The water was frigid against my metal skin. The sea a deep blue.

"Well, friends, we're almost there!"

I opened my eyes and found myself on a horse-drawn cart in the glistening golden sunlight. I stretched and groaned, and my enchanted paladin armor shook against me. I asked with a yawn, "Are we there yet?"

Ai-Gee's white hair looked almost reflective in the morning light, and his red eyes were aflame with adventure. He stared at the approaching walls of the Elvish Kingdom. "That we are, friend." He looked at Eskei, the spearman, saw him snoring, and kicked him in the knee.

Eskei grunted awake and gripped himself in pain. "Aw, come on, Ai-Gee. Not cool."

Ai-Gee scoffed. "Don't be a little bitch, alright? You'll never top my DPS WHINING like that."

Eskei looked at me for help, and I only shrugged with a grin. Ai-Gee was right. His DPS was kinda shit for a spearman.

The gates lifted as we passed through.

I grinned to myself. This is what life was about. Fun-filled adventures with friends, romping across the continent, and fulfilling the quest of the Chosen One.

I blinked.

Air rushed past as a thousand thousand little bubbles, trickling up my limbs and to the surface.

And I found myself in an Elvish tavern. The noise of it flooded my ears. Silverware tapping against dishes, conversations here and there, drunken patrons having an argument at the bar.

I gulped my drink and slammed my mug against the table. "Well, Eskei, what do you think?"

He had been zoning out, staring into his drink when I startled him out of it. "What? Oh, right." He took a swig. "Well, we still need a healer, right?"

I chuckled. "Man, I can tank and heal if needed. I'm a paladin, remember? Easy!"

He offered a small smile. "Maybe. I mean, you're the leader and everything, and the Chosen One, but I think it would be more fun if we had a dedicated healer."

I leaned back and crossed my arms. I tried not to take offense, but it was written all over my face. My heals were just as good as my tanking, and they knew it. Why was he being so weird about this?

"I know," he said. "How about a girl? We could use a girl in our group, right?"

Ai-Gee walked up and squeeze into the booth, pushing Eskei to the end. "What's this? Girl talk?" He shot me a competitive, snarling grin. "No way I'm gonna let you be the one who gets the girl, Imsi."

I laughed. "A girl healer. Not just something to fuck, alright, buddy?"

"Yeah," he chuckled. "We'll see."

I smiled back, lifted my drink, and stared at the bottom of the mug. I gulp-gulp-gulped, slammed it down, and saw the face of the Kraken as it tore into the battleship. Metal groaned and twisted, muffled by the cold ocean water, and I could see it--

Bodies, floating.

"Imsi, pay attention," Ai-Gee hushed.

I blinked.

We stood in the palace, and the head priest had just explained the nature of the quest. There was a great and terrible dragon that plagued the forest, whose scales shine in the color of the leaves. It was a mythic raid, and the priest just offered the guidebook on his raid mechanics.

"Yeah," I said without looking. "Pay him."

Eskei shelled out the cash, and I stared, not at them, but at the small Elvish girl by the window.

I was struck by her beauty, and in the draft of the open window, her pale blonde hair flowed and glistened with the light, her porcelain skin so pink and pale and pure, her body so perfect, and--

"Imsi," Ai-Gee whispered in my ear. "If she's a healer, I call dibs."

"No bet," I whispered back.

And when I turned, I turned into a basement room, dimly lit by candlelight, sitting across Ai-Gee as Eskei stood watch outside.

"We'll split her, half and half," he said.

"Like cut her in half?"

"No, you idiot," he said. "We'll just take turns seducing her. Easy."

"Easy..." I echoed.

Eskei peeked his head in from the door. "Guys, I don't think this is a great idea. We should be focusing on the quest--"

"Fuck. Off," growled Ai-Gee. "We're young men, and young men need fresh meat to fuck. This little elf slut is our prey."

"She's the head priest's daughter," Eskei said. "You'd steal her from the temple like a couple of thieves!"

Ai-Gee pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yeah, no shit we're thieves. We're planning a heist for an elf girl's heart."

"When you should be planning on how to defeat the dragon," Eskei shot back. "They need us to kill it to save the village."

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Ai-Gee jolted to his feet. His chair knocked over. "If you wanna kill the fuckin' thing, then don't wait for us," Ai-Gee said. "Go get another party and fuckin' do it yourself. We literally don't need you. Your DPS is SHIT."

Eskei's face twisted as if a knife had been driven into him. He dropped his eyes, slid them to my chair, and pulled them up to me.

"You're annoying the hell outta me," I told him. "If you don't want to wait for us, then fuck off."

He stared with poison in his eyes, a look of disdain. "Trash," he finally said. "You're both fuckin' trash." He stepped back, shook his head at the sight of us, and left.

The door slammed shut.

The battleship's hull thumped in the darkness of the deep.

The Kraken had lost its taste for it, and its tentacles moved around sniffingly before finding me. It lashed out and gripped me tight.

I felt a tug at my hand. It was Laya. Her white priestess garments were practically falling off her, and her eyes begged me to hurry.

"Imsi! Help me out!" Ai-Gee reached out to me. A javelin--no, an enchanted spear had pierced through his back. Far behind us, Elvish guards with Eskei leading them.

I snapped open the portal. The swirling wind pulled the dust around, and I smirked down at him. "No honor among thieves." I pushed Laya through the portal.

The Elvish guards sprinted closer.

"You piece of shit," Ai-Gee said through his teeth. "You human FILTH!"

I laughed as I walked away, and his voice followed me.

Not just his, but--

"Utter garbage," said a voice.

"Dirty and awful," said another.

I stepped through the darkness of the portal, and I opened my eyes to the Kraken's open maw, staring down into the darkness of its throat, the jaggedness of its fangs, the hunger in its breath. And the world around became a cacophony of different spoken phrases once heard and long forgotten by people far from now.

