Chapter 384

Chapter 384: Metamorphosis

Anomaly 077 ranked in the top hundred. It had once caused dozens of ships and thousands of sailors to die in storms. It had a mind of its own and the traits of a living thing. No matter which city-state it was kept in, it was a dangerous Anomaly that the local Church treated with extreme caution – yet now, right in front of Lawrence, it simply chose to shut its eyes and play dead, refusing to use its power at all.

Lawrence had imagined countless possibilities for what might happen after he activated Anomaly 077. He had even come up with several plans to seal “Sailor” again. But he had never thought something like this would happen.

The old captain raised his head and met the eyes of his First Mate. Both of them felt that the mummified corpse in front of them did not match the descriptions in the reports. At the same time, they both wondered where things had gone wrong.

But before they could think it through, the roar of water pillars from the nearby sea and the sound of the White Oak’s defensive guns firing broke their daze.

This was no time to stand there stunned. The Sea Swallow was almost on them.

They could not win in a straight fight, and they could not outrun it. “Sailor”, with its ship teleportation ability, was already the White Oak’s only hope of escaping this danger.

Lawrence lowered his head and stared hard at the mummified corpse that kept its eyes shut and pretended to be dead. Whatever was wrong with this thing, he had to find a way to make it cooperate and enter runaway state.

“Wake up!” Lawrence reached out, grabbed Anomaly 077 by the collar, and shook it hard. Getting this close to a mummified corpse was disgusting, but he could not care about that now. “I know you have already broken free of the seal. Listen, you are taking the helm of this ship now. ‘Sailor’, don’t you have an instinct to control ships? Don’t you have a tendency to enter runaway state on your own? Do it! Take over this ship and get us out of here!”

The mummified corpse on the floor rattled with a creepy cracking sound as its joints rubbed together under the shaking, but it still kept its eyes shut. Its chest rose and fell plainly though, and no one could miss that.

Meanwhile, the non-stop explosions around the White Oak only made Lawrence more and more frustrated. At last he could not stand it. He reached out and slapped the mummified corpse. “I know you are awake!”

The mummified corpse finally could not keep lying there. It opened its eyes in the middle of all that shaking, but its first reaction was still to dodge away. It tried its best to avoid Lawrence’s gaze while it yelled: “Stop it! Stop it! I will go back to sleep, I will go back to sleep, all right?! You cannot joke about this! This ship cannot be touched, cannot be touched!”

Lawrence did not care what it said. The moment he saw the mummy open its eyes, he yanked it to its feet and dragged it toward the helm.

Several nearby seafarers finally reacted too. The bolder ones rushed forward to help. A few people almost had to pin “Sailor’s” dried-up body to the console by force.

The First Mate shouted at their side: “Press it against the wheel! That way its power will take effect the fastest!”

But Anomaly 077 only kept screaming in a shrill voice, and its struggles grew even more fierce: “Let me go! Let me go!

“You cannot do this! Help, help!

“Who even are you people… have mercy, have mercy!”

“Just touch the wheel once!” Lawrence shouted while he used all his strength to press the mummified corpse onto the ship’s wheel. “It will be over soon!”

“I will not! Help!” Anomaly 077’s strength was shockingly great. Even several burly White Oak crew members could not hold its arms down.

It thrashed wildly and twisted its head, trying to look back toward the spot where it had been lying just now. “Let me go back! Please… just loop that rope around my neck again. One loop is enough. I will lie there quietly and sleep. I will never get up again! Or give me the rope and I will hang myself… just do not make me touch this!”

The bridge fell into chaos. The scene was twisted to the extreme.

Anomaly 077, which had a terrifying reputation among captains and sailors all across the Boundless Sea, was struggling and begging like a victim tied up and dragged aboard. The White Oak’s crew members, who were trapped in a desperate situation, looked like fiends as they pinned the “Anomaly’s” arms and tried to press them onto the wheel.

This was a sight that even the maddest patients in an asylum, in their wildest hallucinations, could not have imagined. Yet it was now happening for real on the White Oak.

Lawrence no longer had the mind to think about how wrong all of this was. He only knew the shadow of the Sea Swallow was getting closer and closer. Its gunnery was growing more and more accurate.

The White Oak’s broadside had already taken several hits in a row. Fire burned at the stern. If the next shell hit the engine compartment or the magazine, or even the bridge… it would all be over.

As he thought that, a sharp whistling suddenly reached his ears. Judging by the direction of the sound, Lawrence’s mind went blank.

[Not good.]

