POV: Wynter Ash
Time: Day 7 Post-Fall (02:00 AM).
Location: Main Deck -- The Gilded Wreck.
The victory celebration ended too quickly.
Three hours ago, the crew of The Gilded Wreck were toasting with cheap rum, celebrating the discovery of the "God's Heart" that would make them rich. They laughed, sang, and danced on the tables.
Now, the ship was dead silent.
But not the peaceful kind of silence. This was the silence of someone holding their breath out of fear.
I woke up on a pile of grain sacks in the logistics hold—my makeshift bed. My eyes snapped open not because of noise, but because of the absence of engine noise.
The ship's engine was dead. The propellers had stopped spinning. The ship was adrift and lifeless in the middle of The Silent Drift.
"What did these fools do?" I muttered, rubbing my temples.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
The hair on my arms stood on end, but not from the cold. The air in this hold felt dense, heavy, and charged with static—a sensation I knew well from my days in Valdor when mana generators were spinning at full capacity.
Normally, with atmospheric pressure this heavy, the Core in my chest would vibrate, resonating with the power source out there. But my chest was silent. Empty.
That was strange. It felt like watching a raging thunderstorm before your eyes, but hearing no thunder at all. The disconnect between the air pressure and my internal emptiness told me one thing: this wasn't a natural phenomenon. This was a massive-scale magical leak.
I grabbed my walking stick and limped out into the corridor.
As soon as I opened the door, I saw him.
One of the crew—a large man named Jorah who worked the anchor—was standing in front of a wooden wall. He wasn't moving. His forehead was pressed against the wall, and he was muttering rapidly, his eyes wide open staring at the wood grain as if it were a movie screen.
"...Delta Formation destroyed... Sky collapsing... They're coming from the rift... Fire... Fire..."
His voice trembled, full of pure terror.
"Jorah?" I called softly.
He didn't turn. He kept babbling about a war that never happened in this era.
"...Captain... My heart's hot... please pull it out... pull it out..."
His hands began clawing at his own chest, leaving bloody scratches.
I took a step back. This wasn't seasickness. This wasn't alcohol poisoning.
This was Resonance.
The Titan Core we were carrying. That thing wasn't dead.
It was dreaming.
And because our insulator shield was just a used salamander-skin vest, the radioactive dreams of that ancient weapon of mass destruction were leaking out, possessing every living being with an active Mana Circuit on this ship.
Everyone on this ship was an antenna.
Except me.
Because I was empty. I was a radio with its battery removed.
I was the only sane person in this floating asylum.
"Solstice!"
My mind immediately went to one name.
If Jorah, whose mana was low, was already hallucinating this badly, what was happening to Solstice? He was a Walking Reactor. He was the biggest and strongest antenna on this ship. He would absorb the signal the loudest.
I dragged my leg as fast as I could towards Cabin 304.
Along the way, I saw other crew members lying on the floor, convulsing or crying while hugging their knees. They were trapped in the Titan's memories—memories of war, destruction, and death.
I barged through the door to our cabin.
The temperature inside was no longer hot. It was boiling.
The wooden walls were blackened, charred. The water in the bucket was hissing into steam.
Solstice was kneeling in the middle of the room. His eyes glowed a bright blue—too bright. The veins in his neck and arms bulged, glowing orange like lava beneath his skin.
He held the Solaris Umbrella in spear mode, aimed at the door. At me.
"FALL BACK!" he shouted. His voice wasn't Solstice's. It was a hoarse voice, overlaid with static. "DEFENSE LINE BREACHED! PROTECT THE REACTOR!"
He wasn't seeing me. He was seeing an enemy from the past.
The tip of his umbrella spear began to heat up, ready to fire a plasma laser that would pierce my chest and the ship's hull behind me.
"Solstice, it's me!" I yelled, raising both hands. "Wynter! The Auditor!"
"ENEMY DETECTED. CLASS: INFILTRATOR," Solstice raved. He stepped forward. The wooden floor beneath his feet began to burn.
Damn it. He didn't recognize me. The Titan's Resonance was overriding his consciousness, overriding his new memories as a crew member.
I couldn't fight him. I had no ice to put him out.
I only had one weapon: my physical anomaly.
I dropped my stick. I walked forward, through the heat wave that should have seared normal human skin. But my corpse-cold skin absorbed the heat.
"Shoot me and we all die, you fool," I said calmly, continuing to step forward.
The spear tip trembled, just an inch from my heart.
"Target... locked..." Solstice whispered, sweat pouring down his pain-distorted face. His eyes flickered wildly, trying to process the visual before him that didn't match his war hallucinations.
I pushed the spear tip aside with my bare hand. The hot metal sizzled against my palm, but I ignored it.
I stepped into his guard and pressed both my cold palms against his burning cheeks.
"Look at me," I commanded sharply.
The temperature contrast startled him.
The coldness of my hands on his face was like a splash of ice water. It wasn't the sensation of an enemy. It wasn't the sensation of war. It was the sensation of home.
His wild blue eyes flickered. His focus returned for a moment, piercing through the haze of hallucinations.
He stared at me in confusion. His lips trembled.
"Ice... Rock?" he whispered weakly.
Not Auditor. Not Wynter. Not Target.
Amidst the madness burning his brain, he called me by that old taunt. The only name that meant anything to him.
"Yeah, it's your damn Ice Rock," I answered, feeling a strange, slight relief in my chest. "Now stop trying to burn me."
