The assassins kept coming.
Small groups at first—three or four at a time, always at night or in narrow stretches of road. Renji erased them without breaking stride. By the end of the second week the parties had grown larger and better equipped. One group even brought a mage who tried to pin him with binding chains. Renji looked at the chains, the mage, and the two swordsmen flanking him.
“Erase.”
All three vanished together. Multi-target had climbed again somewhere along the road. He no longer bothered counting the exact number.
Aya stopped commenting on the bodies that never left corpses. Lira simply stayed closer to his side, wings hidden, blue eyes occasionally flicking to his face like she was still trying to measure what he actually was.
They reached the southern shore on a gray afternoon. A mid-sized merchant vessel was taking on the last of its cargo, bound west across the narrow sea toward the Elven territories. Renji paid for three passages in hard crystal coin and ushered both girls up the gangplank without ceremony.
The ship left port on the evening tide.
Within an hour Aya was green and gripping the rail. Lira had gone pale, one hand pressed to her stomach, wings twitching weakly under her cloak every time the deck rolled. Renji stood between them, completely unaffected, watching the coastline shrink.
{Seasick. Both of them. Plot armor is undefeated.}
He kept a steadying hand on each of them while the crew moved around the three passengers with the usual indifference of men who had seen land-dwellers suffer before. The journey across the channel was supposed to take four days. Renji already knew Aya and Lira were going to hate every hour of it.
He didn’t mind the idea of the Elven kingdom.
New land. New faces. Possibly new girls worth looking at. The thought sat comfortably in the back of his mind. Aya was still first—would always be first—but he had never pretended to be monogamous, and the agreement they had reached weeks ago still stood. Lira had already proven how easily she could be brought into the arrangement. An elf or two would simply be more of the same.
On the third night the sea turned wrong.
The temperature dropped. The wind died. Something vast moved under the black water. Sailors began shouting. Lanterns swung. A massive shape broke the surface off the starboard side—an enormous kraken, tentacles thicker than the main mast, a beak that could shear a ship in half, eyes the size of carriage wheels glowing dull red in the dark. The legends had called it a calamity on par with the Demon King. The legends had not exaggerated.
Crewmen screamed. Harpoons flew and bounced off rubbery flesh. A tentacle the length of the ship itself slammed across the deck and swept six men into the water. Another wrapped the bow and began to pull. Wood screamed. The vessel listed hard.
Aya tried to open a portal and nearly vomited from the motion. Lira’s healing light flickered uselessly in her shaking hands. Men died in the water and on the deck with equal speed. The kraken was simply too large, too strong, too far beyond anything the crew had ever trained for.
Renji watched the chaos for a few seconds, mildly annoyed that the ship was about to sink under him.
He looked at the central mass of the creature—the place where the tentacles met the bulk of its body—and spoke one word.
“Erase.”
The kraken ceased to exist.
No explosion. No thrashing death throes. No lingering ink cloud. One moment a legendary sea calamity was tearing the vessel apart. The next moment there was only empty ocean and the violent splash of water rushing in to fill the space where thousands of tons of monster had been.
Silence slammed across the deck.
Then the ship, already half-broken, began to sink in earnest. Water poured through the holes the tentacles had left. The remaining crew shouted and ran for the boats.
Renji’s private window lit up like a festival.
**Level 560**
**Magic: 2,345,050**
**Strength: 53**
**Agility: 56**
**Defense: 51**
**Void – Concept Deletion**
**Multi-target limit: 120**
The numbers were ridiculous. Apocalyptic. Endless. He stared at them for a long moment while the deck tilted under his feet.
{I could walk back to the capital and delete the Demon King before breakfast. Still feel like leaving that to the hero. He’s earned the participation trophy.}
Water reached his boots.
A new line of text appeared beneath the others.
**New skill unlocked: Reverse Void**
**Effect: Invert the core principle of Concept Deletion. Instead of erasing, create. Material, structure, or conceptual constructs may be generated within current capacity limits. Complexity and scale scale with Magic.**
Renji read it twice.
A slow smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
{Jackpot.}
The ship was going down fast. Aya and Lira clung to him, both still seasick and now thoroughly terrified. The remaining crew were already abandoning the vessel.
Renji looked at the dark water, at the distant line of the Elven coast somewhere beyond the night horizon, and decided there was no reason to panic.
He had Reverse Void now.
He could build whatever he needed when the time came.
For the moment he simply held both girls steady on the tilting deck and waited for the right moment to act. The Elven kingdom was still ahead. New land. New possibilities.
Aya remained first. Everything else was just a matter of walking far enough and erasing whatever tried to stop them.