Things happened fast… really fast.
General Keith's shadow separated from his body and immediately disappeared into the darkness. The general himself lunged at the leaders with madness.
"Stop the general!" Leo yelled at the top of his voice.
The soldiers were left in shock, and it was too late. The general's sword reached forward to pierce through the back of one of the leaders, but it shattered as a hardened water forcefield surrounded the leaders, surfacing in an instant and sending the mad general flying backward.
The leaders continued their meditation, this time much more strongly.
The forcefield broke, and a nearby soldier fell to the ground on her knees. Creating a forcefield at the last minute had immediately drained her.
"What are you looking at?! Stop the general!" Leo yelled again.
The soldiers were confused. What had happened in the span of a few minutes? They decided to fight their fear and turn their weapons toward the general while others surrounded the leaders.
Leo was about to let go of the steering oar when five soldiers immediately flanked him, replacing Lyra, who had dashed forward in an instant to battle the general.
He looked at them with surprise, coldness finding its way into his voice.
"How dare you embarrass me and think you can't protect me? I'm the only Pisces here; have you no brains?"
With that, he grabbed the sword from one of the soldiers and dashed forward.
General Keith slowly rose to his feet in the most abnormal way ever, the madness never leaving his eyes. He took a slow step forward, then immediately lunged, leaving a gust of wind behind him.
Leo didn't move toward the general, as Lyra was already entangled in a brawl with the weaponless madman. Instead, Leo was looking for another enemy.
Gazing at the shadows of the soldiers, his gaze landed on a particular one. As if noticing his stare, the shadow raised its hand as if mocking Leo and ran toward another soldier.
"Got you."
Leo was about to chase the shadow when someone grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him across the ship, hitting his back.
Leo groaned under the impact and slowly pushed himself up, his ribs screaming in protest. The white metal of the [Shell of Dread] hissed, venting steam as it absorbed the force that should have shattered his spine. He looked up, expecting to see Keith, but his breath hitched.
The soldier who had thrown him wasn't Keith. It was one of the five guards who had been flanking him seconds ago. The man's shadow was gone—not hidden by the dim light, but physically absent from the deck boards. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated until they swallowed the iris, leaking a thin, oily vapor.
"Tsk. The cursed shadow is moving through the reflections," Leo hissed, his crimson eyes scanning the deck.
The chaos accelerated. The shadow Leo had been tracking blurred. It dove into the shadow of a spearman, and for a heartbeat, the two shadows merged into a distorted, multi-limbed shape. Then, the original shadow leaped out, lunging toward the next target. The spearman he left behind didn't even scream. He simply stood still for a second, his shadow vanishing into the wood, before he spun around and drove his spear into the throat of the archer behind him.
"The shadows! Stay away from your own shadows!" Leo roared, but the command was impossible to follow on a deck crowded with soldiers and flickering magical light.
Even if they heard, how were they supposed to stay away from their own shadows?
It was a chain reaction. Every time the darkness touched a man and left, it took their shadow with it, leaving behind a husk filled with nothing but the Spirit's raw madness.
Lyra was a blur of silver-steel in the center of the deck, her blade clashing against General Keith's forearm. Keith was using his bare hands, his skin hardened into something resembling black basalt. He ignored the shallow cuts Lyra dealt him; his only goal was to reach the runic circle.
"Lyra, fall back!" Leo yelled, grabbing a discarded heavy shield to use as a bludgeon.
The deck was becoming a slaughterhouse of confusion. Soldiers were fighting soldiers, unable to tell who was still sane until a blade was already buried in their side. Every few seconds, another shadow would disappear from existence, followed by a guttural roar of madness.
Ten became twenty. Twenty became fifty.
The infection was scaling up, moving faster than Leo's eyes could track.
Leo ducked a wild swing from a shadowless soldier and smashed the rim of his shield into the man's jaw. He didn't stay to finish the fight. He scrambled back toward the steering oar, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
'If the leaders fall, the ship dies. No, no, I have to stop it.'
He reached the raised platform and grabbed the oar, locking his legs to stabilize the vessel as a rogue wave slammed into the hull. The ship listed a full thirty degrees. Below, in the inner decks, he could hear the muffled screams of thousands of civilians. They were trapped in a wooden box with the ocean on one side and a growing army of madmen on the other.
"Aquarius! I can't hold him!" Lyra's voice was strained.
Leo looked over. Lyra was being pushed back toward the railing. Keith's movements were erratic and jerky, like a puppet being handled by a drunkard, but his strength was undeniable. With a roar, Keith grabbed a nearby soldier—a man whose shadow was still intact—and threw him bodily into the runic circle.
The formation broke.
The twelve practitioners who had been maintaining the ship's integrity were jarred out of their meditation. The pink-gold light flickering from their palms sputtered and died.
"No!" Leo screamed.
The darkness that had been prowling the deck didn't waste a microsecond. The shadow, now massive and bloated from the hundreds of souls it had touched, surged across the deck boards like a tidal wave of ink.
It swept over the twelve leaders and the King in a single, fluid motion.
Leo watched in horror as the shadows of the realm's leaders were ripped from the floorboards. The light of the runes turned from a warm pink to a cold, abyssal violet. The King, the man who had built the very foundations of their defense, slowly stood up. His crown fell to the deck with a hollow ring. When he looked up at Leo, his eyes were two pits of endless, swirling darkness.
The ship groaned with the sound of dying wood and failing magic. Without the pure auric reinforcement, the Tide Of Seas began to win.
"Back to the helm!" Leo's voice was raw, his ego finally being crushed under the weight of the disaster. "Lyra! To me!"
Lyra dived through a gap in the madness, her armor scorched and dented. She scrambled up the platform, followed by only five soldiers—the last ones whose shadows still clung to the wood beneath their boots.
They formed a tight, desperate circle around Leo and the steering oar.
Below the platform, the main deck was a sea of gray skin and dilated eyes. Hundreds of infected soldiers stood in eerie silence, their breaths coming in synchronized, ragged gasps. At the front stood General Keith and the King, their bodies leaking black vapor that rose to meet the cracks in the firmament and the thin forcefield.
The storm roared above, the lightning illuminating the nightmare on the deck.
Leo gripped the steering oar with both hands, his knuckles white and his crimson eyes fixed on the army of what used to be his people. The [Shell of Dread] groaned, its [Impervious Solitude] reaching its absolute limit as it tried to filter the concentrated madness radiating from the deck.
"Seven," Leo whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and terror. "There are only seven of us left."
Lyra stood beside him, her sword raised, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts. "Then I guess we make them work for it."
The King stepped forward, his hand reaching out toward the steering oar. The thousands of infected soldiers followed his movement, a slow, shambling advance that promised nothing but a slow, shadowed death.
Leo looked at the monsters wearing the faces of the soldiers with mixed emotions.
The King opened his mouth, and a voice that wasn't human—a voice that sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates—filled the air.
"Leave the ship and open the door to the inner deck, or pay a heavy price for it."
Leo's expression darkened. "To hell with you," he spat.
The hundreds of madmen lunged at once.