Chapter 657

Chapter 657: Boarding

The cotton caught fire and in an instant turned into a great blaze. Along with the drifting spores, it burned down to ash. Then the flames quickly went out. Only now did the cultists gathered in the hall finally breathe out in relief.

That strange and horrifying scene, and those spores that so clearly meant to spread and infect, had filled every sane person with a sense of enormous danger.

But while the ordinary congregants relaxed a little, the gloomy pressure from the platform did not fade at all. The Saint lightly clicked his bony “crown” against itself. His eyestalks still swept uneasily over the hall and beyond. He knew the shadow hanging over this ship was still there. What he had just destroyed was only a sliver of that shadow that had seeped in many days ago. The true body of that sliver had already completed its invasion…

He had moved too slowly.

“Do not relax too soon. Uninvited guests have already come aboard,” his voice sank into every heart. “From now on, the whole ship is under hostile cultist invasion alert… Lentim, take people to search the entire ship and find the intruders. If anyone refuses to be searched or acts suspicious, kill them on the spot.

“Gomoro, take people to the engine room and seize control of the steam core and the main valves. The intruders may try to take the ship’s core… take nitroglycerin with you.

“Persha, take your followers to the armory and arm all the ordinary congregants… let those mortal sailors take up weapons as well.

“Basmodon, take people to control the deck guns. The enemy may also attack from the sea.”

The Saint’s sudden string of orders snapped the Annihilators in the hall back to full alert less than a few seconds after they had relaxed. Everyone understood how serious things were. The priests who received orders quickly gathered their subordinates and hurried out of the hall.

The number of people in the hall dropped by about half at once, but many priests still stayed in the assembly space, forming layers of protection around the platform where the Saint stood.

After thinking rapidly for a while, the Saint raised his eyestalks again and looked at the high-ranking priest closest to him: “Eric, take people and execute all the sacrificial victims in the cages.”

The high-ranking priest named Eric froze: “Now?”

“I need fresh blood to strengthen myself. These intruders are far from ordinary. This is not the time to worry about squeezing out the greatest value,” the Saint said calmly. Giving execution orders was as natural to him as breathing. “We can capture new sacrificial victims later. For now, execute all the ones on the ship. Drain their blood and soak the deepest stone slabs of the cages. I need to gather strength and prepare for a final battle.”

“Yes, my Saint.”

Eric bowed his head at once. After accepting the order, he took several of his followers and quickly left the assembly hall.

His hurried steps carried him into the corridor that led deeper into the ship. He rushed past rows of tightly closed doors and down one connecting stairway after another toward the deeper, quieter cabins.

Thin, cool smoke had somehow seeped into the ship from somewhere. It made the corridor look faintly blurred.

“High priest,” one follower suddenly spoke, uneasy as he broke the silence, “this smoke isn’t right…”

“It really isn’t. Under normal conditions, how could there be so much smoke on the ship?” Eric frowned. Behind him, a shifting phantom floated in the air. Black chains stretched out from his spine, and at the end of those chains drifted a black creature like a shapeless lump of flesh. Many eyes opened across its surface, as if it were cautiously watching the surroundings. “…It’s too quiet.”

It was far too quiet. The whole corridor lay in stillness. No sound came from the nearby rooms. Only faint noise from some machine far away could be heard – distant and hazy, like it came from another world.

Where were the people he had sent out earlier to carry out orders? Wasn’t the whole ship supposed to be in the middle of a massive search?

Thin smoke drifted toward them from ahead. Eric suddenly twitched his nose. In the smoke, he smelled a familiar scent. Gunpowder.

Faint sounds suddenly came from some direction. Right after that, someone began giving orders from deep inside the smoke.

“Take your positions! Form up, load, aim -”

It sounded like a military commander shouting to his soldiers.

Eric turned his head in shock toward the source of the voice. With the help of his symbiotic pact “flesh aberrant” demon, he was the first to find it – a squad of toy soldiers, as if carved from wood, was setting up formations on the floor at the far end of the corridor.

The soldiers were only palm-sized. Bright paints covered their bodies, and they wore uniforms like the musketeers and artillerymen of a past age. They ran back and forth across the floor. Some waved tiny flags as they dashed through the ranks, and some stood on higher spots blowing small trumpets. A commander stood on a block of wood dragged from who knew where, raising his command saber high as he gave his orders.

The musketeers were loading their “rifles”, which looked like matchsticks.

The other Annihilation Priests also noticed the toy soldiers gathering on the floor and preparing to “attack” in an oddly proper way. The scene was so strange that at first they could not even react. Some of them even felt it looked ridiculous and funny.

That feeling of humor lasted less than a second. In the next instant, everyone’s heart jolted in alarm. On the Boundless Sea, anything that looked wrong meant danger, even if it looked like a bunch of silly toy soldiers.

