The island shook with a tremendous rumble.
Ode could hardly tell if it was the ground pounding against his soles or his raging blood surging through his body.
His right fingertips, hidden behind his back, subtly flicked the safety on the shotgun, confirming it was ready to fire at any moment. Only then did he quietly lower his hand, proceeding forward with natural poise under the gaze of countless green eyes floating in the night like lightbulbs.
“I don’t understand your language, Father God,” Ode said in a tone of humble deference that carried not a shred of it. “But am I not the most perfect sacrifice offered to the mighty?”
“Father God is our ancestor!! Our protector! What right does a mere human have to call out like that?!” An angry voice rose from among the prostrating Deep Ones, but Ode completely ignored it.
He leaned casually against the rotting, damp wooden railing in front of the altar. His two long, straight legs emerged from beneath his suit jacket, crossed idly, gleaming so white in the dark, humid environment that they were almost dazzling.
“Or… did I misunderstand? Are you not among the ‘mighty’?”
“What?! How dare you—no, no… Father God! Please, let me explain!” The interviewer shuddered violently, slipping several times before crawling to its feet from the ranks. “He truly isn’t a sacrifice for you, but—but it has nothing to do with might! When I chose him, I only thought he was the most suitable bridegroom for Lady Khirra. He will join with Lady Khirra to breed the most perfect embryo—”
“Don’t you want me?” Ode deliberately rasped his voice low, lifting his gaze slightly. That seductive gleam from beneath his thick lashes instantly made all the surrounding clamor irrelevant.
“You…” The giant’s voice rumbled like muffled thunder. It slowly bent down through the sea mist, churning the night fog into surging waves.
Ode caught a whiff of a decaying, oppressive scent like the deep ocean. When those two yellowish-green lanterns—larger than his entire body—descended before him, they cast rippling glimmers across his form. But the light brought no warmth; instead, it drained all the heat from around him.
Ode nearly succumbed to a dizzying faintness, as if he might black out in the next second. But he didn’t. He simply adjusted his posture and state with uncanny calm, ensuring he could strike at any moment. “Don’t… you want to possess me?”
“…” Dead silence fell across the area.
In the next instant, Ode whipped the shotgun from behind his back!
“Boom boom boom…” The bullets slammed into the massive eyeball, producing a dull thud like shots plunging into water.
Before Dagon could react to the sudden rupture of its eyeball, Ode seized a cluster of tube worms clinging to the socket’s edge and swung himself into the gushing, turbid liquid of the shattered orb.
Ignoring the stench of the surrounding slime, he pushed against the resistance, raised the gun again, and aimed toward the upper interior of the eyeball—likely the brain—
“Ahh ahor ymg’…” Dagon let out a drum-like low roar.
Its speed was far greater than Ode had anticipated. Before his finger could squeeze the trigger, it gouged out its own damaged eyeball with a single finger!
“Bang!”
Ode spun dizzily inside the slime-filled eyeball, but the bullet still flew true, savagely tearing a gash through the center of Dagon’s palm and clearing him an escape route.
Amid the churning, Ode thrashed his arms desperately, clawing at the rift. Just before Dagon crushed the eyeball, he yanked himself free, kicked off a watermelon-sized barnacle for leverage, and leaped through the gash in the palm.
As he plummeted, he glanced back hastily, gun in hand—and saw a brand-new eyeball regenerating visibly in the pitch-black socket!
“How dare you—” From underground, the Deep Ones that had been kneeling in submission finally surged in fury, snatching up their weapons.
Ode staggered but steadied himself, sparing no time to glance at them.
His mind was clearer and more focused than ever. Confirming that all attacks were now fixed on him, he bolted straight toward the stone hut, relying on his self-healing to roll over shattered glass into the structure. He tumbled swiftly behind the witness, whose face registered surprise!
“Boom…”
Dagon’s foreclaw, thick as a skyscraper, pierced straight through the sturdy onyx hut.
Gripped tightly by Ode and held before him as a shield, Cavendish let out a soft sigh, half-enlightened. “No wonder you kept confirming I’d stay… You wanted to maneuver us into mutual destruction.”
Time seemed to slow. Cavendish lowered his frost-colored lashes, watching Dagon’s razor-sharp talon inch toward his chest.
