The morning air smelled like roasted crab and sea salt.

Kuku sat high in the tallest palm tree, his little legs dangling over the large leaves, his crab helmet slightly too small for his head now. He was growing. And he'd keep growing still. Below him, breakfast was already in full swing. Hundreds of 'Damselfly Oracles'—all tall and graceful and clad in metal masks shaped like damselflies—were passing around thatch trays of fruit and steaming crab, their shimmering wings catching sunlight as the other crab children stuffed their mouths full.

Under normal circumstances, the crab children wouldn't have allowed so many foreign tribesmen on their island. The humans of the Whirlpool City were one thing, but Kuku had heard from a little bird that the Damselfly Oracles were man-eating cannibals. Obviously, he'd been terrified for his friends when he heard they were going to be living on the island for a little while, but… what else could they do?

Where else could they go?

Kuku could see it. Far past the floating island, past the deep, deep blue. The black tide—that crawling, seemingly endless wall of plagas del mar—moved slowly and steadily across the western horizon, creeping ever closer to the Harbour City just a couple kilometres away from them. The city's great 'autocannons' lined the high walls and towers, already pointing at the black tide, but even from this far away, Kuku could feel it. The battle would be long. And painful.

The Harbour City and its soldiers were ready, but was ready ever enough?

He frowned, gripping the bark of his tree a little tighter. He wished he was down there. Maybe even in the city. But not here, on the island, safe and eating. He wasn't dumb. He knew he was too small and too weak to make much of a difference against the black tide.

Even still, the thought of sitting and waiting while people fought and died made his belly feel all wrong, like he'd swallowed a stone.

… Then he heard it.

A crackling sound, faint at first, but sharp. The kind that made his skin prickle, like a storm was about to break.

He blinked, glancing over his shoulder—then froze.

A storm was breaking.

From the deep inland—past the hills and farming fields of the Harbour City, past the thick jungles and the rivers cutting through the land like veins—a massive storm raged towards the city.

But it wasn't normal.

It wasn't natural.

Storms didn't move like that.

Kuku's breath caught as he stared. The clouds, thick and black, swirled like a cloak behind something small and impossibly fast, a streak of lightning cutting across the earth at speeds no man, no beast, no god should move. Earth seemed to blur beneath them, the rivers splintering into mist, the very air twisting in their wake.

They were coming straight for the Harbour City.

Yet Kuku didn't feel afraid.

A soft flutter of wings came from behind him. A moment later, a young girl landed beside him, perching on a thick branch. She was one of the Damselfly Oracles. Her long silver hair caught in the wind, her thin eyes narrowing as she raised her mask and tried to get a better look at the storm.

She was silent for a long moment.

Then her breath hitched. She jolted, head snapping towards Kuku, her mouth opening in a sudden rush of words—fast, bright, desperate. A string of language Kuku still didn't understand, and he probably won't for a long time, though… he caught one familiar word.

A single name.

He grinned so hard his face hurt.

Grabbing the trunk and swinging himself down, his feet hit the bark, and he slid, the roughness scratching at his soles as he tore down the length of the tree.

The others needed to see this.

The Harbour City trembled under the weight of its own evacuation. Tens of thousands flooded the streets, pushing, stumbling, dragging what little they could carry. Wagons groaned beneath their burdens, wheels biting into stone as panicked giant ants flicked their antennae at the distant sound of gunfire. Caravans choked the roads, overloaded with supplies, rolling onward in slow, desperate lines stretching out of the city's front gate like veins bursting open. The people—mothers gripping their children, fathers hoisting sacks over their shoulders, elders clutching relics of the past—moved as one massive, living thing, driven by instinct. By fear. By the single, primal need to leave.

Captain Enrique stood outside the city's eastern gate on a stack of crates, barking orders.

"Keep movin'!" he shouted. "No stoppin'—stay with your group! Guards, tighten the lines!"

