The cult brought a koi to a shark fight.

  Brom had, briefly, forgotten something about Boss. Boss wasn't actually a battleship and he didn't have to act like one. The bow of the steel behemoth rose, that scream of shearing metal piercing the air as the great maw opened and a decidedly un-sharklike roar bellowed out. Brom had just enough warning to brace himself before Boss dove, and all Brom could think about as he clamped his grip down on the railing was he hoped Jonesy was okay up on the bridge. Then dark water swallowed him, and the shark was rolling through the lightless black. Well, there went his sunglasses. He'd fucking liked that pair too!

  The pull of the water tried to tear him away, but the Grip wasn't about to let go, giving Brom time to press his feet back down on the deck and raise a fist in a fighting posture. It wasn't just moral support, he'd swing on the damn fish if he could, but the bigger picture was the activation of the passive.

  - Unyielding Stance Activated!

  There we go! With his ring keeping his eyes from burning in the salt water and his feet firmly on the deck, Brom thought he'd recovered well. He was wholly unprepared for what came next. Boss had clearly found his prey because suddenly the cavitation wave struck Brom as those big forward guns let go, sending whatever the hell Boss used as munitions screaming forward through the water.

  HP: 770/800

  The blast wave took enough health off of him to nearly kill a man. He didn't want to think about what an actual hit from the shot would have done. Judging from the answering scream of pain that reverberated distantly, echoing in that warped way that water does to sound, Boss had scored at least one hit on his foe.

  A light rippled in the water ahead of them, drawing closer with every breath, and Brom realized a heartbeat too late that the koi creature glowed. It fractured in a myriad of dazzling lights that would have been beautiful if the deadly reality hadn't been realized a moment later. It had flaked off many of its scales, and each of those scales was a tiny, ravenous little bastard, all of them screaming toward Boss with mouths full of needle-like teeth agape. The moon had hurled a field of killer stars toward them.

  The toothy little bastards weren't anything to Boss. They hit his armored skin and scraped harmlessly off the steel of his exterior. Brom knew from experience that there wasn't any meat to be found on the surface of the battleship-shark, for that you had to get deep inside.

  Brom, however, was a tasty fleshy meat sack. A meat sack that might have armored arms but was virtually undefended anywhere else. Considering he was holding on for dear life, he doubted Unyielding Stance would keep him secured to the deck and prevent him from falling into the ocean depths, that left Brom with a single arm free to fight back against the hungry little horde. He swatted at them, reaching out to catch them in his hand and crush them, but it was like a scorpion fighting ants.

  Thankfully, Boss whirled in the water, whisking Brom away from the worst of the pests, and fired a raking broadside at the gleaming koi as the two massive monsters passed each other. The second, cavitation wave left Brom surrounded by little scraps of what might have been a problem. He pushed his gratitude through their bond.

  HP: 687/800

  Those little bastards had taken a good amount of health in a very short amount of time. Brom debated making his way along the deck, heading toward the superstructure where the bridge and Jonesy were. Boss, however, chose that moment to breach the surface again, and Brom saw that the yacht, the Erzsébet, was right there off the port side. He patted Boss, leaving the behemoth to fight his own fight, and dove into the sea without hesitation. Brom might not like the ocean, but that didn't mean he'd never learned how to swim!

  He had to look downright terrifying, his armor-covered fingers slamming into the yacht's hull, driving into the wood and creating the handholds he used to physically haul himself out of the sea and onto the ship. Water, blood, and ichor streamed off of him as black iron arms made hideous noises against the wood, dragging himself fully aboard. He slowly stood up just as the broken moon seemed to implode and an uncanny, luminous liquid began to stream down from the cloudless foreign heaven.

  "Alex Ruddle, where is he?"

  He didn't even recognize his own voice, wrecked and raw by the mouthfuls of seawater he'd been breathing during Boss's dive and the swim over. Fuck he was going to have to drink so much tea when this was over, otherwise he'd start losing vocal range!

  For a hot second, nobody moved. Everyone who could think for themselves just stared at Brom like he was violence incarnate, and all the NPCs seemed to be stuck querying their programming for a moment. Then, as one, they all seemed to give a unified, synchronized shoulder twitch. All of them turned hostile in the same moment, a dozen high school zombies, locking empty gazes on him. He slapped the first one so hard that they flew overboard.

  "I'm not asking you Thriller rejects again, where's Alex Ruddle?" His gaze was fixed on the thinking cultists, systematically heaving each of the jerky NPCs overboard as they reached him. He didn't even break the uncomfortable eye contact to do it. Just shouldered through them, the spells they chanted at him glancing off him with soft pops.

  - Hostile Magic Negated!

  - Hostile Magic Negated!

  - Hostile Magic Negated!

  Finally he reached out, gently fisting his fingers in the soft shirt of one of the two adults that were huddled against the mast with the few thinking teens. Brom drug him close, the toes of the man's shoes squeaking across the wet deck, the sound nearly lost amid the eldritch violence carrying on in the background. "Alex Ruddle, cult man. Where might he be?"

  HP: 677/800

  - Bleeding

  The harpoon from the spear gun thudded into Brom's back just below the shoulder and drove the wind out of him, hot pain searing up his back in a sharp jet of agony. He turned slowly and saw Alex, calmly reloading the speargun, standing a short distance away. He didn't look like a teenage cult leader, well, aside from the glowing medallion around his neck. That pretty moonlight hue was exactly like that koi monster that was currently busy somewhere below the waves with Boss.

  "I didn't expect you to be here yet. TJ should have sent you out to Meyer's Reef."

