Marisol was sinking in the same dream again.

The weightlessness of it should've felt peaceful, like a freefall without an end, but the deeper she went, the more the sea twisted around her. Thick and viscous like tar. It clung to her limbs, wrapped around her throat, and filled her lungs with the heavy press of silence. It was always like this. Always the same cold, black sea of oil stretching into infinity.

But she'd never had a dream of sinking before, and this time, she was going into the deep.

Can't… move.

Her body felt sluggish, half-paralyzed. Her mind swayed on the edge of consciousness, barely tethered to the world. Somewhere above her, the real sea churned and raged, but down here, everything was eerily still. The pressure of the abyss crushed the sound out of her bones, leaving only the slow, sickening pull downwards.

Can't… hear.

She drifted past something massive. An iron husk, ruined and rotting in the deep. Captain Enrique's first warship, and the one she'd boarded after escaping from the giant remipede. The wreckage loomed around her, its broken masts reaching up like skeletal fingers, the tattered sails drifting in the current like ghostly shrouds. She sank past the ship, and though she didn't want to look, she couldn't turn away from the suspended corpses around the debris.

Catrina.

The Guards.

The people she hadn't been fast enough to save.

They watched her as she sank. Their expressions were cold, empty, and unreadable. They didn't move. Didn't speak. They simply stared, their gazes like hooks in her skin, dragging her lower.

Can't… move!

She tried to push against the pull, tried to move her arms, her glaives, but the sea of oil wouldn't let her. It swallowed her struggles, weighed her down until the wreckage and the ghosts blurred into shadow.

And she kept sinking.

The oil around her twisted, reshaped itself into something else. The dark spiraled. Walls formed around her. Tall, endless, moving. She knew this place. The whirlpool's walls.

She was sinking through Depth Five, and she wasn't alone again.

More corpses emerged from the gloom. The First Lighthouse Imperator. The Guards and Imperators she'd left behind when she escaped to the surface. They hovered in the abyss, unmoving, watching her fall past them. No words. No accusations. Just the silent, crushing weight of recognition.

Marisol clenched her jaw, forced herself to breathe, forced herself to remember—this wasn't real. It wasn't real.

But it felt real. It always did.

The darkness thickened, and the oil twisted again.

Now she saw them around her—the Highwind Inn staff. The civilians who'd died before the Worm God would warp them out, the soldiers who'd been stretched too thin trying to fend off three Insect Gods at the same time. All of them had fought. None of them had fled. They'd been swallowed by a war they never asked for, and now they were all sinking with her.

She twisted, her heartbeat hammering against her ribs.

There were more bodies beneath her. More than she could ever name. A churning mass of faceless dead, stretching endlessly downward. Swallowed by the deep. Soon to be forgotten by time.

And she was falling to join them.

The fear hit all at once. A raw, visceral terror that seized her chest like a vice. She gasped, but the blackness flooded her throat, strangling the breath before it could escape. She tried to move, tried to swim, but her body wouldn't listen. She was trembling too hard, limbs locked up with panic.

She wasn't supposed to die like this. She had things to do. People waiting for her. She had to move.

But the abyss was waiting.

It yawned beneath her, wide and endless, swallowing all light, all sound, all warmth. And she was plummeting straight into its depths, unable to stop herself, unable to fight it.

She was going to die down here.

She was going to—

Marisol's body screamed as she was dragged from the water, but her mind hadn't caught up. She was still drowning. It was in her lungs, burning, thick and black like it'd become part of her blood.

Then someone shook her. Hard. Bandaged hands clamped on her shoulders, dragging her up onto solid ground. She gagged, coughed, and a flood of seawater forced itself from her lungs. Her stomach twisted violently, her ribs spasming as she fought for breath.

"Lass!" Victor's voice snapped into focus. She continued choking, sputtering, vision spinning in all directions. The black sand beneath her hands was coarse and real, but it felt like she was still floating, weightless and wrong, as if the sea had carved something out of her and left a hollow in its place.

But she was very much still alive, and somehow, the old man had managed to drag her, Maria, and Andres onto the distant giant horseshoe crab island.

[Only ten minutes have elapsed since the three of you were shot out of Kalakos' mouth,] the Archive said, distant and clinical. [Analysing biological vitals: Acute hypoxia. Severe stress response. Current emotional state: shock, panic, extreme disorientation.]

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No shit.

Her pulse was hammering so hard she could hear it in her skull, a frantic drumming that refused to slow even as the Archive flooded her bloodstream with chemical regulators. They weren't working. As she watched about a dozen more Guards and Imperators wade knee-deep onto the beach to yank out Andres and Maria—who were similarly sluggish, if not even more than her—her hands continued clenching against the sand, nails scraping over rock.

Victor was saying something right next to her, gripping her arms. Then she was lifted up by several more pairs of hands, laid down, her back pressing against something hard—two metal crates shoved together like a makeshift bed.

He was telling her to breathe.

She couldn't.

She became aware of everyone around her. Helena. Claudia. Hundreds, a thousand other people who'd jumped onto the island in what felt like not too long ago. All of them were just standing around the black sand beach, and save for the medics pulling the three of them onto makeshift beds, none of them were moving deeper onto the island with their crates, cannons, supplies, and wounded.

Why?

What… are they looking at?

She couldn't help but turn her head and follow their gaze.

Her breath hitched the moment she saw the black tide.

It was larger since the last time she saw it. It was an unrelenting tide of chitin and legs and segmented bodies crashing over the water like a living storm. There was no end to it. No gaps. No weakness. It was a wall spanning the entire horizon, the glossy, black shells reflecting sunlight in strange, unnatural ways, making it seem like a shifting shadow—like the crawling maw of something infinitely hungry—but it was most definitely not a shadow.

And cutting through the center of it was Kalakos.