"Wasted talent."

"Discarded fool."

"A wreck of a person."

The Kraken pulled me closer.

"All used up."

"Tossed aside."

"Thrown away."

It closed its mouth over me.

"Refuse."

"Rubbish."

"Unsalvageable."

"Garbage."

"Trash."

And the darkness came.

----------------------------------------

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat--

The gunner fired the heavy machinegun mounted atop the cruiser's deck, shooting beams of tracing lines of fire across another tentacle.

It sawed it right in half, and the fleshy mass flopped onto the deck and slipped into the water.

A wyvern squawked above.

He raised his turret--it wouldn't aim that high.

He ducked as it swooped down for him, but something exploded overhead.

Chunks of the wyvern plopped around nearby. He looked up and saw that his sister destroyer had aimed at it, and its barrels smoked. He thought to offer them a salute, but before he could act, another tentacle shot up behind their ship.

He aimed, squeezed the trigger, and bullet after sparking bullet perforated along a near-horizontal line until it, too, was cut in parts.

A deep rumble resounded. A lull in the battle came. What had happened? The tentacles! They froze, no, they sank! The Kraken--was it slain?

The wyverns fled from the noise. An eery, uneasy, uncertain silence came.

The gunner--like countless other sailors in the fleet--hurried to the edge of the deck to look below. The water was murky and dark, but ultimately still. He squinted his eyes for the Kraken's body, and through the waving, uneven surface, his eyes focused, and he found it.

The Kraken was dead, and as its limp carcass sank to the bottom of the sea, it would take with it the imperial battleship--and with it--their true enemy.

Redrim.

Whispers turned to murmurs turned to outright shouts, and soon the entire fleet raised their fists and threw their hats in celebration.

Redrim was dead.

None other felt more vindication than the gunner, Private Reno.

He knew all too well the dangers of Redrim, the dangers of a recycler gone rogue, the dangers of a capable system-recycling force of nature on a warpath. But it was done now.

It was over.

Redrim was finally dead.

Worried whispers nearby--

Reno looked over--

Someone pointed into the water.

It was... churning. Bubbling.

Impossible.

A huge blur rushed to the surface and erupted out of the water as a geyser, as a breaching whale--it was--

"NO!"

Redrim's ship, rising out of the water as if in slow motion.

The loudspeaker roared across the water and the fleet of ships and into the hearts of men. "I am trash!" the voice echoed across the sea. "And as a recycler--" he growled, "I must recycle myself, my ego, my identity into something greater, better, stronger! I am Obi Imsi, RECYCLED! I am Redrim, REBORN!"

It was Redrim's voice! He was fucking alive!

His voice rattled with resolve, "Emergency Power... activated."

His ship reached its apex. It began to fall back, and the water rained around the fleet.

Reno stumbled back to his machine gun turret. Ships aimed their cannons.

"Heart of the Dragon... activated--" Redrims voice turned more unhinged. More feral. More mad.

Redrim's ship continued to drop as if slowed. The imperial battleship breached the surface beside it.

The fleet of ships fired everything available, and--"Oh, for fuck's sake," Reno said. The shells paused at the hull of the ship, flipped around, and burst with rage back at the fleet.

The entire fleet rocked with explosions. Alarms blared. Men screamed. Metal and water and blood sprayed into mist.

"Heart... of the Masochist--activated!" Redrim's voice was reaching its crescendo, and his ship continued to splash down.

But something was... off.

Private Reno knew this was suicide for Redrim, or at least it should've been. There was no way his destroyer-class ship could handle an entire fleet. This was just his death throes, his final lashing out in desperation.

Unless--

"Heart!" Redrim roared, "of the KRAKEN. ACTIVATED."

--He recycled the Kraken.

A hundred--no, countless--magic circles flashed around the hull of his ship as it splashed back down into the water, and from them, Kraken tentacles.

The tentacles shot out in an instant and reached for any ships nearby--an unlucky cruiser and a destroyer--and Redrim gripped and twisted and with a roar over the loudspeaker, the ships crumpled, exploded, burst into flame.

This battle was lost.

Redrim himself had become a raid boss.

The surviving ships in the fleet fired another salvo, but Redrim's Kraken tentacles swirled around his hull like a tempest of thick flesh. Several exploded into fishy, meaty chunks, but there were hundreds, thousands, perhaps countless.

Private Reno dropped to his knees. Another cruiser cracked open, and Redrim threw the pieces far. Reno lurched over and vomited. His ship shook with a fleshy, meaty slap.

A tentacle gripped the fore beside him, and Reno could do nothing but watch helplessly as the cruiser was lifted like a toy--

--and suplexed into the ocean.

----------------------------------------

I panted.

The world blinked in and out, a static threatening to consume my vision, and my eyes darted to the next target--one left, a wounded destroyer attempting to escape.

This ship was my body, and my body was this ship, and I controlled the Kraken tentacles as naturally as my limbs as I whirled them around the hull like a propellor, and I dashed through the water, multitudes faster than my prey.

And when I caught up to them, I raised my arm in a knife-hand--a hundred tentacles manifested and reformed and mimicked the gesture--and I ran the ship through. The ship screamed and whined as if a dying animal, and it fell silent with the world around.

It was done.

The world blinked again. Someone yelled at me through the comms, but my hearing turned to fuzz. I looked back at the imperial battleship. The rebels hurried out, with a single person leading them.

Red hair. Freckles. Rebel uniform and armed with a large rifle.

It was Jenna.

My hulking, writhing mass of a ship and its tentacle limbs looked down at her as if I were a monster, and she looked up at me.

And I opened my mouth to speak.

Kraken Mode deactivated.

Overdrive: shutting down...

And the world turned black.