“Haaah… Never again,” Zanma sighed as he settled back into his own body. Never again, never again would he push this far. He wasn’t built for this. These were the thoughts crossing the surface of his mind, but just one layer deeper, he knew very well he would encounter far worse predicaments in the future and thrash against them with yet greater gusto.

  The Wurger circled Shellhead’s corpse, jolting from one step to the next as if ready to continue fighting at full-tilt at a moment’s notice, but it was a lie. Zanma had severed half of its threads the moment he was sure it had landed on its feet. Veins bulged out on his temples, blood swelled under his eyes, and it felt as if his brain might do an impression of Shellhead’s fate at any moment. His limbs were numb, it would be a few minutes before he could move properly.

  Nonetheless, tuning out the concerned voices of the sailors around him, he forced himself up. Four burning jolts of red ran down from his head, and, somewhat limply, as if being pulled up, Zanma stood. He regarded the Captain’s two sons and the other sailors, their expressions darkening at a mere glance from him; not for any effort to be intimidating on his part, he simply looked like death, and they had witnessed him reenact a true-to-life scene from the War for Axis Fulcrum only moments prior.

  He looked out over the deck, over the blood-sea, and towards the pirate vessel, upon whose top deck two armored figures were looking out through the optics of their accelerator rifles.

  “I’m afraid I am in no state to carry out counter-boarding actions. Would you, gentlemen?” Zanma said flatly.

  Instantly, they scrambled to their feet and down the stairs. The shouting resumed, only this time panic was replaced with retaliatory spiritedness. Only Carter, the surgeon-technician stayed behind to attend to him, reasonably so, having no combat skills, a constitution unsuited to fighting to begin with, and a good rapport with Zanma. Only he among the crewmen tended to do things Zanma wanted done before he had to ask.

  The Captain walked down from the level above with no particular hurry to his step. Zanma could hear him racking his rifle and adding new shells. He stopped at Zanma’s level, leaning over the railing and looking down onto Shellhead’s sputtering corpse, rifle propped up on his shoulder. The damn thing was longer than Zanma was tall, huge even for the eight-foot-tall cyborg.

  “For the better part of a century, he’s been chasing after me. I figured he’d eventually find the island and get his head burst like an overripe grape by the old man of the mountain. Close enough,” the white-bearded captain said. There was neither joy nor anger in his voice; it was flat, somewhat melancholic. Zanma sensed a faint sense of relief from the old man. They stood in silence for some time while the rest of the Etsutensoku’s crew scrambled, forming a boarding party.

  “Hope you don’t hold it against me that I didn’t shoot more. Didn’t want to risk interfering with you or hitting your puppet,” the Captain added.

  “Do you take me for a psychotic young master?” Zanma asked.

  The Captain glanced at him sideways, raising an eyebrow.

  “Nevermind, don’t answer that. I am certain I sounded the part. Won’t they flee now that the boarding attempt has clearly failed? Surely, the myth of the vessel dying with the captain is just that, a myth,” he continued. A part of him expected the pirate vessel to just pull away and flee the moment Shellhead’s corpse hit the deck. Before the Captain could even answer, Zanma caught himself dozing off, and shook himself awake. At that moment, it also hit him why the pirate ship wasn’t leaving. “Right. I forgot. Gokaku was likely the one bonded with the shipbeast, wasn’t he...” he muttered.

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  He eyed the Locke’s Salt, then shook his head. Yawning, he stretched in place, then dragged the canister into his hand through brute telekinesis. Still not as smooth as it should be, but it was better. He almost went to store it in his earring before he caught himself. The salt was too unstable for that.

  “You two had quite a history, didn’t you?” he asked, knowing full well he didn’t actually want the long answer such a question could dredge up. However, at the moment, Zanma didn’t have the mental fortitude for good judgment, and the question slipped out before he could stop it. With the stimulation of combat gone, the consequences of all that he had done to himself to stay functional were crashing down on him.

  “So we did, so we did. Good bloody riddance,” the Captain answered, chuckling under his breath.

  After emptily staring into the middle-distance for a few seconds, Zanma mustered the energy to construct one more coherent sentence. “Carter, lock up Gokaku’s corpse in the brig, or somewhere he’s not liable to be touched. Keep it on deck for all I care if you believe nobody will disturb it. Bring another liter of the same biogel, same ichor if possible, leave it somewhere I’ll see it but won’t be able to reach it. That’s… I believe that’s all. I need to sleep.”

  With that, he left, barely putting any weight onto his feet as he made his way down the stairs, unconsciously tracing his fingers along the wall where his psionic overflow had scraped the paint off earlier. It appeared as if he were floating. The Wurger trodded after him with the Spider on its shoulder as he vanished below deck, and the crew didn’t see nor hear a hint of him for days after.

  Zanma slept for sixteen hours that day and awoke knowing neither where nor when he was. For a moment he thought he was back at the puppet theatre. Glancing about, feeling like a man dying of thirst, he spotted the biogel canister he had asked for. He reached out, invisibly, and lifted it into the air. He had purposely asked Carter to place it some distance from him so that he would have no choice but to exert his psionics and thus see how much he had recovered just from sleeping.

  The canister swam gracefully through the air and reached his hand. Zanma furrowed his brows in dissatisfaction as he swung his feet off his bed and sat up on the edge. It wasn’t fast enough. The psionic force didn’t mobilize readily enough, and burned through his skull like an infection. He reached out again, this time beckoning with his fingers to pull the second, smaller canister of shipbeast ichor towards him. Lazily, it tumbled into his other hand, and he mixed the ichor with the biogel in the same manner as before. In four huge gulps, he consumed the entire liter-or-so of syrupy elixir.

  The sound of the shipbeast’s groaning, gurgling and the creaking of its hull became slightly more noticeable to his ears, albeit for just a few moments. Still bleary-eyed, he looked over his workshop, thinking. Puppets, puppets everywhere the eye could see; skeletal Hollow Men in various states of construction and modification made up the vast majority of them. Workbenches, shelves, and racks of all sorts took up much of the space, so much so that the workshop’s sizable footprint appeared almost cramped. At the far end, a large hunched-over shape knelt, a mass of white ceramic and tangled serpents of maroon muscle with man-sized pylons of solid armor for forearms. Motionless and still, it was to be Zanma’s steed on this long journey. It was an incomplete and graceless thing, yet monstrously powerful all the same, and with a spatial-fold gut as voluminous as its naming implied: The White Serpent, Wyrmkaiser. Before it, strung up from a gantry overhead like a martyr, there hung the Wurger. Several holding bays with rib-like support arms to either side flanked the scene, each holding a Hollow Man.

  His own living space, once intended to be separate from the workshop, had rapidly blended together with it, having only standing partitions to segregate it, and even these, Zanma had kept out of the way since he had begun working with the Tridacna Leviathan pearl. The only restraint he had maintained was the purposeful omission of any serious equipment from the “bedroom,” leaving only minor tinkering feasible in that space. He forced himself to his feet and walked to the corner. A shower corner awaited, though its ominous black panels made it resemble a sarcophagus more than anything.

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