Minutes bled into excruciating, agonizing hours.
The cacophony of war—the deafening, rhythmic roar of black powder muskets, the sharp, ringing clash of cheap iron sabers, and the fanatical, throat-tearing war cries of men dying for flags they barely understood—began a slow, grim descent into absolute silence.
This quiet did not fall upon the burning shores of Oakhaven because a truce had been struck, nor because a commanding officer had finally signaled a desperate retreat.
It did not end because one grand empire had claimed a decisive tactical victory over the other.
The battle ended simply because there was virtually no one left on the island with the breath to scream.
The wooden planks of the harbor docks were slick with an ankle-deep mire of blood.
It poured over the edges of the pier in thick, continuous waterfalls, mingling with the saltwater and staining the rolling, frothy tide a sickly, foaming crimson.
The shoreline itself was no longer visible; the pale sand was buried beneath a literal mountain of tangled, butchered bodies.
It was a macabre monument to human frailty, a fleshy labyrinth of severed limbs, shattered armor, and lifeless, staring eyes reflecting the flames of the burning village.
In the exact epicenter of this unparalleled devastation, standing perfectly still in a massive, coagulating puddle of gore, was Elian.
His ten-year-old body had been pushed so far beyond the natural parameters of human endurance that, by all known medical and anatomical logic, he should have collapsed into the mud hours ago.
‘My heart is beating at nearly two hundred and fifty times a minute,’ the cold, fragmented memory of his past life calculated, observing the destruction of his own physical form with the detached fascination of a coroner.
‘In the world I remember, a prepubescent human cardiovascular system would have suffered a catastrophic valve rupture ninety minutes ago due to sustained, maximal adrenaline output.
The lactic acid buildup in my calves is absolute.
The micro-tears in my quadriceps have progressed to total muscular shredding.
The tendons connecting my bicep to my forearm are actively attempting to tear themselves from the bone with every micro-movement.
Clinically, I am dead.’
But Elian was standing.
The suffocating, blood-red mist that bled continuously from his pores was acting as a paranormal, synthetic life support system.
It bypassed his failing biological organs entirely, severing his pain receptors at the neural level.
The aura acted like millions of invisible, microscopic puppet strings, manipulating his small, trembling frame with the ruthless, mechanical efficiency of a master assassin.
The terrified, grieving boy who had cried over his parents’ lifeless bodies in the village square was buried deep, locked away beneath an endless ocean of red apathy.
He couldn’t feel the agonizing burn of his torn muscles.
He couldn’t feel the ambient heat of the burning village blistering his pale skin.
He felt nothing at all.
By the time the pitch-black, ash-choked sky began to bruise with the dark, purplish hues of an impending dawn, the chaotic melee had finally been reduced to an eerie, horrifying stillness.
Out of an initial combined deployment of nearly three thousand heavily armed men, barely fifty remained standing.
They had dropped their weapons.
Sleek Roshwan sabers, expensive flintlock pistols, and heavy Oykot muskets lay abandoned in the bloody mud, entirely useless against a ghost.
Soldiers from opposing empires—men who just hours ago had sworn blood oaths to slaughter one another in the name of holy justice, territorial expansion, and imperial pride—were now backing away toward the freezing water together, shoulder to shoulder.
They were trembling violently, their uniforms soaked through with the blood of their fallen comrades.
Their holy war, their fierce patriotism, and their rigid military discipline were entirely forgotten, eclipsed by the sheer, unadulterated terror of the entity standing before them.
They were no longer soldiers of the Vanguard or the Empire.
They were prey confronting an apex predator.
Elian stood perfectly still, drenched from head to toe in a thick layer of blood that wasn’t his own.
His small, ragged clothes were heavy and stiff with gore.
The red aura surrounding him had expanded outward, blanketing the entire dock in a suffocating, physical pressure.
The air tasted sharply of copper and ozone, making it incredibly difficult for the surviving men to draw breath into their burning lungs.
‘Fifty combatants remaining,’ the fractured tactician in his mind observed, analyzing the shifting geometry of the survivors.
‘Enemy morale has reached absolute zero.
Combat capability is non-existent.
They have abandoned their defensive postures.
They are no longer a fighting force.
They are just meat waiting to be processed.
Oblige them.’
Elian took a slow, squelching step forward.
He raised his right hand.
The cheap, chipped boning knife he held was barely recognizable, but the red aura pooled around its jagged edge like liquid neon, humming with a terrifying, conceptual sharpness.
The surviving soldiers whimpered.
It was a pathetic, broken sound.
A few grown, battle-hardened men—veterans of countless campaigns—fell to their knees in the bloody water, openly weeping.
They clasped their trembling hands together, frantically praying to gods that had long since abandoned the burning shores of Oakhaven.
They didn’t even attempt to turn and run; the primal, lizard part of their brains had already accepted that running from a phantom was mathematically impossible.
You cannot outrun a natural disaster.
The Absolute Murderer felt absolutely nothing for them.
