There was no more time left for hesitation.

  Ahead of them loomed the undead god, vast and unmoving except for the single colossal hand that continued to reach. Its fingers were not merely flesh alone, not anymore. It was warped with seams of darkness running through them like veins. That hand was closing the distance with dreadful patience, intent on claiming them before the vessel could slip past.

  Darren did not allow himself to look at its two faces again.

  He waved away the flashing red screens hovering before his vision. Knowing what stood before him would not make it any less monstrous. It would not make him any more capable of opposing it. So he dismissed it, forcing his focus onto what he could control.

  “Merlyn. Is Autopilot still active?”

  “It is." The System's voice remained neutral as ever, its composure never faltering even in a moment like this. But Darren could hear it, a faint strain beneath the surface. Merlyn rarely allowed emotion to bleed through its cadence, but the presence of imminent destruction was enough to crack his shell.

  “Good.” Darren’s eyes remained fixed forward. “Then I’m going to need you to sail straight ahead.”

  “What?”

  The man heard the word once from within him, Merlyn’s voice sharpened with unmistakable alarm, and once beside him, Marianne’s disbelief barely contained. He ignored the System first. It would argue in calculations and probabilities, would list the impossibility of what he was suggesting. That would only weaken his resolve.

  Instead, he turned to the Witch.

  Marianne had long since grown accustomed to him speaking into empty air. She had never questioned it. The glowing crystal embedded in his chest had always been there, pulsing faintly with its white light. The Witch would not have failed to recognize that a System lived within that gem. Even so, only listening to Darren's side of the conversation and what he was proposing now was beyond reckless.

  Even for her.

  He stepped closer, lowering his voice, though the roar of pressure against the membrane made secrecy pointless.

  “Listen to me, Marianne. I need you to wrap these Gates around us and only us. Leave the ship to me. We need to make sure that darkness does not reach us. Can you do that for me?”

  She had said she trusted him.

  Now those words demanded proof.

  The Wicked Witch held his gaze, her golden irises reflecting the fracturing lattice above them. She searched for something in his gaze, measuring fear, doubt and insanity. The air around her shimmered with authority, the wooden staff already lifted and pointed toward the protective membrane. She had been rewriting it constantly, restructuring the hexagonal weave over and over in a desperate attempt to reinforce it against the god’s encroaching presence. Every second the structure transformed, new runes forming as old ones dissolved. But even then, it would not be enough to keep them alive for long.

  They both knew it.

  Her lips pressed thin.

  A curse slipped from her mouth.

  She seemed certain he was leading them into death. But she trusted him.

  The golden symbols responded to her will immediately.

  They peeled away from the outer membrane like molten leaves torn from a living tree. Sigils detached from their lattice positions and shot inward, spinning through the air in radiant arcs. The geometry of their protection began to collapse in on itself, compressing tighter and tighter around the Ferry. The once-broad dome narrowed, folding layer upon layer until it cocooned them in dense, overlapping bands of light. Cracks formed the instant the reconfiguration began. Hairline fractures split across the thinning outer barrier, jagged lines racing like lightning through glass. The membrane flickered violently, unable to withstand the changing in structure and the pressure exerted upon it at the same time.

  The dead god’s hand surged closer.

  The fingers spread, eclipsing what little light that filtered through the void. Between them, darkness gathered, not mere absence of light but something tangible, writhing. It was the virus of the Undead.

  Tendrils began to snake outward, slipping through the openings Marianne’s manipulation had created.

  They probed hungrily at the fractures, testing its resilience.

  One tendril slammed against the outermost layer of compressed Gates. The contact sent a tremor through the Ferry. The deck shuddered violently beneath their boots. The ancient vessel creaked in protest as the System wielded the Authority of Hades, straining to hold the ship together.

  Darren drew in a single breath, steadying himself against the violent tremors rippling through the Ferry’s frame.

  There would be no turning back after this.

  “You heard what I said, Merlyn,” he growled, the words filled with urgency. “Full speed ahead. Now!”

  This time, the System did not try to argue.

  There was no verbal confirmation, no calculated protest layered beneath synthetic calm. But Darren felt the disagreement all the same, a silent resistance threaded through the crystal embedded in his chest.

  Merlyn had assessed the trajectory.

