Chapter 658

Chapter 658: .

ghostly green flame surged like a suddenly rising tide, flooding into the vast assembly hall in an instant and spreading toward every Abyssal Deep cultist present—it was as if this fire had been brewing and building on the ship for who knew how long, and when it rose it even roared like wind and thunder.

Shouts of alarm and furious roars erupted from all directions. Almost all the Abyssal demons reacted the moment the eerie green flame appeared. The weaker demons entered a runaway state on the spot, and even the stronger ones, driven by terror and instinct, refused to obey the orders of their symbiotic pact partners. Pitch-black Abyssal Deep rifts formed in the air above the hall. The cultists and priests being dragged away by the demons howled as they vanished into those runaway state rifts—the handful of “lucky” ones left behind had no choice but to hastily face the enemy who had suddenly barged in.

Chaotic gunshots rang out, and a few feeble spells fell toward where Duncan and Alice were standing.

But the flame stood like a wall. These weak attacks lost all strength before they could even get close. Bullets turned ghost-green in the fire and fell harmlessly to the floor. The missiles and acid conjured with demonic power turned into fresh flames in midair and whipped back the way they had come.

Alice stared wide-eyed at the thrilling scene. Strange and twisted demons filled the hall, along with cultists driven mad by terror, but Alice did not feel afraid at all—she had followed the captain here to “watch the fun”, and things were indeed lively.

Very soon, though, she felt it was all a bit too noisy.

She looked toward the loudest part of the hall, frowned, and lifted her hand in a beckoning motion. Invisible threads drifted down into her palm. Before they left, the captain had told her that everyone in this hall was a cultist, and cultists did not count as people.

So, with this doll girl as the center, countless Annihilators suddenly went rigid and froze in place, then began turning into dolls one after another.

But just then, a low sound like drumbeats suddenly came from the center of the hall. A vast power burst out in an instant. It even briefly suppressed the spirit form fire spreading through the hall and brought Alice’s doll control to a halt.

The Saint on the dais finally moved. His eyestalks lifted high. Countless crisscrossing black bones clicked around the huge brain like folded limbs, then unfolded outward to stretch and brace themselves. The skeletal body that had looked like a bony cage quickly changed into a spider-like shape, and that horrifying brain now sat on the center of this bone spider’s back. It swayed, and from the swelling, writhing blood vessels came a constant “thump, thump” that sounded like both drumbeats and a heartbeat.

Duncan watched in some astonishment as the Saint rose from the platform, the bone spider clinging to the edge and sending a string of chaotic hissing noises toward them.

His expression was surprised—because he had not thought the thing on the platform could get any uglier.

Before he had time to make a comment, Duncan and Alice heard the terrified, despairing screams of Annihilation Priests dying all around the hall.

They were the cultists who had withstood the first wave of demon runaway states, had luckily escaped the first blast of flame, and had barely survived Alice’s doll transformation. As they howled, their bodies suddenly began to swell. Their human forms twisted in the blink of an eye into all sorts of horrifying shapes. Countless swelling, crawling traces writhed under their skin, as if another body had appeared inside them, out of control, trying to burst out of their flesh.

In the blink of an eye, the cultists’ bodies ripped themselves apart and collapsed into piles of flesh on the floor. As they died, the demons tied to them through symbiotic pacts began to collapse and fall apart one after another.

But those collapsing demons did not simply vanish.

They turned into drifting black smoke and poured toward the air above the central dais.

“The Saint” raised his black bone limbs on the dais. The black smoke released by the Abyssal demons when they died rushed into the swelling, writhing brain and was greedily absorbed. His size doubled in the blink of an eye, and an even stronger aura leaked out of the brain, faintly forming a barrier around the dais like warped space.

“…You killed your last followers the first chance you got,” Duncan said, looking at the dais with some surprise. “That really was unexpected.”

“The weak are useless here… They would only become fuel for your flames or sacrifices to Anomaly 099,” the Saint rasped from the dais. His bone limbs clicked as he slowly crawled down to the floor. “Better to turn them into my strength… I will fight you to the death in their place…”

Duncan could not be bothered to listen to his rambling. Halfway through, he raised his hand. The spirit form fire in the hall, which had been briefly suppressed, surged up again in an instant and spread toward the dais.

