Xere woke up to the buzz of static in his ears. He rose violently to see something he wasn't prepared to witness. His blue-haired roommate stood in a half-squat in nothing but his underdrawers, fists cocked at his sides. One after another, Mira punched forward, dragging sparks along with him as those blurry, little fists ripped through the air. Xere was caught off guard by the sight, but Mira's fixated gaze at their boiler room wall, along with the boy's awkward position and choice of sleeping attire, forced the senior cabin boy to crack a smile.

  "Oi!" called out Xere. "You woke me up!"

  Mira swung around, embarrassed, rubbing at the back of his neck to cover up his actions. "My bad! I couldn't sleep so I thought I'd get my workout in early."

  The Inagi raised a brow at whatever he was watching being considered "work."

  "Whatever," Xere turned away. "If you're gonna be all weird, just go outside for it."

  "But I can't!" Mira threw his arms out in exasperation. "We're underwater, dude!"

  "Then go to the galley, dunce!" Xere slumped back into his undersized bed and tossed a poorly stitched blanket over his face. "I don't care where you go. Just keep... whatever that is away from me."

  "Oh..." The blue-haired newcomer seemed confused by his roommate's statement. "But I do this every morning—I throw a thousand punches."

  Xere pulled the cover off his face and spoke in a judgmental tone. "You're weird."

  He was right. Mira was as odd as any being could be, and his body was proof of it. As the small boy turned his back, Xere was met with the disturbing sight of Mira's spine. To put it simply, the boy's anatomy was completely unnatural. Mira's original spine had clearly been taken out at some point in his life. Down the center of his back was an artificial replacement, made from flexible, silver-colored alloy that stuck out of his skin ever so slightly. The ill-fitting spine's position created small spikes that protruded from the boy's pale flesh. The cloudy metal seemed to pulsate with Mira's own heart, releasing a surge of faintly blue-shaded flashes down the grotesque links with every beat. Mira noticed his crewmember's eyeline and chuckled over his shoulder.

  "Wanna touch it?" He presented his back and hunched over slightly, backing up slowly with a slack-jawed smile. "My brother, Sachi, said it feels sharp, but I can't reach far enough to feel the points."

  "Gross!" Xere tried to look away from the boy's back, but his eyes kept falling back on the flashing spikes. The strange tattoo on Mira's chest was interesting too, but once Xere saw that disfigured spine he wasn't interested in seeing what other oddities Mira was hiding. He thought his roommate's back was nauseating to look at, but somehow the disgusting sight kept pulling his gaze back to relish the horror. He wondered if Mira belonged to a Clan the Thousand Legends hadn't crashed into yet. The Neptunes spent most of the year hidden beneath the waves, so it wouldn't be absurd to think a Mortal with metal bones might live on the surface. He kept staring even after Mira threw a shirt on, for the psychological damage had been done.

  Knock! Knock! Knock!

  Mira flinched slightly at the rapping upon their door, unsure who else might be up so early. There was no need to wait long, for the knocker let himself in.

  "Wake up, ya little cunts!" Welz hobbled in with two glasses in hand, both filled with orange juice; one topped with liquor for his own needs. "The Admiral's found something. We need all hands on deck."

  Mira's eyes lit up at the promise of adventure. "Woah! What are we doing?"

  Xere was quick to ignore Mira's question and roll his eyes at Welz, for this morning had already been wild enough to require another few hours of sleep. "Can't this wait? I haven't eaten yet."

  Welz smirked, for he knew something dangerous lurked ahead of their ship. "It can't. Get some shorts on, we'll need you most of all."

  An astonished look consumed Xere's face. "You don't mean..."

  "Ya bet'cha! We found one." Welz's smile was increasingly nefarious, but he looked happy through all that chaotic excitement. He then turned to Mira and offered the non-alcoholic glass of juice to the boy. "Here. Start the day right, kid."

  Mira smiled in delight at the drink and guzzled it down in a flash. He wasn't too sure what was going on, but he knew it was interesting enough to shut up Xere.

  Fwoosh!

  An undersea current raged against the Thousand Legends, slaps of current that rocked the entire lower deck. Mira jumped up to get a good view out of the window to investigate, but he saw nothing more than a dim sea world above bright sand.

  "Come on, lad!" Welz grabbed the blue-haired fool by the arm and dragged him out of the cabin. "Let's get to work."

  Stern faces gathered in the Thousand Legends galley. Admiral Jones stood before his crew with arms folded behind his back, staring patiently at Xere as the dark Inagi made his way upstairs.

