The black water whispered as it was cut by something that should not float.
Ash exhaled, and the air scraped his throat like crushed glass. He looked back—the burning silhouette shrank in the distance, a memory that no longer belonged to him. When he turned his gaze forward, the wind struck the blue cloak turned sail, and the scythe trembled slightly against the current.
Beneath his gaze, bodies.
Sunny lay motionless, his torso opened by something that no longer bled. His face contorted even in unconsciousness. The shadow, that extension of himself, watched Ash with an expression no being of darkness should be able to make: gratitude and accusation fused into one.
"Don't look at me like that."
The shadow pointed to Changing Star. Nephis was breathing, but her armor—the Fisherman's tunic—was soaked in red. Blood from both. Her flames had closed the worst of it, but the marks remained.
Ash ran a hand through the water, letting the cold carry something away. When he touched his face, his fingers found the jagged edge of a burn that had cost him his right eye. Not the left—the right. Or what remained of it.
His body was an open map. Cuts that still oozed. Bones that remembered impacts. Weakness lapped at his edges like a black tide.
Finally, Cassie.
Of the three, she seemed to be doing best. She was simply sleeping.
Time stretched like a wounded muscle. After several minutes—or maybe seconds, the black water didn't allow for measurement—Cassie opened her eyes. Her blind pupils found Ash with impossible precision.
She stood without a word.
The embrace took him by surprise. The fabric of her armor dampened where her face buried itself. Cassie's body trembled with small spasms, as if trying to contain something much larger than herself.
When she spoke, it was a broken whisper against his chest:
"Thank you... thank you..."
Ash blinked—blinked, because his remaining eye still worked—and felt that something didn't fit. Her words floated in the air like leaves finding no ground.
"Why are you thanking me?" His voice sounded strange even to him. "If it weren't for your warning, this would have been worse. We're even."
He was going to stroke her hair, but his hand stopped. His fingers still dripped something dark that the water hadn't washed away.
Cassie didn't respond. She simply sat beside him as he continued steering the improvised vessel.
A groan broke the watery silence.
Sunny opened his eyes. He blinked. Recognized the sky, the boat, his companions. Then he tried to move and discovered the bindings.
"Why...?" He began, but pain cut his sentence short. He blinked again, faster.
"Why am I tied up? And why am I...?" He looked down. The wound on his chest was a pale abyss that didn't bleed.
"I did it."
The golden rope dissolved with a thought. Sunny slowly sat up, grimacing, and then his eyes met Ash's.
He froze mid-motion.
His friend's face—what should be his face—was marked by a burn that claimed the right half. The eye, or the space where the eye should be, was a socket sealed by twisted flesh. Fresh cuts crossed his arms, his neck, the little visible of his torso under soaked bandages. His skin had that waxy tone that only comes from blood no longer inside the body.
"What... what happened to you?" Sunny's voice came out higher than intended.
Ash looked at him with his remaining eye. "Don't you remember?"
"Remember?" Sunny frowned, searching a memory that suddenly felt full of holes.
"Just... we were heading toward the tree. That's all."
"I see."
"Cassie?" Sunny turned to her.
The blind girl slowly shook her head.
"Fragments. Only fragments."
Nephis sat up with a strangled gasp. Her inner flames extinguished with difficulty, leaving behind the tremor of one who has emptied their reserves. She opened her eyes—and froze.
She looked at Ash. The burn. The cuts. The way his right eye simply... wasn't there.
She knew those marks. She had seen them before, on other bodies. On her own. Only one person—or something—left them like that.
"What happened?" Her voice was a taut thread.
Ash coughed into his hand. When he pulled his fingers away, there was something dark and thick on them.
"Do you have energy to heal me a bit, Neph?"
She nodded, though the movement cost her. She clenched her teeth as fire sprang from her, painful and warm at the same time.
Ash felt flesh closing, the deepest cuts beginning to seal. The burning on his face diminished until it became a hot memory. But the eye—the hollow where the eye should be—remained the same.
Nephis stopped, pale, on the verge of fainting.
"It's enough," said Ash. "The eye can wait."
Sunny watched him with a mixture of concern and something else—something he couldn't name. "Ash. Do you want to tell us what the hell happened?"