The colossal Remipede God wasn't slowing. Wasn't hesitating. She was coming straight for them, jaw pried open, swallowing the sea in front of her as she led the charge.

A voice rasped beside her.

"So that's the Swarmblood Art of a giant remipede."

Andres was lying on his own stretcher next to Marisol, eyes dark with exhaustion, but his words registered quickly in everyone's heads. Marisol's gaze dragged away from the tide, back toward the island.

The beach was littered with bodies. Some were still breathing, some were barely moving. Wounded soldiers, burned sailors, Imperators slumped against ruined structures, their armour half-melted into their flesh. Those who'd been so much as grazed by Kalakos' acid beam were shaking, their skin blistered and scorched where the droplets had touched them. Those who'd been hit directly—they weren't here anymore.

Gone. Erased.

Her hands clenched into the fabric of her torn clothes.

… It was a mistake.

The thought slashed through her like a blade, sharp and undeniable.

She was the deciding vote, after all. Back then, when they'd debated whether to fight for Whirlpool City or abandon it, she had made the call. She had tipped the balance.

And now all of them—every last one of them—were too injured to fight. The Guards had already exhausted themselves working the warships for an entire week straight. The Imperators had already spent their all against Eurypteria and Rhizocapala back in the city. Reina was bedridden. Claudia couldn't fight. Maria and Andres were groaning, half-conscious, as the medics tried their best to patch up the acid burns the two of them had protected Marisol from the brunt of.

They had nothing left.

No one was strong enough to stand against the Remipede God.

Her breath caught as her gaze flicked back to Kalakos.

That acid beam was unstoppable. Kalakos had burned through everything three kilometres in front of her, and she could do it again in three more minutes. There was no shielding the giant horseshoe crab island from it. There was no telling the Whitewhales to swerve and veer them off course. They were like sitting ducks on a giant pond, and the moment Kalakos fired that beam again from three kilometres away, they'd all be wiped out.

Was this their end?

Would the Deepwater Legion Front fall here?

"... No."

Victor's cane hit the sand with a thump. A sharp, jarring noise that reverberated through the noise of the beach like the fall of a hammer.

Marisol blinked, her gaze snapping to him as he stood tall, facing Kalakos.

He didn't say a word.

He wasn't looking at anyone, and he wasn't reacting to the despair around him.

"Andres, Reina, and Maria are out," he said plainly. "Hugo's gone, Claudia's a healer, and the lass has burned herself with her own lightning. It appears to me there's literally nobody left to deal with the black tide, so I guess I'm going to move now."

Marisol gritted her teeth, pushing herself up to a sitting position. "And… you think you can take him on alone?" she hissed. "You're… look at you. You're the oldest old man there is. What are you… gonna…"

Victor didn't flinch. He didn't react at all as Marisol trailed off into the weighty silence between them.

He was already beyond her reach, already slipping into something different, something dangerous, and as the first flicker of his power began to unfurl, the air itself seemed to shrink.

His aura swelled, spreading out in an invisible shockwave. It wasn't a mere ripple. It was a detonation of bioarcanic essence, an explosion that couldn't be seen, but could be felt, deep in the bones. It pressed down on them, on the whole island.

The ground trembled.

Everyone staggered back, winced, as if the very air had turned to iron. Even the soldiers who'd once been poised for battle now froze, caught in the grip of something far more terrifying than their enemies. The faintest tremor ran through the sand beneath their feet, and the giant horseshoe crab itself stopped swimming, jerking the whitewhales in front to a complete halt.

Then, like fire consuming kindling, Victor's bandages began to burn. The fabric over his legs started to blacken first, then disintegrate in a slow, deliberate fashion. The rest of the fabric across his body started glowing as well, but they were burning much slower, and nobody was looking at the rest of his body anyways.

After all, two glaives emerged below his knees, wicked sharp and gleaming silver in the sun.

They were identical to hers, but where hers crackled with pinkish-blue lightning, his blazed with a violent, bluish-gold energy. The intensity of the lightning was different. It was fiercer, more raw, like… his lightning was a living being contained within the glaives themselves.

… He really does have it.

He has—

Before she could even finish that thought, Victor's voice cut through it.

"The disciple doesn't worry about the mentor, especially when the mentor is the first person to ever have lightning coursing through his veins," he said, reaching into his pocket as the bandages over his arms also started to crackle off, igniting into bluish-gold cinders.

In one smooth motion, he tossed something at her. She caught it instinctively—months of catching his pebbles early in the morning paying off—and her fingers immediately brushed cold glass. A small cork.

She looked down and smelled brine before she saw the small vial of soft, ethereal blue liquid.

Her pulse quickened. Her eyes shot up to meet his.

"This is—"

"That vial was supposed to be for me," he said, like it didn't matter. Like it wasn't important. "If I used it myself, I might get one last push out of my Art, but I promised I'd get you back to your mama, didn't I?

"So don't worry about me.

"You've more than earned it in my eyes."

Then he tipped his feathered hat, and the lightning around his glaives exploded.

It was like whips of pure energy cracking across the sky. His lightning sizzled and sparked, filling the air with a sound that was half roar, half scream. Marisol wasn't even that close to him, but she felt the heat arcing through the air around him, shooting sparks into the sand and sizzling the beach beneath him.

Nearby soldiers flinched back, eyes wide in terror, as his lightning became too much to handle. The sands themselves glowed as though they were about to melt. The light was blinding—too bright, too much—but Marisol, for her part, couldn't tear her eyes away.

It was the fiercest lightning she'd ever seen.

And with one hand still resting on his cane and the other tipping his hat, Victor turned his head just enough to catch her gaze one last time.

His grin hadn't wavered.

"... Now watch and learn, lass," he said. "You ain't ever seen speed like this before."

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