The cannonball scread through the smoke-thick air, a raw force of fire, iron, and fury. Its roar ripped across the sky like the final judgnt of a dying god, trailing a tail of smoke behind it as if hell itself had spat it out. It arced high, barely clearing the blood-slicked deck where the rman lay, broken and breathless. His gills fluttered weakly. His body was a ss of bruises and torn scales, leaking dark fluid with every shallow breath. Still, he watched. We all did.
Ti slowed as the cannonball flew.
Not literally—but that’s how it felt. Like the universe took a breath. Like fate had decided to wait and see what we’d done. That cannonball wasn’t just tal. It was desperation. Rage. A scream loaded into a barrel and fired by a blue-haired girl whose hands still shook from everything she’d seen. It flew like it had purpose. Like it knew this was the only chance we had left.
The demon never flinched. He never turned.
He was still walking, slow and steady, toward . Toward the brick clutched in my hand like it ant sothing. His face was a blank canvas of obsession. Whatever was left of the man he used to be was gone. No anger. No fear. No awareness. Just hunger. Just the brick.
And then the ball hit.
It didn’t announce itself. There was no impact sound before the scream of tal turned into flesh-crushing finality. One second the demon was whole. The next, he was a sculpture torn apart mid-carving. The red-hot iron seared through his back, burning a hole through his spine. It carved into his guts, organs collapsing like ash under the heat, bones cracking and splintering like dry wood. It didn’t stop there. The shot punched through his chest and erupted out of him in a burst of gore so violent, it painted the deck like a butcher’s canvas.
His torso exploded.
Not figuratively. It blew open like a sack of rotten at thrown from a rooftop. Ribs, muscle, blood—all of it went skyward in a wet, horrifying display. His body spun from the force, twisted midair, then tore apart completely. Chunks of what had once been him rained down. His upper body was gone. There was no ti for his blood to save him this ti. No ti for regeneration. He didn’t scream. He didn’t move. He didn’t understand he was dead.
He just ended.
And I laughed.
I laughed like a madman. I laughed as bone shrapnel buried itself in my chest and tore into my eye. I laughed even as the sa cannonball that killed him tore into my shoulder, ripping my right arm clean off and flinging it sowhere behind . I dropped to one knee, blood gushing down my side—but I didn’t stop. I howled with laughter, head thrown back, lungs burning. It was ugly. Cathartic. Wild. It wasn’t joy. It was release. It was relief. It was the kind of laughter that only cos after you’ve survived sothing you were certain would kill you.
The demon had fallen.
The thing that had haunted our every breath, whose presence warped the air itself, was nothing now but at. Bits and pieces scattered across the ship, so still twitching but no longer healing. No longer coming back.
And for the first ti, silence didn’t feel dangerous. It felt earned.
I turned, breathing hard, my body failing piece by piece—but alive. Just barely. And I caught the rman staring at . There was confusion in his eyes. A strange, wary disbelief. He looked at like I was the monster now, like whatever I’d beco to laugh in the middle of this slaughter was sothing he couldn’t understand.
The girl was quiet. Rifle at her side, knees shaking, blue hair wild in the breeze. She just stood there, staring at . Her eyes were wide, filled with sothing I didn’t want to na. Shock, maybe. Maybe pity. Maybe fear. Or maybe sothing deeper—sothing raw. She’d seen the worst of people, and now she was watching what it looked like to lose everything but still smile.
My stump bled freely. My face was half-red from the shattered fragnts that tore across it. My eye was ruined, pulsing with each heartbeat like a second heart in my skull. But I kept laughing. Because we’d done it. Because sothing in this damned world had actually died and stayed dead.
I grinned at her with broken teeth and blood-slick gums.
She didn’t answer. She just stepped forward, slowly, like I might still collapse. Her hands trembled as they reached for . And I let her.
We stood like that in the middle of the ruin—a girl who’d fired a cannon, a rman who’d fought with his last breath, and a broken man laughing in the wreckage. Around us, the sea rocked the ship gently, as if the ocean itself had cald now that the demon was gone.
But in that quiet, I knew sothing else. The demon might have died. But we all left sothing behind. Or at the very least only I did.
And still, I laughed.
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