But before any gore could erupt, everything flickered. Ode, still clutching Cavendish’s arm, blinked once—and found himself at the highest level of the deep pit outpost.
Cavendish half-supported his waist with one arm, his tone thick with irrepressible regret. “I can’t see you, so I wanted to stand as close as possible. But it seems getting close just turns me into your pawn…”
Ode’s reply was the cold barrel pressed against Cavendish’s abdomen. “Go die.”
“Bang!”
The shotgun’s muzzle spat fire.
Ode pulled the trigger without a moment’s hesitation.
Cavendish was either a monster or a cultist—keeping him around after the mask was off was too dangerous.
If he couldn’t pit Cavendish against Dagon, then he’d have to kill the man himself.
Alas, some scourges were destined to linger for a thousand years.
Before the muzzle flash bloomed, Cavendish dissolved like mist in front of Ode, leaving only a gleaming bullet that streaked through the night and blasted the wooden structure of the opposite platform.
“Boom…” Shattered planks rained down.
And in the darkness, things were rising—countless things. Monsters crawling from the deep sea, Deep Ones thoroughly enraged, and their Father God, Dagon.
“Fuck…” Ode stared at those ghostly lights ascending in the night sky, casting aside his usual decorum. In the face of death so near at hand, such niceties no longer mattered.
He bluntly voiced his regret at the best-laid plan’s failure, then leveled his gun once more.
His eardrums thrummed with pounding blood, but his thoughts remained crystal clear:
If he couldn’t use Cavendish to draw the enemies’ attention, he’d have to do it himself.
He’d keep every enemy locked on him, buying time and opportunity for the hostages to escape!
“Boom…”
The second bullet ripped through the night, burrowing into the skull of a Deep One trying to recapture a terrified human sacrifice.
Its claws were still embedded in the sacrifice’s shoulder—which was now empty. The sudden lightness from the severed head sent it toppling forward, sliding inch by inch down the sacrifice’s back like wet mud.
“Ah… ah!!!!!” The sacrifice, smeared in blood and slime, shrieked in unbridled terror, clutching its head as nails raked bloody furrows across its face. “Ah!! Ah!!!!”
“?” Ode grabbed the dorsal fin of a Deep One lunging at him, using its back as a springboard. He glanced down just in time to leapfrog over Dagon’s crushing claw with the creature’s momentum.
As expected—and yet, an unexpected mishap occurred:
The unlucky hostages seemed utterly shattered by Dagon’s arrival. Some rolled on the ground laughing and sobbing; others screamed in breakdown, clawing at their own eyes.
Among them all, only Lola—who had just been roused by the commotion—was still sane. But the little girl weakly lifted her gaze, confronting the demonic frenzy in the night: “—”
Ode watched her pupils dilate as unnatural madness colored those blue depths: “—Lola!! Listen!”
He had never shouted so loudly before. If Grandfather were here, would he scold him for losing composure? “These are all your nightmares!! All fake! Let me tell you what’s beyond the dream—1980! There, girls can take any class they want!”
“Don’t you want to sit in a classroom learning medicine?! Don’t you want to pick up the scalpel yourself, to practice the knowledge from your books—instead of sneaking into the library at dead of night, studying skills you’ll never use in a lifetime, not even until you die and rot in the ground?!”
“…!” Lola jolted violently, snapping free from the madness.
At the same moment, the long-brewing storm clouds on the horizon unleashed a torrential downpour.
“…” Ode panted harshly, his deep reddish-brown hair soaked through and plastered to his forehead and cheeks.
His throat ached as if something solid were lodged in his windpipe; his heart had never raced so fiercely—
Look at that.
The one true path had revealed itself.
He had wanted to use Cavendish to tangle with the monster and escape with the hostages, but Cavendish had left the board.
He had wanted to tangle with the monster himself to give the hostages a chance to flee, but the hostages had descended into madness with Dagon’s arrival.
Now, only one road remained—the one where death stood at the end—
To annihilate all the Deep Ones here, along with their beloved Father God, Dagon.
No more concerns left.
Etiquette, promises, death.
He no longer needed to worry if devouring monsters would make him inhuman, for death was his destiny.
