Return to Carnival City

Carnival City, harbor.

The western harbor lay between breakwaters built from white marble, its lighthouse gleaming extravagantly beneath the sun. This was an exclusive district for wealthy merchants and nobles;

the eastern harbor, however, was an entirely different sight. Rusted sheet-metal docks stretched crookedly into the sea, while blackened crates and torn fishing nets were piled along the shore—this was the slums' harbor.

David's Revenge, its enormous hull like a slumbering beast, was moored steadily at the outermost berth of the eastern harbor.

Such a massive vessel should have drawn a crowd, yet the commoners on shore merely glanced at it before lowering their heads. A ragged youth was washing an oil-stained fishing net in murky river water, his fingers deeply cut by the fishing line. Not far away, a woman clutching a child squatted beside a garbage heap, searching for edible vegetable leaves. The child's cries were hoarse and weak.

To them, the mysterious ship was merely an irrelevant backdrop to their lives. Figuring out how to fill their stomachs was far more urgent than guessing who was aboard.

Deep within the crisscrossing dark alleys of the slums, the air suddenly rippled. Amid a faint sound of spatial distortion, an Air Door appeared out of nowhere. Dawn stepped out first, his left arm around Yamato and his right hand holding Hancock's, with a white fox and a puppy perched on his shoulders.

After the group stepped out of the alley, the Air Door silently closed as though swallowed by rippling water.

"This way."

Dawn released the two women, then raised a hand toward the cluster of low buildings at the end of the alley. His gaze swept over the mottled walls and pitted ground, and a trace of barely perceptible complexity flickered in his eyes.

While Dawn and his