  "Good. We're all here." The Admiral's gaze fell harshly upon Mira, but it was only momentarily. "Our next target has revealed itself."

  The cook, Shik, raised a ruby-scaled arm scarred by grease-burns. The heavyset man spoke with a yawn as the Admiral acknowledged his question. "Do you really think we've found her this time?"

  "Aye. I've got a mean hunch on this one." The Admiral spoke without any shake in his tone. "Today could very well be the day this leg of our journey ends, my loyal friends."

  Mira spoke without raising his hand, messing with his hair in confusion. "Who is she?"

  The whole crew looked back to their new buffoon with furrowed brows, but Rish was patient enough to answer kindly for them all.

  "It's a Leviathan, lad."

  "Not just any Leviathan." Admiral Jones cut in. "This Leviathan ate something important to us."

  Mira looked around at the crew of sailors, most of whom were missing limbs. He asked his next question plainly. "Was it an arm, or was it a leg?"

  Welz chuckled at the rude question. "Do ya think we'd go so far for some lil' leg? No, lad—we're hunting for a hook."

  "Ah, okay." Mira had no idea why such a simple piece of fishing equipment would be so important to the Neptunes, but he figured it would be best to wait and enjoy the surprise. "One more question: are Leviathans big?"

  The whole crew blurted out in a merry fit of giggles at the question. And right on cue, another shift in the sea's current greeted the hull of the Thousand Legends. The abrupt change in current sent another smack! through the galleon's wood that rumbled each room. The galley creaked as if about to burst, and the ship's course diverted by a few degrees due to the impact. The Thousand Legends was now being pulled to the surface at a stomach-churning speed. Still, the Admiral and Rish didn't seem bothered by the creaks and croaks of the hundred-year-old craftsmanship surrounding them, nor by the sudden ascension. From their sea-faring gazes, everything was going according to plan.

  "Eyes up!" called the stone-faced Admiral. "Oi! Cabin boy!"

  Mira's golden eyes lit up with joy. "Yeah?"

  Jones quickly corrected himself. "Not you! Useful cabin boy!"

  Xere hardly glanced up from his feet. "Aye. I'll do it."

  "Good lad." Jones turned his attention to Welz. "I need you out there. Are you ready?"

  Welz poured the last bits of his morning beverage into his mouth and gave his Admiral a teasing grin. "Only if I have to."

  "You do." Rish was next on the Admiral's list. "Ready the cannons. I'll rush out once we breach."

  Rish saluted his longtime friend. "Aye, Admiral. Consider it done."

  With that, the crew ran to their posts. Mira stood around hesitantly for a second, but the slap of something cold on his shoulder guided him away from the Neptunes' chaos. The short boy looked up to see Rish grinning down at him. "Come on, lil' lad. With me." Mira followed along as the hook-handed pirate pushed him down to the lower decks.

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  Xere walked away with the Admiral, heading upstairs to wait until the breach. This was the forty-seventh time Xere had assisted in a Leviathan hunt, and frankly he didn't care for the work. It was too easy by that point.

  The Thousand Legends met breathable air again in a violent blast of seawater that disrupted any peace the surface world may have held that day, and Admiral Jones was first to rip open his ship's doors to bring the fury of his crew into that world. Xere rushed out with his Admiral alongside Welz, who was quick to climb his way up the tallest mast and into the crow's nest.

  Jones put his all into every step as he ran. He dashed towards the ship's ledge and threw himself overboard into the waters below, making sure to toss his cherished hat and coat onto the deck before flinging himself overboard. The leader of the Neptunes splashed hard enough into the sea to create a plume of seawater that nearly touched his ship's deck. Xere watched on with an unamused expression as he watched the dramatic display.

  Below deck, Mira and Rish peered into the depths through another oval-shaped window. From down there, the pair was able to get a clear view of their Admiral's graceful dive into that shadowed sea. Though the fall looked treacherous, the Admiral remained composed as he sank further into that deep, treading far below the galleon's keel with eyes fixated on what lurked in the black below. Jones pushed patiently into those tides once his natural descent slowed, focusing evermore on shadows lingering beyond Mira's window view. Their boat thrashed once more, knocking the boy off his feet and into the action. The moment Avery's crew prepared for had finally arrived. The sea itself raged, desperate to toss the Thousand Legends back to any dry lands. The blue-haired boy dashed back to his window and stared with child-like wonder as the target revealed itself from the depths. What Avery Jones hunted was hard to make out through the increasingly violent currents outside the ship, but Mira could have sworn he saw a smile of excitement creep across the pirate's scarred face just as the danger arrived.

