The distance between safety and death was measured in wet, rotting wood.
Aris Valerian stood on the edge of the floating crate, his body swaying in perfect counter-rhythm to the heaving ocean. The purple rain fell in heavy, vertical sheets that hissed when they hit the black water, sounding like bacon frying in a distant room. It was a surreal, sensory nightmare that smelled of ozone and ancient, stale salt.
"Jump," Aris said. He didn't shout it. The roar of the storm would have swallowed a shout, so he pitched his voice low and hard, a command meant to cut through panic.
Renna looked at the gap. Six feet of churning water separated their crate from a half-submerged hull of a copper steamship. Beneath the surface, dark shapes moved with terrifying speed, tracing serpentine patterns in the foam.
"I can't," she breathed, her knuckles white where she gripped the crate's rusted banding. "The wood is slick. If I slip..."
"If you stay, you get eaten," Aris said, extending his hand backward without looking at her. "Timing, Renna. Wait for the swell to lift us. When the crate hits the apex, gravity does the work. You just have to commit."
The ocean rose. The crate lurched upward, groaning under the strain. For a split second, the gap narrowed as the debris crested the wave.
Aris moved. He didn't just jump; he launched himself with the explosive precision of a spring uncoiling. He landed on the copper plating of the steamship, his boots skidding on the slime-coated metal. He dropped his center of gravity, digging his fingers into a rivet seam to arrest his slide toward the water.
He turned back instantly. Renna was in the air.
She had jumped a fraction of a second too late. Her trajectory was low. Her chest hit the edge of the copper hull with a sickening thud, the breath driven out of her in a wet cough. She began to slide backward, her boots scrabbling uselessly against the slick metal, her legs dangling over the abyss where the shadows waited.
Aris scrambled forward on his stomach. He grabbed her wrist just as her grip failed.
The weight of her jerked his shoulder in its socket, a sharp pop of pain that made his vision swim. He gritted his teeth, feeling the slime under his own body betraying him. They were both sliding now, inching toward the water.
_Physics,_ his mind whispered coldly. _Friction coefficient is too low. Mass is too high._
He considered the Lock. He could freeze the friction between his body and the ship. He could turn himself into an immovable object.
_Cost: The sound of your mother's voice._
He hesitated. The memory of the red ball was gone. The name of his first friend was gone. If he gave up her voice, what would be left? A picture without sound? A silent movie of a ghost?
"No," he snarled.
He wouldn't pay. Not for this.
He jammed the toe of his boot into a gap between the copper plates, twisting his ankle until the bone ground against the metal. It held. The pain was blinding, white and sharp, but it was an anchor that didn't cost his soul.
He hauled back, his biceps burning. Renna scrambled, finding purchase with her elbows, and together they dragged themselves up the slanted deck of the ship, collapsing near the remains of a smokestack.
For a long moment, the only sound was their ragged breathing and the relentless drumming of the rain.
Then, the Lock on Aris's lungs expired.
It didn't fade gently. It crashed. His body, which had been suspended in a state of artificial stasis where oxygen was unnecessary, suddenly remembered that it had been holding its breath for three minutes while exerting maximum effort.
Aris rolled onto his side, gasping. The air felt like broken glass in his throat. His diaphragm spasmed violently, trying to pull in enough oxygen to repay the biological debt he had accrued. He retched, coughing up seawater he didn't remember swallowing, his vision tunneling into gray pinpricks.
"Aris?" Renna crawled over to him, her hands hovering uncertainly. "Your eyes... they're bleeding."
He wiped his face. His hand came away smeared with a thin, crimson fluid mixed with the rain. The capillaries in his sclera had burst from the pressure change.
"I'm fine," he wheezed, forcing his lungs to settle into a rhythm. "Just... payback. The System always takes its cut."
He sat up, leaning against the cold smokestack. He looked out at the Drowned Armada.
From this vantage point, the scale of the Selection was horrifying. The ocean was littered with thousands of survivors clinging to debris. In the distance, he saw flashes of magic—fireballs fizzling in the rain, arcs of lightning striking the water. The monsters were feasting. But worse than the monsters were the other candidates. He watched as a group on a nearby raft kicked a girl into the water to lighten their load.
Survival in the Static Zone had taught him that desperation didn't build character; it revealed the rot that was already there.
"We need to keep moving," Aris said, forcing himself to stand on his throbbing ankle. "This ship isn't stable. Look at the waterline."
Renna wiped the rain from her eyes and looked down the slope of the deck. "It's listing to port. Maybe fifteen degrees. But the hull looks intact. Why is it sinking?"
"It's not sinking," Aris realized, looking at the ornate, gothic architecture of the ship. "It's replaying."
"Replaying?"
