CHAPTER 5: THE BLOOD MOON FEAST
The sea did not sleep after a slaughter; it grew heavy.
Outside the armored bulkheads of The Rust Ship, the storm had reached its zenith. But it was not a normal gale. The clouds above had curdled into a sickly, bruised copper color, and the ocean swell carried a strange, oily texture that coated the lower pontoons in a black, sticky film. The survivors called it a "Blood Moon Sea"—not because the moon was visible through the thick shroud of storm clouds, but because the water itself felt alive with a restless, predatory hunger.
Inside Bael’s workshop, the air grew increasingly thin. Rin sat huddled on a crate of brass fittings, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The dark crimson blood from her nose had dried into a crust on her upper lip, but the phantom sensation of cold water filling her lungs remained.
"They're coming, Bael," she repeated, her voice a hollow shell. Her hổ phách eyes shifted restlessly toward the iron floor, staring as if she could see right through the triple-layered steel plates into the black depths beneath the hull. "They’re dragging the Silt Runner behind them. Like a trophy. Like bait."
Bael didn't answer. He was furiously working on a primitive radio receiver, trying to bypass the heavy, high-frequency static that Vance’s transmitter was pumping through the station's internal grid. His thick fingers, scarred from decades of welding, trembled as they twisted the copper dials.
Kzzt... grrrr... shhh...
"Come on, come on..." Bael muttered. Suddenly, a voice broke through the noise. It wasn't the military frequency of the Iron Armada. It was the frantic, screaming panic of the Upper Deck watchmen.
"—docking bay four! We have a hull-breach alert! No, wait... it’s the Silt Runner! It’s floating back in!"
Bael snapped his head toward Rin, his single eye wide with horror. "You said they sank. You said the Drowned took them."
"They did," Rin whispered, standing up slowly. Her body felt strangely light, the leaden weight of her usual fatigue completely gone, replaced by the deep, resonant thrum of the Guardian's pulse. Bùm... Bùm... Bùm... "But the Blight doesn't let things stay dead, Bael. It animates them. It uses them to open the doors."
Before Bael could stop her, Rin pushed past the heavy iron door of the workshop and stepped into the main corridor. The emergency lights were flashing a rhythmic, blinding red. Throughout the lower decks, the siren was screaming—a long, agonizing wail that sounded like a dying beast.
She walked toward Docking Bay Four. Her feet moved with an eerie, rhythmic certainty. Along the way, terrified citizens scrambled past her, carrying crates of meager belongings, fleeing toward the higher, supposedly safer decks of the floating city. Nobody noticed the small, pale girl walking toward the danger. Nobody saw the faint green script pulsing behind her ear, or the way the puddles of salt water on the floor rippled outward away from her boots as she passed.
When she reached the observation gantry overlooking Docking Bay Four, the scene below was already a nightmare.
The bay was a massive, cavernous moon-pool—a giant rectangular opening in the center of the ship’s belly where harvesting boats could enter directly from the sea. The water inside the pool was violently churning, foaming with a thick, yellowish froth.
Floating in the center of the pool was the shattered husk of the Silt Runner. Its wooden hull was splintered, its mast snapped in half, and it was encrusted with thick, weeping patches of black coral that shouldn't have been able to grow in hours.
A team of five station guards stood on the iron catwalks surrounding the pool, their steam-rifles aimed at the wreckage.
"Is anyone alive on there?!" the chief guard shouted through a megaphone. "Jax! Toby! Stand up if you can hear me!"
The wreckage drifted closer to the catwalk. Slowly, a figure emerged from the shattered cabin.
It was Old Captain Hurn. Or rather, what was left of him.
His clothes were waterlogged, clinging to a body that had grown strangely bloated and pale. His head was tilted at an unnatural, broken angle, resting against his left shoulder. But it was his face that made the guards draw back in horror. His eyes were gone—replaced by two hollow, weeping sockets leaking a thick, black ichor. His mouth was stretched open far wider than humanly possible, the jaw completely dislocated, revealing rows of sharp, needle-like calcium growths that had erupted from his gums.
"Help... me..." a voice came from Hurn's throat. It was his voice, but it was layered with a sickening, wet gurgle, as if he were trying to speak while swallowing a gallon of mud. "So... cold... open... the... gate..."
"By the Trench," the chief guard whispered, his hand shaking on his rifle. "That’s not Hurn. Fire! Fire!"
The steam-rifles erupted with a loud hiss-crack, sending heavy iron darts tearing through Hurn’s torso. The impact ripped holes in his waterlogged flesh, but there was no blood. Only thick, black slime leaked from the wounds. The creature didn't even flinch. It grinned, its dislocated jaw dropping even further, and let out a high-pitched, deafening shriek that shattered the glass panes of the observation gantry above.
SCREEEEEEECH!
From the foaming water around the Silt Runner, dozens of pale, long-limbed shadows erupted. The Drowned climbed the iron ladders with terrifying, spider-like speed. Their webbed claws tore through the metal mesh of the catwalks.
One guard was seized by the legs and dragged instantly into the moon-pool. The water turned a violent, boiling crimson as the pale shapes swarmed over him. Another guard tried to reload, but a faceless creature lunged from the dark, its expanding, circular maw clamping down on his face, silencing his scream in a horrific crunch of bone.
"Rin! Get back!" Bael’s voice roared from behind her as he finally caught up, grabbing her arm.
But Rin didn't run. She leaned against the broken glass of the gantry, looking down into the boiling water of the pool.
The water pressure inside the bay was rising rapidly. The air grew freezing cold. The blood on her face began to glow with a faint, iridescent green tint.
Through the chaos, she saw him.
Lieutenant Vance stood on the opposite side of the gantry, flanked by his armored Armada guards. He wasn't helping the station defenses. Instead, he was standing before a heavy, brass-encased console—the ship’s main ballast control. He was pulling the manual override levers, forcing the lower floodgates to open completely.
"He's opening the ship," Rin said, her voice dropping into that terrifying, double-tonal resonance. "He thinks he can let them in to purge the station, so the Armada can claim the tàn tích without any survivors left to fight."
"The fool!" Bael yelled, his face contorted in rage. "If the lower floodgates open entirely during a storm like this, the whole filtration matrix will implode!"
Down below, Captain Hurn's mutated corpse crawled onto the main catwalk, its pale, elongated fingers reaching for the remaining guards. But then, the creature stopped. Its hollow, weeping sockets turned upward, locking directly onto Rin standing in the high gantry.
The collective mind of the Blight recognized her. It felt the presence of the Guardian inside her.
[The Echo...] the wet, gurgling chorus echoed in Rin’s mind, making her knees buckle.
Dozens of Drowned stopped their slaughter of the guards and turned toward the ladders leading up to the observation gantry. They began to climb, their pale, wet bodies glistening under the flashing red emergency lights, their circular maws gnashing in a horrific rhythm.
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Rin stood her ground at the shattered window. She closed her eyes, letting the pulse of the ocean fill her veins. The air around her grew so cold that Bael’s breath turned to thick white mist.
"Let them come," she whispered to the dark. "The water remembers who rules it."
