"An all-out assault?" Bustamante blurted out, voicing his concern with the captain's seemingly reckless plan
"Yes! Exactly! It is as Cecilia suggested," Bustamante and the others glared at the awkwardly smiling Cecilia, who at the time wished the twilight would just swallow her whole, so she could vanish.
"What it is, is something they will not expect, and hopefully it will be enough to make them panic, even for a few seconds," Chris started to explain. "We will use that time to rescue our crew."
"Sir, I want to be part of the rescue team," Martinez bravely volunteers
With a skeptical look, Chris approached the helmsman. "Are you sure?" he asked, to which Martinez nodded. "Very well...Martinez, you create a team that will free them from their confines, while I and the others stand guard."
"Me? What about me?" Cecilia enthusiastically asked.
"You are going to stay here, since your Chief is at the moment indisposed, you will join the others and make sure all crew members are accounted for, save for the ones taken." He instructed her, thinking it was enough to make her stay on the ship.
"Chief Engineer, your team is intact, right?" The captain asked the chief in charge of maintaining the ship.
"Aye, Captain," The chief Engineer replied, without being asked. He stressed his team was already hard at work. "I already sent a team to investigate if there are any damages to the haul, while the rest are maintaining the ship's systems."
While the captain was strategizing with the crew, Cecilia was also strategizing with herself on how she was going to disobey the captain. "Stick me here? We'll see about that. Cecilia Amparo can never be left behind!" She then raised her gaze upwards as if she was wondering about something, "When did I ever sound like that?"
The sealed doors of the weapons storage were opened, and Chris entered the room. He hands out mana charges and mana spears, the only weapons they have on the ship. Cecilia and what remained of Chief Murillo's team prepare the motorized lifeboats, making sure all of them are seaworthy and without tears or damage.
The ladies lowered the boats onto the water and left. Cecilia, instead of following the others, jumped into one of them and covered herself with a tarp.
When the captain and his team were ready, they boarded the rafts and used a compass that pointed to the direction of souls bound to the Twilight. The rafts moved southward, directed by the compass to what looked like an island over the horizon.
One crewman sat on what he thought was a pile of tarp. "I never thought a pile of tarp would make a good seat," he said
Underneath the pile of tarps, Cecilia stifled a grunt. "Because that is my back, you jerk!" she thought to herself, trying to stay as quiet and still as possible.
When they were near the island's shores, they turned off the motors and let their inertia carry them the rest of the way.
Upon reaching land, they quietly pulled and hid the boats so they could not be found and lose the element of surprise. Stealthily, they moved through the thick vegetation, towards the rowdy sound they heard.
Once the coast was clear, Cecilia came out of her hiding place. She did some back stretches as she got off the boat. "Aish! I thought ghosts were supposed to be weightless. Who would have thought he was that heavy?" Suddenly, she heard the sound of rhythmic chanting and drumming. Turning her head to the source of the sound, she saw a faint light in the distance. "That's probably where they went." Without a second thought, she raced to the source of the sound and the light.
Chris and his team arrive at the demon camp. The light they saw from a distance was coming from the large fire in the middle of the camp. Beside the campfire, the makeshift cages held Murillo and the others, keeping them confined. The demons were gathered around the cages, menacingly circling the captured souls, and danced violently to the beat of the drums.
Chris, using simple hand gestures, instructed his team to scatter. And to surround the demon camp. Cecilia, who had just arrived, saw the chaotic ritual, but she was unaware of what the ritual was for. Then the drumming stopped, and the demons moved away from the cages to give way to a four-armed figure that approached. The four-armed werewolf demon pointed at one of the captives. Two demons opened the cage where Murillo was kept and took out a male crew. The demons forced him to his knees, and the rest of the captured crew watched in horror. "No! Stop it! Please spare him!" They all shouted, but asking a demon for mercy is like asking a predator to spare its prey.
The demons all chuckled and sneered at the captives. The crewman struggled to be free, but the demons were just too much for him to overcome. As the giant werewolf approached, the crewman pleaded, tears streaming from his eyes. "Please, don't, have mercy…" He was not able to finish his begging when his mouth was forced open. The imposing demon raised one of his arms, and he cut across the wrist until blood started to flow from the wound.
It then positioned the bleeding wrist on top of the crewman's mouth so that the blood would go straight into his mouth. The crewman started to convulse violently, they let him go and watched with glee as he wriggled on the ground, shouting in excruciating pain.
The human soul soon morphed, the air thick with a suffocating dread that clawed at his chest. Cecilia's hand flew to her mouth when she witnessed the horrors happening. Her eyes were wide in fear and disbelief. At first, it was just a pain—his essence throbbed violently beneath his skin, like something restless, alive, writhing just under the surface. But the pain quickly spiraled into a torment beyond comprehension. His form began to ripple and stretch, as if invisible hands were pulling and tearing from within. The pain was a searing fire, molten and unrelenting, radiating from his core outward.
His screams echoed through the night, raw and primal. His fingers, once nimble, twisted grotesquely; they were snapping and reshaping into long, sinuous forms. Scales erupted across his skin like shards of glass, sharp and cold, crawling over his body in a relentless tide. His eyes burned with a venomous green glow, pupils narrowing into serpentine slits that pierced the darkness with a malevolent hunger.
Inside his mind, the agony was matched only by the terror. Memories fragmented and slipped away like sand through trembling fingers. He clawed at his throat as it elongated, his tongue splitting and flicking out to taste the air, alien and sinister.
The final shreds of his sanity shattered as he slithered from the wreckage of his former self, a creature born of nightmare and venom. When the sinister new figure's roar thundered, so did the chanting of his fellow demons.
The werewolf demon soon pointed at a new target, Chief Murillo herself. She was grabbed and dragged out of the cage. The other prisoners all shouted and offered themselves in exchange for their chief's freedom.
Chief Murillo glared defiantly. They forced her mouth open so they could force-feed her the blood, which would morph her into an entity of darkness. From their concealed positions, Chris raised his hand ready to give the signal to launch their attack, but then he heard a familiar voice. "NO STOP IT!" Cecilia's scream echoed through the madness.
"Hoo MAN!" The werewolf bellowed, it then pointed in Cecilia's direction, and the others all scampered to get her.