His men rushed to comply, fanning out along the city's outer roads, gripping their blades and rifles as they pressed between evacuees and guided the tides of people forward. The evacuation had been steady for hours—days—and so far, order remained intact. But tension clung to the air, thick and suffocating. There was no screaming yet, no trampling. But there would be, eventually.

Because a battle was coming.

Enrique had seen it before. He'd seen what happened when the last line of defense fell, when the Swarm overran the streets, when there was nowhere left to run. He'd seen the Whirlpool City turn into a feeding ground, and he'd watched from the cold waters as his own family was taken, screaming, into the black.

His jaw tightened. He shoved the memory down, buried it beneath duty.

Focus.

The Harbour City was fortified. It was armed with autocannons, bastion walls, and a solid standing army to man the ramparts. This time, they were prepared. The fight ahead would be long and brutal, but they had a chance. If they held today, and if they whittled enough of the black tide, they could push it back and live to see another day.

But then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

It wasn't the black tide.

It was something else.

He turned, looking inland, into the continent—and his breath caught.

A storm was racing toward them.

It wasn't natural. It wasn't a slow-moving front, or a distant cloudbank rolling in from the mountains. This was something different. A monstrous, writhing fog of black and blue, sweeping over the land like a living thing. The wind shrieked ahead of it, curling through the hills, carrying the raw scent of lightning.

Thunder slammed through the sky, rolling outward in violent, concussive waves.

Enrique squinted into the chaos, rain pelting his face as the first waves of wind slammed into the city's eastern walls. The storm came in fast and hard, and the morning sky darkened. The evacuation stopped. The entire front gate—thousands of people, guards, and refugees—froze as one, staring straight ahead at the oncoming storm, transfixed. The wind caught scarves and banners, ripped through cloaks, lifted loose papers and tore them into the sky. Giant ants reared, antennae flattening against their skulls, screeching in absolute terror. Even the war-hardened guards hesitated, their grips tightening on their weapons as if steel could protect them from something like this.

The black and blue storm slammed into the city entrance a second later, swallowing the gate in an explosion of wind and rain and fog. The force of it rocked the stone beneath Enrique's feet, the downpour drenching him instantly, turning the ground into slick pools of water. He gritted his teeth, raising his arm to shield his eyes as the winds howled around him, threatening to drag him off his feet.

And as the black storm rolled across all of them, blanketing them in screaming wind and slashing rain and the constant, rolling, growling thunder—a blur.

Too fast to see, too fast to track. A streak of raw, unchained velocity, moving faster than any human body had the right to move. Her glowing figure tore through the eastern lands, trailing the black storm in her wake, lightning bursting at her heels.

Enrique caught the briefest glimpse of her face as she streaked past him like a bolt of living thunder, shooting into the city like a comet.

The wind roared in her absence. It carried the rain sideways, hammering against the stone. A heartbeat passed. Then another. The guards—his men, his soldiers—slowly turned to look at him, still wide-eyed, but he found the heart to exhale sharply.

Then, he chuckled.

It was quiet. Just a dry, low thing, lost almost instantly in the storm, but he dipped his head nevertheless as rain dripped down his face.

"... Don't stop her!" he roared back at the guards in the city. "Open the road! Move people out of her way! Make sure she can find the biggest ramp in the damn city if it's the last thing you have to do!"

The lantern chamber was a storm of its own.

Heat pressed against Maria's skin. Not the heat of fire, no, but of too many bodies crammed into too small a space—of breath and movement and urgency thickening the air until it became something suffocating. The long rectangular table at the top of the lighthouse in the middle of the city was barely visible beneath the maps, ledgers, and ammunition reports scattered across its surface, pages curling at the edges where her hands had gripped them too hard. The smell of sweat and iron and smudged ink clung to the wood like the ghosts of a thousand lost battles. The floor vibrated faintly beneath her boots, a constant hum from the city's autocannons shifting into position, waiting for the black tide.

She turned a page in her ledger, skimming the figures again. The truth sat before her in hard, inked numbers: they had too many guns, not enough shells, too many men, and not enough time. The Harbour City had been built to withstand the worst storms of the world, but even the strongest walls meant nothing when the sea itself rose to swallow them.

