The massive cloud of dust that Cielle had kicked into the air slowly began to settle, drifting down like a curtain of gray snow. It coated the pristine floorboards, the reinforced metal of the walls, and the shoulders of Sunny's shroud. He coughed quietly, waving a hand to clear the air in front of his face, but his eyes never once left the center of the room.
The armored treasury was exactly what he had imagined a pirate's vault would look like, stripped of all the rot and decay that plagued the rest of the ruined vessel. It was completely untouched by the creeping red moss. The thick green vines that choked the outer corridors had not dared to slither past the heavy iron threshold. It was a perfect sanctuary of wealth.
Sitting directly in the center of the chamber were three heavy wooden chests. They were magnificent pieces of craftsmanship, bound in thick bands of tarnished silver and dull gold.
But it was the chest in the middle that completely hijacked Sunny's attention, effectively freezing the blood in his veins and silencing the ever-present voice of his paranoia.
Unlike the other two, the central chest was wide open. And it was overflowing.
It was not filled with ordinary gold or mundane jewels. It was brimming to the absolute brim with the mysterious coins they had been tracking. Thousands of them. They cascaded over the wooden lip of the chest, spilling onto the floorboards in a chaotic, glittering pile of wealth. In the dim light of the treasury, the sheer volume of gold was staggering.
But for Sunny, the treasure was entirely secondary to the sensation it produced.
To an ordinary Awakened, they were merely strange, intricately minted coins from a forgotten era. To Sunny, they were something else entirely. There were thousands of shadow fragments. As he stared at the overflowing chest, he could literally feel the call deep within his soul. The fragments of darkness trapped within the cold gold were singing to him, calling out to his cores with a magnetic, almost intoxicating pull.
He took a slow, completely unconscious step forward.
His mind was no longer in the cursed Dream Realm. It had detached from the reality of the parasite-infested ship and the thing sleeping in the cargo hold. Instead, his entire focus was on the coins in front.
'Thousands,' Sunny thought, his breath hitching slightly in his throat. His dark eyes went entirely glassy, reflecting the dull gleam of the mountain of gold. 'There have to be at least several thousand coins in that pile. If every single one of them holds even one shadow fragment.... it's enough.'
A sudden sense of thrill shot straight down his spine, making his fingers twitch.
His shadow cores were notoriously, agonizingly difficult to fill. The fact that he could only saturate them via kills was a monumental hurdle that often made him feel as though he was drowning in quicksand. But this chest… this single, overflowing chest could change everything.
If he absorbed the fragments contained within that mountain of gold, it wouldn't just give him a slight boost. It would be enough to completely saturate his current core and instantly fill up some of his third. He would become an Awakened Demon. The ever-present gap between him and Nephis would finally, definitively reduce.
He could catch her. He could finally stand on equal footing with the girl who held his True Name. The invisible chains of his fate, the shadow bond that kept him awake at night in a cold sweat, might finally stop feeling like a loaded gun pressed against the back of his head.
Sunny took another step toward the center of the room. The tip of Cruel Sight lowered slightly toward the floor, forgotten in his grip. The intoxicating ecstasy of the gold was wrapping around his mind like a thick, warm blanket, drowning out every single instinct that had kept him alive in the dream realm.
"Sunny."
The voice cut through the thick haze of his daze like a sharp silver blade, but it sounded distant, muffled by the roaring rush of blood in his ears.
Cielle had not moved toward the center of the room. She had remained exactly where she was, standing just beside the fallen heavy door. Her pale spear was still gripped tightly in her hands, her white wings twitching with an agitated energy.
She wasn't looking at the gold. She was looking at him.
"Sunny, stop walking," she said, her voice dropping into a commanding register.
Sunny blinked, his boots halting just a few feet away from the overflowing chest. He shook his head slightly, trying to clear the heavy, intoxicating fog from his thoughts. "What? Why? Look at it, Cielle. Just look at it. It's a fortune. It's exactly what we came here for."
"I am looking at it," Cielle replied flatly, her green eyes darting rapidly from the mountain of coins to the massive, jagged breach in the rear wall of the treasury, and then back to Sunny's glassy eyes. "And I am looking at you. You are not acting like yourself. Your pupils are dilated. Your breathing is shallow. Gold is affecting your mind."
Sunny frowned, a wave of irritation breezed past him. He wanted to snap at her, to tell her that she simply didn't understand, that she couldn't comprehend the value of these coins to him. But a tiny, rational part of his brain, the part which helped him survive till now, managed to claw its way to the surface.
He forced himself to take a deep, steadying breath, tightening his grip on the hilt of Cruel Sight until his knuckles turned white.
"I'm fine," Sunny muttered, though his voice sounded slightly hoarse. He dragged his eyes away from the gold, forcing himself to look at cielle's still figure. "It's just… a lot to process…. But you're right. We need to be smart about this."
