Once the notion took root in Jeanne's mind, it spread like wildfire. Her raw curiosity about the mysterious artifact burned hotter by the second, her eyes fixed on the item in her hands with an almost hypnotic intensity.
Even Skadi, who had just used blunt physical force to restore her own mental clarity, noticed Jeanne's sudden trance. She couldn't help but wonder what had caught the young woman's attention so completely, leaving her sitting there in silence.
Skadi refrained from interrupting her. She figured Jeanne must be wrestling with some profound revelation—much like her former captain back in the hunters, who used to sit in solitude after a grueling contract, lost in thought.
One knew better than to disturb someone in that state. Interruption ran the risk of triggering an unpredictable response, and the person disturbing them usually bore the brunt of it.
High above the clouds, the wyvern hovered gracefully, awaiting its rider's next command. Beneath them, swarms of fish-like monsters leaped endlessly from the waves, thrashing in a desperate attempt to reach the skies. To an outsider, the sight of countless abominations leaping toward the clouds was the stuff of nightmares.
Yet amidst this horrifying spectacle, as Jeanne remained locked in thought, Skadi gasped.
The golden horn, previously no larger than an ornate trinket, began to expand. It swelled rapidly, growing until it reached the dimensions of a full-sized war horn before coming to a complete stop.
Skadi stared in genuine amazement. Throughout her travels across the mainland, she had seen very few things that could genuinely catch her off guard, yet she could hardly believe her own eyes.
A solid golden horn expanding as though it possessed a mind of its own—was this the kind of technology the land-dwellers possessed? What was the phrase the crew on Rhodes Island used? Black technology, wasn't it?
Driven by curiosity, Skadi reached out, longing to trace her fingers along its surface. Up close, the horn looked remarkably rough, resembling an ancient relic forged by a primitive tribe.
It lacked gleaming gemstones, possessed no intricate carvings, and lacked even a leather wrap around its grip. It was simply a horn forged from pure gold—or perhaps an unknown metal of a similar hue—that exuded the presence of a sacred masterpiece.
Despite its lack of ornamentation, the horn possessed a breathtaking, otherworldly beauty. It felt less like an object decorated to look beautiful, and more like the literal embodiment of beauty itself. It was difficult to fathom what kind of legendary craftsman could have forged such a creation.
The horn's strange properties extended far beyond its appearance. The moment it fully expanded, Skadi felt the agonizing, intrusive whispers in her mind vanish into thin air. Her very soul experienced an unprecedented lightness, as if an unnatural link binding her to the deep had been severed in an instant.
Down below, however, the sea erupted into a violent frenzy.
Monstrous shadows surged from the abyss at terrifying speeds. Towering behemoths that usually never set foot in these shallow coastal waters were now thrashing toward the surface, driven by a primal urge to crush Jeanne before she could act.
Massive dark silhouettes materialized beneath the waves. Grotesque tentacles lashed upward out of the surf, reaching toward the clouds like a tightening net designed to ensnare two helpless fish.
Fortunately, the wyvern possessed sharp instincts. Working in tandem with Skadi's defensive swings, the creature banked sharply, narrowly escaping the living trap laid out by the abyss.
Skadi watched Jeanne with mounting intrigue. Ever since the horn expanded, the sea creatures had abandoned all caution, throwing themselves into a reckless, suicidal assault without regard for their own survival.
Something terrifying is coming, Skadi realized, her instincts screaming a warning. The tool Jeanne held was a lethal threat to the Seaborn—so catastrophic that the creatures were forced to attack blindly, risking everything on the off chance they might stop her.
What neither woman realized was that they weren't the only ones witnessing this madness. Far beneath the ocean floor, hidden deep within subterranean bunkers, another faction was watching the entire event play out—the secret observers of Aegir.
Deep sea surveillance teams gathered around glowing monitors, exchanging hurried, disbelief-filled hushed whispers as they tracked the surface feed. The sight of a massive beast hovering in the upper atmosphere was shocking enough, but the sudden mass frenzy of the sea creatures had sent their command room into chaos.
"Visual confirmation received: one of the three surface targets matches the biological signature of an Abyssal Hunter. When did those half-breeds start fraternizing with land-dwellers? Has she abandoned Aegir?"
