The deck heaved under Dion’s bare feet, a living thing writhing in the storm. Salt spray lashed his face, every droplet burning like acid in his lungs.

  Lanterns tore loose from their hooks and swung madly, their light scything across the deck in frantic arcs, carving jagged shadows into the rigging.

  Men scrambled like rats, each of them had something in common, their eyes held terror as if the storm itself had hollowed them out.

  A scream cut through the storm high, thin, and quickly drowned.

  The planks split with a sound like a spine breaking. The hull seemed to bow inward as if something beneath pressed against its ribs.

  Then it came.

  Flesh stretched translucent, veins glowing with rivers of brine. Salt-crystal ridges spread across its body, sharp and shell-like, symmetry too precise to be natural.

  Its face was warped into a coral mask. Eyes pearl-white, lidless, unblinking.

  Its roar came not a voice, but the groan of crushing stone, the belly of the ocean made sound.

  The Carrion Host faltered. Hardened killers, smugglers, slavers, men who had gutted villages and stared down storms every one froze, as though seized by a single invisible hand.

  Its milky white gaze causes gaunt men and women to cower.

  One whispered prayers through cracked lips. Another tried to chew through his own bonds, blood spilling down his chin.

  And then the Hollowed, no, the Titan straightened. Taller than the mast. Its figure made the other hollows look like playthings.

  Its limbs rippled like tidewater, shifting, reshaping, flowing as though the sea itself was learning how to walk.

  And with it came the voice.

  Sink.

  Belong.

  Dissolve.

  This time, the intensity hammered in their head.

  Both slavers and prisoners alike. They slithered into skulls like cold fingers, pressing behind their eyes, prying under tongues.

  Each one felt them in their bones, a pressure that wasn’t thought but command.

  A man fell to his knees, gagging. No wave had touched him, yet seawater poured from his mouth in choking torrents.

  He drowned there on the deck, thrashing as his lungs filled with his own tide.

  The stench of brine and blood thickened. Prisoners at the rails shrieked, yanking at their chains until wrists split open, crimson mingling with salt as they fought to tear themselves free.

  The Titan loomed above it all, its body boiling with light and fluid, every breath spilling death into the storm.

  One of the men stumbled forward, face slack, eyes rolled white. His arms spread wide as if to embrace the monstrosity, lips moving around silent, senseless words. “It’s a sea god… w-we can’t… f-fight that…”

  Steel flashed.

  SPLURTT.

  His own head soared briefly, a dark arc against the storm, before thumping wetly onto the deck.

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  Seris cut him down without breaking stride, the spray of his blood adding another hue to the salt-slick planks.

  She turned on the rest, her blade dripping. “Run, and I’ll gut you myself!” Her voice was a whip-crack, louder than the wind, freezing the crew between the horror before them and the fury behind.

  Then she moved. A blur of rage, she lunged at the Titan itself, driving her sword deep into a glowing vein in its colossal thigh, in its translucent form, they were impossible to miss.

  Guns and bullets were useless against such a thing.

  The steel hissed, the corrosive brine on its flesh eating the metal like acid. Foul steam vomited from the wound.

  Tch.

  She made a sound of pure disgust. But before she could wrench the blade free, the wound began to seal, salt-crystals knitting like bone.

  The sword itself, trapped in the healing flesh, glowed cherry-red, then white-hot.

  It didn’t just melt. It shattered, brittle and sudden, the superheated fragments exploding outward in a shower of molten shrapnel.

  The monster shuddered, a groan like grinding continents rippling through its vast frame. Planks buckled under its shifting weight.

  It turned its milky, lidless gaze toward her.

  “Shit!”

  She jumped back barely in the nick of time.

  BAM!

  A massive, fluid limb, not a fist, but a crashing wall of solidified seawater and coral swatted down where she stood.

  BAM!

  In the echoing silence of that missed strike, the captain made his call. To fire the deck cannons was to invite ruin, to risk blowing out his own hull.

  But as he watched the abomination rise over his shattered ship, cold calculation overrode instinct. Some losses were acceptable. Total annihilation was not.

  “Cannons!” His command cut through the panic, a note of finality in his voice. “All batteries! Aim for the center mass…. fire at will!”

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  Destruction on a scale Dion had never witnessed, well not like this.

  He had seen the siege of a battering ram as it sundered a gate, witnessed flocks of arrows darken the sky and impale men in an open field.

  But this… this was annihilation concentrated into the space of a ship’s deck.

  It was not warfare, it was a localized apocalypse of splintered wood, shredded flesh, and concussive thunder that stole the air from his lungs.

  No words could describe the sheer, intimate violence of it.

  Unfortunately the attacks only managed to slow it down.

