[EVACUATED ALLIED WATERS - DUSK]
Smoke and blood smeared the horizon as Harrison's battered fleet limped from the blighted shore, a ragged armada in grim exodus. Hulls ravaged by the dread Weber Protocol creaked and groaned in the swells, steel bones protesting their torment. On the fouled decks, haunted men tended wounded comrades and tallied the fallen, their hollow eyes reflecting nothingness.
Yet even in this piteous rout, Harrison's cruel stratagem unfolded with ruthless meticulousness. As the ships clawed their way to open sea, a vile cargo winched over gunwales under cloak of fading light - depth charges gorged not with conventional yields, but with canisters of the same malevolent alchemy that had scourged his fleet.
One by one, the cylindrical harbingers plunged into the obsidian depths, each a seed of future atrocity. Sailors consigned the treacherous munitions to the abyss with hands still raw from scrubbing charnel gore, their purpose withheld by officers with hearts hardened to pity. None dared question the orders that sent such queer and unsettling payloads into the deep.
Only Harrison and his cabal knew the true depravity of their ploy. With each splash, they sowed a minefield of misery in the lightless fathoms, primed to unleash heinous destruction upon any vessel that dared to pass. A spiteful masterstroke to punish the foe who had brought Tanya's hellish genius to bear against them.
On the bridge of his wounded flagship, Harrison penned the deception into log and manifest with a steady hand, transmuting sin to innocence with the stroke of a pen. The screech of hull plates and the distant cries of the maimed formed a dire counterpoint to the scratch of nib on paper. Each word committed a bit more of his soul to the abyss.
Sonar pings charted the descent of his malevolent jetsam, a funereal rhythm to mirror the turmoil in his breast. With each echoed report, he visualized the future dead - German sailors clutching dissolving flesh, eyes bulging in ultimate horror as they reaped the grim harvest he had sown.
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His lips curled in a smile devoid of warmth, a rictus to match the death-masks he envisioned blooming in gelid depths. Vengeance would find those who had authored his fleet's harrowing, even if it wore the guise of Tanya's own dark artistry.
As dusk bled to night, the final hell-fraught canisters vanished into the ink-black swells. Harrison watched the waters seal over his dread handiwork, a tomb for the hopes of civilized warfare. Ahead lay a horizon promising brief reprieve for his savaged armada. Yet his heart dwelled not on sanctuary, but on reprisal.
He set a course for safe harbor with the resolve of the damned, his soul yoked to the same void that now cradled his dark bequest. The abyssal currents would ferry his vengeance to the enemy in due time.
Around him, the battered fleet lumbered on through the dark, a procession of wretched specters condemned to bear the scars of Tanya's blood and steel. Astern, the poisoned waves gleamed with the same false promise as a serpent's scales.
Harrison breathed deep of the salt-sting air, savoring the iron taint of burnt cordite and seeping wounds. Each breath seared his lungs like the exhalations of Tanya's own fell engines. In this harrowed space, he found a strange kinship with his tormenter - an understanding of the cold fury that sacrificed legions in the name of conquest.
War had plumbed profound depths of cruelty, staining the very tides with its barbarous hues. And he would answer its every fathom with unflinching resolve, his course charted by a lodestar of pure retribution.
No mercy. No quarter. Only the stark reckoning of those who had dared to sow cataclysm.
The night sea cloaked Harrison's fleet like a burial shroud as it limped toward distant sanctuary, while behind them, an industrial harvest of death rolled in their collective wake. From horizon to horizon, depth charges dotted the wine-dark sea - hundreds upon hundreds of them, a carpet of doom stretched across the shipping lanes. When they detonated in sequence, they would turn miles of ocean into a chain of underwater volcanoes, each explosion feeding the next in a symphony of destruction that would boil the deep and shatter the bones of anything caught in their overlapping kill zones.
Let the enemy reap as they had sown. And let the waves bear testament to the depths men sank in the name of victory.
For there could be no armistice with honor - only requital measured in charnel seas and the inexorable malice of the deep.