Ludger pushed himself fully upright, chest heaving once, rain sliding off him again as the storm rushed back into the space the shockwave had cleared. He flexed his fingers, ignoring the pain, eyes snapping back to the ocean. The tail was still there. Still moving. Still enormous. And now it knew he could hit back.
The first stop should’ve been impossible. The second should’ve been suicide.
Ludger stood in the rain anyway, water running off his chin, wind clawing at his clothes, the deck still trembling under his boots like the ship hadn’t forgiven him for cracking it.
He looked at the tail, huge, ridged, bleeding in thin streams that vanished into foam, and a smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.
It can be hit.
That was all he needed. Then something pinched hard in his right shoulder. Not a stab.
A deep, grinding pressure that radiated into his arm, like the joint had been packed with sand and forced to rotate anyway. The impact had taken a chunk out of him. Or the Overdrive had. Maybe both.
His fingers flexed once, then twice. Pain answered. Ludger breathed in. The storm howled. His smirk didn’t fade. He reached to his chest again and traced the rune, fast, brutal, rewriting it like a man overwriting a warning label.
The glyph flared, thicker and hotter than before, the lines biting into him as if his skin didn’t deserve to keep them on the outside.
Overdrive ×3.
The world sharpened.
Rain slowed, each drop becoming a line he could see and ignore. The deck’s tilt turned into information instead of instability. His heartbeat slammed like a war drum and somehow still felt too slow. Power surged through his limbs with an exhilarating violence that made his teeth want to bare.
He stacked Rage Flow on top of it. The change was immediate.
Heat climbed from his gut into his chest like a rising animal. His vision narrowed around the tail, around the threat, around the simple truth of hit it until it stops moving.
His mind started drifting toward something feral, toward a pure, beastial fury that didn’t care about plans or retreat or politics. It only cared about dominance. Ludger bit his lip hard. Metallic taste flooded his mouth. Pain grounded him.
He forced the rage into a cage. Not gone. Contained. Just enough. The tail moved again.
It didn’t hesitate now. It came in lower and faster, a sweeping strike meant to shear the deck clean and send men and mast into the sea in one motion.
Ludger moved.
His boot slammed down, deck cracking again under the force, and he launched forward like a thrown spear. Wind and rain exploded around him as he met the tail mid-swing.
His fist hit. The shockwave detonated.
A ring of air burst outward, pushing rain aside in a violent halo. The sound was not thunder. It was a cannon blast fired inside the storm, a concussive boom that made sailors flinch and made the rigging sing.
The tail’s trajectory shifted, just enough. It clipped the ship again, but the hit was blunted, deflected, robbed of the lethal angle. The beast didn’t withdraw. It corrected.
The tail rose and snapped down, vertical this time, aimed at the deck like a guillotine. Ludger sprang up into it, fist driving upward.
Boom.
The ship shuddered. The air punched outward. Foam erupted from the ocean’s surface as if the sea itself had been slapped. The tail recoiled a meter. Two meters.
Not far, nothing that massive moved “far” quickly, but it moved, and blood sprayed again in a dark fan that the rain swallowed.
The beast tried again. A sideways sweep from the opposite direction, faster, lower, trying to catch him off balance.
Ludger pivoted on the slick deck like traction was a suggestion, shoulders twisting, hips snapping, fist slamming into the moving wall of flesh with perfect timing.
Boom.
The rain parted again.
For a heartbeat, everyone could see clearly, Lanterns, faces, rope lines, the monstrous tail framed in blue lightning like a pillar of the world.
Then the storm closed back in. The beast didn’t stop. It adapted.
The tail feinted, slowing, then accelerating, changing rhythm, testing whether Ludger was reacting or predicting.
Ludger didn’t chase the feint. He watched the weight. He watched the water displacement. He watched the fraction of a second where the tail committed. Every time it committed, he was there.
A punch. A blast. A shockwave that tore holes in the rain. The ship became an arena that shifted underfoot, and Ludger danced on it like a weapon balanced on a knife edge, too fast, too heavy, too angry to be reasonable.
The ocean tried to steal him with a sudden roll. He ignored it. The wind tried to blind him with spray. He ignored it. The storm tried to drown his senses in mana noise. He ignored it.
All that mattered was the limb in front of him and the moment it tried to erase his people. He stopped it again. And again. And again.
Each impact echoed through the storm like drumbeats of war.
Boom, rain blown aside, crew stumbling, lantern flames flaring.
Boom, tail deflected, hull spared, the ship’s groan reduced to a survivable scream.
Boom, blood in the foam, the beast’s irritation rising into something sharper.
Kaela and Maurien kept throwing wind into the sails, trying to force the ship toward any direction that wasn’t the beast’s shadow, but it barely mattered. The cyclones churned. The sea heaved. The tail kept coming, relentless.
The monster’s strikes grew heavier. Ludger’s counters grew louder. The deck under his feet cracked further, spiderwebbing from repeated launches. His right shoulder burned, the joint protesting each punch, each recoil, each redirection.
He didn’t slow. He couldn’t. At one point the tail struck in a rapid double, left to right, then right to left, trying to catch him between beats.
Ludger met the first with a punch, took the recoil sideways, and used the slide to carry him into the second, fist driving in with a savage, perfect angle. Two blasts back-to-back. The rain vanished in two expanding rings. The ship lurched as if caught between two invisible explosions.