The next second, a deafening explosion swept over the upper deck. A giant fireball rose right beside the bridge and burst open. The Sea Swallow’s shell had hit the side of the White Oak’s bridge. This hit was fatal.

The blast wave crashed in. Metal and glass were torn to pieces by the shell’s power. The torn wall fragments became deadly shrapnel.

A blinding light filled Lawrence’s vision. He saw his First Mate lifted into the air, his body swallowed at once by the onrushing wave of fire. Then it was the other sailors on the bridge.

Then it was himself.

The flames swallowed everything. Lawrence watched the fireball swell and engulf the whole bridge. He watched his own body burn away in the flames. Time seemed to slow down.

He saw it all clearly. He even saw the fire creeping inch by inch through the air, and slowly taking on a strange, ghostly green.

Ghostly green?

Lawrence’s mind suddenly went blank again. Before he could understand what was happening, the crimson fireball that had rushed into the bridge turned at once into a sea of eerie green flame.

The sea of spirit form flames licked everything in sight – metal, wood, glass, leather…

Everything the flames burned began to look like a spirit form, turning half transparent.

The crew members who had been swallowed by the fireball all fell to the floor. spirit form flames wrapped around their bodies. Their flesh and bones turned clear and bright like jade. Then, one by one, they got up again as if nothing had happened and stared at one another in shock.

This scene was exactly the same as their first encounter with the Vanished.

It was as if the terrifying sight that had once appeared on the White Oak was playing out again.

A solid feeling under his feet came back. Lawrence jolted awake from his daze and saw that he was already standing at the helm.

At some point, his body had also been covered in roaring spirit form flames.

He reached forward on instinct and grabbed for something. His hand closed around the wheel.

In that instant, he felt it.

He felt everything about the White Oak. From a single screw to a window and a length of rope, every part of the ship appeared in his mind as clearly as if it were a part of his own body.

He had lived on this ship for so many years, but he had never been this closely linked to her.

Along with this feeling, another strong intent flooded his mind. It was as if a voice filled with endless authority was proclaiming his fate.

Now, you are a member of the Vanished Fleet. Go and serve Captain Duncan faithfully.

Lawrence held the wheel in a daze. He sensed the White Oak turning nimbly under the push of his will, and he slowly lined the bow up with the “enemy ship” rushing toward them in the distance.

Anomaly 077 was still there. The mummified corpse had curled into almost a ball beside the console. It shivered as it stared at the rising spirit form flames around it and wailed: “I said I would not touch it, but you forced me to touch it. How would I dare touch it? A Sailor who tries to seize control gets tied to a shell and thrown into the sea! I know the rules on a ship! I am a Sailor!”

Lawrence slowly lowered his head and glanced at “Sailor”. He was still lost and confused and had no idea what had really happened. But his gaze made Anomaly 077 fall quiet at once.

The mummified corpse snapped its mouth shut and carefully stood up. It looked around.

The bridge that had been torn apart by the shell was quickly knitting back together under the burning spirit form flames.

All the crew members stood at their posts. They now looked like ghosts from head to toe, but instinct and the bit of reason they still had drove them back to their stations at once, waiting for the captain’s next order.

“Captain…” Anomaly 077 turned its head and looked into Lawrence’s eyes. “What do you want to do next…”

Lawrence drifted for a moment, then seemed to sense something. He slowly lowered his gaze.

“The Vanished Fleet has been attacked… we strike back.”

“Strike back!” Anomaly 077 shouted at once. “Strike back!”

“Strike back!” The voice of First Mate Gus sounded beside him. Flames rose all over Gus’s body, and crackling fire filled his voice. “The captain has ordered it. Strike back!”

“Strike back!”

The crew on the bridge roared. All across the White Oak, every crew member who had transformed into a ghost “heard” the captain’s command at the same time.

This ship, which had completed a metamorphosis in the flames, moved at once. Its steam core roared. All its guns began to turn. A shrill, howling whistle echoed across the sea.

Under their feet, the ship began to speed toward the Sea Swallow. Almost at the same time, Lawrence saw another shadow at the White Oak’s side.

It was another ship, a warship whose form was almost only a pitch-black outline, shrouded in thick fog and smoke.

Its outline was seven or eight parts similar to that of the White Oak. It was clearly a sister ship of the same class.

That shadowy ship sped up alongside the White Oak. The two ships charged together toward the Sea Swallow.

Through the ever-rising spirit form flames, Lawrence stared in shock at the phantom warship that had suddenly appeared on the nearby sea. He did not know how long he watched before he finally whispered its name, as if in a dream.

“The Black Oak… Martha?”