Esau’s description had hardly done the beast justice.
As he’d described earlier, the torrafin was as wide as three sharks, with six beady eyes all in a row. It had leathery skin, ink-black and pockmarked with scratches and scars. Its mouth stretched unnaturally wide, its smile — was it fucking smiling? — eerily Joker-like. Four fins: one below, one on each side, and a comically massive one on top, far taller than its body was long. All four fins looked razor sharp, but not quite as sharp as its teeth, which could only truly be compared to a set of Japanese kitchen knives angled inwards and tinted red.
Esau moved first. Kane felt the effects before he saw them; a huge sunburst of flame appeared in front of the pyrokinetic’s fist as he made the motion of throwing forward a haymaker with his entire body, the result being a massive blaze as large as the beast itself, whooshing forwards and doing an excellent job of blinding them both.
The ungodly mass of flame flew towards the beast and enveloped it completely, a sharp hissing sound resounding as the fire evaporated the bloodwater on its skin. Despite his burnt retinas, Kane felt his heart lift for a moment, a relieved grin daring to slip onto his face.
But the flames dissipated all too quickly, and the fish emerged from the conflagration covered in burn marks like lacerations but still whole, its momentum reduced and direction altered. Knocked off course, it landed over to the side, just missing both seacraft and shooting up a massive fountain of bloodwater as it hit the surface of the ocean.
Esau shoved past Kane, the latter tripping and collapsing into the hull as Esau took his spot in the boat. Kane barely had time to regain his bearings before Esau singed the ropes attaching them to the ship with precise jets of fire, then opened both hands facing outwards and flared his flames, propelling the boat away from the ship and further into the open water.
“What are you doing?!” Kane yelled, his voice lost in the sound of air whooshing past them, bloodwater splashing into the boat, and the flames overhead. The heat of Esau’s fire was already baking him.
“Can’t let it sink the ship.” Esau’s voice was nearly inaudible and had a slight tremble to it, as if he’d just now realized that they might have been out of their depth.
The first attack had been unexpected, like a silent predator who didn’t want to scare off its prey. Now, the torrafin’s strategy had changed, and it was making its way towards them below the depths.
Luckily for them, it was stupidly easy to tell where the torrafin was; its massive black fin pierced and cleaved the surface of the water, towering over them and approaching at ungodly speeds.
Esau was focused on only one task at the moment: steering their little rowboat away with surprising deftness, altering the intensity of either hand’s flames to turn and snake around, the boat itself bouncing up and down on the waves like a speedboat with a broken throttle. There wasn’t much Kane could do besides hold on tight and not get fried, peeking over the side to watch as the torrafin matched every turn and kept pace.
“Fuck!” Esau spat, swaying with the motions of the sea vessel. “It won’t let up!”
“So what do we do?!” Kane yelled, doing a much worse job of staying steady as the boat jostled him up and down in the hull helplessly.
Esau managed a quick glance back at Kane, a look on his face that was half-apologetic and half-devious. “You won’t like my idea.”
Kane’s stomach dropped. “What id—”
All of a sudden, Esau extinguished one hand and throttled the other. The boat made a violent 180, coming to a drifting halt, while the massive dorsal fin continued to barrel towards them with no sign of slowing.
“If this doesn’t work, it was nice knowing you,” Esau announced, lifting a single hand towards the beast.
Kane didn’t even bother with a response. In truth, it hadn’t been that nice knowing Esau, mostly due to the circumstances they’d met in. But the real reason he said nothing was that he knew he wouldn’t even be able to get a full sentence out before the hell-shark was upon them. So he simply rolled his eyes at the back of Esau’s head, bracing himself for either a very fiery or very sharp death.
The man’s raised hand took the form of a finger gun, and he braced it with his other arm as energy coalesced around it, causing the air around the pair to tremble and ripple and tear with energy just as powerful as that of the blast before. But this energy was far more condensed, and Kane found himself blinded once again as a laser of pure red plasma shot out of Esau’s index finger and towards the torrafin, slicing air and splitting water, blasting right through the creature’s head and torso.
The attack dealt some serious damage. Blood — or maybe it was just bloodwater — shot up in another column, and along with the violent visual spectacle came an unholy sound, a low-pitched gargling, far too loud for a creature of that size to make.
However, unlike the previous attack, this one didn’t stop the beast’s momentum.
It was all a blur of light and motion. For the third time in the last minute, Kane found his vision leaving him once again; he could only hear and feel as he get knocked out of the boat, his motion abruptly halting as he hit the surface of the Sea and sank into the bloodwater.
He’d never been in bloodwater before — other than before he could remember, when Tal had presumably fished him up — the height of the ship mostly keeping him safe from it. However, being submerged in it was a totally different experience than the mere splashes that would wet the deck at times.
It was frigid as ice yet hot as lava. The very sensation of it on his skin was contradictory, burning and freezing and itchy and stinging; all he knew was that he wanted out.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
With his eyes shut tight, Kane did his best to swim towards what he felt might be up. The bloodwater was thicker than regular water — go figure — which honestly made sense if it was truly made out of blood. But an entire ocean of actual blood came with frightening implications that Kane didn’t have time, energy, or strength to consider.
It took painfully long to reach air, and as his head broke the surface, he took a deep breath, spitting out inhaled bloodwater that tasted like copper on his tongue and letting the light of day hit his eyes.
Around him, pieces of the obliterated boat floated on the waves, reduced to planks and splinters. As he looked to his left and right, there was no sign of Esau or the beast.
And that was when he finally decided to look up. Esau was hovering roughly forty feet in the air above him, a flame below each foot, his clothes somehow untouched by the red water, his head swiveling about rapidly, as if searching for something.