The moment the black tide entered the range of their autocannons, their munitions would last a day. Two, at most. After that, it'd be blood and teeth and the crack of bone against chitin. They'd have to go out and whittle down the rest of the black tide with their bare hands.

Across the room, Andres was shouting into his conch shells again, voice hoarse from hours and days of command. While she'd been busy coordinating the autocannons, he'd been busy coordinating the men, and she was glad she wasn't doing his job. She could barely hear him now—she'd grown too used to his shouting—but it seemed like a nightmare trying to get everyone to be on the same page.

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…

Then, something changed.

The shift was subtle, but it brushed against her skin like the touch of an unseen hand. She lowered the papers in her hand and glanced up. The air curling through the single open window above her carried something heavier, something thicker. 'Charged' was the word she was looking for.

Her fingers stilled against the papers.

She turned, stepping away from the table, past the frantic voices, past Andres' barking commands, past the weight of too many Imperators and Guards and dockmasters leaning over too many maps. Her boots were soundless as she approached the glass walls surrounding the lantern room.

She looked far north, to the Vile Lands, and saw nothing. She looked far south, to the colossal fungi forests, and saw nothing. She looked far east, towards the city's eastern walls—and there she saw it.

An oncoming storm.

A great, black mass raced toward the Harbour City's eastern gate, devouring the land beneath it. Not fog. Not mere rain. A churning, howling maelstrom, darker than the deepest depths of any sea. Lightning seared through its belly, flashing in violent streaks, and then it hit the eastern gate like a tidal wave crashing against jagged stone, swallowing the entire wall.

The storm didn't slow, didn't pause. It poured into the streets, devouring entire blocks, wind screaming through alleyways, rattling rooftops, bending iron like reeds. Buildings groaned under the pressure, windows vibrating in their frames.

Lightning continued striking within the black storm, and inside it—for the briefest, most impossible moment—she felt she saw the flash of glaives made of pure lightning, carving through stone, steel, and everything that dared stand in their path.

She barely had time to process it before the storm moved deeper into the city.

It wasn't stopping.

It was headed straight for her lighthouse.

She didn't hesitate. She took a calm step back, grabbed the nearest soldier by the collar, and yanked him back with her. The man barely had time to choke out a protest before—

The glass exploded.

The walls of the lantern room shattered, every pane bursting inwards in a rain of jagged shards. The wind that followed slammed into the room like the fist of the wind god, knocking men off their feet, sending maps and ledgers flying everywhere. Shouts erupted from every corner of the chamber. Soldiers ducked, shielding their faces, stumbling as the shockwave rolled through them.

Even Andres' conch shell shattered in his hands.

… For her part, Maria simply closed her eyes.

She let the wind sweep past her, curl around her fingers, and tug at the hem of her coat.

She didn't resist it.

She listened to the storm—to the flow of the world itself—and she smiled as she watched the source of the black storm skate up the walls of the lighthouse, as if using it as a ramp.

So it seems you finally know how to read the currents.

How's your new outfit working for you?

Pain had become an old companion by now. It lingered in Reina's bones, settled deep in her ribs where Eurypteria's tail had nearly torn her apart, curled behind her eyes like a dull fire. Every breath was a slow ache with no true relief. Even lying still on the infirmary bed nearly an entire month after she was stabbed didn't really help. Every part of her felt too tight and too heavy, like her body was something she had been forced into rather than something she owned.

Across the bed, Aidan let out a sharp breath, shifting slightly against his bandages. Bruno, beside him, stared at the ceiling, his expression unreadable. They weren't much better off than she was, though the worst of their wounds had closed already. They were lucky. So was she.

Helena sat between them, perched stiffly on her stool, arms crossed over her chest. She wasn't injured, but Reina could see the tension in her shoulders, the barely checked impatience in her fingers tapping against her forearm. None of them liked being here. None of them wanted to be here.

Reina shut her eyes, inhaling slowly.

