Finally, Lansi and Winsor approached the perimeter of the Alliance.
Out of caution, they abandoned the stolen military yacht while they were still a considerable distance away, slipping quietly into the open sea. Both of them shifted back into their merman forms, planning to swim the remaining distance to avoid radar detection.
Lansi looked toward the horizon, pointing a finger forward. "Are we really just going to swim straight through?"
Along the massive high wall, the scars from the previous whale attack were still clearly visible. A massive section of the structure had collapsed during the siege, now covered in a thick, gray synthetic membrane where human engineering crews were working to patch the breach. Lansi reasoned that after surviving such a devastating breach, the Alliance would have heavily reinforced their patrols and automated defenses along the wall. Slipping past them undetected seemed nearly impossible.
"Of course not," Winsor replied smoothly, shaking the military communicator in his hand. "I sent an encrypted transmission to Carl. If nothing has gone wrong on their end, he and Rose should be waiting for us."
The communicator was tightly sealed inside a waterproof plastic bag. With his sharp eyesight, Lansi leaned in and noticed a string of strange, unfamiliar characters flashing across the digital screen.
"What you wrote... Why can't I understand any of it?" Lansi asked, tilting his head.
"Oh, just a little trick humans use to protect their data," Winsor explained casually. "It's a standard cryptographic cypher often deployed in military communications."
After explaining, Winsor switched off the device. He knew it was vital to remain vigilant against the possibility of the Alliance intercepting their coordinates, which was why he had used the specialized code.
With their plan set, Lansi and Winsor navigated the coastal currents, eventually arriving at the base of a towering, jagged cliffside. The rugged, vertical rock face served as a formidable natural barrier, meaning human sentries rarely patrolled this sector. It was technically the easiest blind spot to exploit to enter the Alliance territory.
Lansi stared up at the sheer, vertical cliff and let out a silent, exasperated choke. "...Are you finished laughing at me?"
If they wanted to scale a cliff this steep from the water, there was only one logical way up—they would have to fly. But they were mermen; they didn't exactly come equipped with wings. Even if they manifested human legs right now, climbing a vertical cliff face with bare hands was a death sentence. One loose grip, and they would plunge back down onto the jagged rocks below.
Winsor didn't bother answering verbally; he had always been a man of immediate action.
He swam a short distance away into a deeper pool of water. Under Lansi's utterly bewildered gaze, Winsor slowly arched his back.
Lansi: "????"
Before Lansi could even open his mouth to ask what was happening, he noticed a violent protrusion beneath Winsor's shoulder blades. It looked as though something massive was fighting to break through his skin. In the next second, the flesh along Winsor's back parted, and a pair of immense, pitch-black skeletal frames erupted from his shoulder blades.
Lansi watched the scene in absolute shock. He raised a hand to cover his mouth, his brain temporarily short-circuiting. *Good heavens...* He had thought Winsor was magical enough when he manifested clothing out of thin air, but this transformation was on an entirely different level.
Once the black skeletal frames fully extended, the dark merman's anatomy began to shift rapidly. Layers of deep red muscle and tissue knit themselves over the bone structure at a terrifying speed, quickly followed by a dense plumage of feathers. Within ten seconds, a pair of powerful, imposing black wings was fully formed on Winsor's back.
Lansi's eyes were completely blank with awe.
Amid the crashing waves, Winsor gave his massive wings a tentative flap. The dark feathers were huge and radiated immense strength. With a sudden downward thrust, Winsor launched himself upward out of the sea. The moment his black tail cleared the water, it split flawlessly into a pair of human legs, and a fresh Vanguard uniform manifested over his body in mid-air.
At this moment, whether in physical form or raw capability, Winsor looked exactly like a deity descending upon the sea.
Lansi watched the entire spectacle as if witnessing a literal miracle. He was in such a trance that he completely forgot to flick his tail, nearly drifting away with the ocean current.
Noticing Lansi dazed and floating adrift, Winsor raised an eyebrow. He snapped his massive wings forward, diving back down toward the surface, and scooped Lansi up into a secure, tight embrace. Then, before Lansi even had a chance to process what was happening, Winsor beat his wings powerfully and soared directly up toward the summit of the cliff.
"Wow!"
The flight was so blindingly fast that Lansi didn't even have time to scream before his feet—or rather, his tail—cleared the water and landed on solid ground.
