Argentus calculated the distance to Sylvia in a fraction of a second.
The sloop was hundreds of meters away, bobbing violently in the massive wake created by the Sea King's emergence. The water between him and safety was a churning blender of conflicting currents, white foam, and debris.
Swimming through that chaos would be suicide. He'd be pulled under by the turbulence and drowned before he made it halfway.
But then his eyes tracked upward, and a mad idea crystallized.
The Sea King's massive entry had displaced tons of water—a geyser that had shot fifty meters into the air and was now falling back down. Mixed in with the cascading water were chunks of wood—shattered railings, broken masts, splintered crates—all tumbling through the air in slow motion, suspended briefly by momentum before gravity reclaimed them.
"A path," Argentus whispered, his silver eyes narrowing as calculations ran through his mind at lightning speed.
It was insane. Completely, utterly insane.
He grinned.
He bent his knees until the wooden deck beneath his boots began to splinter and crack under the coiled pressure.
BOOM.
He vanished.
To the terrified Marines and pirates still cowering on the deck—those who hadn't yet fainted from shock—Argentus simply ceased to exist in one location and instantly reappeared twenty meters in the air, his body crouched on a falling piece of broken mast.
he wasn't done.
He kicked off the wooden debris beneath him.
WHAM.
The wood exploded into splinters under the force of his step, the entire piece disintegrating from the impact. But the equal-and-opposite reaction launched Argentus even higher, propelling him upward and forward in a zigzagging blur.
He was using Soru—the high-speed movement technique he'd copied from watching Garp move during their training. Kicking the air itself dozens of times per second to create momentary footholds.
Debris became his staircase.
He climbed through the falling wreckage in a drunken, impossible ascent, moving faster than the human eye could properly track. Each step destroyed what he touched, but each destruction gave him the momentum to reach the next piece.
He soared higher and higher until he was level with the masts of the battleships below, then above them, still climbing.
On the Marine deck, Colonel Nezumi stared upward with bulging eyes, his jaw hanging open in disbelief.
"He's insane!" Nezumi shrieked, clutching his head with both hands. "He's going straight for it! The boy's going to get himself killed!"
But Argentus wasn't listening to the screams below.
He reached the apex of his climb—the absolute limit of how high the debris field extended.
For a single heartbeat, he was suspended in midair, completely motionless, face-to-face with the Sea King's massive underbelly. The creature's crimson scales filled his entire field of vision, each one the size of a dinner plate.
Then gravity reasserted itself, trying to pull him down toward the waiting ocean far below.
Argentus twisted his entire body in midair, pulling his right arm back in a throwing motion. He gripped Regulus so tightly his knuckles turned bone-white. The black spear hummed in his grip, the golden feather carvings seeming to ignite with inner light.
Below, the remaining conscious pirates and Marines watched with mouths hanging open, their eyes bulging with fear and with the awful certainty that they were witnessing something impossible.
"HEY, UGLY!" Argentus roared, his voice cutting through the thunder of crashing water and the roar of the ocean.
The Sea King's massive pupil—easily five meters across—rotated in its socket, searching for the source of the tiny, insignificant sound.
Then Argentus thrust.
He threw his entire body weight into the strike. Every ounce of momentum from his falling trajectory. Every gram of strength his enhanced muscles could generate. All the cutting power he'd learned from Koushiro. Everything focused into a single point—the tip of Regulus's black blade.
KAAAA-BOOM!
A cone of compressed air exploded from the tip of Regulus. The shockwave was visible—a ripple spreading outward through the air itself.
Then the black blade made contact with crimson scales.
SHIIIING.
Argentus drove the tip of Regulus into the beast's flank with terrible precision. The black steel bit deep, piercing through scales as thick as shield plates, cutting through muscle denser than ship timbers, finding the spaces between existence itself.
But instead of bouncing off or stopping after penetrating a few inches, the blade kept going.
And Argentus, using his own falling weight and the momentum of his descending body, held on tight.
Like a man sliding down a curtain with a knife, he plummeted toward the sea below, ripping Regulus's blade through the Sea King's flesh as gravity pulled him down.
SSSHHH-RRAAAK!
The sound of tearing flesh was obscenely loud—wet, horrible, like fabric being shredded.
A vertical line, easily twenty meters long, opened up on the monster's belly. A waterfall of dark crimson blood erupted from the wound, spraying out in a pressurized stream that painted the air red and began raining down on the ships below in a grotesque downpour.
At the last possible second before hitting the water, Argentus kicked off violently from the Sea King's skin, using the monster's own body as a launch pad.
He flipped in midair—once, twice—and landed with a heavy, wet thud on the railing of the pirate ship.
His boots skidded across the blood-slicked wood. He nearly lost his balance but managed to catch himself, coming to a halt in a low crouch.
