Harvest

A sudden sound of waves jolted Duncan awake from his dream.

He abruptly opened his eyes. The visions he had seen in his half-dreaming state had dwindled to only faint silhouettes. He remembered seeing fish swimming through the air, and the fish circling him had seemed especially delicious—but what had those fish looked like again?

Fish... could swim through the air?

Duncan blinked. The bizarre feeling of reality and dreams tearing apart and blending together left him briefly confused. He looked at the three fishing rods secured to their holders and saw no sign of a bite. In the distance, however, the sea had begun to heave, wave after wave crashing against Lost Homeland's hull.

Then the waves grew larger. With a change visible to the naked eye, increasingly powerful swells came surging in from afar without pause. Lost Homeland's massive hull rocked in the wind and waves, while the roar of the sea filled his ears.

Duncan looked up at the sky and found that the weather was still fine. There merely seemed to be more wind and waves; it did not look like some extreme weather phenomenon, such as a major storm, was about to strike.

"This probably isn't good weather for fishing..."

He muttered to himself, considering whether he should reel in the rods. But just then, from the corner of his eye, he saw the tip of one fishing rod suddenly bend sharply!

The tough line made specifically for sea fishing instantly went taut. The short, sturdy rod seemed to have caught something enormous, its entire front half bending like a bow with a harsh creaking sound. The rod holder, strained by the tremendous pull, also groaned with the sound of wood grinding against wood. All of it conveyed a single message to Duncan:

The fish was here! A big one!

He instantly abandoned the idea of packing up and resting. A fisherman's passion blazed in his chest as he crossed the distance to the hooked rod in two strides. One hand seized the rod to keep it from slipping out of the holder, while the other began carefully adjusting the tension of the line.

"I knew it! How could I possibly come up empty-handed?!"

Duncan muttered excitedly as he began wrestling with the enormous thing at the other end of the line. It was a difficult struggle. Whatever was at the end clearly had no intention of surrendering, and an immense force tugged at the rod. Even with Duncan's strength and the support of the rod holder, the stalemate seemed on the verge of collapse.

The wind and waves around Lost Homeland gradually grew stronger, but such slight rocking was nothing to Duncan.

He was merely getting worked up by the stubborn "prey," while worrying that this hard-won chance to improve his meals would slip away for nothing.

The line had reached its breaking point. The big fish was about to break free from his grasp.

After an unknown period of deadlock, Duncan finally gritted his teeth. A cluster of Eerie Green Flame suddenly spread outward from the hand gripping the rod.

The Green Fire flared fiercely, spreading like water before swiftly flowing along the rod and fishing line. Spirit Body Fire burned all the way down, forming a "line of fire" that plunged directly into the sea. The next instant, an illusory outline of green flames abruptly appeared in the depths around Lost Homeland, and under the illumination and contouring of that Eerie Green Flame, a massive shadow emerged beneath the water.

The shadow resembled a mass of flesh that endlessly expanded and contracted, nearly covering the entire sea surface within several hundred meters of Lost Homeland. Countless shifting, proliferating things of darkness extended from its edges, writhing and waving through the ocean like thousands upon thousands of arms. They churned the seawater around Lost Homeland, controlling the rise and fall of invisible waves.

Duncan heard something strange coming from the sea. Maintaining his struggle with the "prey," he leaned out and curiously glanced over the side.

He saw nothing, only the rising and falling waves, with no great change from before.

Yet he could clearly feel that the opposing force transmitted through the rod had weakened somewhat.

His prey was beginning to run out of strength. A radiant smile spread across his face at that realization.

He began tightening the line with force, dragging his prey bit by bit out of the sea...

Alice was startled by the rumbling and howling outside the cabin. Violent shaking came up through the floor, making the furnishings in the room collide in a clattering series of bangs. Quick as lightning, she grabbed a nearby railing and avoided falling, her face full of uncertainty. "What happened?"

Lost Homeland was rocking as though a massive storm raged outside. Deep within the ancient ghost ship came a low, oppressive, strange noise, as if it were roaring and bellowing, fighting against the terror of the deep sea, fighting against some gigantic beast trying to devour it.

Everything in the cabin clattered noisily. At first, Alice assumed the sounds were simply collisions caused by the ship's rocking, but she soon realized that many of the noisy objects were chattering where they stood—they were making sounds to communicate with one another, but Alice could not understand this language that only Lost Homeland itself could comprehend.