Men on deck shouted, not words, just sounds. Not fear. Awe. Desperation. Because they were watching a duel that didn’t belong to humans. Lightning flashed again, revealing the scene in stark clarity: A boy, drenched and bleeding from his lip, eyes bright with contained fury, launching himself again and again into the path of a hundred-meter tail.
A monster beneath the waves, unseen except for that limb, hammering the ship with the patience of something that had crushed fleets before.
Punch.
Tail.
Shockwave.
Foam.
Rain.
Again.
And again.
They weren’t winning. Not yet. But they weren’t dying either. For long minutes, the fight settled into a brutal rhythm, strike and counter, sweep and deflect, neither side giving ground, neither side able to finish.
A stalemate carved in thunder and blood.
Ludger landed after another counter, boots skidding, chest heaving once, Overdrive heat roaring in his veins like a furnace. His teeth were bared, not in a smile, not anymore. In a snarl he kept behind closed lips. He tasted blood again and swallowed it, eyes locked on the tail as it rose for yet another swing.
“Come on,” he whispered into the storm, voice low and vicious.
“Show me your head.”
The rhythm broke.
After the last exchange, tail swing, Ludger’s punch, another concussive boom that split the rain, there was… nothing. No immediate follow-up. No angry corrections.
Just the ocean heaving under the storm, the cyclones still chewing at the surface, and that massive tail hovering half-submerged like a weapon held back.
It hung there, bleeding in thin, dark streams, not retreating, waiting. Assessing. Ludger stood on cracked planks with Overdrive heat roaring through him and watched the tail go still.
His breath came out as steam in the cold rain. A smart beast didn’t throw itself at a wall forever. It changed angles. Changed tactics. And Ludger could already feel how dangerous that next tactic might be.
It would’ve been convenient if the monster decided to show its head, some big, obvious target lunging up out of the water like a storybook leviathan. Convenient for a point-blank Turtle Shock Wave.
But convenience was for people who got to live in safe cities.
Ludger didn’t wait.
He pivoted and vaulted onto the rail in one motion, balancing there as the ship rolled beneath him. Rain whipped his face. Wind tore at his clothes. The ocean below was a black, churning pit.
He extended both hands toward the tail’s direction, angled slightly off to the side, as if he wasn’t aiming for the ship’s safety, but for space.
Viola’s voice cut through the storm.
“Ludger!” she shouted, panic and anger tangled together. “Don’t! Not without a proper opening!”
Ludger didn’t look back. He couldn’t afford to.
“I’ll create one,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Then we run.”
His fingers spread.
Mana surged into his palms like floodwater forced through a narrow gate. The pressure built instantly, dense, hot, heavy, enough that the air around his hands began to distort. The rain didn’t hit his skin anymore; it hissed and skated sideways, pushed away by the field forming around him.
He shifted aspect. Wind. Not a gentle breeze. Not the clean slicing currents Kaela used.
Wind-as-force. Wind-as-violence. Wind-as-a spear driven by a storm monster. The mana in his hands changed texture. It sharpened. It thinned. It began to vibrate. And the world noticed.
Lightning didn’t just flash in the clouds anymore.
Small sparks began to crawl from his hands into the air, thin, snapping filaments that leapt to nearby metal fittings, to wet rope, to the rail itself. Every spark sizzled against rain-soaked wood, each one an angry little serpent of light.
The lantern flame flickered hard. Hair rose on necks. Even the sailors who didn’t understand mana felt it in their teeth. Ludger poured more in.
The rune inside his chest burned like a brand, Overdrive screaming, Rage Flow clawing at the edges of his restraint.
His arms trembled, not from weakness, but from the sheer density he was forcing into a single shape. The air around his hands turned into a tearing howl.
A cone of pressure formed, invisible but violent, flattening rain into mist, pushing it outward in a widening arc. The storm tried to swallow the sound, but the sound fought back, an escalating pitch, like the sky itself was being drawn into a blade.
He didn’t aim for a precise kill. He aimed for space. He aimed for distance. He aimed for a chance. Ludger’s eyes locked on the tail.
And he let everything go.
A beam erupted from his hands, wind-aspected mana compressed into a brutal, focused lance. It didn’t look like normal magic. It looked like the storm had been forced through a narrow tunnel and fired like a cannon.
The beam hit the tail with a blinding impact. For an instant, the night turned white-blue.
Sparks of lightning exploded outward from the point of contact, branching in jagged lines across the rain like a shattered web. The air detonated with a roar so loud it drowned thunder, a shockwave that shoved the storm aside in a wide ring. Rain vanished in a sudden corridor of clarity, steam and spray ripping away from the beam’s path.
The tail bucked. Not a small jerk.
A violent, forced recoil, water erupting around it in a towering burst as the beam drove into flesh and ridged armor like a drill made of wind and wrath. Blood sprayed, instantly whipped into the storm. The tail’s massive weight fought back, but the beam kept pushing, carving a visible displacement in the ocean as if the sea itself was being shoved away.
Lightning filaments continued to arc from the impact, snapping across the surface, crawling over foam, striking rigging and rail with sizzling pops. The whole scene looked unreal, like a giant had drawn a line through the storm and told the ocean to move.
The tail slid backward through the water.
A full body-length. Then more.
A wake formed, wide, angry, waves rolling outward as the beast was forced away from the ship’s immediate space.
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