Shadow Slave

The ghostly crewmates of the spectral ship all wielded power similar to that of Corrupted abominations. Most were akin to Beasts, while the captain was akin to a Monster — at least that had been the case during the brief skirmish between the vanguard of the wraith armada and the Night Garden in the past.

Jet could feel that this particular crew was more powerful than the scouts who had attempted to board the living ship before, and had no doubt that there were far more harrowing terrifying beings among the ghosts the Dutchman commanded — Demons, Devils, and even nightmare creatures of the Great Rank.

But it did not matter.

The ghastly armada was vast, and there seemed to be an endless number of lost souls populating the ethereal, rotting ships. They were wraiths, which meant that most Awakened would be in great peril in a battle against the Dutchman’s otherworldly army. But for that very reason, Jet was their natural adversary.

Her Aspect allowed her to directly destroy the souls of her enemies, after all. Not only that, but she grew stronger with each enemy she killed. Her essence was replenished, and the cold shattered star of her soul core grew both in size and volume... one dark jagged shard at a time. After two relentless decades of chaos and slaughter, her jigsaw soul core had become vast and expansive, looming above her Soul Sea like a broken sun.

And that, in turn, allowed her to augment her undying body with essence far past the limits of what any other Awakened was capable of, both granting her fierce power and allowing her to sustain that ferocity for a longer time — almost indefinitely, as long as there were living beings for her to kill. Or undead beings...

It mattered not to Jet.

As the crew of the spectral ship rose from ghostly light and rushed at her, she saw them clearly. Their ancient armor was shredded and torn, their phantasmal bodies underneath were covered in terrible wounds, and their cold empty eyes burned with ethereal green flames.

There was no frenzied hunger or demented fury in their gazes, though, like in those of most Nightmare Creatures... just torment. Lunging forward to meet the flood of murderous wraiths, Jet spun her war scythe and easily sliced the nearest of specters in half. A mundane blade — or even an enchanted one — would have simply passed through his ephemeral body as if it were passing through mist, but her scythe severed the soul of the spectral abomination just as easily as it would have severed flesh. The silhouette of the ancient wraith rippled and dissolved into a dying flash of pale light, disappearing forever.

Those who had managed to slay these peculiar beings before reported that the Nightmare Spell did not announce their deaths, and there were no soul shards left behind them either.

But Jet could clearly feel the end of the ghostly sailor’s existence. A stream of essence entered her soul, and a new shard was added to the jagged orb of her broken soul core, making it a fraction bigger.

The Spell whispered into her ear, as well. [You have slain a... you have slain a... you have...]

However, its voice suddenly faltered and grew indistinct, as if it could not process or express the truth of what had happened, like a machine encountering an error.

‘How curious...’

It seemed that even the Nightmare Spell did not quite know what the Dutchman and his wraith armada were, or at least could not speak it.

Jet ignored that information, for now. Continuing the motion, she took a step forward while reversing the grip on her weapon and thrust it forward to pierce the chest of the next wraith. Since their ethereal bodies offered the Mist Blade no resistance, she then fluidly transitioned from a downward thrust into a spin, beheading the one rushing at her from the back.

[You have slain... a...]

Jet exploded into a hurricane of ice-cold steel, moving across the deck of the ghostly ship like the Grim Reaper. She was a Transcendent being, while the spectral sailors were all Corrupted — so, in theory, each of them wielded power equal to hers, or at least power that existed in the same realm. Nevertheless, they all fell under her scythe like stalks of wheat, vanishing forever.

And whatever essence she burned while harvesting these lost souls was immediately replenished by the streams of essence she received from the kills.

The captain of the ship was far more powerful than his subordinates, but he dissolved into ghostly green light in mere seconds, as well. In an astonishingly short amount of time, the deck of the rotting ship became empty, with only Jet standing there, bathed in an eerie glow and the echoes of the brutal violence that had just been perpetrated here.

Still... she felt like her job here was not finished, yet.

So, Jet plunged the blade of her scythe into the deck itself, aiming to destroy the soul of the ship.

That, she felt, was the real monster.

It took several blows, and just as she suspected, a torrent of essence more potent than all the previous ones flowed into her soul as the shape of the ship dimmed, slowly disappearing into the bright daylight. At the same time, an explosion of radiance escaped from somewhere deep within its hold, accompanied by a litany of otherworldly groans.

As if a swarm of tortured souls was suddenly set free.

Jet smiled darkly, thinking that she was starting to unravel the secret nature of the sinister wraith armada — or at least the nature of its lesser ships.

Just before the spectral ship disappeared completely, she pushed herself off its broken deck and soared high into the air, flying across the sky.

Breaching hundreds of meters with that single jump, Jet landed on the next ship in a maelstrom of cold steel, wreaking havoc among its crew and harvesting their souls to empower her own. Ṙ𝘼NΟ𝐁Е𝘚

Behind her, the Night Garden towered like a fortress of weathered wood, and her soldiers were feverishly rushing to reload its mighty cannons.