too.'
He twisted his neck, observing the metal surface within reach of his left arm. If he could mark it, even a little, he'd have something to hold onto. He took a deep breath, swallowing the taste of blood trickling down from his forehead.
He extended his left arm until it touched the cold, wet wall. The contact sent a shiver through him, but he didn't pull his hand away. With his right, he drew it back, fingers together, as if turning it into a spear.
'Can I pierce it?… or will I just end up with broken fingers.'
Doubt gnawed at his mind, but there was no other option. The pain in his head clouded him, blood blinded one eye, and yet he convinced himself: it was that or fall.
Kaep closed his eyes for a moment, trying to concentrate. The pain in his head didn't relent, but he needed to focus all his energy into his arm.
—"Discharges…"— he muttered through clenched teeth, as if the word could summon the spark.
A tingling ran down his forearm. First weak, then stronger. The tips of his fingers began to glow with erratic flashes.
Chss… chss…
Small discharges jumped between his left hand, pressed against the metal, and his right, tensed backward. The air filled with the acrid smell of ozone. Suddenly, both sparks sought each other out and met halfway, fusing into a single whip-crack that crackled in the darkness.
This was the moment. Kaep thrust his right arm forward like a spear, his whole body pushing the blow.
The impact never came.
At the decisive instant, a gust of wind shook the structure. His legs, already halfway out of the hole, slid even further outward, completely diverting the angle of his attack. His hand passed by, grazing the metal, the discharge dissipated into the air with a snap, and the only thing he accomplished was losing his balance.
—"No, no, no!"— he moaned, desperate.
He felt the void pulling him. His feet no longer had support, the window was behind him. His whole body tilted toward the inevitable fall.
In a reflexive act, he stretched both arms out to his sides, searching for any handhold. A miracle appeared: an irregular hole, one of the gaps the fish had opened. His hands dug into the sharp edge. His skin was cut on contact, but he didn't let go.
The swaying stopped abruptly, his body swinging upside down. His legs dangled free, only his feet still inside the window. Blood slid from his palms, mixing with the rainwater, but Kaep didn't loosen his grip.
He had dodged the fall for a second. And he was bleeding more than ever.
The air burned his lungs as he tried to catch his breath. Every muscle in his arms trembled, and blood slid from his palms in dark threads.
Then, he felt it. A strange warmth, different from the burn of his wounds or the cold of the rain.
It came from his left thigh.
He looked down and froze.
A golden glow was emerging from beneath his soaked trousers, pulsing as if a living spark throbbed inside his leg. It wasn't the bluish light of his discharges. It was something more… something he didn't recognize.
—"What…?"— he whispered, unable to look away.
He had no time to find an answer.
BOOM!!!
A brutal blow shook him from the side. The metal plate to his left buckled outward as if something gigantic had rammed it from inside. The crash reverberated through the entire structure, and the impact nearly tore him from his hands.
—"Aaagh!"— he screamed, clinging desperately to the edge of the hole. The sharp edge dug deeper into his skin, tearing the flesh of his palms. A stream of fresh blood fell into the void, but he didn't let go.
The metal gave him no respite. The dent began to vibrate, cracking with a terrifying crunch.
BOOM!!!
The hull exploded outward, tearing out twisted pieces and deforming the entire surrounding wall. The shockwave swept away everything nearby: the window, the edges holding him, even the fish-hole where he had dug his hands.
Kaep felt the handhold disintegrating under his fingers. The roar of the explosion deafened him, the air became an invisible force pushing him backward.
His body lost all balance.
And he fell.