He took a step back, creating a small distance between himself and the alluring chest. The intoxicating pull lessened slightly, allowing his usual paranoia to seep back into his thoughts. Cielle remained silent, only watching as sunny regained his composure.
"Alright," Sunny murmured, mostly to himself "We have a massive problem. We cannot possibly carry all of this. My pack is too small. Even if we completely emptied our supplies and filled every single pocket we have, we would barely make a dent in that pile. Gold is incredibly heavy. We would be burdened, slow, and completely exhausted before we even made it halfway back "
He began to pace a line near the entrance, his mind spinning at a fast rate.
"So, what do we do?" Sunny continued, thinking aloud. "We could bury it. Yes, we could find a secure location somewhere on the island outside, far away from the ship and the toxic spores, and bury the bulk of the coins. We take what we can carry now, and we make multiple trips back to the island over the next few weeks to ferry the rest. It's tedious, and it's dangerous, but it guarantees we get everything without turning ourselves into easy targets."
It was a solid plan.
But as he stared at the overflowing chest, a nagging sensation began to scratch at the back of his skull. It was a tiny itch of wrongness that completely refused to go away.
Something about the treasury didn't add up.
He stopped pacing. His dark eyes drifted away from the gold and settled on the massive breach in the rear wall of the room. The thick, reinforced metal had been peeled violently outward, completely ruined by immense physical force.
'The Chain Worm,' Sunny thought, piecing the timeline together. 'The dead abomination we found outside. It came here. It crawled all the way up the island, ignored the sleeping titan in the cargo hold, and smashed its way directly into this secure room. It came inside.'
Sunny narrowed his eyes, trying to guess the beast's movements. When they had found the rotting carcass of the colossal worm, Sunny had personally cut it open to search its stomach. Inside the foul sludge of the beast's digestive tract, he had found a massive chunk of wood. It had been the corner of a heavy chest, complete with a rusted iron band.
The worm hadn't eaten the gold. The beast was a mindless abomination; it had no concept of currency or wealth. It had simply bitten a massive chunk out of the wooden chest, swallowed it whole, and then inexplicably retreated from the treasury to die on the mossy rocks outside.
Sunny slowly turned his head back toward the center of the room.
He looked at the three chests sitting perfectly undisturbed on the clean floorboards. He looked at the closed chest on the left. It was completely intact. He looked at the closed chest on the right. It was perfectly unblemished.
Finally, his gaze settled on the open, overflowing chest in the middle. He walked towards it and felt the wood.
The heavy timber was stained a dark brown. The silver and gold bands holding it together gleamed softly in the dim light. It was a beautiful piece of ancient history. But as Sunny stared at the bottom right corner of the massive box, his nerves went aflame.
This chest also looked undamaged, yet one of its corner was wrong… different from the rest, a lighter tone perhaps. The metal band wrapping around that corner wasn't tarnished silver; it was a strange, dull gray substance that merely mimicked the texture of metal.
It looked exactly as if the corner had healed.
"Sunny?"
Cielle's voice cut through the silence, laced with sudden alarm. Her spear raised a fraction of an inch, as she walked towards him.
"What is wrong?" she demanded, her wings flaring out behind her in preparation for a fight.
Sunny opened his mouth to scream a warning, to tell her to run, to throw himself backward and put as much distance between himself and the mountain of gold as possible.
He was entirely too late.
The instant his hesitation registered, the creature realized its prey had finally seen through the deception, then the chest lunged.
In one burst, like a coiled spring getting released, the entire chest shot towards them. The wooden chest contorted violently, as hands and feet sprouted out of its side, disfigured and entirely ugly.
The mountain of glittering gold coins that had been overflowing from the brim did not scatter. They were pushed aside as a horrifying set of jagged teeth erupted directly from beneath the gold. The inside of the chest was a cavernous, dark maw lined with rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Sunny watched the massive lid of the monstrosity snap downward with the speed of a guillotine.
He didn't have time to use Shadow Step. He didn't even have time to fully pull his body back. At that moment, his instincts took over. Instead of trying to yank his extended arm away, Sunny violently thrust Cruel Sight forward, driving the dark metal of the blade directly into the descending maw.
The heavy lid of the coffer slammed shut.
CRACK.
The sound was absolutely sickening, a wet, heavy crunch that echoed like a gunshot in the silent room..
The jaws of the monstrosity clamped down with thousands of pounds of crushing force. The dark, incredibly durable metal of Cruel Sight acted as a desperate wedge, catching the brunt of the horrific bite and preventing the creature's jagged teeth from completely shearing Sunny's arm off at the elbow.
But the metal could not stop the full impact of the heavy lid.
The pressure transferred directly through the shaft of the weapon and into Sunny's extended arm. He felt an agonizing pop as the bones in his forearm snapped under the overwhelming weight.