Upon touchdown, Winsor smoothly retracted his wings into his back, letting the skin seal over them, and placed the still-stunned Lansi onto the grassy clifftop. Because the transition from the ocean to the cliff had happened in the blink of an eye, Lansi hadn't even had time to transition his lower half.
Touching the rough, dry earth beneath him, Lansi found it hard to believe he was suddenly at the top of the plateau. Shivering slightly from the sudden exposure to the wind, he instinctively tucked his vibrant tail close to his body, trying to curl up protectively.
"Holy shit... you're an angel!"
A voice gasped from the shadows. Carl and Rose had been hiding near the cliff edge, waiting anxiously for Winsor's arrival while stressing over how they were going to help a merman scale a sheer rock face. They had never anticipated that Winsor would make his grand entrance by literally flying over the top.
With those immense black wings and Winsor's near-flawless features, Carl and Rose froze in absolute bewilderment, genuinely wondering for an instant if angels and gods truly existed in this broken world.
Then again, because the figure before them possessed pitch-black wings, he looked far more like a fallen angel than a heavenly protector. And according to standard lore, fallen angels were never a harbinger of good tidings—for all they knew, this entity had arrived to dismantle the Alliance entirely.
The sudden, catastrophic realization struck Carl and Rose simultaneously. Moving in perfect sync, they both drew their sidearms and snapped their barrels forward, aiming directly at Winsor's chest.
Carl glanced down at Lansi, who was huddled near the edge looking thoroughly shaken, which only solidified his assumption that this winged entity was a threat. He leveled his gaze and shouted at Winsor:
"Step away from Lansi!"
In fairness, Carl couldn't be blamed for his paranoia.
While Winsor and Wen Yu were, in a cosmic sense, two facets of the exact same entity, their external countenances were drastically different. The most glaring distinction was that Wen Yu, no matter how enigmatic, consistently presented himself as a human being. Winsor did not. Even though their underlying facial structures shared striking similarities, Winsor had completely shed any human facade. The cold, absolute aura of a primordial apex predator radiated from him seamlessly, triggering a deep, instinctual terror that forced weaker humans into a state of primal panic.
"Carl?!" Lansi finally managed to find his voice, letting out a breath of pure relief.
Suddenly being yanked from the depths of the ocean by Winsor, followed by a vertical, rocket-like ascent and landing, had left Lansi feeling like a fish caught in the talons of a seagull. When he finally looked up and saw Carl and Rose drawing their weapons on Winsor, his heart practically skipped a beat. He scrambled forward to intervene.
"He's Wen Yu! Well, uh... he's not exactly the Wen Yu you're picturing, but he's on our side! Please, let's just put the guns down and talk this out nicely, okay?"
"Heh."
Winsor glanced down at the barrel of Carl's gun. For reasons known only to himself, his expression darkened, and a cold, dismissive sneer curled across his lips.
Naturally, this did absolutely nothing to de-escalate the tension. Seeing that Carl and Rose were about to bristle even further at Winsor's arrogant mockery, Lansi quickly lunged forward, throwing his body directly between Winsor and the weapons.
"Just listen to me explain first!!!"
---
Carl and Rose exchanged a long, hesitant look. Finally, sensing Lansi's genuine desperation, they lowered their weapons and gestured for him to speak.
Thankfully, reality didn't operate like a poorly written melodrama; there was no agonizing sequence of *"I won't listen, I won't listen!"* to delay them. Lansi let out a massive sigh of relief.
For the next half hour, Lansi sat on the clifftop and systematically detailed everything he knew to the two resistance fighters. By the time he finished, Carl and Rose were standing completely stiff, their expressions entirely blank as their minds struggled to process the sheer scope of the revelation.
While the two humans were left grappling with the profound existential question of *"Who am I, who is he, and what exactly are we dealing with,"* Lansi turned his attention back to Winsor.
He had noticed that a heavy, low-pressure aura had settled over Winsor ever since they made landfall. Yet, interestingly enough, despite the dark merman's utter disdain for explaining himself to mortals, he hadn't made a single move to stop Lansi from telling Carl and Rose the truth.
"What are you sulking about?" Lansi asked gently, shuffling over to the edge of the cliff.
Winsor remained seated at the precipice, staring silently down at the churning waves below. Under the bright sunlight, his dark eyes looked like polished obsidian—clear, deep, and entirely unreadable, as if they were reflecting the weight of the entire ocean within them.
Winsor lowered his gaze slightly, looking at Lansi as the smaller merman rested a shoulder against him. "How is it that you can always recognize me instantly?" he asked calmly.