In the frigid rain, Lola shivered as she looked up. She should have instinctively feared those grotesque shapes floating in the night; she should have hidden in panic. But amid the all-encompassing sea fog, one lean figure seized her entire attention—
Ode was laughing.
Laughing madly, hysterically, as if all the emotions pent up since Grandfather’s death had finally shattered the shell of restraint.
With one hand, he tore off his tattered shirt—mere baggage now—and flung it into the endless darkness below.
Three Deep Ones lunged at him simultaneously. He lifted one into his chest and blasted it to chunks with a “boom”; the other two drove their talons through his chest and abdomen, only to watch in horror as this lunatic seized the skull of their dead comrade, stared them down, and crunched through the cranium’s crown.
Fetid blood and brains gushed out, yet every taste bud on Ode’s tongue and every cell in his body screamed with ecstasy.
In two short seconds, he drained the skull dry, then hurled it downward. He grabbed the arm of the Deep One that had pierced his chest, his tongue slowly tracing his blood-smeared pale lips, green eyes aglow with eerie, greedy hunger. “Your turn.”
“…?…!” The Deep One’s bulging eyes widened impossibly, trembling in the wind. “No… no!! Monster! N’ghftdrn (monster)! You’re no human!!”
“Crack!”
Fueled by the flesh of the Deep Ones, Ode snapped the enemy’s arm with his bare hands. He raised his gun with his right hand and shattered the creature’s skull in one shot. The next second, like a wild beast, he clamped the severed arm in his jaws. He whipped his head around like an owl and flashed a sinister grin at the terrified Deep Ones behind him.
“…Yog nnn! Yog nnn! (Watch out!)”
Panicked shouts began to erupt among the Deep Ones, as if they were the innocent victims whose home had been invaded, and Ode the cruel monster destroying their peaceful haven.
More and more flesh was brutally shoved into Ode’s mouth. A tremendous surge of power flooded his body like a tidal wave, giving him the illusion that he was transforming into some horrifying monster himself.
—And it wasn’t far off.
Ode leaped into the air, stepping off the headless corpse of a Deep One at his feet. Relying solely on the strength of his legs, he soared nearly ten meters high. His movements were no longer clumsy and heavy. In just three seconds, he cleared out the more than a dozen enemies scattered along the hundred-meter passage.
“No… no!!”
“Help—”
“Madman… that’s a madman! Attack his head! It’s not a vital spot—he doesn’t even dodge!”
…
Lola, half-buried in a pile of Deep One corpses, happened to witness Ode flash past her from the left side of the path to the right, devouring as he went. The red-haired young man, covered in blood, truly didn’t look like a good person under the moonlight. He resembled a vampire that hadn’t tasted blood in millennia, driven mad by hunger and hunting for prey.
She couldn’t stop her body from trembling. The Shattered Onyx clutched in her hands nearly slipped from her grasp. But the next moment—
A wind thick with the stench of blood slammed into her cheeks, then gently halted.
The young man, his mouth full of gore, dropped to a half-kneel before her. With one hand, he seized the Shattered Onyx from her, clenched his fingers tight, and shaped a razor-sharp stone shard like a scalpel. He tossed it back into her palm. His hoarse voice was concise and commanding:
“Rain makes it hard to start a fire. Light it in a cave, then come out.”
…
Lola’s wildly thumping heart skipped a beat. She stared in stunned silence as the young man dashed away.
He had guessed…? He knew she wanted something to cut the fat from the Deep Ones’ bodies to make a fire for help, so he came to assist her?
That figure, which had seemed like a starving beast rampaging through the rain, suddenly lost some of its feral terror. She realized all at once that the man was badly wounded too. He’d been taking hits the whole time.
Lola hurriedly crouched back down, fighting to steady her trembling hands. She sliced into the monster’s fat layer as quickly as she could manage. When she glanced up occasionally, she saw either Ode draining the blood and flesh from another monster or one of them stabbing new holes into him.
…She could hardly bear to watch anymore.
It was a grueling war of attrition. Though Dagon attacked relentlessly during this time, Ode always managed to seize the moment by a hair’s breadth, leaping from small fry to the big boss itself. Dagon, ever prideful, clearly didn’t want to play this game where it risked slapping its own face. After being toyed with several times, it flew into a rage. It raised an arm longer than a five- or six-story building and smashed it down onto the ground below.