A scream of absolute agony tore its way out of Sunny's throat. The pain was blinding, a searing wave of white-hot fire shot up that completely short-circuited his brain. His vision flashed for a second before he regained some sense. He was pinned, his broken arm trapped in this creature's maw, held in place only by the precarious wedge of his sword.
The mimic let out a horrifying, wet gurgle, its fleshy body beginning to rapidly unfold and rise from the floorboards.
It was preparing to twist its massive head and shear Sunny's shoulder completely off his body.
Before the monster could execute the lethal maneuver, a streak of pure silver lightning crossed the room.
Cielle did not waste a single millisecond trying to process the horrifying transformation of the chest. The absolute moment the chest had moved, she had already launched herself forward.
She closed the distance with her explosive speed, her white wings snapping the air behind her. She didn't aim for the thick, heavily armored mass of the creature's main body. As the mimic began to unfold, a long, incredibly gaunt, multi-jointed limb burst from the side of the wooden exterior, attempting to find purchase on the floorboards to leverage its massive weight.
Cielle drove her pale spear directly into the center of that emerging limb.
She threw her entire body weight and the momentum of her sprint behind the thrust. The razor-sharp tip of the spear pierced straight through the tough, gray flesh of the creature's leg, pinning it violently against the solid floorboards.
The mimic shrieked a horrifying sound like tearing metal and grinding bone. The sudden destruction of its limb completely shattered its balance. Instead of violently twisting its maw to tear Sunny's shoulder away, the massive creature lurched sideways, its body misaligning awkwardly as it desperately tried to compensate for the pinned leg.
Sunny gritted his teeth, tasting blood, and ripped his broken, crushed arm backward, pulling it free from the loosened grip of the jaws. Cruel Sight remained wedged firmly between the monster's teeth, abandoned in his desperate bid for survival.
Freed from the trap, Sunny stumbled backward, clutching his ruined arm to his chest as fresh waves of dizzying pain rolled over him.
But the monster was not done.
The coffer violently ripped its pinned limb free from Cielle's spear, tearing a massive chunk of its own flesh away in the process. It did not seem to care. The creature rose to its full, horrifying height. It was easily three meters tall, an incredibly gaunt, nightmarish parody of a humanoid figure. Its body was a twisted amalgamation of gray, muscular flesh and broken wooden planks, its long, multi-jointed limbs ending in sharp, rusted iron claws with a chest for its torso.
The mimic loomed over them, its cavernous maw dripping with foul liquid. It lashed out with blinding speed.
The next moment, dunny barely managed to bring his good arm up in a desperate guard again its massive, iron-clawed feet which came as a horizontal kick aimed directly at Sunny's chest.
He was lifted entirely off his feet, the breath knocked completely out of his lungs. He flew backward through the air, sailing across the treasury and crashing violently through the shattered remains of the reinforced doorway.
He hit the floorboards of the outer corridor hard, skipping and rolling like a discarded ragdoll before finally slamming to a halt against the pulsing green vines of the opposite wall.
A fraction of a second later, Cielle came flying out of the room right behind him. The coffer's sweeping kick had clipped her shoulder as she tried to pull her spear back. She hit the floor of the hallway with a heavy thud, skidding a few meters across the wood before her wings flared out to arrest her momentum, leaving deep gouges in the floorboards.
Inside the pristine treasury, the towering, gaunt monstrosity let out a horrifying sound.
It was laughter. A dry, rattling, wooden sound that perfectly mimicked the cruel, mocking laughter of a human being.
Sunny gasped desperately for air, his vision swimming with pain from his crushed arm and bruised ribs. The sweet air was back.
He looked up, his eyes widening.
The mimic dropped onto all fours, moving with a deeply unnatural, skittering grace, and pounced directly through the broken doorway, its massive jaws opening wide to finish the meal it had started.
Sunny didn't have a weapon. He didn't have his breath. He only had his shadows.
As the massive jaws descended toward his face, Sunny locked onto the darkest corner of the corridor, perfectly ignoring the blinding agony in his arm. The world dissolved into shadows.
The massive teeth of the mimic snapped shut on empty air, biting a massive chunk out of the floorboards where Sunny had been laying a millisecond prior.
Thirty feet further down the dark, skewed corridor, Sunny stepped out of the shadows and collapsed onto his knees, hacking violently as he clutched his broken arm. Cielle was already on her feet a few yards ahead of him, her spear raised, her green eyes were a little hazy due the air yet they locked onto the horrifying creature now blocking their path back to the treasury.
The mimic slowly turned its massive, wooden head toward them. Cruel Sight was still wedged comically in the corner of its jaws. It let out another dry, rattling burst of laughter, its long, gaunt limbs shifting as it prepared to charge.
And somewhere deep beneath them, echoing through the rotting timber of the hull, the entire colossal ship shuddered slightly in its sleep.