The serpent's carcass stank. It was a heavy, oily reek that clung to my throat, but the haul was worth the gagging. I ran a whetstone over the edge of the new poleaxe, the steel-scaled head glinting with a dull, predatory light. It felt balanced. Heavy enough to crack the skull of whatever else crawled out of the surf, but light enough to keep me mobile. And as for the two flowers... I'll wait before using them.
The biggest problem is the "Gaia System." I spat into the dirt. I'd read every scrap of lore in the old man's library, and not a single page mentioned a sentient interface acting as a cosmic overseer talking about a loss of consciousness or the phenomenon that is happening to me. It felt like a leash.
I sat at the old man's scarred oak desk that we had built together looking at the tracing of Ink marks and it's also that day he'd confused volcanic Cayenne with sweet paprika when cooking the dinner. The memory brought a phantom heat to my tongue.
"Okay, I need to get to work now" I thought.
I needed a boat. If I could bridge the portal back here, this island became my private armory—a goldmine of raw, untainted mana. That's what I need to try and solve now. Well, sleep on it.
Early in the day a movement caught my eye.
I was halfway up the training wall when the horizon broke. Not a ship—not yet. Just a smudge of wrongness against the grey sky. I pushed the Arcane Soul into my optic nerves. The world snapped into a terrifying, high-contrast clarity.
Canvas ripping. Men screaming. A Royal Galleon was being toyed with. Beneath the hull, the sea wasn't waving; it was inhaling.
"Son of a—"
I didn't finish the thought. I dropped, the sudden descent jarring my teeth, and hit the treeline at a dead sprint. My lungs burned, each breath tasting like frost and salt. I didn't care about the ship's crew. I cared about the wood. I cared about the hull. That was my ticket off this rock, and something was chewing on it.
From the ridge, the carnage was total.
The galleon listed hard to port, its white sails shredded like wet tissue paper. A line of mages stood on the deck, their faces pale, fingers glowing with frantic blue light. They threw up barriers of solidified brine, but the impact that followed made the entire ship groan like a dying animal.
Then the head broke the surface.
It was a nightmare of barnacles and rotting ivory—a head the size of a watchtower. Its maw dripped with black ichor, and the steam hissing from the spikes on its back sounded like a thousand boiling kettles.
"Move, you idiots!" I hissed, watching a captain charge the beast with a pike. It was like trying to kill a mountain with a toothpick. The creature swiped, and the man didn't just die—he vanished in a spray of red mist and shattered plate.
I didn't play hero. I timed the swells. I mapped the kill zone.
I hit the water, gravity magic snapping tight under my boots like invisible skis. The sea was an ice-bath. Every spray of foam felt like needles against my skin.
A column of pressurized water, black and heavy as lead, slammed into the deck. The ship's mainmast snapped with a sound like a thunderclap. Wood splinters the size of daggers hissed through the air. One sliced my cheek; I didn't blink.
I saw them at the stern. A woman, her noble silks soaked and clinging to her, shielding two smaller shadows. A girl with tangled braids and a boy who looked like he'd already seen his own ghost.
The woman looked up. She saw me skidding across the whitecaps—a man standing on the water like a god or a demon. Her lips moved. No sound, just the raw shape of a plea.
Then the wave hit.
I reached out, trying to warp the gravity of the incoming swell, but the sheer mass of the ocean laughed at me. My mana flared, then flickered.
"Not enough. Still too weak". I thought
The wave didn't just wash them away; it crushed them into the cabin. The ship broke in two. The roar of the water swallowed the screams.
I spent the next hour pulling bodies from the wreckage. The monster had grown bored, slipping back into the depths with a heavy, rhythmic pulse of displaced water.
I found her pinned between two jagged beams of oak. Her regal dress was a rag. One arm was bent at an angle that made my own stomach flip.
"Them..." she wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of her mouth. Her hand, cold and slick with sea-salt, gripped my wrist with a strength fueled by the grave. "Protect... my treasures."
"Save your breath," I growled, checking the girl nearby.
"Promise me," she rasped, her eyes wide and glassy. "Tell them... I'm the stars. Tell them I'm... in their hearts..."
"That's a lie and you know it," I muttered, but I closed her eyes anyway. "I'll keep them alive. That's the only promise that matters."
The boy, Xavier, crawled out from under a pile of canvas. He was shivering so hard his teeth clicked. He saw me leaning over his sister and, through the shock, he pulled a rusted paring knife.
"Back off!" he screamed, his voice cracking. "What are you doing to her?"
I didn't even look up. I swiped his wrist, sending the knife spinning into the surf, and pinned him with a glare. "Keeping her lungs from collapsing. Now shut up and hold this bandage, or she bleeds out in three minutes."
I didn't use the 'gentle' alchemy. I used the raw stuff. I forced heat into her shivering limbs and murmured the sutures into her torn flesh. It was messy, painful work. She shrieked once, a high, thin sound, then went limp.
"She's alive," I said, wiping the gore onto my leggings.
The boy stared at me. The fear was still there, but it was being drowned by a desperate, hollow need for a leader. "Who are you?"
"Raymond," I said, my voice as cold as the spray. "And you're Xavier. I know. Your mother had a loud ending."
He flinched, but he didn't run.
We buried her near the old man's plot. Two more graves for a hungry island. I looked at the wreckage of the ship—my potential escape, now a graveyard of driftwood.
I had two kids, a broken poleaxe that I need to fix , and a sea monster that knew my scent.
A promise is a contract. A contract is an obligation. And on this island, obligations were the only things that kept you from becoming part of the scenery.
"Get up, Xavier," I said, tossing him a spare cloak. "The sun's going down, and things here like to hunt in the dark."