Chapter 115: Interception of the Vatican Escorts

The southern shallows did not smell of dead brine or scorched oil.

Across a four-mile crescent of calm coastal water, the surface glowed with a sickening, incandescent emerald hue that smelled sharply of cold myrrh and burning lye. Where the iridescent foam brushed against the black kelp beds, the organic matter dissolved instantly into gray, alkaline silt, leaving the seabed sterile as bleached bone.

Two white-hulled cruisers, built with high Gothic forecastles and ribbed with gilded bronze buttresses instead of standard torpedo blisters, steamed abreast at eight knots.

At the prow of the lead vessel, the Sancti Petri, stood Inquisitor-General Malachi.

His heavy crimson cassock was woven through with strands of spun gold, his gaunt, weathered face framed by a high iron gorget inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In his right hand he held an eight-foot ceremonial crosier topped with a revolving astrolabe of holy quartz. Around him, thirty hooded inquisitors knelt in concentric rings upon the teak deck, their palms pressed against bronze inlay channels that funneled their collective mana directly into the ship’s keel.

"Maintain the chant," Malachi commanded, his dry, reedy voice carrying the sharp rhythm of a metronome. "The American retreat was born of worldly cowardice. Vance measures victories in hulls and ammunition expenditures. The Church measures sovereignty in the purity of the soil."

A junior cleric looked up from the navigation binnacle, his eyes bloodshot from the radiant backdraft. "Excellency, the acoustic sensors from the British wreckage went dead four minutes ago. The carrier has sunk below forty fathoms. We are within the ten-mile demarcation line claimed by the sovereign entity."

Malachi sneered, his thin lips pulling tight against yellowed teeth.

"A border drawn by necromancers does not exist in the eyes of God," Malachi said, turning the quartz astrolabe half a turn to the right. "Let the barrier advance. When the emerald fire touches their basalt anchors, the corrupted souls bound to those sunken wrecks will tear themselves apart in agony."

A sudden, unnatural stillness descended upon the water three hundred yards ahead of the Sancti Petri.

The rolling emerald foam stopped rippling. The gentle hiss of the sanctified mist died away, replaced by an absolute, suffocating void of sound that made the air inside the inquisitors’ lungs feel brittle and dry.

Two figures stood directly upon the ocean surface.

Renan’s dark woolen coat hung loose around his shoulders, his boots resting atop the water as if standing on a sheet of polished obsidian. To his left, Shadow Knight Arthur towered a full foot higher, his fluted star-metal plate armor drinking the emerald radiance without casting a single reflection, his crested helmet tilted slightly toward the gilded bridge of the cruiser.

The chanting on the white deck faltered.

Several inquisitors broke their posture, their hands recoiling from the bronze deck channels as their eyes locked onto the black titan standing beside Renan.

"Arthur?" Malachi whispered, his aristocratic composure cracking as his fingers twitched violently around his crosier. "The reports from Geneva stated he was executed. Why does that creature walk under the heraldry of the Silver Round?"

Renan did not draw a weapon. He took three casual steps forward across the water, closing the distance to two hundred yards.

Beneath his boots, the emerald light hissed, attempting to scorch the soles of his leather shoes with concentrated purification mana. Yet the moment the holy energy brushed within an inch of Renan’s skin, the argent sheen absorbed from the broken star-metal blade flared beneath his flesh, neutralizing the divine heat into thin wisps of harmless steam.

"Inquisitor," Renan’s voice carried across the calm shallows, conversational, quiet, yet vibrating with an unbearable tectonic density. "General Vance was wise enough to save his ships. You bring two floating cathedrals into my bay and boil my kelp. Do you believe your Latin verses will float when your hull takes on seawater?"

Malachi’s face darkened with fanatical fury. He slammed the butt of his iron crosier onto the deck, channeling eighty percent of his personal core into the revolving quartz astrolabe.

"Blasphemer!" Malachi roared, his voice amplified by forty acoustic speakers hidden inside the ship’s bronze gargoyles. "You speak to the Vicarate of the Western Seas! The barrier you stand upon was consecrated with the tears of forty martyrs! No corrupted entity, no risen scavenger of the trench, can cross this threshold without turning to ash!"

The emerald ring around the Sancti Petri erupted.

A vertical wall of translucent, emerald glass surged eighty feet into the gray sky, sealing the two Vatican cruisers inside an impenetrable, domed sanctuary that stretched three miles from reef to reef. The air within the perimeter turned boiling hot, radiating a high-frequency spiritual frequency designed to disintegrate necrotic bonds down to the individual soul thread.

On the water outside the dome, Shadow Knight Arthur did not flinch.

He raised his left hand, resting his dark gauntlet on the pommel of the silver-black claymore at his hip. "Sovereign. Malachi’s barrier is anchored by the twin quartz engines in their engine bays. It rejects all kinetic mass. In the continental campaigns, three dragon legions starved themselves against this same ward."

"It rejects kinetic mass," Renan repeated softly.

He raised his right arm, his fingers extending straight forward toward the roaring curtain of emerald glass fifty paces away.

He did not summon an artillery shell from the Iron Wall. He did not ask Thorne to shift the seabed.

Renan simply focused on the newly acquired skill humming within the center of his chest.

[Skill Activated: Conceptual Cleave] [Target: SSS-Rank Consecrated Sanctuary Ward] [Mana Density Injected: 4,000 Sovereign Units]

A hairline fracture of dark violet gravity, woven through with a needle-thin edge of liquid silver light, snapped into existence along the rim of Renan’s index finger.

It was no larger than a kitchen knife, yet the moment it formed, the three miles of ocean water between Renan and the Vatican cruiser dropped three inches in a clean, rectangular depression, as if the physical space itself were being squeezed out of reality.

Renan brought his hand down in a simple, vertical chop.

There was no explosion. There was no thunderous crack of detonating mana.

The vertical wall of eighty-foot emerald glass parted down the center with a sound like dry silk tearing in a quiet room.

A clean, three-foot fissure split the barrier from the upper clouds to the ocean floor. The holy ward did not shatter into shards; its conceptual architecture simply failed, the consecrated geometry unraveling into a shower of dull, lifeless green sparks that sputtered out the moment they touched the salty foam.

On the forecastle of the Sancti Petri, the quartz astrolabe atop Malachi’s crosier cracked into twelve pieces, the backlash of severed divine mana snapping the inquisitor’s wrist with a sickening crunch.

Malachi dropped to both knees, clutching his mangled forearm against his velvet cassock, his eyes wide and hollow with absolute, unadulterated terror.

"The barrier," the inquisitor gasped, blood pouring from both nostrils onto the mother-of-pearl deck inlay. "He... he did not overpower the ward. He cut the authority that held it together."

Renan lowered his hand, his coat settling against his knees.

He did not look at the fallen inquisitor. He turned his head slightly toward the black titan at his shoulder.

"Arthur," Renan said, his voice flat as the horizon.

"Command me, my Sovereign," the shadow knight replied, drawing the long silver-black claymore from his side with a cold, ringing hiss.

"Take their steering gear," Renan whispered. "Take their communication masts. Leave the priests alive to steer the rudders back to the Italian coast."

Arthur bowed his crested helmet once, his silken cape catching the freshening wind as he vanished into a streak of argent twilight, his heavy boots touching down onto the teak forecastle of the Sancti Petri right before Malachi’s trembling face.

From the dark waters behind Renan, fifty yards offshore, the black conning towers of eight captured destroyers breached the surface in perfect formation, their rusted main batteries swiveling eighty degrees south to lock onto the fleeing Vatican auxiliary ships.