"How should I know? We lost all contact with their unit after the last incident!" another technician muttered dismissively, completely indifferent to the fate of a stray hunter.
"Speaking of land-dwellers... I heard rumors that the higher-ups were planning to establish contact with the surface dwellers to combat the Seaborn threat together. Honestly, what use could those primitive land-walkers possibly be against oceanic monstrosities? Serve as emergency rations?"
A technician sneered, using a remote interface to maneuver a stealth drone closer to the scene, eager to record the impending slaughter of the surface dwellers.
"It really is a waste of that winged creature, though," a third researcher mused. "In theory, an undocumented airborne species could have provided valuable data for our countermeasures..."
Before the observers could finish their cold calculations, Jeanne snapped out of her meditative trance.
She stared down at the massive golden horn in her hands, her expression hardening with resolve. Raising the mouthpiece to her lips, she looked down at the boiling sea below, drew a deep, lungs-filling breath, and exhaled with everything she had.
The response from the abyss was instant, apocalyptic panic.
The Seaborn went utterly mad. They no longer cared about self-preservation or tactics—their singular hive-mind directive was to touch that woman, to interrupt her at any cost. Towering leviathans began grabbing smaller Seaborn organisms and hurling them into the sky like living artillery shells!
Skadi swung her greatsword relentlessly alongside Fafnir—the noble dragon using her sharp claws to cleave through the incoming tide of flying flesh. Yet the sheer volume of monsters was overwhelming. They could only do so much to shield their wyvern mount from the rain of claws and teeth.
"Whatever you're going to do, do it now!" Skadi shouted over the deafening wind. "This creature isn't going to hold out much longer!"
Jeanne remained detached from the chaotic world around her, locked in a state of pure spiritual clarity. Through the lens of the golden horn, the world looked entirely different—she felt elevated into an indescribable realm of perception.
Jeanne pushed the breath from her lungs into the ancient instrument.
The air resonated through the metallic chamber, awakening the slumbering artifact. A deep, resonant, ancient tone thundered across the sky and sea.
WOOOO—WOOOO—WOOOO—WOOOOOOO—!
As the horn's call reverberated across the ocean, Skadi felt a presence descend upon the world. It was a suffocating, instinctual terror that made every single cell in her body tremble—a wave of despair crawling up from the darkest depths of her soul.
In that fraction of a second, a vivid vision flashed before Skadi's eyes.
She saw an age long forgotten, from a time before Aegir had ever built its first city. It was an era when the Seaborn ruled the endless waters unchecked, a dark epoch when the hive threatened to devour the entire world.
A lonely figure clad in simple linen robes stood at the edge of a desolate shore, staring out over the boundless, thrashing sea. After a long silence, the figure let out a heavy, bone-weary sigh, their posture heavy with defeat.
"A failure..." the figure whispered softly. "A total failure..."
What did those words mean? What failure? What experiment had gone wrong?
Skadi had no idea why these memories were flooding her mind. She had never witnessed these events, nor had she ever heard of such a time. She could only assume that the golden horn's awakening had breached the walls of her consciousness.
Because in her vision, that ancient figure held an identical golden horn—and had sounded the exact same call!
Then, both within Skadi's vision and across the real world, a terrifying silence descended upon the sea—a silence meant exclusively for the Seaborn!
The boiling ocean below let out an agonized, collective shriek. A visible ripple expanded outward from the wyvern, spreading across the surface of the water like a single drop falling onto a quiet pond, only to trigger a catastrophic, world-shaking tidal wave!
Far beneath the waves, the arrogant Aegir observers stared at their monitoring screens in stunned, paralyzed silence. They looked at the data feeds in disbelief, unable to process the impossible scene unfolding before their eyes.
"Quick! Record everything! Transmit this data to the High Council immediately! HURRY!"
The technicians exploded into a frenzy of activity. Shivering with intense, unbridled excitement, they began launching every available deep-sea probe toward the surface, desperate to capture every fraction of data from the drone feed.
Because of Jeanne—because of that ancient, heavy call echoing through the sky—the entire ocean had begun to boil!