She only knew that something might have happened outside.

Miss Doll decided to go up to the deck and take a look. She stumbled out of the cabin, steadying herself against the nearby walls to avoid falling as she ran toward the deck.

After nearly being tripped several times by flying ropes and wildly rolling barrels, she finally reached the end of the stairs. She pushed open the wooden door that swayed constantly in the wind and waves, only to see astonishingly huge swells rising across the Boundless Sea.

The sky was pitch-black. Ominous clouds had nearly condensed into heavy masses, pressing darkly down toward the sea. Under those black clouds, waves as high as city walls rolled and surged, rising around Lost Homeland as though encircling it!

It was Alice's first time seeing such a sight. She did not know whether this was normal at sea, but she knew she had to find the captain now.

She scanned the deck and, with almost no effort, found Captain Duncan standing at the edge of the deck.

The surrounding wind and waves were rather annoying, but to Duncan, who was on the verge of success, they were nothing more than insignificant "disturbances." Through the dual feedback from the fishing line and Green Fire, he could clearly feel that his prey had stopped resisting. The enormous creature was being dragged bit by bit toward the surface.

"Get up here!"

He shouted cheerfully and gave the rod one final, powerful pull.

A big fish leaped from the sea—truly big, nearly half as large as he was.

In that fleeting instant, Duncan's gaze met the fish's in midair.

"...Pretty ugly."

That was his first thought.

It truly was an incredibly ugly fish. Its pitch-black body seemed covered in some kind of growth, rough and uneven, with strange grayish-white markings spreading chaotically along the fins on either side. Numerous structures like bony spines could be seen around its head, and beneath those spines, a pair of hollow, whitened eyeballs stared at Duncan.

Duncan felt deeply uncomfortable. He actually felt as though the fish were looking at him with malicious intent.

But the next second, he saw the fish convulse violently. For some reason, the pair of eyes watching him burst open out of nowhere, blood instantly pouring out.

The fish landed heavily on the deck, jumping and twisting madly as if electrocuted before falling still within seconds. Blood seeped from its mouth and burst eyes, dripping onto the deck little by little.

Duncan looked in surprise at the hideous fish rapidly losing its life at his feet. He vaguely recalled something he had read in a book: most deep-sea fish really were ugly, and because they had lived for so long under immense water pressure, their blood vessels could indeed rupture when they were hauled to the surface due to the pressure change, causing them to die quickly—so fish in this world were like that too?

Just as he stood there dazed, another burst of crackling sounds suddenly came from nearby.

Duncan looked toward the noise curiously, only to see several more, smaller "monster fish" dropping onto the deck one after another.

They looked much like the monster fish that had been nearly half his height, but were only around half a meter long. And just like the big fish—when Duncan looked at them, blood was already gushing violently from their bodies, and they soon lay at death's door.

Duncan stood blankly for a moment before finally reacting. "Trying to save Grandpa one at a time? Delivering yourselves in a whole chain?"

Alice tightly gripped the nearby railing, nervously watching the brutal battle unfolding not far away, a sight enough to drive an ordinary person mad.

She saw Captain Duncan standing at the edge of the deck, Eerie Green Flame erupting wildly from his body. Like a blazing giant, he confronted the sea. Three hooked chains extended from the deck beneath his feet, one of them burning with terrifying flames.

She saw a massive shadow suddenly appear in the Boundless Sea. Then a tentacle almost thicker than Lost Homeland's main mast emerged from the water. Countless malicious eyes opened across its surface, while innumerable sharp teeth ground and chewed between them, as though they would bite the entire ship into pieces the next moment.

Alice nearly cried out. She wanted to warn the captain to evade it, wanted to rush over and help, but before she could act, the tentacle came crashing down toward him.

She saw Captain Duncan raise his head. Amid the blazing flames, the captain's face actually bore the joy of a harvest—he stared at the countless eyes on the tentacle, and the countless eyes on the tentacle stared back at him.

The next second, every eye on the tentacle burst open at once. A piercing, agonized shriek rang out from among the hundreds of sharp teeth, and then the tentacle severed itself out of nowhere—as though some enormous entity hidden beneath the sea surface had voluntarily cut off its connection to the tentacle, directly abandoning its severely damaged end on the deck.

The tentacle slammed onto the deck. Foul, viscous flesh and blood poured from the severed end, splattering across the ground and landing at the captain's feet.