  Scales slithered past Mira's view—silver, blue, and red—each scale the size of a dinner plate. He was so surprised that he nearly fell onto his back and bottom. The cabin boy regained his footing, forcing himself back on the tips of his toes to meet the sea once more. And there it was, some castle-sized serpent still lumbering past his sight, aiming to breach the world above. Admiral Jones managed to remain composed as the beast inched by him like some vile wall of algae-encrusted scales. Fins came into Mira's vision next: a pair of massive, fanned wings the creature used to glide through current.

  A monster had revealed itself from the dark abyss. He was some serpentine-fish with mothlike fins capable of swatting away a city block with a single motion. The creature looked irritated, with beady black eyes pinned on the bothersome galleon. However, the sea monster didn't come to dine today, it was a territorial male who considered the Thousand Legends as some undersized rival. He was here to kill the challenger and assert control of this stretch of his realm's domain.

  "SKRAAAW!!!" The Leviathan let out a high-pitched screech that echoed through the ocean depths and pierced the surface, a sound that surprised both Xere on the deck and Welz in the crow's nest. The pirates tried to cover their ears as the monster's wail breached the barrier between their two worlds, but sound was too sharp to be blocked out. It whined on to challenge their ship, one of over three hundred such calls the Neptunes had heard over their years of hunting these monsters. They all knew what came next would be far worse than any auditory discomfort.

  Admiral Jones grinned at the screaming Leviathan, and with a scoff veiled in bubbles, he called out the beast. "Ahoy, great beast! I'm sorry, but you've been caught up in something bigger than yourself!" The Admiral took a deep breath of sea water in and let his Light flow freely; an eruption heavy enough to be felt by every sailor on the Thousand Legends.

  Mira watched with wide eyes from the window as Admiral Jones' body began to morph dramatically. His skin grew paler until reaching a hypothermic shade, and jagged scales began to pierce through Avery's flesh and coat him in his own unique armor. His body stretched like a contorted as well, expanding like a balloon suddenly filled with too much water. Next, Admiral Jones' once handsome face twisted and grew more angular, his jaw sprouting outwards into an eel-ishly fanged snout. He stretched onward, arms spreading into fins capable of concealing his galleon within his new, scaley wingspan. Several dorsal fins forcefully pushed into existence as a tail sprouted from the backside of Admiral Jones' new form. Avery roared into the sea as his Light pushed him into the end-stage of this beastly transformation.

  As Mira watched the startling transformation through his small window, he noticed that two things remained constant. Somehow the Admiral's scar remained fixed in place at his chin, merely growing larger as he morphed into this new, serpentine form. Also, Avery's irises remained the same deep shade of blue, confirming that this was indeed the same creature he ran into before falling to the Corvus Kingdom. He gulped and shook his head, still unable to believe their reunion was possible.

  By the end of his transformation, the Admiral had the appearance of an eel-faced salamander, his jaw far too large with a body wrapped in sharp scales of sky-blue. Now the pirate was barely smaller than the Leviathan they hunted. Jones grinned at his opponent with a jaw full of fangs, each long tooth the size of a fully-grown Human. He called out to the beast circling around him in voice far deeper than he had ever spoken on the Thousand Legends.

  "Let's go!"

  Xere was the first to hear the signal from the ship's deck, his Admiral's call muffled by the seawater separating their worlds. The cabin boy took in a deep inhale and started chanting loudly at the raging sea. The language that slipped from Xere's lips was passed down painstakingly among a single Inagi bloodline, the "Voice of the Waves" known as simply as Inta. The voice Xere released was filled with a good amount of unpronounceable clicks and screeches that Mira's surface-born ears couldn't keep up with. The chant continued, and although Mira couldn't understand the sounds coming out of his roommate, he could recognize that the same sequence of sounds was being repeated. Xere's chant continued, on and on, louder and louder, calling down to the Leviathan predating their galleon.

  Mira turned, tapping Rish on the shoulder to ask about the strange noises seeping through the deck above. "What's Xere saying up there?" The boy had not been paying attention to his Vice-Admiral's actions throughout the commotion, but he quickly realized that Rish had been busy tinkering on some pipe mechanism on the wall while he gawked at the sea.