  The Titan boarded the ship.

  Iron links rattled as men surged forward, dragging weighted chains across the deck. With a practiced heave they flung them high, hooks biting into the Titan’s coral ridges.

  Muscles corded, spines bent, they pulled as one, straining to bring the monster down. The Titan roared, a sound like reefs breaking in the deep.

  The chains went taut. Then, with a single lurch, they snapped like wet twine. One chainman was ripped skyward, then flung into the sea. His scream ended in a hiss, swallowed whole by the Brine.

  For a heartbeat, silence followed heavier than the storm. As if on cue, more Hollow surged on deck.

  Veynar's voice whistled across the deck, iron over panic “Hold formation, don't let them take a step past you.”

  The deck was a slaughterhouse. Chains snapped. Men screamed. The Titan tore through them like the tide smashing driftwood.

  A hooked limb swept low, and three men went flying, bodies snapping like kindling against the mast.

  Another slammed down, splitting one in half so clean his entrails slapped the deck before his upper body slid into the sea.

  Salt brine hissed across the planks, eating into wood and flesh alike. A man’s scream rose high before gurgling out as his face melted, bone showing through crystalizing skin.

  Grish hacked, spittle flying from his mouth. “Harder! Hit it harder, damn you!” His blade skidded off the creature’s coral plating, a splash of corrosive brine searing his cheek. He hissed, swinging again with frenzied, useless strength.

  He had abandoned his gun for a much more personal weapon, a heavy cutlass. The lead shot had done nothing.

  But steel, driven by rage, at least seemed to make the thing feel a sting.

  Veynar darted in, a ghost of precision where Grish was a storm. “Not like that! Aim for the joints—where the plating meets the flesh!”

  “What fucking joints? It just knits back together!” Grish’s bark was raw, panic fraying the edges of his roar.

  “Then keep it busy while I find one that doesn’t!” Veynar’s words broke into a pained grunt as he yanked his dagger free from a seam that had already begun to seal.

  Bullets sparked and whined away from its crystalline armor, blades clanged and shattered against its salt-hardened ridges.

  The Titan seemed to be the center of attention, despite more hollow pouring in continuously.

  Despite this, the Titan did not so much as slow down. Instead, the massive, solidified hand that had swatted at Seris dissolved back into an amorphous mass of brine and muscle.

  For a heartbeat, it churned, then it re-formed, splitting into a forest of whip-like, barbed tentacles.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Grish breathed, his face draining of blood. He knew what came next.

  BOOM!!!

  A rain of destruction answered the ship's cannonade. Not a volley, but a downpour, a hurricane of serrated limbs that descended upon the deck to repay their violence a hundredfold.

  One figure tried to crawl away on all fours. The Titan’s massive foot came down, crushing him flat, ribs and skull bursting in a wet spray.

  Every motion of the Titan was both alien and efficient, as if the storm itself had been given limbs to reap men down.

  And still it kept coming.

  Prisoners and slavers alike sobbed at the rails, gagging on salt and terror. The whole ship was drowning, not in water but in the living tide that had crawled aboard an impossible storm, hellbent on their annihilation.

  —

  Sink.

  Belong.

  Dissolve.

  The words pressed against Dion’s mind, not sounds but shapes of thought, cold fingers curling deep into the marrow of his bones. His knees buckled, vision swimming.

  “We are all going to die!”

  A slaver’s raw scream sliced through the psychic fog. A brutal shove, a shoulder ramming into Dion’s side jolted him back into his own flesh.

  The man barreled past, a silhouette of pure panic, his gun raised toward the horror as he screamed his terror into the teeth of the storm.

  Before he could compose himself, a Hollow was on him.

  It was a blur of pale, wet flesh and snapping limbs. The only thing Dion had was a sword, but it felt like a toy in his trembling grip.

  His instinct screamed. He didn’t think, he reacted, a clumsy sideways swipe meant to create space.

  Yet the hollow didn't care, it lunged in all the same.

  The blade bit into something soft, and the creature shrieked, recoiling. But it didn’t fall.

  Dion stumbled back, barely parrying a clawed swipe. The impact rattled his teeth and sent a shock of pain up his arm.

  He gasped, the realization dawning like a cold tide. These things weren't animals driven by hunger or fear.

  How did one fight something that attacked not just the body, but the will? That whispered surrender into your mind while its claws sought your throat?

  Dion had no answer. He had only the sword, the pain in his arm, and the chilling certainty that he was battling the ocean itself.

  Still, he had been able to infer something from the slavers as they fought against the hollows.

  The weak point of these creatures.

  The head.

  A bullet to the head kept them down permanently, then decapitating them would work.

  Dion's eyes glimmered, a sharp calculating light passed through.