Ash looked back. The thing—the tree, or whatever it was—was no longer visible. They'd have hours before the horizon brought them something worse.
"It's not a pretty story," he finally said. "I guess it all started when we finished the plan to attack the carapace demon."
He paused.
Or so he believed. His own memories also had blurry edges.
But he didn't say that.
He simply began to speak, as the demon carapace boat cut through the black water toward nowhere, carrying four people who weren't sure how they had arrived there or what they had really left behind.
Then his gaze returned to the three, still feeling the phantom pain in his body.
"For that, we need to go back about two or three weeks."
...
"So we're going to kill that demon?" Sunny asked, looking at Nephis as if she were crazy, which in a certain way was true.
"You're really insane. It's... it's an awakened demon we're talking about, remember? Have you forgotten we're only sleepers?"
Sunny looked at Ash, who had a calm expression on his face.
"We have to kill it. We don't have other options," Ash said after a few moments.
Sunny sighed.
"Actually, you both said that last time before fighting the carapace centurion," Ash said.
"Yes! Exactly! And how did that end? We almost died!"
"You survived, didn't you?" Nephis asked, looking at Sunny.
Sunny made a bewildered face before finally speaking again.
"That's not the point!" Sunny said with an exasperated tone.
At that moment, Cassie placed her hand on Nephis's shoulder.
"Neph. That's not very nice to say."
Changing Star realized her words had caused a misunderstanding before expressing herself better.
"What I meant was... uh... in the end, we won, didn't we? It was a risk we had to take, and it was worth it. We've become stronger since then."
"But that thing is huge! It's so tall you won't even be able to hit it with your sword! What are we going to do—politely ask the bastard to come down to our level?" he asked sarcastically.
"Actually, I think that would be a good idea," Ash said, taking that moment to join the conversation instead of just listening like he did most of the time.
Sunny and Nephis gave him blank stares, even Cassie.
"This isn't time for jokes, Ash."
Ash opened his mouth before thinking a bit and speaking.
"What I mean is, let's just bring him down to our level in terms of strength."
"And how would we do that?" Changing Star asked.
Ash smiled weakly, his eyes shining with a somewhat amused look mixed with madness.
"Nephis, do you remember when you lit a campfire?" Ash asked, making Nephis tense for a moment as she recalled her terrible experience and mistake.
"Yes."
Sunny frowned, not understanding anything.
"What do you have in mind?"
"We don't have to fight, and let something else do it for us. If we set it on fire, when night comes, some kind of horror will come from the dark sea, eliminate or damage the demon so much that we can kill it without too many problems. Or that's my plan."
"Do you think it'll work?" Cassie asked.
"Maybe. It's the only thing I can think of right now. Maybe something else will occur to me later," he replied, shrugging.
"Even if we do this crazy plan, how exactly will we execute it without dying?" Sunny asked.
"You all think about it. Even though it's smarter than a monster, it can be fooled," Ash said.
That night they stayed inside the skeleton of the dead Leviathan. It was the safest camp they'd had besides the coral hill.
Ash lay down, thoughtful about his options for fighting the carapace demon.
His real concern wasn't the demon, but rather the terror that guarded it. He remembered it was an awakened terror, but that could change now.
Significant changes had occurred, so the possibility that the tree was a fallen terror was high. If it was an awakened terror, he could convince them to form a boat and leave for the dark city that very night and get away from the terror.
But if it was a fallen terror, its mental powers would slowly overcome his defenses, making him lose sight of his main objective.
He couldn't kill it because the soul of a terror was much more powerful and greater than his, and its will stronger. To manage that, he at least needed to be awakened and have three complete soul cores and other things like memory and discovering more of its aspect.
Sighing, he closed his eyes and began to sleep.
Near the following morning, he was awakened by Cassie, who shook his shoulder carefully.
Opening his eyes, Ash looked at Cassie staring fixedly at him.
"What's happening?"
"I had two visions. One about the carapace demon and another about the four of us," she said, making Ash raise an eyebrow.
Getting up, he sat down. Soon Sunny and Nephis approached, listening to the blind girl's vision.