She should be out there. Even if her muscles protested—even if she knew she could barely stand without collapsing—she should still be out there. Fighting. Bleeding. Making sure there was still a city left standing by morning.

But Claudia had forced her down, and even Reina couldn't argue against that. Not when she'd seen the exhaustion in Claudia's eyes, the way the medic's hands trembled even when she wasn't healing anyone with her shrimp antennae. Claudia had been pushing herself for a month straight, keeping people alive when they should've died a hundred times over.

Reina had insisted Claudia take a break, because if anyone deserved one, it was her. The problem was, Claudia had a condition: Reina had to take a break from this coming battle, too.

Now, she had to lie here and wait.

A low murmur of voices filled the infirmary in the middle of the city, hushed words exchanged between medics checking on their patients, the occasional groan of someone shifting wrong in their sleep. The heavy scent of antiseptic clung to the air, mingling with the dull iron of dried blood. Somewhere outside, the distant roar of testing autocannon fire echoed through the city, but she had more than gotten used to the noise already.

She wasn't used to the wind changing, though.

It wasn't obvious at first. It was just a shift in the air pressure, a faint hum beneath her skin. Then the voices in the infirmary started getting drowned out by something greater.

Screams. Shouts. The sudden howl of wind ripping through the streets.

The walls of the infirmary shuddered, and her eyes snapped open just as a deafening crack split the air.

Lightning.

Lots of it.

The sky outside flashed white, and then the entire building lurched again as if the earth itself had been struck. The windows rattled violently, the canvas dividers between beds flaring up from the sudden gusts. Dust rained down from the rafters. Dim lantern light flickered wildly as if about to be snuffed out.

Helena shot up from her seat, knocking her stool over in the process.

"What the hell is—" she started, but before she could finish, another wave of wind and thunder rolled through the city, shaking the infirmary so hard the beds skidded an inch across the floor.

The medics scrambled, rushing to stabilise the injured, securing bloodbag stands before they could topple and shouting orders no one could hear over the roar outside.

Helena narrowed her eyes toward the entrance, her whole posture screaming tension.

"I'm going to check," she said, nodding at Reina and her older brothers. "Stay here."

Then she turned to leave, but Reina immediately whipped her scorpion tail forward, curling it around Helena's wrist before she could take another step.

Helena froze, startled. She looked down at the smooth black carapace wrapped firmly, and then she turned her head back towards Reina, brows furrowing.

Reina just smiled.

Soft. Knowing.

"It's alright," she murmured. "There's no need to check."

The answer was already here—thundering through the streets, carving her way across the city, turning the sky into light and fury and shadow.

Reina let out a slow breath, closing her eyes again.

She'd fought beside plenty of Imperators and Guards. She'd sparred the other Lighthouse Imperators many, many times. And she'd always hoped—prayed—for a rival her age who could match her stride for stride, blow for blow.

And in the end, she'd found one.

She was glad for that after all.

The morning wind rolled in heavily from the great blue, thick with salt and damp with the taste of distant rain. Claudia lay sprawled across the roof of a tower on the westernmost ramparts, facing the sea, and the stone beneath her was still cold from the lingering bite of night.

One arm cushioned the back of her head, the other cradled a half-empty bottle of alcohol against her ribs. Her coat lay loose over her shoulders, sleeves rolled up, and her legs were crossed as well. From up here, she could see everything and everywhere in the city: its countless streets winding through the ruins of war, a messy labyrinth of pushing bodies, flickering lanterns, and artillery supply caravans. Look the other way, and she'd see the great blue kissed by the fierce morning light—but the black tide was there as well. That shitty black wave dominating the horizon was no sight for sore eyes, but for now, just for this moment, she didn't want to think about the black tide.

She lifted her bottle, took a slow swig, and let the warmth spread through her chest.

A medic wasn't supposed to drink on duty—wasn't supposed to stop moving, stop working, stop saving people—but she had healed more soldiers in the past month than most medics did in their entire lifetimes. She'd sent thousands back onto the battlefield, stitched up men who swore they'd get stronger, and cleaned the blood from the beds only to watch them fill up again the next day.