  It had calculated impact probability, structural failure thresholds, survivability rates.

  None of them favored this course.

  But Merlyn was not sovereign over its conclusions.

  It obeyed the will of its User.

  The Ferry of the Dead responded instantly to Darren's command.

  The ancient vessel lurched forward with such explosive force that the deck shuddered beneath his boots. The air itself seemed to tear as the ship burst ahead at blinding speed, faster than it had ever sailed before. The void around them warped, streaks of distant light stretching thin as Autopilot poured everything into forward momentum.

  The colossal hand was still reaching for them.

  The two-headed undead immortal loomed beyond it, suspended in the shroud of its own abyssal aura. Twin faces, both of them hollow and unblinking, stared without emotion as the Ferry hurtled directly toward it.

  Around Darren and Marianne, the golden runes were still shifting rapidly under the Witch’s command. The once-wide protective membrane shrank further, compressing inward as Marianne tightened her control. Symbols peeled, rotated, and reassembled in dizzying patterns, folding over one another until the vesicle became dense and compact, no longer shielding the entire vessel but only the space immediately surrounding them.

  Beyond that shrinking cocoon, the darkness surged, no longer content to linger around the undead immortal. It crawled toward the Ferry, drawn irresistibly to the golden radiance of the runes, but even more to the pulse of life beating within them.

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  The darkness hungered for life.

  Black strands lashed against the Ferry’s hull, sliding across wood and metal alike. They sought openings, coiling around the edges of Marianne’s compressed shield, testing for weakness.

  Seconds.

  That was all they had until impact.

  Less than that before the darkness fully enveloped them.

  Marianne glanced over her shoulder. For the first time since Darren had known her, worry was written plainly across her face.

  She had trusted him without understanding.

  And now the ship was racing straight toward annihilation.

  So what was his plan?

  Darren closed his eyes.

  There was nothing left to calculate. The time for thinking had ended the moment he ordered Merlyn to drive the Ferry of the Dead onwards.

  He moved.

  Dropping to one knee, he slammed both palms down against the cool metal of the open deck. The impact rang sharply beneath him, grounding him in the physical certainty of the vessel.

  Then he reached inward.

  Power rose from within his core, vast and violent. It felt like a tidal wave breaking through a dam, flooding his channels with unbearable heat. Veins of crimson light spiderwebbed beneath his skin, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that no longer felt entirely human as he drew upon the magical reserves that the Heart of the Hydra had granted him.

  He did not hold back.

  Every Mana Point that the Heart had granted him, he summoned it all and he unleashed it through the Divinity of Dissection.

  Red light erupted outward.

  Streaks of Darren’s magic shot across the deck in jagged lines, racing along the Ferry’s structure like living lightning. The air filled with a sharp, metallic tang as the power carved through space itself. The crimson glow spread from his hands into the planks, into the railings, into the mast and keel, saturating every inch of the vessel.

  The Ferry of the Dead drank it in.

  The lethal magic of Clan Ittriki awakened.

  Intricate red fractures etched themselves across the ship’s surface. They were lines of severance, threads of absolute cutting authority woven into the vessel’s frame.

  The darkness recoiled the moment it touched the hull imbued with the Divinity of Dissection.

  Where black tendrils had slithered freely before, they now met something far more terrifying. Contact with the crimson-infused ship caused them to split apart instantly, sliced cleanly as if by invisible blades. Shreds of abyssal matter scattered and evaporated into nothingness. The red light intensified, coating every single inch of the ship outside of this barrier that Marianne had created all around them. Even the air around the Ferry shimmered with razor-thin distortions, as though reality itself had been segmented and sharpened.

  Now there was method in the madness.

  They were not charging blindly toward a god.

  Because Darren had turned the Ferry into a blade.

  Every inch of the vessel had become an extension of the Divinity of Dissection. The magic of Clan Ittriki no longer resided solely within Darren, it had been imbued into the ship itself.

  This magic had become their salvation, their light through the darkness.

  Darren threw his head back and roared.

  His Divinity writhed around the Ferry of the Dead, crimson light surging and flaring as he fought to maintain control. Imbuing the entire vessel demanded everything from him just for a single second and he had to hold onto this for as long as he possibly could.