"It hurts..." Solstice groaned, his body slumping into my embrace, his umbrella clattering to the floor. "My head... There's a voice... Thousands of voices..."
"I know. It's the Titan Core. It's noisy," I said quickly. "Listen, Solstice. You have to turn off your fire. You're drawing its signal. You're like a magnet to it."
I held him tightly, letting my body work as a passive heat sink, sucking the feverish heat from his body.
"Focus on my voice. Not the one in your head. My voice is real. They're just echoes."
He clutched my shirt, his breathing ragged. Slowly, the blue light in his eyes dimmed. His burning skin began to cool.
"You... why don't you hear it?" he asked weakly, his face buried in my shoulder.
"Because I'm empty," I answered bitterly. "Sometimes, being junk has its uses."
I helped him sit on the floor.
"Wait here. Don't die, and don't call me Auditor for now. I prefer Ice Rock when things are this dire."
I left Solstice and ran to the Main Cargo Deck, where the Core was stored.
The situation on the upper deck was more chaotic.
Captain Sable was kneeling near the helm. His mechanical hand was beating against his own head. His camera eye spun wildly, its zoom lens extending and retracting uncontrollably.
"Error... Logic Failure... Overwrite... Get out of my head!" Sable yelled.
Quartermaster Grimm lay unconscious nearby, foaming at the mouth. His muscle brain couldn't withstand the psychic assault.
I ignored them. I headed for the iron crate where the Core was placed.
The crate was shaking violently. Purple light pulsed from the cracks in its lid. A low humming sound made my teeth ache.
The whispering... even I could feel it now. Not as sound, but as pressure. Like being at the bottom of a deep swimming pool.
But that pressure couldn't get in. There was no Mana inside me for it to latch onto.
"Sable!" I yelled, approaching the Captain. "Unlock the weapons locker! Where do you keep the lead sheets for hull plating?"
Sable looked up. His face was deathly pale.
"Auditor... they... are screaming..."
"I know! Where's the lead?!" I shook his shoulder.
"Locker... Below... Red crate..." he stammered.
"Good. Don't die yet."
I ran to the lower locker. I dragged out a heavy crate containing sheets of lead—usually used to patch reactor leaks. My muscles screamed, but adrenaline took over.
I returned to the Cargo Deck.
I had to make a Faraday Cage. A magical version.
The principle was the same: block electromagnetic waves (or in this case, mana-psionic waves) with a conductor that grounds the signal.
I opened the Core crate.
Purple light exploded out.
Sable screamed behind me, covering his ears.
I had no time to be afraid. I grabbed the lead sheets and began wrapping the Core, which was still wrapped in Solstice's leather vest.
My hands blistered from the pure mana radiation, but I kept wrapping. Layer after layer.
"Sleep, you old bastard," I growled at the crystal sphere.
I grabbed a heavy iron chain from the deck floor. I coiled it around the lead-wrapped bundle, then hooked the end of the chain to a Grounding spike in the ship's floor connected directly to the seawater.
KLANG. The moment the chain connected to the sea, a flash of blue sparks erupted.
The signal was grounded. Dumped into the open sea.
Instantly, the humming stopped.
The whispering in the air vanished.
Silence.
True, complete silence.
Behind me, Sable collapsed to the floor, his breath coming in ragged gasps like someone who had just surfaced from underwater.
The sun rose two hours later.
Orange light illuminated The Gilded Wreck, which looked like a battlefield, even though no physical enemy had attacked.
The crew began waking up one by one, confused, headachy, and frightened. They asked each other what had happened, but their memories were hazy like a nightmare.
I sat atop the now-neatly wrapped Core crate, sealed with lead and chains. My hands were wrapped in makeshift bandages.
Sable walked over. He looked ten years older than yesterday. His mechanical eye still twitched occasionally.
He stood before me, staring at the crate with newfound fear.
"What was that?" he asked hoarsely.
"An echo," I answered calmly, taking a sip from my water bottle. "The Titan's residual memory. It was trying to sync itself with your brains. It thought you were its crew."
Sable looked at me. His gaze changed. There was no more doubt.
"Why aren't you insane? Grimm is still vomiting over the side. Furnace still has a fever. Why are you... fine?"
I tapped my empty chest.
"Because I have no frequency, Captain. Ghosts can't possess an empty house."
Sable nodded slowly. He carefully touched the lead crate.
"This thing is dangerous. We should dump it."
"Don't be stupid," I cut him off. "This thing is dangerous for amateurs. Now it's safe inside its lead cage. And because it's active... its price just tripled."
I looked sharply at Sable.
"You need me, Captain. Not just to count your money. But to make sure your 'money' doesn't kill you in your sleep."
"From now on, I hold the key to this cargo hold. No one approaches this Core without my permission. Including you."
Sable fell silent. A slave had just given orders to the Captain.
But Sable only gave a thin smile. A smile full of respect.
"You thought I'd be angry? No, Auditor. You just saved my sanity."
He turned, yelling at the still-dazed crew.
"BACK TO WORK, YOU LAZY RATS! The Auditor is in charge of the cargo from now on! If anyone touches this crate without his permission, I'll cut your hands off!"
I let out a long sigh, leaning my head against the cold crate.
Across the deck, I saw Solstice emerge from the cabin. His face was still pale, but he stood upright. He looked at me from a distance and gave a small nod.
A wordless thank you.
I had survived again.
But more than that... I had just been promoted from "Accountant" to "Handler."
And on a pirate ship, the one who holds the leash of the monster is the hardest person to kill.