“You have dug up quite a bit of information,” he said casually. “But I still advise you to cooperate. My request is simple—I just want to talk to your ‘Lord’… and, if possible, I want to know where this ship is headed.”

“So that’s it… You really are dangerous to us, ‘Captain Duncan’,” the Saint said. He moved his long limbs forward, forcing back the fire’s corruption as he came. “All the more reason not to let you have your way… O Holy Lord, grant me Your divine blessing!”

The monstrous bone spider gave a low growl. Space around him seemed to twist for a moment. The spirit form flames that had almost set him alight were forced back again for an instant. At once he leaped high, hurling himself at Duncan, who commanded this sea of fire, as if ready to die together.

“The time for martyrdom has come!!”

This twisted, terrifying monster shouted in fanatical zeal. With shocking power he drove back all the flames spreading into the air. He was like a jet-black meteor, fearlessly crashing down toward the “Subspace Shadows” that filled the world with dread!

Duncan spread his hand toward the monster. The spirit form fire that had been forced back closed together in the air in the path of the falling body, ready to swallow the bone spider completely in the next instant.

But the Saint suddenly veered in midair.

At an almost impossible angle, the monster plunged straight down. With a deafening crash, he smashed through the hall floor, opening a huge hole. He dropped straight into it and began furiously tearing through the decks below, disappearing from Duncan and Alice’s sight in the blink of an eye.

Duncan: “…?”

Alice: “…?”

Things happened too fast. Never mind Alice’s wooden head—even Duncan did not react in time.

After all, he had seen people die as martyrs before, and he had seen fanatical cultists too. But this was his first time seeing someone quit halfway through martyrdom. In a world where the Gods truly existed, could a zealot on the level of a Saint really leave his own “Lord” hanging?

Alice turned her head in confusion to glance at Duncan, then at the big hole in the center of the hall, its edges still wreathed in ghostly flame. At last she asked: “Did it run away?”

Run away? Out here on the vast Boundless Sea, on a ship already completely burned and corrupted by spirit flame, where could that “Saint” possibly run?

Duncan frowned. The thunderous sounds of decks and walls being torn apart and support structures snapping still came constantly from below. All at once, he understood.

“No, that guy isn’t running… He’s going to destroy the ship!”

Digging, digging, always downward. The engine room lay just ahead.

As fast as possible, as fast as possible, before that ghost captain reacted, before the roaring spirit form flames caught up to him.

He was almost at the bottom of the ship. Beyond the last layers of flooring and walls, past the piping zone… that was where the nitroglycerin he had ordered sent down earlier was stored.

As long as he detonated the nitroglycerin at the steam core, the chain reaction after the reactor boiler went into a runaway state would be enough to destroy the whole ship. Then… the “Holy Land” would be safe.

The huge, terrifying bone spider dug rapidly through the vast ship. Following his memory, he ripped open steel plates, pipes, and bulkheads along the way. This ship, built at great expense and once regarded by the Cult as a symbol of pride, was being quickly ruined by his digging, turned into a heap of irreparable scrap.

But the “Saint” did not hesitate at all. He only sped up, carving an ever faster path through the steel beast’s belly.

In his glimpses of fate, he had long since seen his own death, and the deaths of everyone else.

The weak congregants would die wailing, their flesh burning in the flames. He himself could not survive either, because the gloom had already covered every path. When you were still on the edge of the Shadows, changing course might have helped. But when the whole ship was already deep in endless darkness, choosing a different direction no longer mattered.

It was unwise to fight that ghost captain. In the clearest glimpse of fate, the Saint had seen himself defeated quickly and pointlessly.

Since the ending was fixed, he might as well do something bolder.

At the very least, he could not let this ship fall into that “captain’s” hands. He could not let anyone learn the secret of the “Holy Land”. Otherwise his sins would be unforgivable.

The last wall collapsed before him with a crash.

The cabin in the deep layers that housed the steam core finally appeared before him.

The bone spider almost stumbled as he burst into the space and landed on a platform ringed by pipes, valves, and control stations.

He raised the many eyestalks at the edge of his body and swept his gaze around the chamber.

As he had expected, no congregants were alive here. Only a few corpses lay on the open floor nearby, and around the control consoles and valves he could see twisted human-shaped Shadows “printed” onto the surfaces of the machinery.

The “Saint” did not “mourn” his fallen kin.

He had already found what he wanted. The explosives were stacked at the far end of the platform.