The lantern-beast's strike turned the sea itself into a vast water dragon, a flood bursting from a shattered dam, surging forward with brutal, pulverizing force.
Water looks soft until it kills you. In the right hands it's deadlier than steel.
Kaido knew that if that many-meters-thick current hit him square, even his hide would pay dearly. He bunched every muscle, power flaring
and punched.
It was like smashing into a wall of velvet. Just as Tengetsu Ares had learned a year ago, the sea blunts a man's strength. In water, the "soft conquers the hard."
Damn!
I don't know how to fight down here at all!
He'd thrown with everything he had… and the water shaved it down to barely two-thirds.
In the space between two heartbeats, the torrent met Kaido's fist the size of a boulder.
The instant they touched, his face changed. The sea wasn't brittle it was endless. Force kept coming, and coming, and coming, raking his knuckles and then his whole frame with grinding pressure and pain.
"Grave robbers die with the treasure!" the angler-thing howled. It was on him in a blink, trident leveled at Kaido's chest like a farmer sighting a boar in the melon patch
one thrust to end it.
Kaido's lips stayed clamped; he twisted at the last instant and the tines hissed past.
John was there the next moment, driving in with a needle tube thicker than any hospital syringe something unknown sloshing inside. He jabbed for the creature's hide, but even that small motion sent the water shivering; the lantern-beast felt it, flicked its tail, and slid meters aside. The trident snapped back at John.
Too fast.
Steel kissed flesh. The edge raked his waist; beads of blood bulged like red pearls, then bloomed into a ribbon in the dark.
John grunted, held his breath, and using the moment cut a stern glance toward Kaido and jerked his chin up: Go. Get help. Now.
The beast saw that, too, and sneered. "There is no 'away' at a thousand meters down. Turn your back, and you die."
"You won't leave this place alive nor will the ones waiting above."
Kaido had just started to kick away when the creature grabbed the sea in front of him. Liquid clenched like putty in its palm. It pitched spheres of water that burst against Kaido's guard.
Each detonation hammered him; shot-spray pecked his skin like bullets, opening a hundred pinprick cuts that wept red.
The angler-thing's grin twitched wider, then turned lofty. "A decent body. But I have lived thousands no, tens of thousands of meters down. Year after year, under pressure that would crush ships. Stone would soften before my flesh."
"Here or on land you cannot beat me."
This time it came bare-handed, no flow tricks, no weapon almost to show off. Dark-blue skin made the arm look like a reef given shape; the muscles weren't meat so much as strata, layers of rock stacked and chiseled.
It drove a fist that sent ringed waves rolling out through the deep.
Strength? I don't lose on strength! Kaido roared inside. Veins corded his face; with the horns crowning his head he looked like a demon king rising.
Bones clicked and sang. He tore at his limits and met the punch.
WHUMPF.
The impact boomed like thunder swallowed by the sea and under it, a sharp crack.
Air exploded from Kaido in a storm of bubbles as he rocketed backward through the dark.
He'd lost. Again. Overwhelmed, this time at the thing he prided in most.
"I've lived over two centuries in this ocean," the lantern-beast said, voice flat with the confidence of fact. "I've fought Sea Kings big as islands, and tempered this body against the weight of the abyss."
"My strength is beyond your imagining."
It hovered there with the trident, impassive, watching Kaido tumble as if swatting down a small fry meant nothing.
Two hundred years? John's eyes bulged despite the burn in his lungs. A monster that old… no wonder he's this strong.
On this sea, only giants had that kind of span three times a human's life, sometimes more. Some giants were said to see three and a half centuries.
But outside of them? He'd never heard of any race reaching hundreds of years.
The creature flicked a glance after Kaido and then leveled the trident at John again. "How long can you last?"
"Decades I've waited. Finally, someone comes. A little diversion before you die, and then I'll drown the rest of your pack."
He almost sounded… eager. Starved of company so long that even killing was entertainment. "I wonder when the next treasure-sniffing fools will arrive."
John, perversely, smiled. If he's talking like that, there is something here. A treasure worth guarding with blood. That makes me even more curious.
Wang Zhi must've smelled trouble that's why Kaido came. Which means the next wave is coming soon. Hold a little longer, and I'm safer than he is…
Just… don't let that idiot kid die on me.
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