  The red magical energy spread thicker across the vessel, wrapping mast and hull, deck and keel in razor-edged radiance. The Ferry no longer looked like an ancient ship of the underworld. It looked like a weapon forged from bleeding light.

  Then they collided.

  The impact was titanic.

  The Ferry slammed into the reaching hand of the undead god with enough force to shatter mountains. The sound was a wet, disgusting rupture as crimson magic met rotting meat. The flesh of the corrupted immortal split open on contact. The deck bucked violently beneath Darren’s feet, throwing him forward, but he did not release his grip on the magic.

  Meanwhile, the ship did not slow.

  It could not.

  Merlyn drove it onward without hesitation, the System's Program of Autopilot pushing every ounce of power into forward thrust. The Authority of Hades surged through the Ferry’s structure, holding the ship together as best as it could. The ancient vessel groaned in agony, metal shrieking as if alive, but it endured.

  They ripped into the hand and tunneled through it.

  Putrid, decayed tissue parted around them as the Divinity of Dissection cleaved a perfect path forward. Anything in its path was divided cleanly, reduced to sundered halves that fell away after crashing into the golden runes that protected them from both the darkness and colliding debris.

  Every single one of them were playing their part

  Merlyn piloted, threading the Ferry through the dense resistance with impossible precision. Darren knew—knew with absolute certainty—that if he had been forced to steer this ship while sustaining this level of output through the Divinity of Dissection, he would lose control of at least one of those powers. The coordination required would have been beyond him.

  Without the System, they would have been long dead.

  Marianne held down another front of their survival.

  The compressed vesicle of golden runes spun violently around them, symbols rearranging at speeds perhaps just as fast as the Ferry of the Dead itself. The barrier was a living structure now, rotating and reconfiguring to intercept every strand of darkness that lashed toward them. The light was so bright it seared itself Darren’s vision, gold mixing with red in flashes as the Witch reinforced weak points before corruption could seep through. Dark tendrils slammed against the barrier, shrieking as they were repelled. They clawed toward the life within, desperate to drag Darren and Marianne into the ranks of the Lost.

  But they could not reach them.

  Not while the Wicked Witch of Humanity still stood strong.

  Still, survival did not rest with Merlyn’s calculations or Marianne’s defense.

  It rested with him.

  The Divinity of Dissection surged again, carving deeper. The Ferry punched through the wrist, through sinew and bone that crumbled like diseased stone beneath the cutting authority of Clan Ittriki. Ahead loomed the massive torso of the undead immortal, its twin faces contorting as the vessel bored straight toward it.

  A roar erupted around them.

  It vibrated through the void, a sound beyond mere hearing. Whether it was pain or fury did not matter. The monstrosity had tried to trap the Ferry of the Dead in its grasp.

  Now they were drilling through its body.

  But even as they advanced, Darren felt the cost.

  The Divinity of Dissection might have granted the Ferry the power to cut through anything in its path but it could not give it greater durability.

  The Authority of Hades held the structure together, but the materials themselves were failing. Wood blackened at the edges. Metal fastenings warped and cracked. Stress fractures spiderwebbed beneath the red glow. Merlyn could bind the vessel only so much, even this borrowed power of Hades could not remake what was deteriorating under impossible strain.

  This was the risk Darren had chosen.

  Because there had to be a reason this undead god stood here within the vast void.

  It was not random.

  He refused to believe it was.

  The Compass of Life had pointed straight past this abomination from the moment Darren had laid eyes upon it. Its needle had not wavered, not even when the dead god had revealed itself. Whatever civilization still endured—whatever sources of life remained in this ruined expanse—they lay beyond this being.

  That was what his instincts told him.

  And Darren Ittriki trusted his instincts.

  The Ferry tore through the second head in an explosion of severed rot and crimson light.

  Then—

  They burst out the other side.

  The resistance vanished instantly. The oppressive darkness thinned as though a curtain had been ripped apart. The Ferry shot forward into open expanse, trailing fragments of sundered immortality behind it.

  Silence followed.

  The Ferry of the Dead continued sailing forward.

  The golden runes slowed their frantic spinning. The crimson aura flickered but remained intact as Darren forced himself to maintain it a moment longer.

  A translucent screen flashed across his vision.

  He did not dismiss the notifications this time.

  // Leaving behind the Lands of the Lost

  // Entering Earth-67616.