It registered no pity for their tears, no triumphant joy in its total victory, and no sadistic pleasure in the slaughter.
There was only the cold, mechanical urge to clear the board entirely.
Elian took another step, preparing to cross the final distance and cleanly sever the throat of a weeping Roshwan captain.
But before his bare foot could hit the wooden planks, the bruised sky above the bay drastically, impossibly darkened.
The intrusive, analytical hum in Elian’s head suddenly spiked, emitting a piercing, deafening neural alarm that cut straight through the heavy apathy of the red mist.
It was a biological warning system the boy had never felt before—a klaxon of sheer, insurmountable danger that bordered on visceral panic.
‘Massive kinetic displacement detected directly above my position,’ his mind raced, forcing his dead, apathetic eyes to look up at the clouds.
‘Trajectory is vertical.
Velocity is extreme.
In the physics of the world I knew, a shadow of this magnitude moving at terminal velocity would strictly correlate to a tactical orbital strike or a falling satellite.
But there is no engine noise.
There is no propulsion heat signature.
There is no thermal radiation.
There is only raw, unmitigated, astronomical mass.
It defies every known mathematical parameter.
Evade.
Evade.
Evade.’
The cloud cover violently split open.
A colossal shadow blotted out the rising sun entirely, turning the pale dawn back into the dead of night for a fraction of a second.
A massive, solid iron cannonball—larger than a galleon’s main cabin and painted with a crude, mocking dog face—slammed into the shallow water of the bay with the apocalyptic, world-shattering force of a meteor strike.
The resulting shockwave was cataclysmic.
The sheer kinetic force of the impact displaced hundreds of thousands of tons of ocean water in a microsecond, creating a towering, sheer wall of a tidal wave.
The displaced water violently hurled the three remaining Roshwan dreadnoughts high into the air.
Their thick, iron-reinforced wooden hulls were completely pulverized against the jagged coastal cliffs, snapping like brittle matchsticks in a hurricane.
They were blasted backward into the sand, their eardrums ruptured, rendered instantly unconscious by the sheer, staggering atmospheric pressure.
Elian didn’t fly back.
The red aura flared wildly around him, transforming from a weapon into a conceptual anchor.
It violently bound his small, bare feet to the wooden planks of the dock, digging into the architecture of the world itself to defy the shockwave, even as the thick timber groaned, splintered, and fractured violently beneath him.
As the colossal plume of vaporized water, hissing steam, and displaced sand began to clear, a new sound echoed through the eerie, ringing silence of the ruined harbor.
*Thud.
Thud.*
It was the sound of incredibly heavy boots hitting the blood-soaked wooden docks.
From the dissipating smoke, a giant of a man stepped forward.
He wore a crisp, impeccably tailored white suit, with a pristine Marine coat draped casually over his impossibly broad shoulders.
Despite having apparently dropped from the stratosphere directly into the center of a blood-soaked, burning warzone, there wasn’t a single speck of dust, ash, or blood on his immaculate uniform.
‘Every instinct, every encoded memory from the life I lived before, is demanding immediate retreat,’ Elian’s mind calculated, struggling to process the visual data.
‘The physics of this current reality are fundamentally broken.
A standard biological organism cannot fall from the cloud layer and crack the earth without instantaneously shattering their own skeletal structure into dust.
A normal human being does not bend gravity.
A normal human being does not displace the oxygen in the air simply by existing in the space.
He is an anomaly.’
Vice Admiral Monkey D.
Garp stopped walking.
He stood incredibly tall amidst the ruin, surveying the unbelievable destruction surrounding him.
He looked at the literal mountains of butchered soldiers, the splintered, floating remains of two mighty naval fleets, and the burning, ash-choked remnants of the village in the distance.
Finally, his gaze lowered, locking onto the tiny, blood-soaked boy standing in the absolute center of the carnage.
Garp’s face, usually characterized by a legendary, boisterous cheer and an impossibly wide grin, was completely unreadable.
He didn’t look angry.
He didn’t radiate the righteous fury of a Marine delivering justice.
He looked infinitely tired, and profoundly, deeply sad.
“Kid,” Garp rumbled.
His voice wasn’t particularly loud, but it carried a dense, physical weight that vibrated through the air, making the surviving wooden planks of the docks tremble violently beneath Elian’s anchored feet.
“What have you done to yourself?”
**Author’s Note** *Hits the snooze button for the 5th time…*
Hey everyone, **Typing_In_My_Sleep** here.
So, about that last update…
I uploaded the completely wrong chapter.
In my defense, please refer to my username.
I’m also brand new to this app, and the buttons are very confusing when your eyes are only halfway open.
My bad!
To bribe you for your forgiveness, the *actual* chapter is up now.
I’ll also try to chug enough coffee to write and upload **two extra chapters** over the next two days (assuming I don’t pass out on my keyboard).
They woke me up just enough to realize my mistake.
You rock.
Alright, going back to sleep now…