"This is an Echo, Renna. It's a memory of a disaster. This ship isn't just sinking now; it's _been_ sinking for a thousand years. It's caught in a loop. If we stay here too long, we might get pulled into the reset."
As if to answer him, a spectral green light flared in the bridge of the ship, high above them. A low, mournful horn blasted, vibrating through the copper deck plates. The ghostly figures of crewmen flickered into existence near the railings—transparent, glowing silhouettes that ran silently, screaming without sound as they threw themselves into the phantom waves.
Aris felt the hair on his arms stand up. The chronal radiation here was intense.
"The Compass," he muttered.
He pulled the iron device from his pocket. It was hot to the touch now, vibrating so hard it blurred in his hand. The needle was no longer spinning. It was locked, pointing straight toward the center of the ruins—a massive, cathedral-like spire rising from the water about a mile away.
"The Anchor Beacon," Aris said. "That's where we have to go."
"A mile?" Renna looked at the treacherous path of debris. "That will take hours."
"We don't have hours," Aris said. He pointed to the horizon.
A wall of water, darker than the sky and taller than the Spire, was moving toward them. It wasn't a wave. It was the edge of the simulation collapsing, wiping the data clean.
"The Zone is shrinking," he noted. "Let's move."
They scrambled up the slanted deck toward the high point of the bow. From there, a tangle of rigging connected their ship to the next ruin, a crumbling stone watchtower protruding from the depths.
Aris tested the rope. It was thick, blackened with algae, but it held his weight.
"Go," he told Renna. "Don't look down."
She clipped a makeshift carabiner she had fashioned from a piece of wire onto the rope and began to shimmy across. Aris waited, scanning their surroundings.
Movement caught his eye.
Not from the water. From the deck behind him.
Three figures emerged from the gloom near the broken smokestack. They weren't ghosts. They were candidates, shivering, soaked, and armed.
The leader was a tall boy with a shaved head and a jawline that looked like it had been chiseled from granite. He held a pipe wrench in one hand, hefting it like a mace. The two behind him—a girl with wild, matted hair and a boy nursing a broken arm—held sharpened pieces of driftwood.
They stopped when they saw Aris. They looked at his black coat, at the compass in his hand, and then at Renna hanging vulnerable on the rope halfway across the gap.
"That's a nice compass," the leader said. His voice was cracked, desperate. "Looks like it knows where it's going."
Aris turned fully to face them. He slid the compass into his pocket and let his hands hang loose at his sides. He didn't draw his knife. He didn't want to escalate this if he didn't have to.
"It points to the Spire," Aris said calmly. "You can see the Spire without the compass. Just look up."
"Maybe," the boy said, taking a step forward. "But I think I'd rather have the map than the view. Hand it over, and we don't cut the rope."
Aris felt a cold stillness settle over him. It wasn't the Lock; it was just rage. Pure, distilled hatred for the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality that kept the slums poor.
He glanced back at the rope. Renna was two-thirds of the way across. If they cut it now, she would fall into the monster-infested water.
"You cut that rope," Aris said softly, "and you won't live long enough to watch her hit the water."
The leader laughed. It was a jagged, ugly sound. "There's three of us, man. And you look like you're about to fall over. Get him!"
The two lackeys surged forward.
Aris didn't move. He waited. He analyzed.
_Threat Assessment._
_Enemy A (Broken Arm): Slow, favoring right side._
_Enemy B (Wild Hair): Fast, aggressive, holding weapon improperly._
_Leader: Hanging back. Coward._
The girl reached him first, thrusting the driftwood spear at his chest.
Aris stepped inside her guard. He didn't block; he simply occupied the space she needed to generate force. He placed his palm against her sternum and shoved. Not a hard shove, but a precise one, utilizing the slick footing of the deck.
She slipped, her feet going out from under her. She crashed onto the copper plating, sliding uncontrollably toward the railing.
The boy with the broken arm hesitated. That hesitation was his mistake.
Aris closed the distance. He grabbed the boy's good arm, used his own hip as a fulcrum, and threw him. He didn't throw him overboard—Aris wasn't a murderer, not yet—he threw him into the leader.
The two collided in a tangle of limbs and cursing.
Aris turned and sprinted for the rope. He didn't have time to finish them. The ghost-crew was screaming louder now. The loop was resetting.
He leaped onto the rigging just as the leader shoved the groaning boy off him and scrambled up, swinging the pipe wrench wildy. The metal head of the wrench clipped Aris's boot, sending a jolt of numbness up his leg, but he hauled himself onto the rope.
"Cut it!" the leader screamed at the girl, who was pulling herself up from the railing.
She looked at the knife in her belt. She looked at Aris, hanging over the abyss.
Then she looked at the water.