And for what?

Promises were cheap.

'I'll come back stronger.'

'I won't end up back here, Claudia.'

'I swear it.'

All the same words. All the same empty breath. They always stop coming back, every last one of them. The beds may change, the names may change, but the cycle wouldn't. Blood spilt would still be blood seeped into the walls no matter how hard they scrubbed. It'd always be just a matter of time before another injured man took their place.

She took another swig, let the burn sit on her tongue, and exhaled slowly.

Then came a sound that didn't belong from her right.

Screaming. Louder than before. Not the pained kind. Not the kind she'd grown numb to.

This was something else.

She pulled her brows together and turned her head slightly just in time to see a storm moving through the city.

Black winds churned between the sprawl of terracotta buildings, thick and roaring, streaking through with striking claps of thunder. The force of it shook rooftops, splintered wood, and sent banners snapping like whips. Wind tore through the lower districts, rattled shutters, upended market stalls, and sent dust and debris howling through the air. It wasn't a devastating storm, no, in the sense it was only far more menacing-looking than it really was powerful, but the entire city itself still seemed to shudder beneath its weight.

And at its center…

Something shot upward.

A small figure, barely visible against the swirling black, launched straight into the bright morning sky.

Claudia watched as the single shooting star leapt off a giant lighthouse like it was a ramp, burst free from the storm, and soared. It was moving so fast—so impossibly fast—that it crossed the rest of the city in an instant, heading straight for the far western walls where Claudia was.

Then, the shooting star passed directly over her.

…

For a heartbeat, everything else ceased.

Claudia tilted her head back, eyes following the streak of light as it flew beyond the ramparts, past the city, past the final bastion of the Deepwater Legion Front, and past the walls that'd stood firm for decades against the Swarm. The storm it'd brought with it raged on, rolling through the streets, but without it leading the charge, the storm would dissipate soon enough. The shooting star itself wouldn't.

It soared straight at the black tide on the distant horizon.

So Claudia exhaled slowly, closed her eyes softly, and remembered.

Decades of faces flashed through her mind. The tens of thousands of soldiers she'd treated. The countless voices that'd promised her they'd get stronger, survive, and fight for the city. The faces that'd stopped returning, the empty beds that'd never stayed empty for long.

She had learned not to believe in people.

It was easier that way.

So what makes you different, little lass?

The first time Claudia saw her, she was half-dead, dragged into her infirmary by Victor Morina as a ruin of a girl. When the old man said she was burned and broken from crossing the great blue alone, Claudia had laughed. It was an unbelievable story. 'There's no saving her, then' was one of the humorous responses she'd considered giving the old man, but that wasn't the truth, and that wasn't what she did. Besides, the old man had used one of his two Art charges to drag her into the city despite Defense Protocol 'Black Storm'. It would've been a pointless expenditure if Claudia hadn't tried to save her.

Claudia would be lying if she said she thought the 'Sand-Dancer' would survive her first dive into the whirlpool.

But then she came back.

Unconscious, but alive.

And then she kept coming back.

Over and over.

No matter how many battles she fought. No matter how many times she should've died.

Why?

Why you of all people?

…

Claudia opened her eyes again.

The shooting star was still soaring, a pinkish-blue streak of light cutting across the sky.

So she huffed a laugh and shook her head.

Well, what d'ya know?

Maybe Sand-Dancers can fly, after all.

She took another swig of her bottle, let the warmth sit in her chest for another moment, and then groaned as she crawled onto her feet.

The city was still screaming. The wind was still howling. The storm was still raging. But for the first time in decades, she wasn't thinking about all the people who never came back.

She was thinking about the one person who always did.

And if that damn Sand-Dancer was stupid enough to launch herself into the sky all recklessly like that, someone would have to nurse her back to health when she eventually fell.

This was no time to slack off.

The Deepwater Legion Front's 'Chariot' would be back soon enough.

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