The seawater inside Svelten's Reality Marble wasn't the pristine blue of the natural world. It was a murky, abyssal green, the churning, polluted tide of a cursed harbor. It gave Rimuru severe Bilgewater vibes from his past life's gaming days.
As Rimuru looked down, the very last patch of solid asphalt beneath his feet dissolved into frothing waves. The Reality Marble's overwrite of the World was complete. Heaven and earth had been entirely replaced by storms, fog, phantoms, and the sea.
Standing amidst the vast emptiness, Rimuru flicked his wrist.
A tsunami, driven by a howling squall, rose like a mountain range. It crashed down onto Svelten's ghost ship with apocalyptic force, swallowing the galleon whole.
But Rimuru wasn't naive enough to think mere waves could sink it.
A Reality Marble is an inner world projected outward. It imposes the creator's absolute rules upon reality. And the fundamental rule of the Parade fleet was simple: The ghost ships never sink.
Sure enough, with a groan of rotting timber, the spectral galleon pierced through the crushing depths and floated right back to the surface.
Svelten, soaked but unharmed, finally dropped his arrogant smirk. His eyes narrowed into slits.
"When land-dwellers lose their footing," Svelten said, drawing a standard European knight's longsword from his hip, "they either drown, or they board the ship to fight."
Rimuru stood perfectly still, balanced casually on a floating slab of magically reinforced ice.
Svelten didn't wait. The sickly green fog behind him condensed, forming a pair of massive, grotesque bat wings. With a sonic boom of displaced air, the White Knight launched himself off the deck, hurtling directly toward Rimuru.
Both of them knew the score.
The true horror of Parade wasn't the ships themselves. It was the endless, immortal horde of ghost crewmen that manned them. Rimuru's massive tidal waves and whirlpools weren't actually trying to sink an unsinkable ship.
It was crowd control.
He was aggressively manipulating the environment to lock the ship in place and sweep the crew off the board, forcing Svelten into a one-on-one duel away from his undead army.
The three towering water dragons coiled behind Rimuru hadn't moved an inch since they spawned. Their jaws were locked solely onto Svelten.
Well? Rimuru asked internally, watching the incoming vampire. Can we win this, Great Sage?
Hijacking the water inside a Reality Marble was a nightmare.
Even with a Phantasmal Species' absurd mana capacity and rapid atmospheric absorption, fighting the World overwrite was burning through Rimuru's reserves like a jet engine. It was a ticking clock. If he couldn't end this quickly, he wouldn't have the juice left to run.
Can we win this? He asked again.
The Great Sage didn't answer. There was no time.
In the space of a heartbeat, Svelten's bat wings snapped. The White Knight blurred past Rimuru's ear, closing the distance instantly.
Clang!
Svelten's standard knight sword clashed against Rimuru's replica demon blade. The sheer weight of Rimuru's two-handed grip threw the vampire's arm wide, overpowering the initial strike.
But Svelten didn't care. He just smiled, that same, gentle, deeply unsettling smile.
His free left hand shot up. Blood condensed instantly around his fingertips, hardening into elongated, crimson claws.
Slash.
The Great Sage's reaction was flawless. Rimuru's body twisted violently, throwing his chest out of the fatal trajectory by a fraction of an inch. But it wasn't enough to dodge completely.
Three deep, jagged lines tore through his shoulder.
Pain flared. Rimuru immediately backpedaled.
This was the Great Sage's one weakness in close-quarters combat: lack of data. Without enough behavioral patterns to predict Svelten's movements, the AI couldn't preempt him. Especially when the vampire was inherently faster than Rimuru's physical vessel.
And just as Altrouge had noted, the White Knight lived for the chase.
The moment Rimuru gave ground, transitioning into a defensive retreat, Svelten surged forward. His smile widened. He thinks I'm caught in his rhythm. He thinks I'm bleeding out.
Rimuru abandoned the Executor's close-quarters playbook. Distance. He needed distance.
As he skidded backward across the ice, the sea behind him boiled. The three massive water dragons roared, launching themselves at the encroaching vampire.
Back to basics. Magus territory defense. Svelten was too fast and too erratic for a sword fight. Rimuru had to rely on his hijacked aquatic Workshop to lock him down.
Svelten saw the dragons and his grin turned predatory. He didn't even try to cut them. His body shimmered, turning translucent.
Phantom Form.
He flew straight through the snapping jaws of the water dragons, enduring the slight sting of the mana burn, and continued his dive-bomb toward Rimuru. It was a calculated risk. First, to maintain offensive momentum. Second, to drain Rimuru's mental bandwidth.
In Svelten's Reality Marble, his ghost fleet was autonomous. But a Magus? A Magus had to actively pilot their familiars and traps to make them lethal.
You can summon dragons, rip open whirlpools, and stir up a hurricane? Fine. But can you split your attention two ways? Three ways? Seven ways?
Svelten assumed Rimuru was hitting a processing bottleneck, a momentary mental vacuum while micro-managing the dragon attack. That was his opening.
Unfortunately for Svelten, Rimuru had the Great Sage. Multithreading wasn't a strain; it was the baseline.
To Svelten's shock, Rimuru didn't stagger. As he retreated, dozens of thumb-thick, crystal-clear water ropes shot out from the churning sea below, lashing around the phantom vampire from all angles.
At the same time, Rimuru crushed a handful of glowing seeds in his right hand. The seeds combusted into a pale, luminescent smoke.
Mana Burst.
Rimuru channeled the smoke directly into the water ropes.
Snap!
The water glowed with a holy, searing light. Even in his intangible ghost state, Svelten suddenly found himself violently entangled. The Church's Exorcism Magecraft, seamlessly woven into Hydro-mancy.
Splash!
The glowing ropes yanked the White Knight out of the air and dunked him brutally into the ocean.
Rimuru let out a slow breath, glaring at his shoulder. The bleeding hadn't stopped.
High-Speed Regeneration isn't working. A curse, then.
If he hadn't cannibalized those Executors earlier, dealing with these weird Dead Apostle hax would have been a massive headache. Rimuru was immune to physical trauma, but Svelten's phantom state bypassed physical collision entirely. It's basically Kamui, just without the cool mask, but way longer lasting, Rimuru grumbled internally.
He closed his eyes, tracking Svelten's frantic struggles underwater. The Great Sage casually layered three water prisons and a dozen sealing bounded fields over the drop zone. Only then did Rimuru raise his hand to his bleeding shoulder, condensing a weak Purification spell over the claw marks.
"I really, really hate status-effect builds…"
BOOM!
A massive geyser erupted right behind him.
Rimuru's pupils contracted. The Great Sage took over instantly. Rimuru didn't even turn around. He simply ripped the heavy demon sword backward, twisting his wrist into a physically impossible angle to form a blind guard protecting his spine.
But the attack never came.
"What a familiar posture. You've completely digested Strout's swordsmanship, haven't you?"
Svelten's soft, eerie voice floated over the sound of the rain.
Rimuru turned around. Svelten was no longer the delicate, Astolfo-looking pretty boy. He had fully reverted to his true vampiric nature. His golden hair whipped wildly. His crimson pupils had narrowed into bestial slits, and elongated fangs pushed past his lips. His limbs had stretched, losing their soft, effeminate grace to become heavily muscled, predatory weapons.
"Tch." Rimuru didn't skip a beat, his tone dripping with mockery. "Do all of you Twenty-Seven Ancestors come with a transformation sequence? What are you guys, a Magical Girl idol group?"
He gripped the greatsword, resting it on his shoulder.
"Go on, then. Hit me with your Phase Three while you're at it."
….
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