Until he froze, eyes landing behind Kane and growing wide.
Kane quickly spun around, treading bloodwater, and once again, he saw the torrafin’s fin. Except this time, it was low and mostly horizontal over the water, nearly parallel with it, the mega-shark laying on its side. Now that its full body was closer to the surface, Kane could see the clean hole Esau had made that seemed to go straight through its head and torso like a tunnel, accompanied by a thin funnel of smoke, as if made by a sniper rifle’s high-caliber bullet.
And despite it all — despite its burns and injuries and all of it — it still seemed to be moving towards Kane.
Kane felt conflicted in several ways.
On some level, he actually felt some sort of admiration for the beast, who, after being oven-toasted and then JFK’d, still kept things pushing despite it all.
He also felt anger — anger that the beast still hadn’t died, given everything Esau had thrown at it. And annoyance — he was annoyed that his clothes and hair were totally ruined, annoyed that he’d been dragged along on some stupid, pointless fishing task, and annoyed that he was about to die for it.
And most of all, he felt pissed at how helpless he’d been. This whole “fight”, he’d literally been dead weight in the boat, and at the end of the day, he was going to get his comeuppance in the form of becoming an afternoon snack, just as he’d predicted.
Time seemed to slow as Esau began to make a move above Kane’s head. There was no time for the guy to build up another laser blast, so he’d seemed to have resolved to make it to Kane before the beast did, his body angled downwards as he flew like a real-life Superman. But there was no way in hell he would make it in time.
The torrafin, meanwhile, was already nearly upon him — that’s what he got for looking away — its maw perpendicular to the sea and wide open, like a cave moving wit the intention of swallowing him, casting a cold shadow as it blocked out the sun, its swimming method messy and unprofessional.
Kane felt an all-too familiar pang of regret, of pain, of envy, all mixed together. This seemed to be happening a lot recently, like when Esau had thrown the dagger at his face the previous day, and during his knife fight with Lucian earlier. It was a sensation Kane was unfortunately beginning to grow accustomed to.
Time continued to move in slow-motion. But Kane knew this time wasn’t being provided by some benevolent deity allowing him to act. Rather, it was as if the universe was drawing the moment out to allow him to ruminate on his bad fortune, his stupidity, his inability to do anything right, encouraging him to uselessly wish he was somewhere else, something else, someone else.
And last of all, Kane thought of Esau, who would absolutely not die trying to save him, simply because the cost analysis didn’t add up. Kane would get swallowed, and Esau would cut his losses and fly away. The man had doomed him, and would get away with it with hardly a modicum of guilt — perhaps it was even on purpose! He’d get to live, get to escape. While shreds of Kane would be digested in the beast’s stomach.
The thought itself immediately caused Kane to see red.
The resulting heat started in his chest.
It then suffused the rest of his body, extremities and skin and all. The bloodwater around him began to bubble and froth.
The beast was preparing to chomp down. Until it didn’t.
It flinched back.
It was as if the torrafin were a disobedient child who had touched a hot cooktop. As soon as it entered the patch of heated water around Kane, it reeled backwards, a moment too late; the water all around them was much like a cauldron now, boiling away.
The largest surprise was not that Kane hadn’t been eaten, but rather that he was now bone-dry. Any and all bloodwater that touched his skin wicked away with a noisy hiss, and more rushed towards him to fill the gap, only to meet the same fate. The torrafin was drawn towards him in this pseudo-whirlpool, despite its feeble efforts to swim away.
Again, the monster made another gargling noise, its charred skin peeling away as it was boiled alive. Kane himself felt similar — felt he was burning, self-immolating — but found that he hardly had the agency to do anything about it.
All he could do was hold onto the feeling. This burning sensation in his chest.
Because if he let up, he knew he would lose it — whatever it was in this context — and then he would die.
By this point, Esau had swooped down and then back up, realizing that somehow, despite all odds, Kane wasn’t dead. He hovered above man and beast, watching the display in awe, as if waiting for Kane to finish the job.
This only pissed Kane off further.
But he had to focus, to indeed finish the job — despite not even being sure of what exactly he was doing. Bloodwater whirled violently around Kane and the creature, and at this point, the torrafin was thrashing about helplessly, not a thought in its head.
Despite treading water in a vortex of blood with a supershark in hell, the strangest part to Kane that he found himself smirking through the veil of steam.
It feels nice to not be the helpless one.
The beast made one last, pitiful attempt at survival, this time attempting to close the distance and crush Kane within its jaws, but by the time it reached him, it was no longer thrashing but rather drifting, its massive body open-eyed, motionless, and medium rare.
After holding the creature’s empty, many-eyed gaze for a few moments, Kane finally allowed the fire within him to wane, allowed his heartbeat to slow, allowed the overwhelming heat to simmer down as the clump of emotion in his gut began to dissipate.
He took a deep breath, the bubbling around him calming in intensity, and Esau flew down towards the beast, taking a casual seat on its corpse.
He wore a toothy smile, something big and proud, as he watched Kane do his best at treading water.
Esau looked Kane up and down with newfound curiosity. “Where’d your clothes go?”
Kane hadn’t even realized until now. Somehow, his clothes had burned off — go figure. Fortunately, the shirt hadn’t been his, but his pants had been pretty nice and comfy. Good things never lasted.
Kane shook his head. “Is that really what’s important right now?” he managed to say, some part of him telling him to swim towards the beast and grab on for support, but the rest of him urging him to stay put.
“No.” Esau patted the beast below him, the sound of his palm on the burnt flesh heavy and crisp. “What’s important is that, thanks to you, I don’t need to overthink tonight’s dinner.”