Chương 161: 13. Spear of Light 3

As we left the command center, I took one final look back—at the high chair, the skeleton still seated at its post, the schematic spread across the console. I suddenly thought that those ancient crew members had probably believed, right to the end, that they were in control of this steel leviathan. What they'd actually left behind were a few pages of documents, a diagram, and the determination of those who came after to decide how best to bury it. The white beam reached ahead, illuminating another door.

We walked toward the part of this ship that should never be opened. We left the command center without looking back. Not because it wasn't important. Because it was too important—I didn't want to look longer than necessary. The captain's chair, the skeleton that had died at its post, the schematic that dissected the ancient monstrosity section by section—just carrying those images in my head was already threatening my ability to sleep tonight.

Another glance would only clarify exactly what grade of catastrophe I was standing in the middle of. The passage ahead was narrow and low—a corridor designed for secrets and the dead. Ignicia walked in front with the ancient light cylinder, its beam sweeping along curved bulkheads and picking out heavy doors set into the hull, each marked with rows of ancient lettering I couldn't read. Some markings were painted in stark red or outlined heavily—the ancient equivalent of: whatever is stored here is not a joke.

I genuinely wanted to announce that I was currently in no mood for jokes anyway. Another muffled impact echoed from far behind us. Transmitted through metal hull plating, it arrived warped—like a drumbeat that had sunk underwater. I paused and glanced back. Nothing visible, of course. Just the corridor, dark and silent as though no living person had ever walked it.

"They're still behind us," I said quietly.

"I know." Ignicia didn't turn her head.

"Which means you should lighten your footsteps. Right now you're walking like you're reminding the entire ship that we're not dead yet."

"This humble servant will endeavor to die more quietly." She didn't respond, just raised the light slightly higher. After two more turns, a door appeared on the right that looked visibly different. The label panel was larger than any we'd passed, and beside it was a simple but deeply threatening diagram: a cylindrical shape pointing forward, designed to be legible even to the illiterate. Ignicia stopped and studied the panel.

"Here."

"Are you certain this isn't where the ancients stored cleaning supplies?"

"If the ancients marked their cleaning supplies like this," she said coldly, "then destroying the world was entirely deserved." I shut my mouth. The door wasn't locked—just jammed tight. We each took a side and forced it open enough to squeeze through. Inside was colder than the corridor, as though even the air here was denser. The light swept across two rows of racks holding cylindrical objects longer than a man and thick as small tree trunks.

I stood in the doorway, observed a moment of silence, then said honestly:"All right. Those definitely don't look like cleaning supplies." The compartment was long, ceiling slightly higher than the living areas. Beyond the racks: overhead rail systems, mechanical handling arms, and a half-overturned workbench. Cracked crates and metal boxes littered the deck. Two skeletons lay in the corner, one almost touching the rack frame, arm extended as though it had been trying to load one of the cylinders when it died.

"Torpedoes?" I asked. Ignicia walked in and ran her fingers along one cylindrical casing. Her fingertips paused beside a faded string of letters, her expression going cold and still.

"Most likely," she said.

"Used to kill ships underwater."

"The ancients were remarkably creative."

"Put enough intelligent people into a war and they reliably become more creative in exactly this direction." I had no answer for that. I moved to the overturned workbench. Several waterlogged document folders were scattered across it, along with a hard-sided case. I opened it: inside, neat rows of small metal cylinders with color-coded markings. They looked like components. Ignicia glanced once and took the case from my hands.

"We're taking this."

"What is it?"

"Unknown." She answered with complete conviction.

"But something stored this carefully in a weapons compartment is probably not candy."... Brutal logic. Brutally effective. She tucked the case under her arm and moved to another storage unit, wrenching open a half-rusted drawer. Inside: heavy webbing straps, shoulder-carry tool bags, and two weapons—longer than the short weapon at my hip, clearly more complex. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. My eye twitched involuntarily.

"Your Highness, I have a premonition."

"Your premonitions have performed admirably today." She tossed one to me.

"Catch." I fumbled it, nearly dropped it under the unreasonable weight. It had the general shape of a long weapon but shorter and thicker, with grips and forward assembly I didn't recognize. Cold the way iron deliberately shaped into something lethal was cold.

"Why did the ancients need so many different formats of personal murder equipment?"

"Because they weren't lazy about it." Her voice came from the far side as she continued searching.

"Hang whatever you can carry. Right now being alive takes priority over looking dignified." I looked down at myself. One short weapon at my back, one case of unknown components in my arms, one ancient long weapon that resembled a shortened iron staff. If Victoria saw me right now, she'd probably observe three seconds of silence before asking whether I'd finally decided to stop being human. I slung the webbing strap over my shoulder and tried positioning the long weapon across my back. It actually held.

The ancients had given serious thought to the problem of carrying multiple lethal implements while running. Ignicia's search yielded more treasures. From another locker she dragged out a dark green hard bag, zipper still functional. Inside: rows of sealed packets, coils of heavy cord, a folding multi-tool, and several hard rectangular objects wrapped in yellow plastic. My spine went cold the instant I saw them.

"Wait, are those—""Yes," she said flatly.

"The category of thing you nearly had me taste a second time."

