Chapter 155: A Touch of Lovecraft

What was the defining metric that made the “sea” the “sea”?

Was it the sheer salinity of the water, the boundless expanse of the horizon, the gravitational rhythm of the tides, or the presence of a complete, self-sustaining marine ecosystem?

Even the coastal people of Iberia lacked a strict scientific definition. If asked, they would simply shake their heads and say, “It’s the feeling. The feeling is just different.”

Thorns was a man of science and practical combat; he usually never entertained such abstract, meaningless questions. But tonight was different.

The Aegir had always harbored a deep-seated disdain for venturing too far inland. Even though the demographic of Iberians at this particular music festival was unusually high, they still barely accounted for a tenth of the roaring venue. Thus, the sea of bodies surging across the festival grounds was dominated by the feathered ears of the Liberi and the beast ears of the Perro and Feline. The distinct fins and scales of his own Aegir kin only flashed sporadically in the claustrophobic gaps of the crowd.

Yet, as he stood there, Thorns felt an inexplicable, suffocating sensation washing over him. This was… the sea.

It was a living, hyper-aroused, writhing ocean of flesh and sound.

You are alerted. You are embraced. You are trapped in its blood, its shadow, its blinding sun. You hear his figure—a figure with no eyes, no voice, no life. He is as still as a dead, bright star.

The hypnotic lyrics from the stage bled into his thoughts: He smelled the scent of the sea; turning his back on the sea, he should repent, he should return to the sea, he saw…

Smack!

Just as Thorns’ mind began to sink into the abyss, subconsciously preparing to hum along with the eldritch melody, a hand slapped him hard on the back. He spun around to see the Doctor looking up at him with a beaming, entirely out-of-place smile.

Thorns jolted violently, like a drowning man breaking the surface of a long nightmare. He shuddered, his chest heaving as he gasped for oxygen. A delayed, icy dread crept up his spine.

‘This is exactly the kind of ghost-story garbage Elysium listens to every single day!’ Thorns thought, his pulse hammering in his ears. If the Doctor hadn’t forcibly snapped his aggro just now, what would have happened to his mind?

“Relax, this kind of localized mutation only popped up recently in the meta,” you said. Noticing that Thorns was currently bristling like a severely startled cat—or rather, a highly defensive sea urchin—you quickly patted his back a few more times to soothe his spiked nerves. “If these idol singers had a passive AoE sanity-drain wherever they toured, the Abyssal Hunters would have caught wind of it ages ago. Skadi would have come flying in from the top rope with a heavy-armor elbow drop to finish them off.”

Whether a mere elbow drop would actually kill whatever these things were was up for debate, but the Hunters absolutely would have dropped it.

Thorns didn’t offer a witty retort. He just fell silent, his golden eyes locked onto the surging crowd, his expression dark and contemplative.

As the final chord of the song faded out, the four wide-eyed beauties on stage—whose entire visual art style seemed jarringly different from every other person in the venue—waved to the cheering fans and hopped off the platform. Thorns immediately clamped his hand over the hilt of his sword. Without a word, he melted into the dense crowd, tracking them like a stoic, venomous predator locked onto its prey.

You sighed. There was no helping it. Sure, his silent-assassin routine looked incredibly cool, but ditching his commanding officer in the middle of a mosh pit was a severe breach of protocol! Did commanding a squad of one suddenly not count as commanding?!

What made the situation even more pathetic was that, without Thorns to act as a vanguard, your physical stats were entirely insufficient to pierce through the crowd’s defense.

Watching him effortlessly push and weave against the flow of bodies, you attempted to follow a path that was mathematically much more efficient. Yet, you were instantly and ruthlessly body-blocked by a horizontal line of four teenage girls holding hands, sweeping through the venue like an unstoppable flesh steamroller.

It was a deeply familiar, entirely futile despair. It was exactly like being fifteen again, trying to sprint to the cafeteria for the last piece of fried chicken, only to encounter an impenetrable wall of female classmates holding hands across the entire width of the stairwell. Back on Earth, the penalty was missing out on lunch. Here on Terra, the penalty was losing your elite Operator.

Alas, the RNG of fate was always so cruel to you.

On the other side of the venue, the four departing girls suddenly halted in perfect, unnatural synchronization. They exchanged a collective glance.

“One of our kin is following us.”

One of the girls, sporting vibrant pink hair, curled her lips into a smile that stretched just a fraction too wide to be human. “Kin are no longer necessarily safe. I will stay behind. You three proceed first.”

The ocean was no longer their home, and so They had been forced ashore. If it was confirmed that their land-bound kin had also undergone these unknown, hostile mutations, They would simply abandon this territory and migrate to a more distant sanctuary.

From the shadows, Thorns watched as the four entities abruptly split up, three of them vanishing into the dense sea of concertgoers with terrifying speed. Gritting his teeth, he had no choice but to adjust his target, tailing the pink-haired one who had remained behind.

He needed answers.

This was the grim reality of being an investigator with high insight. He was an eccentric organism, disregarding life and death for the sake of truth. Physiological fear was a trivial debuff. His mental state was stable. Very, very stable…

He tracked that bobbing pink head of hair through the winding coastal streets, a manic, almost euphoric joy bubbling in his chest as the salty breeze grew stronger. They were getting closer and closer to the seaside.

I am being actively influenced, Thorns clinically diagnosed himself, noting the spike in his own adrenaline.

Finally, the girl with the fluorescent pink hair came to a halt at the edge of the sea. She stared out at the dark water and spoke, seemingly to the empty air. “It is a kinsman. We are happy to see you in this place, so far from the ocean.”