By observing Rose and Carl's delayed reaction, Winsor had keenly realized that Lansi was the only being capable of effortlessly identifying his presence across different forms. Although Lansi himself rarely overthought it, an invisible, tethering frequency always guided him, allowing him to accurately pinpoint Winsor regardless of the disguise. More precisely, Lansi could perceive the subtle, microscopic differences between Winsor's various manifestations, entirely immune to the god's ambient spiritual pollution.
Winsor had initially assumed that his own creations would be able to distinguish him to some degree. After all, Carl and Rose were the only two exceptional humans he had permitted into his inner circle for an extended period. Yet, when confronted with his true form, they hadn't recognized him at all. They had flinched in terror, looking at him as if he were nothing more than a monstrous anomaly.
Though he would never openly admit to such a vulnerable sentiment, a faint, lingering trace of sorrow touched his ancient heart. He had thought Carl and Rose might be different. Now, it seemed, they were just like the rest.
"I don't really know either," Lansi admitted honestly. Possessing a naturally resilient, somewhat thick-skinned disposition, he wasn't entirely sure how to articulate an answer to such a delicate, sensitive question.
He paused, humming a soft, rhythmic melody under his breath for a moment before looking up at Winsor with a bright, reassuring smile. "Maybe... it's just because our frequencies happen to match perfectly?"
In the vast expanse of the ocean, whether it was a blue whale or a deep-sea monster, didn't they all rely on specific frequencies to find one another? Lansi recalled reading a book back in his engineering days about a unique whale known to researchers as Alice, the 52 Hertz whale.
Discovered by marine biologists in 1989 and tracked via sonar since 1992, Alice had spent her entire life traversing the lonely oceans in absolute solitude. She had no pod, no companions, and no response to her vocalizations. The tragic reason for her isolation was that her song resonated at precisely 52 Hz, whereas a normal whale's frequency ranged strictly between 15 and 25 Hz. To the rest of her kind, Alice was effectively a ghost—they simply couldn't hear her song, rendering communication impossible.
Perhaps, during their very first encounter, because Lansi had been too overwhelmed to harbor any deep-seated hostility or instinctual dread toward Winsor, he had managed to tune into the god's profound, isolated frequency. That singular moment of acceptance had sparked everything. Through all their stumbling encounters and shared growth, they had ultimately managed to find completion in one another.
Winsor reached out, gently stroking the top of Lansi's head. A faint, genuine smile graced his lips, the dark cloud over his mood dissipating entirely.
---
"Uh... Boss?"
Carl stepped forward, breaking the silence. After a rigorous internal debate, he and Rose had finally managed to wrap their heads around the cosmic reality of Winsor's existence. Carl offered a sheepish, apologetic grin. "Sorry about that earlier. We definitely overreacted."
Rose, predictably, was far more pragmatic. She marched over to the parked vehicle nearby, dragged a heavy tactical duffel bag across the grass, and tossed it right into Lansi's lap.
"Cut the sentimental chatter," she ordered briskly. "Change into these standard uniforms immediately and get these localized identity chips injected into your forearms. We need to move you past the secondary perimeter."
Winsor nodded smoothly, his tone reverting to its usual detached authority. "What is our route?"
The chillingly familiar cadence immediately reminded Carl of the Wen Yu he knew. His eyes lit up, his lingering doubts vanishing as his brain neatly categorized the entity: *Wen Yu was Winsor, and Winsor was Wen Yu.*
"We managed to bribe Old Tang via the black market," Carl explained quickly. "Once we enter the inner city limits, he'll handle the digital logging to solidify your clearance. You won't have to worry about the automated sweeps."
Rose paused, her expression turning uncharacteristically grim. "Furthermore, a certain self-proclaimed genius reached out to us to repay a prior favor. He provided us with two highly advanced, seamless military-grade identity chips."
"Yeah," Carl chimed in. "They're a hell of a lot cleaner than anything you can buy on the black market. Completely undetectable by standard Alliance firewalls."
"Once we clear the primary gate, our first stop is a secure safe house," Rose said, her gaze shifting between Lansi and Winsor as her face clouded over with anxiety. "We'll brief you on the internal situation there. To put it bluntly, the capital city is a complete trainwreck right now. The Doomsday Laboratory has fractured into rival factions openly vying for political power. The deep-cover informant I embedded inside the perimeter has gone completely silent. And to top it all off... Dr. Mourin has vanished without a trace."