"I did not nearly have you taste anything. Your Highness applied her own enthusiastic approach to unknown substances entirely of her own initiative." She looked up at me. The expression was educational in its coldness. I stopped talking. She packed the plastic-wrapped explosives into the hard bag, then selected several slim metal tubes. Safety caps on one end, faded pull-cords at the other—they didn't look like weapons so much as objects that would make you regret touching them.

"Take these too," she said.

"Your Highness, I want it on record that I have developed serious objections to the phrase 'take these' today."

"You can object all you like," she said, packing items with terrifying calm, "but when it comes time to sink this ship, these will be considerably more useful than your objections." I went quiet. The most troubling part wasn't that she intended to destroy the ship. It was that she delivered it with the tone of someone planning to tidy up before dinner. Which meant she wasn't speaking hypothetically—she had already begun calculating how to return this ancient monstrosity to the seafloor.

I raised the light toward the far end of the compartment. The beam crossed silent torpedo racks, collapsed skeletons, half-overturned handling equipment, and came to rest on a heavier sealed door. A red warning panel was mounted beside it. I couldn't read the text, but the diagram below was universal: a cylinder, an arrow, an expanding burst of light. I stared at that diagram for two heartbeats.

"What's behind that—""Nothing good," Ignicia said, almost simultaneously. She came beside me, looked at the panel, and her expression was colder than it had been even on the bridge.

"This section is probably just the outer weapons bay," she said quietly.

"Whatever is truly significant lies further in."

"So the light-spears aren't here."

"Probably not." She paused.

"At least—not all of them." We looked at each other. In that moment, we were almost certainly thinking the same thought—and neither of us liked it. If the Blazing Yanxia Empire had come here specifically for this facility, they weren't after the outer supply depot or a few ancient ship-killers. What they wanted was almost certainly the kind of thing Kingdom poets could only describe as glowing spears descending from heaven.

And this vessel called Texas was almost certainly the coffin built to send those things skyward. I looked down at the hard bag in my hands, then at the plastic-wrapped explosives, and felt the situation developing firmly in the direction of even if we get out alive, there's no pretending we didn't see this.

"Your Highness."

"Mm."

"A practical question."

"Say it."

"Even if we know this ship needs to be destroyed," I gestured at the torpedo racks, the weapons, the generally hostile ancient infrastructure, "we can't do it empty-handed. We need to take what's usable first, then determine where to apply it. Otherwise we just wander through and end up as two more skeletons contributing to the ancient collection." Ignicia, unusually, didn't immediately say something cutting.

She simply looked at the sealed door ahead and, after a moment, said quietly:"That's what I was thinking as well." Coming from her, that sentence was somehow more dispiriting than anything else she could have said. Because it meant I wasn't being excessively pessimistic. I had simply caught up to her level of pessimism. She crouched and reorganized the hard bag—explosives, small components, pull-cord tubes, ammunition cases, all sorted with methodical precision.

Then she dragged a larger canvas bag from the corner and threw it at me.

"Carry this."

"What's inside?"

"Things that will help you stay alive slightly longer."

"That answer is not remotely—" The weight hit me before I finished the sentence. More ammunition cases. Two coils of heavy rope. A spare light cylinder. Two flat metal canisters—I shook one. Liquid inside. I looked at them and immediately looked up.

"If these are ancient beverages, Your Highness should absolutely not volunteer for taste-testing duties." Ignicia looked at me with no expression whatsoever.

"Cedric."

"Yes."

"If you bring that up one more time, I will strap you to a torpedo and fire you out."... Excellent. Her spirit had recovered to full operational capacity. From a survival standpoint, this was genuinely good news. I shouldered the canvas bag, drew a slow breath, and tried to adjust to having my spine compressed by ancient munitions and unidentified explosive materials. Heavy. Uncomfortable. But the weight felt more solid than helplessness. Ignicia made one final survey of the weapons compartment.

"Take what we can carry," she said.

"What we can't carry, we use later."

"On this ship?"

"What else?" She gave a cold almost-smile, almost entirely without warmth.

"If we can't take it, we put it back on the seafloor. If Blazing Summer wants it, they can dive for it themselves." I watched her. In that moment she was still in human form, still pale from her injuries. But I heard something in her voice that belonged to something considerably larger and older than a person. Not fire. Not rage. The particular quality of absolute decisiveness that emerges when the danger is sufficient—when the calculation completes and the answer requires no further discussion.

And I found I had absolutely no desire to argue. Because she was right. This ship could not remain. Whatever secrets the ancients had sealed inside it, however many light-spears, however much knowledge capable of driving future generations to madness—if there was any possibility of the Blazing Yanxia Empire dragging any of it back into the light, then this vessel was no longer a relic. It was an unexploded grave.

I adjusted the canvas bag's strap, felt the weight of inherited ancient lethality settle against my back, and looked toward the heavy sealed door at the far end—the one with the red panel that had been trying to tell us to turn around since we arrived.

"Right," I said.

"Take what's usable. Then find what most needs to be destroyed." Ignicia nodded and placed her hand on the release lever beside the sealed door. I reached back one more time to confirm the short weapon was still in place, and made a sincere effort to convince myself that whatever lay ahead couldn't possibly be more unreasonable than everything we'd already walked through today. Given my luck over the past several days, that hope was almost certainly not going to survive contact with reality.