A massive tentacle, thick as a tree trunk and covered in barnacles, rose silently from the depths directly beneath the rope. It hovered there, waiting for a meal to drop.
The girl froze. If she cut the rope, Aris would fall. But the vibration of the rope snapping might draw the thing's attention to the ship.
In that second of indecision, Aris moved. He pulled himself hand-over-hand, his muscles screaming. He reached the stone tower just as Renna grabbed his collar and hauled him onto the ledge.
"They're coming!" Renna shouted, pointing back.
The leader had jumped onto the rope. He was climbing fast, fueled by rage.
"Let him come," Aris panted, collapsing against the damp stone wall. "Watch."
The ship behind them gave a groan that sounded like a dying whale. The green light in the bridge flared to a blinding intensity.
The Loop reset.
The copper ship didn't just sink. It _snapped_. The laws of physics reasserted themselves violently. The hull fractured, the air around it twisting as the timeline tried to correct the error of the ship's existence.
The leader, halfway across the rope, screamed as the rigging attached to the ship was suddenly yanked downward with the force of a collapsing building.
He held on for a second, his fingers clawing at the hemp. Then the rope snapped.
He fell.
He didn't hit the water. The barnacled tentacle snatched him out of the air with a speed that blurred the eye. There was a wet crunch, a silenced cry, and then he was gone.
The ship vanished under the waves, taking the other two candidates with it.
Aris watched the ripples settle. He felt nothing. No triumph. No guilt. Just a cold calculation that he was down three competitors and up one survival point.
"They..." Renna swallowed hard, turning away from the edge. "They're gone."
"They were dead the moment they stepped on that ship," Aris said, standing up and brushing the moss from his coat. "The Echo was unstable. The compass warned me."
He checked the device. It was still pointing at the central spire.
"We have to climb," Aris said, looking up the interior of the ruined tower. The stone stairs spiraled upward into the gloom. "The water level is rising."
They ascended in silence. The tower was ancient, the stone worn smooth by centuries of phantom tides. As they climbed, Aris felt the Black Band on his wrist pulsing, a slow, rhythmic throb that matched the beating of his own heart.
He pulled out the Book of Tethers. He needed to check. Just to be sure.
He read the entry: _Name of first friend: [DELETED]._
He closed his eyes, trying to force the memory to return. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough, he could find a fragment. A letter. A sound.
But there was nothing. The space where that person had been was perfectly smooth, like a wall that had been plastered over and painted white.
"Aris?" Renna's voice echoed from above. "You need to see this."
He shoved the book away and climbed the last few steps to the top of the tower.
They were high up now, looking out over the center of the drowned city. The view was apocalyptic. The debris field was a churning grinder of wood and metal.
But it was what stood in the center that held his attention.
The Spire wasn't a building.
It was a sword.
A stone sword the size of a skyscraper, driven hilt-deep into the ocean floor. The "buildings" around it were just the quillons and the guard. And pulsating at the very top of the pommel, glowing with a soft, defiant gold light, was the Beacon.
But guarding the sword was something that made the tentacled horror look like a garden snake.
Coiled around the blade of the massive stone sword was a serpent made of translucent, shifting starlight. It was huge—easily a thousand feet long. Its scales drifted off its body like smoke. It was asleep, its massive head resting near the water line, but its breathing was causing the tides.
"A Void Dragon," Renna whispered, her voice trembling so hard it shook her whole body. "That's... that's a Myth-class entity. We're supposed to fight _that_?"
Aris stared at the creature. The System text appeared in his vision, red and bleeding.
**[ENTITY DETECTED: THE DREAMER OF TIDES.]**
**[RANK: CATASTROPHE.]**
**[STATUS: DORMANT.]**
**[ADVISORY: DO NOT WAKE THE BABY.]**
"Baby?" Aris muttered. "That thing is a hatchling?"
He looked at the path. A series of floating bridges—some made of stone, some of solidified magic—led from their tower to the sword. But to get to the Beacon, they would have to walk right past the sleeping dragon's nose.
"We don't fight it," Aris said, a crazy, desperate plan forming in the back of his mind. He looked at his wrist. He looked at the massive, rhythmic rising and falling of the dragon's chest.
"We just have to be quieter than time itself," he said.
He looked at Renna. "Can you hold your breath?"
"For how long?"
"Long enough to walk into the mouth of a god."
Aris stepped onto the parapet. The rain had stopped, leaving a heavy, oppressive silence hanging over the world. The only sound was the breathing of the dragon.
_In... Out..._
The world inhaled and exhaled with it.
Aris checked his Compass. It wasn't pointing at the Beacon anymore. It was pointing at the Dragon.
And for the first time since he found it, the needle stopped vibrating and clicked into place.