Eric suddenly remembered something. A legend about these toy soldiers flashed through his mind. He threw himself forward at once: “Down!”

His warning came a step too late. From the end of the smoke came the commander’s order: “Fire!”

Bang bang bang, bang bang bang.

Gunfire roared again and again in the corridor. Muzzle flashes tore through the smoke, and bullets screamed toward them. One Annihilator after another was riddled by the storm of bullets before they could even summon their symbiotic pact demons. One by one, they fell to the ground.

It was said that long ago, a foolish city-state had tried to challenge the Witch at sea, hoping to “kill the curse spreading over the Boundless Sea”.

An arrogant commander led his battle-hardened marines to surround the place where the Witch was staying for a time and launched an attack under cover of night.

Mist rolled in with the darkness. The attacking soldiers vanished one after another into the fog. When the Sun rose again, the Witch had turned them into one hundred and sixty-six toy soldiers.

To this day, that corps of toy soldiers was still imprisoned in the Witch’s shadows. When the Witch needed them, they would be freed for a short time and would wield the strength of a real army…

Blood was pouring from Eric’s body. The sharp pain was slowly turning into a numb cold. He lay on the floor, his mind helplessly recalling the story he had heard one day in the past. In the corner of his eye, he finally noticed odd things along the corridor – details he should have seen earlier, but for some reason had ignored.

Many oil paintings hung on both sides of the dim corridor.

Before this, those paintings had all shown the Abyssal Lord’s many avatar forms, along with images of demons and scenes from the Abyssal Deep and the Deep Sea.

Now the content of the paintings had changed.

Many familiar faces gazed sadly and painfully from the canvases at this smoke-filled corridor. Some of them… seemed as if they had still been slowly blinking up until a minute ago.

There was no response at all from the people who had been sent out.

The gloom crouched over the ship grew thicker and thicker, with no sign of fading.

On the platform in the center of the assembly hall, the Saint sank into a long silence, thinking, while anger and despair slowly brewed beneath the calm.

He realized he might have made a whole series of wrong choices.

All his earlier arrangements had not stopped the shadows from spreading. On the contrary, he was losing his “sense” of more and more sections of the ship.

A tense, uneasy mood was spreading through the hall.

The ordinary priests who had stayed behind here also began to notice that something was very wrong.

Those who had left the hall did not return, nor did any report come back. One internal phone line after another failed to connect. Even using Abyssal demons to sense, they still could not reach their “companions” in other areas. First they lost contact with the cargo hold and the water tanks. Then the cabins where the crew members lived. After that, even the nearby corridors…

It was as if the various compartments were slowly vanishing into a spreading darkness. Apart from this hall, the whole ship was being swallowed by something unseen.

Something formless was attacking this place.

Then something even more dangerous touched the ship. A huge, groundless terror fell over everyone’s minds.

There seemed to be movement in the corridor.

A cultist standing closest to the main doors heard faint crackling sounds from the hallway outside. He looked left and right, hesitated a moment, then gathered his courage and stuck his head out to look.

Someone beside him noticed what he was doing and rushed over to grab his arm, trying to stop this reckless move.

They were too late.

The cultist who had stuck his head out suddenly went stiff. He swayed slightly in place, then “walked” backward in a stiff, doll-like way and stepped back into the hall. After a brief pause, he fell flat on his back.

His arms and legs shattered like fragile porcelain. At some point, his body had already turned into lifeless inorganic matter. As he fell, his head came free from the joint at his neck and rolled to the feet of the other cultists.

It was a crude doll’s head.

Cries of shock burst out at once. Then came the sounds of blades leaving their sheaths and weapons being cocked, rising and falling all around. Many Abyssal demons were summoned again. In that instant of panic and fear, the cultists in the hall scrambled to prepare for battle, while footsteps echoed in the corridor and drew closer and closer to the doors.

A silver-haired lady in a deep purple, luxurious court dress was the first to walk in. She had a doll-like, flawless face. Her posture was light and graceful. She simply walked straight into the assembly hall. The gathered Annihilators, Abyssal demons, and all those blades and guns around her were nothing in her eyes. She only looked around curiously. Her deep purple eyes were clear and bright, and deep inside them, it was as if countless invisible threads were reflected.

Another unusually tall figure followed her in.

This figure was like a nightmare that had seeped into the Mortal Realm and branded itself into everyone’s sight. Just by stepping into the hall, he had already begun to scorch the sanity and nerves of more than half the Annihilators present.

Duncan lifted his head. In the ghostly green flames that were slowly spreading out around him, he gazed at the “Saint” on the platform.

“You and your ship are useful to me.”