  A second harpoon thudded into Brom as he turned. Lower left quadrant, burned like a bitch, stuck in deep. He reached down and snapped the shaft off, the Grip sheering the metal of the harpoon easily, leaving just enough protruding. Pulling it out would have been worse.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  HP: 667/800

  - Bleeding

  "I take it you lied to TJ then?" Brom's voice was subarctic as he started down the deck in the direction of the teenager who was calmly loading a third and final harpoon into the gun as though he had all the time in the world.

  "Of course I lied to TJ. Did he really fucking think I was going to monologue my goddamn plan in front of him? I'm not stupid." He raised the speargun again and buried this one center mass, casually tossing it away now that he was out of ammunition.

  HP: 647/800

  - Bleeding

  This time, Brom's body pushed the harpoon out, the location too inconvenient for it to remain in his flesh. It clattered to the ground as Brom fought to get his breath back, his blood spilling down and vanishing amid the black and red design of his Skid Row t-shirt. Was that the first time he'd been hit with a critical? It might have been. Alex was a hell of a shot it seemed. Thankfully, the kid had cut the lines attached to the harpoons, smart enough not to want to be attached to an enraged barbarian.

  "You really are a monster, Mister Jones." Alex's voice was rich boy disgusted as he casually moved around the deck with an ease and familiarity that spoke to the hours he'd spent on the yacht. The luminous liquid kept falling around them, drawn to the youth in rivers of light, a halo beginning to coalesce around him. "But in this world, people kill monsters all the time."

  Brom spat bloody phlegm on the deck and wiped his mouth. "Kid, you're a little young to be deciding who's a monster and who's a man."

  "That's your opinion." Alex shrugged, casually staring at the ropes near his hands, then pulled one.

  The bottom part of the sail suddenly swung wildly, whipping toward Brom just in time to catch him square across the midsection, ramming that harpoon in deeper. He wasn't ready for it at all, hurtling backward and crashing into a coil of rope on the deck.

  HP: 603/800

  - Bleeding

  "Fuck." He pushed himself up, eyes narrowing as he saw Alex hauling on the rope, arms corded with effort. Before Brom could put two and two together, the sail swung again and clocked him in the back of the skull. Pain exploded across his vision, the loud crack of impact on bone echoing in the suddenly very quiet air.

  HP: 588/800

  - Daze

  "This is the Hero of Cold Bay folks. See what I said?" Alex was calmly retying the knot, securing the sail once more.

  - Paralysis

  - Poison

  - Necrosis

  The status effects flooded in and were neutralized so quick it was like a strobe going off in the corner of Brom's vision, and he fought to his feet. What the hell was going on? Pain was crawling across his body and, as he pressed a hand to the wound in his gut, he realized. That white crap was working into him.

  + Bane of the Broken Sky

  HP: 587/800

  HP: 586/800

  HP: 585/800

  His health was ticking down, slowly, little by little just draining away. Not a physical effect. A magical one. Not a spell or a spell-based ability. This was just some raw, magical passive that the weird white liquid had. Alex Ruddle had found the loophole, the gap in Brom's armor. His health was being siphoned away, one HP at a time. It didn't take a genius to figure out where it was going, either. With each point, the medallion around Alex's neck glowed a little brighter.

  The youth did look impressed when Brom got back on his feet, cocking his head to the side. "Wow, your brother was right. You really can take a beating."

  That cleared Brom's head, his eyes narrowing. "You talked to my brother?"

  Alex laughed, shrugging. "I needed information I didn't think TJ had. So yeah, I talked to Jason. He was surprisingly willing to talk shit about you."

  HP: 563/800

  HP: 562/800

  HP: 561/800

  This shit was ticking down in a hurry. Brom started in Alex's direction, stepping over the corpses of the clustered cultists as he did so. Poor bastards. Apparently, the glowing liquid did a number on them, too. Brom guessed they'd thought they had protection from it, and they'd definitely been lied to. Yet Alex had the gall to call Brom a monster.

  "This really isn't going to end well for you. I hope you know that kid." He locked eyes with Alex across the deck, the young man starting to look almost heavenly. The halo was so brilliant around him, his features suffused with that light, the medallion on his chest pearlescent and warm.

  Alex's laugh was downright musical. "I think that you came all the way out here with no plan and no way to deal with me. Did you just think you could punch your way through this again? That you could just tackle whatever I summoned and what, wrestle it into submission?"

  Brom's eyes were flat, chest heaving. "No, I'm not Steve fucking Irwin. I didn't come out here in khaki shorts shouting 'Crikey, it's angry!' You made the same fucking mistake my brother did, Alex."

  HP: 510/800

  HP: 509/800

  HP: 508/800

  The smug youth arched an eyebrow. "And what's that?"

  Brom's smile was all teeth. "You fucking assumed I don't have friends."

  It was at that moment that the sea behind him erupted, Boss screaming up from the depths below. His black steel jaws were gripped tight into the rotting flesh of the nearly descaled koi, its glow fluttering as it thrashed weakly in the eldritch battle-ship shark's grip. Alex's gaze turned horrified, watching Boss toss that nascent cosmic god from side to side, the tonnage of his steel slamming back down into the water and nearly capsizing the Erzsébet.

  Brom skidded across the deck, slamming into Alex, the pair of them nearly toppling over the rope railing of the schooner. His hands clamped down on the teenage cult leader, his bloody grin reflected in the young man's suddenly terrified eyes. "Check fucking mate."

  And then the glowing medallion exploded.

  White hot light, a tearing sensation, and Brom was suddenly flying. The impact on his back shoved the harpoon jutting from just under his shoulder in one side and out the other, the point of it piercing through just under his collar bone. He screamed, anyone in that situation would have. The guttural noise of pain seemed to echo on too still air, taking it's sweet time fading.

  HP: 498/800

  - Bleeding

  Maybe... maybe he'd lie here for just a moment after all...