  "This sea is a void... Your light is fading... Return to the dark..." The hook-handed Inagi spoke without much emphasis on the dark nature of this phrase, like he had heard the siren-like call a thousand times over. "It's an old binding chant—that kid really is something. We'd be royally fucked without him on our crew." He continued fiddling with knobs next to the pipes, watching for a numbered dial to reach the perfect pressure. When Rish was satisfied, he turned away from the wall and began walking back toward the galley. With a wave of his hook, the pirate called out, "Come along."

  The pair trotted upstairs to the deck, where Mira was able to hear the screeching of his roommate clearly. Mira raised a brow at Xere when they made eye contact.

  "I can't believe you called me weird."

  Xere was annoyed by the comment, but he continued with the binding chant without a slip in tone. He turned back to the sea and forced the words out harder, demanding with every ounce of Light in his body for the Leviathan to swim towards the spot he deemed as the best fighting grounds for his Admiral. The larynx shattering language grew higher in pitch as Xere focused on his target.

  "Stop bothering him!" The voice of Rish pulled Mira along to the far end of the deck, where a black iron cannon was being positioned.

  "I don't get it." Mira pried as he glanced around the chaotic deck. "Why is he screaming like that?"

  "It calms down the Leviathan."

  Mira picked at a ringing ear. "How does this calm anyone?"

  Rish sighed and slapped a bright red button on the base of a port-side cannon.

  Ka-Boom!

  A jet of highly pressurized water spat from the cannon in a beam, splitting the angry waves and revealing the entire body of the Leviathan. The attack hit right on target, striking the Leviathan directly in the center of its long, slithery body. Shiny scales spilled into the early morning's tide upon the cannon's impact, and Admiral Jones began his assault.

  "SKRAAAW!!!" The beast shrieked again as it twisted in agony, still determined to protect its prized hunting grounds. The Leviathan was stunned by the jets and enchanted by Xere's Inta chants. He wanted nothing more than to break free from the paralysis and shed the boy's hypnotic whispers. He could rip the good Admiral apart if he was free, but the beast simply couldn't fight back in such an ambush. A higher power forced him into tranquility. All the Leviathan could do was wait in pain as the Admiral's beastly form made its move, snapping a wide jaw of long fangs around the monster's long abdomen.

  Oversized teeth cut through the Leviathan's hard scales, littering the ocean with the holographic shimmer of so many chipped pieces of its armor. The eel-ish Admiral clamped down hard as he could with that elongated snout. The Leviathan wanted to struggle, but he was far too entranced by the Inta chants coming from the Thousand Legends' deck. The monster wasn't able to find the strength to fight off Avery's assault in such a trance, as if his master had ordered an undeniable command. The Admiral clenched harder, and harder still, desperately trying to suffocate the seabeast. If it wasn't for Xere, the Leviathan would have been in a state of pure rage, thrashing against the Admiral's life-threatening hold upon its vital organs. Yet here he was, trapped, stuck in a fugue-state between primal fear and ecstasy. He was completely incapable of fighting against the end of his life.

  Mira watched on from their ship's deck as the Leviathan slowly went limp, a sour look on his face as the beast took its last breath. Admiral Jones released it from his jaw, once all was done and backed off. The Admiral shrank back down to his bipedal, more Human-looking form, and returned to treading water at the surface. He looked winded from the work, but remained unscathed throughout the fight thanks to Rish and Xere. Jones sighed, letting out a lung full of bubbles just below the water before swimming down to the sinking body of the Leviathan. He unsheathed a knife from one of his boots and started carving at the beast's belly, for the treasure he sought would reside inside such a great fish. Mira was confused as to what he was watching, but he stared on intently as the Admiral carved deeper into the creature's flesh. The boy was interested in seeing the end, but Rish interrupted before things got too bloody.

  "Oi! It's no good, Jones! You would've found it by now!" The Vice-Admiral had to cup his hands over his mouth for his voice to carry far enough over the waters.

  Jones grimaced beneath the waves, and with a long huff! he gave up the grotesque digging and swam back to the surface. When fresh air hit the Admiral's lips, he called up to the Thousand Legends.

  "He might just be knocked out! If I stab the heart-"

  Rish interrupted again. "It's dead, Jones! Come back. We can find the hook next time!"

  Clearly annoyed, the Admiral rolled his eyes toward the heavens and paddled back toward his galleon. Mira watched the man swim back feeling a bit confused, scratching atop his messy hair and feeling unsure about what he just witnessed. Xere caught onto his roommate's perplexed expression and cracked his first true smile in weeks.

  "Welcome aboard."

  (To Be Continued...)

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