Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day - Chapter 371: Escape [II]

Chapter 371: Escape [II]

Days blurred together in that darkness.

The lake became colder and quieter with every passing hour.

Even the wind began to weaken. Lily had to force the vessel forward with increasing effort, as though the air itself had grown reluctant to move.

Creatures still attacked us from time to time, though even those encounters began to feel strange.

Some monsters came from below, vast shapes erupting from the water with teeth and fins and armored scales, but others were far less corporeal.

There was this one time when I sat down and had a long conversation with Alexia about her family. It was completely dark, so of course I could not see her.

We spoke for several minutes while leaning against the railing. Then I walked to the other side of the deck… and found Alexia standing there.

When I asked her about it, she swore she had never had that conversation. She had not even moved from her position during that hour.

Countless incidents like that happened to others as well.

They’d describe a conversation they clearly remembered having, only to find that the person they had it with could not recall a single word.

By the eleventh day, we were certain.

Something had climbed aboard our ship and was now among us, watching and interacting with us in the dark.

Whatever it was, we had no idea what it wanted. It was not attacking us directly… or perhaps it was, in its own way.

After the mindfuck of a nightmare that the God Who Eats Is had already put us through, we could not have been certain of anything anymore.

It was a messed-up situation all on its own.

But at the same time, our ship also began getting regularly ambushed by a pack of humanoid monsters.

They were tall creatures with elongated limbs and webbed fingers, their vicious maws filled with rows of shark-like sharp teeth.

Their ridged backs were hunched, and each of them had an antenna growing from the top of their head that ended with a glowing tip — a sort of phosphorescent lure very similar to that of an anglerfish.

They did not have eyes the way we do. Where their faces should have been, there were only twin pits of milky cataracts. Their skin was a bruised grey, slick and cold like the belly of a deep-sea eel.

Most of all, though, they were fearsome hunters.

No matter how many times we tried to evade them, they always tracked us down. They would emerge silently from the black waters and circle the ship like predators testing their prey before jumping onto the deck.

But the worst thing about them was their stench.

They smelled of old salt and rotting filth, a cloying odor that filled your lungs until you felt as though you were drowning while standing upright.

We fended them off many times.

They returned every single time.

Leviathans and sea giants were difficult enough to deal with, but it was the relentless persistence of those creatures that nearly broke our spirits.

I cannot say exactly when despair began to settle into the crew. It crept in gradually, in much the same way that the darkness had crept into the sky above.

At first, we spoke less. Then we stopped laughing.

Eventually even the smallest sounds, like an oar scraping wood or a rope tightening against the mast, started making everyone flinch as though expecting something worse to follow.

The Lake of Grief had lived up to its name.

Not through violence alone, but through the slow and torturous erosion of hope.

There were moments during that voyage when the world felt so empty and so quiet that I genuinely wondered whether we had already died and were now drifting through some forgotten afterlife.

Even my own thoughts felt distant and lethargic, as if it was tiring to even think.

My body continued moving out of habit more than intention.

Maintaining the sand constructs. Taking turns at the lookout. Watching the water stretch without end in every direction, though there was little to see in that oppressive darkness.

It was one of the few times in my life when I was genuinely afraid. No matter how much I tried to suppress that fear, the effort was always in vain.

But I still had to fight, because the others were doing the same.

So I did.

So we all did.

…Aghh!

I don’t even want to remember the rest of that journey.

It was, without question, one of the most helplessly depressing things I had ever experienced.

Forget it.

I won’t bother with the details about how the rest of the voyage went. Just know that it was hell.

The experience left so many scars on all of us, we were exposed to so much trauma on that trip, that we had to eventually be placed on mandatory therapy once we returned.

…The good thing was that we did return.

After thirty days of continuous sailing through that cold and darkness, through that savage and horror-infested ocean of tears, we made it to the Golden Sanctuary, the stronghold of one of the most powerful families in Earth’s history.

At the end of our long odyssey, the Den of Theosbanes was finally in sight.

At first, the Sanctuary looked like nothing more than a soft glow far away in the dark, a dull golden shimmer rising from the horizon like the last ember of a dying fire.

But as we got closer, the glow slowly expanded into towering cliffs veined with luminous gold, their surfaces reflecting faint light across the black waters.

And there it was.

We should have been cheering and shouting in triumph, celebrating the fact that we had finally escaped the danger.

But we were doing none of that.

Because the truth was that we hadn’t yet escaped the danger.

There was still a monster on our tail.

It was a giant of the dark sea, something we had barely managed to avoid several times before, thanks to Lily.

But now we could not avoid it anymore.

It had caught up to us.

We were only a short distance from the Sanctuary when the lake suddenly exploded around us. The water under the ship didn’t rise as much as it just tore

open.

A massive whirlpool formed all around us, trapping our vessel at its center. The currents dragged the ship in tightening circles while something titanic surged upward from the depths with unstoppable force.

Tentacles. Dozens of enormous tentacles erupted from the Lake in a turbulent storm of writhing limbs and raining seawater.

Each tentacle was as tall as a multi-storey building and thicker than our ship’s mast, covered in wrinkles and suckers that flexed and twisted like some sort of biological machinery.

They moved with terrifying speed.

I fired bolts of destructive lightning from my Vajra. Ray unleashed a volley of supercharged explosive lances. Juliana also responded with her own barrage of kunai.

Michael, who was now wielding the Serrated Discus called the Heaven Cutting Chakra, joined the struggle as well.

The enchantment on that Disc allowed it to spin faster the more Essence its wielder poured into it. That, combined with the nearly indestructible metal it was forged from and the natural ability to return to its bonded user that all soulbound artifacts possessed, made it a remarkable weapon.

Yet none of our ranged attacks inflicted any real damage on those tentacles.

We could only brace ourselves as one of them slammed into the hull and split the wood apart instantly on contact.

Then another wrapped around the mast and crushed it like brittle bone. The deck buckled beneath our feet as the whole vessel was shredded piece by piece in real time.

The Golden Sanctuary was right there, close enough that I could see the pale sand along its rocky coast.

But the creature beneath us was so vast and powerful that it might as well have been a force of nature.

In the end, our ship was destroyed before it even had the chance to sink.

Wood splintered and ropes snapped. The keel was cracked in half, and the entire watercraft was crushed like a toy boat.

The towering tentacles continued splashing through the submerging wreckage.

Everything I remember after that point is in hazy bits and pieces, like a fuzzy dream.

One moment I was standing on the deck, the next I was choking on the bitter taste of the Lake’s saltwater while broken planks floated all around me.

Then something happened. I am not entirely sure what it was. Perhaps another massive tentacle broke through the surface nearby.

But whatever it was, it sent a rising tsunami crashing over everything. I was caught up in it.

The world turned upside down.

Sky and water spun over each other while the sinking debris slammed into me from every direction.

Someone’s scream cut through the roar of the whirlpool before abruptly disappearing beneath the thunder of crashing waves.

I tried to keep my head above the water, but the current kept dragging me under until I slammed into something solid.

For a split second, I thought it was one of the tentacles. I remember kicking and wriggling in blind panic until my hand struck a… a rock.