Thorns stopped a dozen paces away. He drew his blade, keeping the tip pointed toward the ground. With a subtle shift of his grip, his custom-synthesized paralytic neurotoxin began to flow, bleeding slowly down the specially designed grooves until it coated the entire edge of the steel.

“Who is your kinsman?” he demanded, his voice dangerously low.

The closer he got to her, the more he realized how flawlessly smooth her face was. It was too exquisite. She didn’t even have pores. Her large, unblinking eyes were spaced slightly too far apart, slumping toward the sides of her skull like a deep-sea fish, and her mouth was permanently fixed in that stretched smile. From a distance, this hyper-human beauty was enchanting. Up close, it triggered a violent uncanny valley response—the exact kind of face that would give Elysium screaming nightmares for a week.

His tone was outright hostile, but the girl did not register anger. These eccentric entities always seemed to operate on a completely different wavelength from the rest of Terra.

I called him kin. He refused. It is that simple.

“Then would you like a record? Or perhaps our new CD? Many people on land like the song we just sang.” The girl tilted her head toward the sea, watching the surging black waves while politely mimicking the conversational rules of terrestrial life.

Thorns kept his eyes locked on her, though his peripheral vision took in the dark, churning water under the dying light of the setting sun. “No. I don’t need your merchandise. Who exactly are you, and what are you doing here?”

“Well, actually, I didn’t prepare any physical records anyway—do you hear it?” The girl shrugged, her gaze entirely intoxicated by the crashing foam. “How beautiful. It calls out every single moment. It is a pity that so many people on land haven’t seen the sea anymore.”

“This isn’t the sea,” Thorns countered coldly. “There is no true scent of the sea here. Have you ever actually seen it?”

Her conversational topics jumped around without a shred of logical progression, like a frog leaping wildly between lily pads. Thorns was burning mental energy just trying to track Her train of thought.

“I have. But what does that have to do with you?”

Before he could process the response, the girl pivoted the topic again, entirely without warning. “Why don’t you like our song? Did you see the ocean in our song?”

The exact microsecond She finished that sentence, a deafening roar of rushing water exploded inside Thorns’ skull.

“Shut up!” Thorns roared, raising his sword. He instantly shifted his weight into the starting stance of Destreza, his muscles coiling like springs, ready to unleash a lethal strike.

The pink-haired girl blinked slowly, her wide eyes projecting genuine confusion as to why he was displaying hostility. She opened her mouth and said: ” “

What was She saying?

Thorns could see her lips moving. He could hear the physical vibration of Her vocal cords. But his brain completely failed to parse the meaning. It was a language of static and void.

Instead of words, he heard the maddening call of his homeland. It wanted to embrace him. It wanted to submerge him, to dissolve his flesh and merge into his bone and blood…

It wanted him to kill.

“Kinsman? Kinsman?” The pink-haired girl looked at Thorns, who had suddenly frozen rigid like a statue. Reaching out without a single ounce of malice, she gripped his shoulder.

With the casual ease of pinching a block of soft tofu, she crushed his shoulder blade.

She truly had no ill intent; her alien logic simply dictated that a sharp spike of physical pain would reboot Thorns’ frozen nervous system and bring him back to his senses.

And right at that exact moment—

Violent, jagged crystals of Originium erupted directly from Thorns’ chest.

The black and gold minerals instantly latched onto her offending finger, spreading with terrifying velocity up her arm, across her shoulder, over her chest, and swallowing half her head. The jagged Originium spikes were heavily stained with the thick, blue blood of a deep-sea beast, making the horrific growth look like a twisted Christmas tree covered in morbid snow.

“Aaaah,” the girl vocalized, experiencing intense, systemic pain as more than half of her physical vessel was instantaneously decomposed by this highly volatile, unknown power. She tried her best to scream exactly like a human would.

Simultaneously, a black-coated figure that had finally managed to catch up lunged forward. Grabbing Thorns—who was currently trapped in a total mental shutdown—by the collar, you violently yanked him backward out of the strike zone. You immediately bent over, resting your hands on your knees as you gasped desperately for air.

The girl attempted to take a step toward you. In the next second, the fission-like growth of the Originium on her body exponentially accelerated.

Sprouting from top to bottom like a demonic seed taking root, the crystals violently pierced straight down through her spine. The reaction completely dismantled the humanoid body—a vessel that was clearly ill-suited for Her true nature anyway—collapsing her into a limp, twitching puddle of flesh and rock on the coastline.

You, the white-haired youth who had just been forced to sprint two solid kilometers like a gamer failing a high school physical education exam, finally managed to steady your burning lungs. Slowly, you straightened your back, your eyes cold and dark beneath your hood as you looked down at the “girl” currently pinned to the earth by your Originium Arts.

The entity’s gaze was still entirely empty, devoid of hatred, holding only pure confusion and childlike curiosity.

“It hurts. I am so weak now,” the puddle of flesh gurgled. “Why did you kill me?”

The Originium had not merely pierced its physical flesh; the crystalline infection had actively locked away its biological authority. It was now weaker than it had ever been in its long existence.

You stared down at the blue blood staining the rocks, your voice devoid of any of its usual comedic warmth.

“Because you are just as dangerous as the current ocean. Tell me… do you know Him?”

[Rhodes’s Note: The “four wide-eyed beauties whose art style differed from everyone else’s” is a meta-reference to the in-universe band Alive Until Sunset (AUS). In the Arknights game, the band members (Aya, Frost, Dan, and Alty) have unique, distinct NPC artwork that heavily contrasts with the standard character art style, and they are heavily implied to be ancient, ocean-linked entities (Feranmuts).]

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent!