The Brine storm howled around them.

  The Carrion Host fought like dying men determined to take the sea with them.

  Dion’s sword rose without thought. Steel met claws in a ringing clash that jarred his arms to the shoulder.

  He pivoted, his footwork a ghost of courtly drills, and cut a searing line across the creature’s chest. Brine sprayed, hissing where it landed.

  The creature snarled, lunging again. Dion dropped low, his blade flashing in a tight, practiced arc that would have drawn applause in a sunlit yard.

  This time, it bit deep, shearing through a thick tendon. The Hollowed staggered, its limb hanging useless.

  Dion didn’t hesitate. He drove the point through its throat, then sawed savagely to the side.

  The blade stuck fast. He wrenched it free with a grunt, black ichor spattering the deck.

  Decapitated.

  A second Hollowed skittered toward him, limbs bending at impossible angles, joints cracking like sodden timber.

  Dion slid into a familiar stance without thought, his weight balanced, the chain on his wrist chiming faintly.

  His breath burned in his starved lungs, his body frail, but the motion was automatic, years of ruthless repetition made flesh.

  It leapt.

  Dion sidestepped, his blade carving down in a clean diagonal. Steel sheared through the shoulder and chest, but a spray of brine followed the cut, sizzling against the metal.

  Dion’s eyes narrowed. Just now, he’d felt it, a subtle drag, a new resistance in the sword’s bite that hadn’t been there a moment before. The brine.

  It’s eating the edge.

  The hollow collapsed, dissolving into frothing salt. Dion finished it with a swift, practiced decapitation.

  He looked at the sword. The edge was dull, pitted, and weeping a faint, corrosive steam.

  Useless.

  Dion thought. He needed a new one.

  His gaze swept across the ship, taking in the impossible chaos. The deck was a charnel house, the storm a fury, the enemy a tide.

  Surviving this felt like a mathematical improbability.

  Yet, a strange calm settled over him. He wasn't truly bothered.

  Even if they somehow vanquished every hollow, it didn't alter his ultimate fate.

  He would still be a slave in chains when the sun rose.

  If the sun ever rose again.

  Still, he wanted to live. That simple, animal imperative was purpose enough. It was the only purpose he had left.

  His eyes soon found what he was looking for, or rather, more of what he needed. They lay beside the dead, strapped to the belts of slavers who had no use for them now.

  Not anymore.

  —

  The sound of steel rang through the storm.

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  The Titan moved like the sea itself slowly, crushing each swing tearing men from the deck like weeds in a flood.

  Grish hacked into a crawling Hollow that clung to the railing, splitting its skull in one swing.

  The creature dissolved into brine, splashing his chest. “Fuck! They’re breeding in the waves!”

  Another rose behind him. Veynar’s dagger slipped through, piercing it.

  “They don’t breed,” The Captain sounded flatly. “They’re the drowned, spat back up. The sea makes them hungry again.”

  “Any bright ideas on how to stop that thing, then?” Grish shouted, jerking his chin toward the Titan.

  Seris appeared from the corner of the deck, a bit bruised but still alive.

  Grish and Veynar spotted her. Their expressions didn’t change.

  If it were that easy to kill a commander of the Host, she wouldn’t wield the title.

  She didn’t pay them any mind. Instead, she ran straight toward the Titan, an act of pure madness.

  No one moved to stop her. How could they? And even if they could, why would they? She was arguably the strongest combatant on board.

  She and the other commanders were the sharpened edge of the Carrion Host’s will, there was a reason they held their rank.

  Seris ducked beneath the Titan’s next swing, her grin sharp despite the chaos.

  She drove another sword into its gut, burying the hilt.

  “Come on, that all you’ve got, you big fu—”

  The Titan’s bellow drowned her out. It turned its milky eyes toward her. No one knew if the things could feel rage but Seris was sure she’d angered it.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  Its limb came down like a falling mast. The world went white rain, salt, and splinters exploding outward.

  Seris twisted aside as the blow tore through the deck, sending a spray of brine that burned like acid. The shockwave hurled her backward into the railing. Breath gone.

