King Ariston lowered his massive arm, the air around his fist returning to normal as he turned his head toward the two boys. A deep, boisterous laugh erupted from his chest, shattering the lingering dread on the ledge.
"Well, kids," Ariston grinned, shaking his head. "You two have pretty bad luck."
Rhydian straightened his coat, his sharp eyes glancing at Akio and Kairo with mild amusement. "Yeah. They have exceptionally bad luck."
A sudden rustle of leaves echoed from the higher ledge above the tunnel exit. A lean boy with sharp features, dark hair, and an impeccable posture dropped down onto the moss, landing lightly on his feet.
"Father," Daichi said, stepping forward quickly, his eyes wide as he looked at the shattered rocks around them. "Here you are... but what was that overwhelming aura? I was halfway down the third tier and I could barely handle the weight of it."
Rhydian looked at his son calmly. "Well, it seems it wasn't just you. The rest of the town ran straight into their houses to hide, am I right?"
Daichi turned his gaze toward Akio, his brow furrowing in confusion. "Akio... didn't you feel that horrific aura?"
Akio rubbed the back of his neck, throwing a sheepish smile toward the King. "Yeah, I felt it... but there was no need to worry. King Ariston was right there with me. I felt completely safe the second he arrived."
Daichi sighed, adjusting his collar before bowing slightly toward the King. "Father, thank you for helping my friend. Now... we will take our leave for the academy."
"Wait, Daichi," Rhydian interrupted, raising a single gloved hand. His voice left no room for argument. "The four of you are coming with me."
Kairo raised an eyebrow, his analytical mind immediately catching the count. "Four?"
From the dark, shadowed crevice of the canyon wall behind them, a quiet, cloaked figure slowly stepped out into the light. Renji stood there, his hands tucked into his sleeves, his face pale as he looked at Rhydian in utter disbelief.
"Wait..." Renji muttered, his voice barely above a whisper. "How did you even find me hiding back there?"
Daichi let out a tired breath, rubbing his temples. "Yeah... I didn't even notice Renji was following us either." He looked back at his father, his posture straightening. "Well, Father, I am at your service. But... what about my fifty brothers back at the estate?"
Rhydian Vale's expression darkened, the light humor vanishing completely from his eyes as he looked out toward the towering mountain walls surrounding the City of Harmony. The wind picked up, whistling ominously through the canyon crags.
"They will protect the perimeter," Rhydian declared, his voice dropping into a stern, commanding tone. "Effective immediately, we have to place our entire land in total quarantine. No one enters. No one leaves."
He looked at the four boys, his gaze heavy with the weight of the coming storm. "We have to be extraordinarily careful. Whatever is coming... it is not a small threat. If even the Captain of the Seven Seas was mutilated and driven back by him... we are dealing with a truly cunning bastard."
The sun had barely cleared the jagged teeth of the eastern ridge, casting a cold, brilliant amber light across the mountain valley. Below, the City of Harmony pulsed with quiet life—smoke rising from slate chimneys, the distant ring of blacksmith anvils, and the low, collective hum of thousands of unsuspecting lives.
Then, the world went cold.
It began not with a roar, but with a sudden, suffocating shift in the atmosphere. The morning breeze, crisp and smelling of pine and damp earth, abruptly died. The leaves of the ancient canopy stopped rustling. The birds—hundreds of them nesting along the canyon cliffs—ceased their morning calls all at once, taking flight in a frantic, silent wave that turned the sky dark for a brief second before they scattered into the far mountains.
"What is...?" Akio muttered, his hand instinctively dropping to the hilt at his waist. His knuckles turned white.
A deep, sub-audible vibration hummed through the soles of their boots. It wasn't the ground shaking from an earthquake, but the stone itself resonating with an immense, distant displacement of weight. In the turquoise pool below the waterfall, the water stopped churning; the white foam flattened as if crushed under an invisible palm, and the deep basin turned a dark, bruised indigo.
"Look at the horizon," Renji whispered, his voice trembling slightly as he stepped out from the canyon shadow.
Beyond the jagged coastal peaks, where the southern ocean met the edge of the sky, the horizon began to bulge.
The ocean did not simply swell—it buckled. Millions of tons of dark, heavy seawater boiled upward, cresting into a tidal ridge that rose higher than the coastal cliffs themselves. Foam as thick as clouds poured off a rising, endless mass of dark slate scales, each individual plate the size of a warship's hull, slick with black slime and dripping ancient kelp.
Higher it rose. And higher.
The sun was swallowed whole.
A shadow, vast and suffocating, crept across the coastal waters, swept over the foothills, and washed over the entire City of Harmony like ink spilled across parchment. The golden morning light vanished, replaced by a eerie, twilight dusk. The temperature plunged instantly; the air grew thick with the heavy, stagnant stench of the fathomless deep—brine, rotting abyssal kelp, and suffocating ozone.
The thing was not merely large; it defied comprehension. A serpentine leviathan, a serpent of the ancient depths, uncoiled against the sky. Its body stretched endlessly back into the ocean mist, thick enough to crush mountains beneath its sheer mass. Along its spine, rows of jagged, bioluminescent dorsal fins flared with a sickly, pale violet light, humming with an energy that made the air bleed static.
Slowly, the abyssal beast turned its massive head toward the land. Two pale, lidless eyes, each larger than the King's keep, burned through the haze, casting a cold, dead glare over the fragile city below.
Kairo stood frozen on the basalt ledge, his breath trapped in his chest. His analytical mind, always calculating, always measuring, spun into absolute overdrive—trying to measure the mass, the scale, the impossibility before them—before completely collapsing under the weight of terror. His knees trembled, the cold mountain wind whipping his hair into his eyes.
"No way..." Kairo whispered, his voice barely audible over the rising hum of the sea beast's breath. "We are all dead."