He stood slowly, shaking the excess blood off Regulus with a sharp flick of his wrist. The crimson gore slid off the black metal effortlessly.
He looked up at the Sea King, expecting a roar of pain. A thrashing retaliation. Something.
Instead, there was only silence.
The massive wound he had carved was indeed bleeding—a steady stream of blood flowing from the twenty-meter gash like a river.
But on a creature the size of a mountain, on a Sea King so massive it could swallow islands...
It was nothing more than a paper cut. A minor irritation.
High above, the Sea King slowly—almost contemplatively—tilted its enormous head downward.
Its massive eye rotated in its socket, the triple eyelids blinking in sequence as it focused with terrifying clarity on the tiny wooden toys floating in what was essentially its bathtub.
The sheer pressure of that gaze was heavier than gravity. It pressed down on everything making the air itself feel thick and hard to breathe.
"Oh," Argentus muttered, reaching up to wipe Sea King blood from his cheek with the back of his hand. "I guess that attack only made it curious. Or maybe angry. Hard to tell with fish."
He glanced around the deck.
The remaining conscious pirates and Marines—those who hadn't already fainted from terror—were staring at him with expressions of absolute horror.
Then, as the Sea King's gaze swept across the ships again, their eyes rolled back in their heads simultaneously. White foam appeared at the corners of their mouths.
The Sea King didn't attack with teeth or tail.
It simply descended.
The massive body blocked out the sun, the sky, the horizon, the entire visible world. Everything turned to shadow as the creature's bulk eclipsed reality itself.
The jaws—each tooth the size of a ship's mast—began to unhinge with a wet, grinding sound of moving cartilage.
The mouth opened wider. And wider. And impossibly wider still, revealing a cavern of interlocking teeth and a throat that looked like a tunnel leading straight to hell.
The water around both ships began to behave impossibly.
It surged upward instead of down, defying gravity. The ocean itself was being sucked into the creature's mouth, creating a reverse waterfall that flowed up toward the beast's gullet.
Argentus stood amidst the field of unconscious bodies, his coat whipping wildly around him from the wind generated by the Sea King's inhale. He looked up at the descending wall of red flesh closing in from all sides.
He didn't feel fear.
He felt a strange, vibrating excitement that bordered on madness.
"I'm about to be eaten by a fish," Argentus muttered, and a slightly unhinged smile spread across his blood-spattered face. "You know what? These creatures are really awesome."
CRASH.
The jaws snapped shut with the sound of mountains colliding.
The world turned black instantly. The roar of rushing water was cut off mid-crescendo, replaced by the wet, suffocating sound of flesh sealing tight around prey.
The ships, the unconscious men, and Argentus were simply... gone.
Swallowed whole.
The Sea King slid back beneath the surface of the Calm Belt with barely a ripple, its massive tail giving one lazy, satisfied flick.
The ocean churned violently for a few seconds—white foam hissing and spitting on the surface, the last evidence of the catastrophe.
And then... nothing.
The silence returned, absolute and oppressive.
The water smoothed out once more into a perfect sheet of black glass, as still as a frozen lake.
It was as if the ships, the people, and the battle had never existed at all. As if reality had simply edited them out.
Time stretched.
One minute passed. Then two.
The Calm Belt remained perfectly, terrifyingly still.
Then, fifty meters away from where the beast had vanished—near the bobbing, untouched hull of Sylvia—the water began to disturb.
Bloop.
A single bubble rose to the surface. Tiny. Red.
Bloop. Bloop.
SPLASH!
A hand shot out of the water, fingers clamping onto Sylvia's gunwale with white-knuckled intensity.
Argentus hauled himself up and over the rail, his entire body heaving with exertion. He collapsed onto the deck face-first, his limbs sprawled at awkward angles.
He was covered—absolutely coated—in a horrifying mixture of seawater, digestive fluids, and thick viscous Sea King blood.
"HAAH!"
He rolled onto his back, his chest rising and falling violently as he gasped for air like a man who'd been underwater far too long.
Regulus was still clutched in his right hand.
He stared up at the gray sky, coughing violently. A mouthful of salt water and something far worse came up, and he turned his head to spit it over the side.
"Good thing..." he wheezed between gasping breaths, wiping slime from his eyes with a trembling hand. "Good thing... I found the place... where I poked that big bastard earlier..."
He coughed again, his entire body shaking.
"And poked... that same place... from the inside."
A wet, rasping chuckle escaped his throat.
"Nothing likes... having a hole opened... in its stomach."
He lay there for a long time, just breathing.
Letting his heart rate gradually slow. Letting the adrenaline bleed out of his system. Letting his hands stop shaking.
The sun was starting to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple.
Finally, when his limbs would cooperate again, Argentus pushed himself into a sitting position.
He stood on unsteady legs, his boots squelching with water and blood and things he didn't want to identify. He wobbled slightly but managed to stay upright.