Run, run, run.
The soldiers still marched in neat step behind Mo Sichen, running along the metal corridor toward the captain’s cabin at the bow.
The trust of his subordinates dazed him – what made them follow him like this?
They had been schemed against, toyed with so thoroughly; how much chance did they have to turn the tables?
Was this also part of their plan?
These delays, these tricks – what kind of final plan were they paving the way for?
A sudden push against his back made the soldier captain pause.
Scattered objects, wax seeping from gaps, all unfixed objects slid backward at once – the Brass Loom was accelerating, for the final step of that unknown plan.
Yet resilience tempered in blood and iron kept Mo Sichen’s military boots firmly on the ground, making him as steady as rock amid the tilt – the ship was accelerating, which meant the other side was still racing against time, and that meant even after such a dereliction of duty, he still had duties he could fulfill!
The next round of anomalies came one after another.
A string of starlight lit up in succession on the riveted iron bars that should have tightly bound the corridor plates, then vanished into thin air.
Corundum’s teleportation technique had created this precise gap at the right time.
High-heat wax sprayed out from all directions, directly onto the soldiers advancing at full speed; the steam filling the air mingled with the stench of corpses and a musk carrying animal rankness.
“Use obstacles to block the wax! Stick to the wall!”
He pulled out a shield backhanded to block the candle wax splashing toward his face.
Half the wax splashed onto the floor, and half congealed into a thin wax film on the shield.
“Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving! Don’t let it seal you alive in here!”
Steel groaned, wax surged.
As the soldiers kept advancing, the pressure outside the cabin tore the gaps left by missing rivet nails wider and wider.
Support frames kept crashing down from overhead, while semi-congealed wax clung around the group’s ankles.
They advanced slowly, as if marching through a swamp.
What did this mean for them?
Was it just to buy time that they would destroy the ship to such an extent?
“You can hear me, right?”
The soldier captain connected the communicator to the captain’s cabin once again.
“You’ve delayed us. So what? At this rate, the whole ship will break apart into neat little pieces in the tide!”
On the other end of the radio was wordless silence.
But it didn’t matter.
“Prepare to breach the door!”
The impact spear, thick enough for one person to wrap their arms around, was braced firmly against the cabin door.
Wheels and levers compressed the Orichalcum spring to the bottom.
The latch of the impact cone gave a heavy click.
Then the trigger was pressed, and the spring shot the steel cone forward heavily.
Steel and brass collided with a powerful boom, and Mo Sichen’s thunder erupted at the same time.
The cabin door was thus violently smashed open into an exaggerated hole.
One after another, all squad members filed out through the hole, no one left behind.
The brass door frame of the captain’s cabin appeared once more in the soldier captain’s view.
This was the last corridor leading to the captain’s cabin, and also the area he had previously guarded.
What obstruction, what trap, what conspiracy, what trick awaited next?
The answer Mo Sichen got was unexpected. From the other end of the communicator came Corundum’s cold voice:
“Actually, Captain Mo Sichen, you guessed right. The entire ship will break apart into neat little pieces in the tide.”
“What?”
As soon as the words fell, the sound of metal disintegrating grew fiercer.
Mo Sichen heard countless seams seeping wax because the riveted iron bars had vanished.
The surging wax easily tore the cracks open, dismantling the ship’s hull as neatly as building blocks.
Behind the cabin door, the corridor collapsed and wax poured out.
Before the cabin door, the tunnel leading to the captain’s cabin remained intact, without even a single crack, as if it were an escape passage left for them.
And the captain’s cabin door that Mo Sichen thought would take enormous effort to open also opened simply and easily, as if welcoming guests.
The blonde girl’s skirt billowed in the tide’s turbulence into blue waves, like the lead actress at the final curtain:
“Everyone, hurry into the captain’s cabin. We don’t wish to cause casualties.”
Mo Sichen’s pupils trembled violently.
Through the disintegrating bulkhead, he saw the Brass Loom performing an elegant death.
The riveted iron bars were like building-block skeletons pulled away by an invisible hand.
The armor plates joined over years were peeling off neatly along the patterns left during casting, revealing the crystalline wax core inside like a butterfly pupa shedding its cocoon.
“You’re insane!”
The soldier captain’s roar seemed fragmented amid the sound of metal collapsing.
“This is your ship, not Stained Glass City’s. Even if you can build a new one, why destroy it? Just for a performance? Just to toy with us?”
“Because we don’t have the ability to build a ship from scratch, nor the means to hide it completely outside Stained Glass City’s sight – we cannot afford the cost of defection, have no place to hide, and cannot contact any third party that could assist us,” the petite black-haired girl also walked to the door, her calm tone as if it were not her ship sinking.
“So we dismantled the ship into parts and let the tide hide them for us. When the time is right, every part of the ship can be teleported back by me and become whole again.”
“As long as the ship is destroyed, they have no reason to inspect it on our behalf, and as renters we only need to pay compensation, without applying for purchase rights,” Willowlia added.
“There isn’t much time. Hurry inside.”
What choice did they have?
As the last person entered the captain’s cabin, the door was shut firmly.
Willowlia’s wax-shaping magic sealed the gaps in the door, preventing the wax outside from seeping in.
With the last sound of metal disintegrating, the captain’s cabin completely lost contact with the Brass Loom.
Now it had become a sealed escape pod, a main control room that an organization could control.
“This is meaningless,” Mo Sichen said.
“I still have a transmitter on me. Stained Glass City’s ships are coming; they can still salvage the wreckage.”
“No,” Corundum said.
“The acceleration just now was enough to send the captain’s cabin flying far away from the other wreckage, and the transmitters on you will draw the incoming ships away from the truly important target.”
“And we also prepared a white-glowing Flame Crystal carved all over with explosion formulas.”
As soon as the words fell, a muffled explosion passed through the sea of wax and reached everyone’s ears.
The remaining components of the Brass Loom were blasted apart into the tide, completely hidden within the chaotic wax.
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