High atop the leviathan's slick, mountainous spine, standing amidst a forest of pale violet dorsal fins, Max stared down at the darkened landscape. The wind up there was a howling gale that carried the freezing spray of the abyssal depths, whipping his leather coat wildly against his scarred frame. His single, bloodshot eye darted across the sprawling topography of the valley below, cutting through the unnatural twilight.
"Where is he..." Max growled into the storm, his teeth grinding together so hard a drop of crimson seeped from his lip. "Where is that damn enemy... I know he's hiding somewhere inside this wretched land!"
Down on the trembling basalt ledge, the sheer impossibility of the titan looming above proved too much to bear. Kairo's knees finally gave out completely. He hit the damp moss hard, his hands digging into the wet gravel as the stagnant smell of rotten kelp and ozone stung his nostrils.
"Well... Rhydian Vale," Kairo gasped, his chest heaving as he stared up at the monstrous shadow blotting out the sky. "You were completely right. Whoever cut off that captain's hand and drove him to this... he's a pure psycho. Max was supposed to be in his retirement! And... and why was he even afraid of my father in the first place? If he's this unhinged, he's just going to attack all of us!"
Daichi stood rigid beside his father, his boots slipping slightly on the moisture-slicked stone as the air pressure continued to plunge. "We have no other choice, King Ariston," Daichi called out over the rising, unnatural wind, his voice surprisingly steady despite his pale face. "This leviathan is going to go completely insane now. It's about to attack the whole valley."
Rhydian Vale adjusted his dark lapels, a faint, proud curve touching his lips despite the impending doom. "You are pretty talented, my son... for figuring it out so quickly."
Daichi's eyes widened slightly, a subtle flush of embarrassment creeping up his neck as he quickly averted his gaze toward the roaring waterfall. "I... thank you, Father."
"Well..." Renji muttered, his voice barely audible as he curled his fingers into his dark sleeves, staring up at the titanic lidless eyes burning in the sky. "Thank you, guys. It's because of all of you that I had a happy life..."
"Shut up!" Akio snapped, turning his head violently toward Renji, his teeth bared in a grimace of pure adrenaline. "Dying right now would be a blessing compared to what comes next! Think about it! What if you survive the initial crushed mountain, but you're left lying there with shattered bones, dying after hours of agonizing pain?!"
Kairo looked back and forth between them, his hands trembling against the wet rock. "Wait... you guys are scaring the absolute hell out of me! Should... shouldn't we run?!"
"Even if you ran, what would you do?!" Akio yelled back, gesturing frantically at the colossal serpent whose head alone spanned entire city blocks. "He will cover kilometers—miles—in seconds! Are you serious right now?!"
Above them, a horrific, sky-shattering screech tore through the clouds.
The ancient leviathan's eyes turned a violent, blood-red hue. It defied its master. Thrashing its massive tail against the distant coastal ridge, it shattered an entire rock face into a rain of falling boulders. The beast went utterly wild, its jaw opening to reveal rows of translucent, jagged teeth, preparing to crush the entire canyon under its ocean-born rage.
"How dare you..." Max's booming roar echoed down from the beast's head, laced with pure, apocalyptic fury. "How dare you not obey me?!"
King Ariston did not wait. The King was already moving, his massive bare feet slamming into the sheer basalt wall of the cliff face as he began to scale the mountain at impossible speed, his aura bursting outward like a mantle of gold. He primed his fists, ready to leap directly into the maw of the titan to draw its wrath away from the boys.
But what occurred next silenced the very air in the canyon.
Max moved his right arm—the limb that had been reduced to a scarred, misshapen stump.
In a fraction of a second, the heavy leather sleeve tore apart as a broad, gleaming blade of black iron, forged seamlessly into the bone of his elbow, extended into the morning mist. Max shifted his weight on his crude wooden peg leg, drew back his whole upper body, and struck downward with sheer, unadulterated raw power.
A single, blinding arc of silver light cleaved the sky in two.
WHOOSH—CRACK!
The sound was not a slicing of flesh, but the atmospheric detonation of compressed air shattering the sound barrier. The massive, mountain-sized head of the abyssal leviathan was severed cleanly from its neck in a single, instantaneous stroke.
The strike was so fast, so utterly absolute, that the sea serpent didn't even have time to bleed. Before the giant head could fall onto the city below, the entire colossal entity—thousands of tons of scale, bone, and ancient magic—dissolved into a massive cloud of sea spray and vanishing grey mist, blown away by the rising mountain wind.
King Ariston froze mid-ascent on the cliffside, his fingers dug deep into the rock, his jaw slack as he stared at the empty, blue sky where a sun-blocking god of the deep had existed just a second prior.
"Woah..." Ariston breathed, letting out a long, incredulous laugh as he dropped back down onto the ledge. "No way... you've gotten a lot stronger, Max."
High above them, floating briefly against the clear blue canvas of the morning air before the currents caught him, Max adjusted his dark hat over his single eye. The black iron blade strapped to his arm caught the returning sunlight, gleaming with lethal precision.
"Yeah," Max's raspy voice drifted down, carried by the dispersing winds. "I would like nothing more than to stay and have a fierce, full-blooded fight with you, Ariston... but the thing is, until I find that bastard, I won't rest! I would even sacrifice my own fighting will if it means tearing him apart!"
With a sudden distortion of the air, the Captain of the Seven Seas vanished into the sky, leaving behind only the faint scent of sea salt and ozone.
King Ariston stood among the four boys on the damp moss, exhaling a massive cloud of vapor. He shook his head, a wry, terrifying grin spreading across his face as he looked toward the horizon.
"Rest in peace..." Ariston chuckled softly, his voice heavy with dark amusement. "Whoever angered this guy... he will find you in the absolute depths of hell."