Boom…
The entire island shuddered violently, slowly tilting to one side.
The wooden structures of the outpost peeled away like dry bark and plummeted. Even the stone spiral passages cracked open several inches deep, sending rubble tumbling into the central abyss.
Ode, standing at the outpost’s highest level, paused mid-step for half a second. He looked down at Lola, who had finished stripping the fat layer and was now tearing cloth to make a wick.
As if sensing his gaze amid some unseen intuition, the little girl suddenly looked up. Through the pouring rain, their eyes met.
Dagon raised its massive arm high once more, about to bring it down.
Ode opened his mouth, at first unable to make a sound. But soon enough, he composed himself, raised a hand, and pointed two fingers at the little girl—like a 19th-century British gentleman jauntily calling out to his neighbors before heading out: “I made a bet with Death! That I could save you all! Don’t make me lose!”
—The next instant, he toppled backward, drawing the hatred of every monster as he plunged into the sea.
…
Lola’s pupils contracted sharply. She could almost hear her own ragged breaths amid the roaring downpour. Her hands shook uncontrollably, but she clamped down on her lip to steady them.
She swiftly finished the rest—twisting out the wick, grabbing a slab of fat, and rushing into the nearest cave.
She soaked the wick in fat, lit it with a fire starter from the outpost, shielded the flame with one hand, and dragged a fur rug laden with extra fat layers. From the breach Ode had deliberately lured Dagon to create, she bolted straight for the beach.
The internationally recognized distress signal was three evenly spaced fires. Lola arranged the fat piles with all her might as quickly as possible, silently thanking the brute strength she’d built over years of climbing trees, walls, and windows to eavesdrop on classes. Then she lit each wick one by one.
“Faster… come on!” Lola felt tears welling up—or maybe they already were, mingling with the rain. Her mouth tasted salty and metallic from biting her lip earlier to force calm. “Faster… that guy, that lunatic! Betting with Death… He never planned to survive! I have to get someone to save him, someone…”
The wicks were soaked by the storm. Even oil-soaked, they refused to catch easily.
Lola tried once, twice. She nearly cursed herself inwardly for not preparing all three wicks in the cave first. But reason quickly scolded her not to lose her head—she only had two hands and couldn’t carry three burning fires out.
The fifth time, the sixth… In her mounting tension, Lola lost all sensation in her body, numbly repeating the motion.
Until the thirteenth try.
A devilish number. But suddenly, flames erupted from the last wick, hissing and burning with fierce, roiling heat.
…
Lola clapped a hand over her mouth and collapsed to the ground.
Would anyone see it? They had to. There were night watchmen at the port, always scanning the sea for ships coming and going—
Across the water, lights flickered to life.
It started with a single small lantern, then quickly swelled into a procession.
Lola saw boats stirring at the harbor, sails unfurling. The lantern-bearing group boarded swiftly amid the warning honks of departing ships.
As if to reassure the signaler, the rescue vessel’s horn blared loud and clear, scattering the fog over the harbor and echoing into the depths below.
Gurgle…
As he plummeted, Ode desperately evaded Dagon’s strikes—this was far harder than on land. In the water, Dagon’s speed surged dramatically, while drag slowed him to a crawl.
But that didn’t stop him from catching the horn’s blast. Nor from spotting the shore lights when he surfaced amid the fray.
“Ha… hahaha!” Ode only managed a few laughs before Dagon crushed his right leg and dragged him under.
Agony ripped through him, but in the pitch-black seawater that admitted almost no light, Ode laughed wildly all the same—as if the pain grinding his nerves didn’t exist, as if the seawater flooding his lungs meant nothing.
No one could see it, no one could hear. Yet in the depths, Ode’s lips moved silently:
‘See that, Death? I stole your prey right from your grasp!’
In the next instant, he snapped his right knee up, yanking himself toward Dagon, closing in on its massive eye glowing faintly in the murky brine.
He raised his gun again, aimed at the foe, and mouthed clearly for Dagon to see: ‘You shitty monsters aren’t invincible after all.’
