Nicolas gripped the hilt of his sword tightly with his left hand, desperately trying to wrap a severed ballast chain around the dead guard's ankle with his right. He seemed to be drawing whatever fragile courage he had left from the familiar leather grip of his weapon, but the violent churning in his stomach and the uncontrollable trembling of his fingers made the gruesome task nearly impossible. The slick, blood-soaked iron links kept slipping through his grasp, clinking softly against the frozen wood.
"Let go. I'll do it," Emily whispered.
Gently but firmly, she pushed Nicolas back by the shoulder and took the bloodied iron into her own bare hands. Her voice was authoritative, yet laced with an undeniable, fierce tenderness. "Just keep watch. Keep your blade ready."
Nicolas swallowed the heavy lump in his throat, giving a jerky nod. He immediately turned his back to the gore, his wide eyes scanning the pitch-black alleyways of the docks. His ragged, rapid breaths plumed into thick white clouds of vapor in the freezing air.
Meanwhile, Alric had already secured a massive, cast-iron anchor ring around Thorleif's colossal frame. Dragging the behemoth to the very edge of the pier, he let out a low, guttural grunt, nodding toward Alex. Catching the silent command, Alex hauled the dead weight of the guard with the shredded throat right to the precipice. Beside him, Emily and Nicolas worked together to drag the headless corpse to the drop.
With a sharp, silent jerk of Alric's chin, the three heavy burdens were shoved into the freezing, abyssal darkness of the ocean.
Splash... splash... splash.
The black waters churned violently. As the immense weight of the iron dragged the corpses straight to the bottom of the bay, a brief, morbid cluster of crimson-tinted bubbles frothed at the surface for just a few seconds.
And then, the rolling black waves closed over them. The sea had swallowed their secret entirely.
Wiping his sweat-drenched forehead against his forearm, Alric straightened up to his full height and cast his hardened gaze upon the colossal galleon. The Silent Revenge rocked violently on the dark waves, looming over them like a gargantuan, floating coffin. Thick rigging ropes moaned like dying men in the howling wind, while the muffled, rhythmic sounds of heavy snoring and the clinking of empty glass bottles rolling across the wooden floorboards drifted down from the upper deck.
"The crew..." Alex whispered, narrowing his dark eyes as he tried to pierce the gloom of the deck. "They're all still aboard. The stench of cheap rum is carrying all the way down here. They've drank themselves into a stupor."
"Good," Alric rumbled, his thick fingers resting casually on the pommel of his broadsword. "We infiltrate Thidrik's captain's quarters in absolute silence. We find out exactly what kind of nightmare we've stumbled into, and we get the hell out of this cursed port before the sun breaks the horizon. Follow my lead, and don't make a single sound."
Gliding up the wooden boarding ramp like phantoms, the five of them slipped onto the main deck.
The galleon was staggeringly massive. Scattered haphazardly across the deck, sprawled among towering stacks of supply crates, wooden barrels, and tangled piles of rigging, were dozens of Akran sailors. Some were slumped heavily against the mainmast, while others lay face-down on the freezing floorboards, their massive hands still loosely gripping wooden tankards.
The relentless, howling wind and the constant, agonizing groan of the ship's timbers perfectly masked the chaotic, drunken breathing of the crew. Holding their breath and stepping lightly over the slumbering bodies, the team began to tiptoe their way through the maze of sleeping giants.
As they crept toward the stairs leading up to the captain's quarters, Nicolas's boot caught on something solid. He stumbled hard, his knee colliding with the outstretched leg of a bald sailor slumped heavily against a wooden rum barrel.
Nicolas froze instantly, his heart slamming against his ribs like a trapped bird. He white-knuckled the hilt of his sword, shutting his eyes and waiting for the Akran giant to wake up and roar.
But the man didn't flinch. In fact, the slight impact of Nicolas's stumble caused the sailor's head to slide limply off the rim of the barrel, his neck snapping down at a grotesque, physically impossible angle.
Alex immediately furrowed his brow. The paralyzing shock of the alleyway massacre was finally fading, and his brilliant mind was forcing itself back into its cold, calculating rhythm. He looked down at his feet. The wooden deck wasn't just slick with freezing seawater and spilled rum. As he shifted his weight, the sole of his boot peeled off the floorboards with a sickening, sticky squelch.
In the pitch-black night, the liquid pooling beneath the slumbering crew merely looked like deep shadows. But the thick, metallic stench rising from the wood was far heavier and far sweeter than cheap alcohol.
Suddenly, Annie went completely rigid.
Her hollow eyes blew wide open in sheer terror. Pressing both hands desperately against her temples, she stumbled backward, gasping for air as if she had just slammed face-first into an invisible brick wall.
"Annie? What is it?" Emily whispered urgently, her longsword sliding an inch from its scabbard with a soft metallic hiss.
"They aren't dreaming..." Annie choked out. Her voice was trembling violently, and hot tears began to spill over her eyelashes, cutting paths through the grime on her pale cheeks. "None of them are dreaming. There are no minds here. No thoughts at all. It's just... one colossal void."
Alex dropped to his knees. Grabbing the bald sailor by the jaw, he forcefully tilted the man's face up toward the pale moonlight.
Right over the sailor's jugular vein was a flawless, impossibly precise puncture wound no larger than a pinprick. His lifeblood had drained out silently, hours ago, slowly washing over the deck. Frantically, Alex scrambled to check the two bodies lying next to the barrel. One had a razor-thin incision slicing perfectly across the nape of his neck. The other had a small, deeply bruised indentation right at the temple—a lethal, localized crushing blow that had shattered the skull inward.
All of them were flawless. All of them had been executed in absolute, terrifying silence.
"They aren't sleeping..." Alex whispered. His voice was utterly stripped of its usual clinical detachment, replaced by pure, unadulterated dread. He slowly backed away from the corpses, rising unsteadily to his feet. "Alric... the entire ship is dead."
The very second those horrifying words bled into the freezing wind, a sharp, rhythmic sound echoed from the sprawling captain's quarters at the stern of the galleon.
Clack... clack... clack.
The five of them snapped their heads toward the noise in perfect unison.
The heavy oak door of the captain's cabin was already sitting ajar. The sickly, flickering glow of candlelight spilling from within illuminated a tall, imposing silhouette leaning casually against the doorframe.
The figure wasn't even looking at them. They stood relaxed, one leg bent with a boot resting against the wood. In their right hand, they were casually tossing a massive string of black pearls into the air. Every time the heavy pearls slapped back into their leather-gloved palm, it produced that sharp, hollow clack.
They tossed it into the air... Clack.
Tossed it again... Clack.
And then, the silhouette snatched the necklace out of the air, their fist clenching tightly around Thidrik's prized trophy. Though the assassin's face remained entirely obscured by the deep shadows of the cabin, the voice that drifted across the blood-soaked deck was as crisp, casual, and freezing as the storm itself. It pierced straight to the marrow of their bones.
"I was beginning to wonder when someone would finally come to mop the deck. Thank you for making my job easier."