  “Hold the line!” another shouted, voice cracking in the wind.

  Men scrambled across the slick planks. One slipped, vanishing overboard. Chains whipped loose. A hook spun past Seris’s ear, clattering into the dark.

  She coughed, tasting blood and salt, eyes rising to the Titan’s pulsing silhouette.

  “Shit.” Veynar yelled. “It’s shifting forms!”

  The Titan’s body ruptured. Its legs dissolved into tidewater that swept across the deck, dragging men with it.

  It no longer walked, it rushed like a tide given shape, smashing through timbers and bodies alike.

  “The sea,” someone cried, voice breaking. “It brought the damned sea with it!”

  The brine foamed and hissed, eating through boots and flesh, filling the air with the stench of cooked meat.

  Steel and bullets alike passed through its tide-flesh like smoke, yet the Hosts swung anyway, shouting as their blades sliced water that healed as fast as it parted.

  Veynar spat salt from his mouth. “You can’t cut water. We’re fighting the ocean itself.”

  “Useless!” Grish roared, hacking at a reforming limb. “We’re just feeding it!”

  BANG.

  Veynar jammed his pistol into the face of a descending Hollow, the blast tearing through its skull and spraying him with foul brine.

  “I’ve heard tales of this,” he muttered, wiping his face with a grimace. “Not steel. Not salt.”

  “What are you mumbling about?” Seris snapped, planting a boot on another Hollow’s chest, kicking it over the rail.

  “The Devils in the Solvent Lands,” Veynar said, his voice rough from smoke and strain.

  “They spoke of Brine Titans… primordial horrors that made the deepest trenches their home.”

  He paused, his eyes tracking the monstrosity as it loomed over the shattered deck.

  “They said only fire could truly end them,” he finished, the words hanging in the air, heavy with both dread and a fragile, desperate hope.

  “Lantern oil!” The captain’s bellow cut through the bedlam like an axe. “Powder kegs from the magazine! Bring it all! Now!”

  Despite the chaos, his command acted like a lodestone. Men broke from melees, scrambling toward the hatch with sudden, grim purpose.

  Seris barked a bitter, smoke-raw laugh. “You want to set the fucking ship alight under us?”

  He didn't look at her. His gaze was fixed on the monstrosity reshaping the foredeck.

  “Hold it down long enough to light the fuse,” he said, each word as hard and final as stone.

  “We burn it, or it takes everything.”

  Chains whipped forward.

  Men hooked the Titan’s newly reformed legs, their boots skidding as they hauled. Its feet slid on brine-slick planks, its immense weight shifting against the sudden, mundane force of the pull.

  “Now!”

  In a perfect, brutal synchronicity, Seris plunged her dagger into the back of its knee to foul the joint.

  Grish attacked from the opposite side.

  His heavier blade, a notched boarding axe slammed into the same joint from the front.

  The monster did not roar in agony. It let out a deep, grinding groan, like stone shearing under continental pressure, as the compromised leg structure gave way.

  It collapsed halfway to the deck, but it wasn't over.

  “Press! Lock it down!” the captain bellowed.

  Steel shrieked and scraped against its crystalline hide. Chains bit into its form, and men screamed as they fought to contain a living landslip.

  In response, the Titan’s glowing brine-veins pulsed with heightened intensity.

  Jets of boiling, corrosive brine erupted in a scalding halo, not from pain, but as a systemic purge, melting the flesh from the men who dared to bind it.

  "Ahhhh—!"

  "Gods, no—!”

  “H–help me!”

  Their screams were cut short, lost in the hiss of vaporizing meat and the Titan grinding groan.

  Before the scorched bodies had even finished slumping, new hands, blistered, desperate seized the sizzling chains.

  "Don't you dare let up! Hold fast!" the captain roared, throwing his own shoulder against a shuddering, blood-slicked link.

  "Stand!"

  The Captain's voice was a whip-crack, a command that somehow carried over the carnage.

  "FIRE!”