The King's Gamma (#Wattys2024)

Ninety Eight

The Stormcutter's deck shuddered as another harpoon struck, splintering oak. Acid hissed through the planks, eating toward my boots.

Deimios' grip on my wrist was iron. "Stay. Here."

The bond between us twisted—his fear, his fury, his need to keep me safe—all of it flooding my veins like liquor.

Then the leviathan screamed.

The sound was gears shearing, hydraulics bursting, a dying beast's final roar. Its maw gaped wide, revealing the Thalassar soldiers inside frantically reloading their cannons.

Something in me snapped when the realization that Thalassar was an immenent threat to my partner, and that if the battle continued as it was going Nautica would lose. Deimios would be injured, or killed.

The world bled red at the edges.

Deimios shouted my name, but I was already moving—not with strategy, not with thought, but with the raw, hungry instinct of a berserker who had scented prey. The rigging blurred beneath my fingers as I scaled the mainmast, the wind howling in my ears. Below, the marines' cannonfire pounded uselessly against the leviathan's regenerating hide.

But the mouth—the mouth was open.

I leapt.

For one weightless moment, I hung between ship and monster, the sea yawning beneath me. Then I crashed onto the leviathan's lower jaw, my boots skidding on slick metal. The soldiers spun, their glass-eyed helmets reflecting my true gaze—not the diluted amber of some backwater berserker, but the crimson of a bloodline that had burned Vexhelm to the ground.

I didn't fight.

I unmade.

Cannons shattered under my fists. Control panels exploded in showers of sparks. A harpoon grazed my ribs—I barely felt it. The bond screamed at me to stop, to think, but the bloodlust was a tide dragging me under.

Then I saw it: the leviathan's heart.

A massive bioluminescent tank pulsed in the chamber's core, its green fluid swirling with stolen life. The soldiers threw themselves in my path.

They were nothing.

The tank exploded under my fist, drenching me in freezing, glowing liquid. The leviathan convulsed, its mechanical systems shorting out in a symphony of screams. As it sank, I turned—

—and found the entire Stormcutter crew staring.

Silence.

Then chaos.

The whispers followed me across the deck like a tide.

"Did you see his eyes—"

"—tore through steel like it was parchment—"

"—if a diluted bloodline can do that—"

Deimios stood frozen at the rail, his face bone-white. The bond between us thrummed with something raw—not fear of me, but terror for me.

The leviathan's carcass sank beneath the waves as I fought to steady my breathing. Bloodlust still clouded my vision at the edges, threatening to pull me under again. If I lost control now, they'd see the truth—the full shift of a pure-blooded berserker, not some watered-down farmboy.

I took a step forward—and pain lanced up my leg.

A shard of metal protruded from my thigh, barely visible where it had been sheared off flush with my skin. The sight of my own blood sent fresh heat through my veins. I clenched my fists, forcing my eyes back to their usual amber before leaping back to the Stormcutter's deck.