Argentus reached the cave entrance.
His fingers—bloody, raw, barely functional—grabbed the lip of the opening. He used his forward momentum to swing his body violently inward, hauling himself into the cave with desperate strength.
He scraped his chest raw against the rough stone. Sharp rocks tore through his shirt and opened shallow cuts across his ribs.
He tucked his legs in with violent force just as—
SCRAAAAAPE!
Massive, serrated talons raked across the rock face mere inches from his boots.
The bird had been moving too fast to stop. It crashed directly into the cliff face with enough force to crack stone, its beak stabbing uselessly at the cave entrance. But the opening was too narrow for its massive body.
It snapped its jaws futilely before finally giving up and pushing off the cliff to take flight again.
Argentus rolled deeper into the cave, away from the entrance, until he hit the back wall with a heavy thud.
He collapsed onto his back, chest heaving, staring up at the dark stone ceiling.
Outside, the birds continued to scream in frustration. Their massive wings beat against the air near the entrance, creating wind pressure that howled through the cave
After several minutes of futile attempts, the birds finally gave up and took flight, their screeches fading into the distance.
Argentus lay in the darkness for a long time, just breathing.
His entire body hurt. His fingers were shredded. His chest was torn. His arms felt like they'd been filled with lead. His head throbbed from Haki overuse.
But he was alive.
He looked down at his empty right hand—bloody, trembling, weaponless.
"Right," he whispered to the darkness, wiping dust and blood from his face with the back of his hand. "I need a weapon that doesn't snap like a fucking twig."
After catching his breath and waiting to make sure the birds had truly left, Argentus pushed himself off the cold stone floor and ventured deeper into the cave.
The air here grew progressively cooler and more still—a stark, almost unsettling contrast to the howling wind and chaos outside. The temperature dropped noticeably with each step.
As his eyes slowly adjusted to the near-total darkness, he began to notice details that made him pause.
This wasn't just a random hole worn into the rock by wind and water.
The walls had been smoothed. Deliberately. By tools wielded by intelligent hands.
He fumbled in his pocket—miraculously, still dry despite everything—and pulled out a small waterproof match case. He struck one against the stone.
Scritch.
A tiny flame bloomed in the darkness, flickering orange light dancing across the cave walls and casting long, wavering shadows.
"Murals," Argentus whispered, his voice echoing softly in the enclosed space.
The walls were covered in faded pigments—ochre reds, charcoal blacks, mineral whites—applied with skill that spoke of artistry and care. Despite obvious age, the images were still clear enough to follow.
They told a story.
Panel One showed the island as it must have appeared thousands of years ago. The trees in the painting were small, newly planted. The central stone cylinder was absolutely teeming with tiny painted figures—hundreds of them. People living in the caves, building structures on natural ledges, creating a vertical civilization of cliff-dwellers.
Panel Two showed birds. But they were small in this image—normal-sized, kept in woven cages.
Panel Three showed a terrible change. The birds had grown. Massively. Their painted eyes were now colored red—aggressive, feral. The cages were shown broken, shattered. And the birds were no longer inside them. They were hunting the people who had once kept them.
Panel Four depicted a massacre. Cliff-dwellers being snatched from the rock face mid-climb. Bodies falling through painted air. Others being carried away in talons to some unseen fate. The central cylinder was painted red with blood.
Then came the final panel.
A single figure stood atop the highest peak—larger than the others, clearly meant to represent someone important.
In his hand was a long, black weapon with golden markings spiraling down its length.
The figure wasn't shown fighting the birds. Instead, he was simply holding the weapon aloft, and the birds—painted in obvious terror—were fleeing in all directions, unwilling or unable to approach.
Beneath the image were symbols Argentus couldn't read. An ancient language, long dead.
But the meaning was clear enough.
Argentus murmured, his match burning down toward his fingers. "A weapon that drives them away."
He followed the tunnel deeper, lighting a second match when the first burned out.
The passage wound downward at a gentle angle before opening into a larger chamber—a small, circular room that had clearly been carved out deliberately.
A burial chamber.
In the exact center sat a throne carved directly from the living stone of the floor—all one piece, never separate.
Slumped on the throne was a skeleton.
It wore the rotted, barely-recognizable remains of leather armor that had long since deteriorated into strips and patches. Its skull was bowed forward, as if the person had died while looking down at something in their lap. One skeletal hand was still raised slightly, as if in the eternal act of grasping.
And resting across the skeleton's lap, completely untouched by rust, corrosion, or the passage of centuries, was the weapon from the mural.
Argentus stepped forward slowly, his match casting flickering light across the scene.
He extinguished the match between wet fingers, letting his eyes adjust.
The weapon seemed to catch the faint light filtering in from the distant cave entrance and somehow amplify it, as if it generated its own subtle illumination.
It was a spear, but unlike anything Argentus had ever seen or imagined.
The shaft was a full seven feet of polished, jet-black metal—so dark it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The surface was perfectly smooth, cold to the eye, impossibly pristine.
It wasn't painted or coated. The metal itself was simply black—born that way, forged that way, existing in defiance of normal metallurgy.
Winding down the entire length of the shaft, from the leaf-shaped tip to the weighted pommel, were intricate carvings of golden feathers.
The gold seemed to flow through the black metal like veins of ore through stone, perfectly flush with the surface, creating a spiraling pattern that looked like a golden vortex frozen in metal.
The blade at the tip was a long, leaf-shaped masterpiece—viciously sharp, black as the void of space, with a single line of pure gold running down the fuller like a river of light through darkness.
It was beautiful.
Argentus reached out slowly.
His fingers extended toward the cold, black metal of the shaft.
He was mere inches away from contact when—
THOOM.
The sound was like a massive drum being struck in an enclosed space—felt as much as heard.
Argentus didn't even make physical contact with the weapon.
A sudden, crushing pressure exploded outward from the spear like an invisible shockwave, hitting Argentus with the force of a physical wall.
The air in the burial chamber didn't just move—it crackled and screamed.
Arcs of jagged red-black lightning erupted from the golden fuller running down the blade's length, thrashing wildly in all directions like living things.
"Ngh!"
Argentus was blasted backward.
His boots skidded across the stone floor, carving deep grooves into millennia of accumulated dust as he fought desperately to keep his balance. His arms came up instinctively to shield his face from the assault of pressure and lightning.
He slammed into the cave wall five meters away—much harder than he'd intended—and the breath was driven completely from his lungs in a painful wheeze.
Rumble...
The entire island groaned.
The vibration started in the burial chamber and traveled outward and downward, transmitted through the solid stone pillar like a struck tuning fork. It shook the jungle below. Birds took flight in panicked masses. Small rockslides began on the cliff face. The violent ocean currents outside churned even harder, whirlpools deepening.
Argentus looked up, his silver eyes wide with shock.
The skeleton on the throne had crumbled to dust from the sheer force of the blast—reduced from preserved corpse to powder in an instant, armor and all.
But the spear remained perfectly upright, hovering slightly above where the skeleton's lap had been, suspended in the center of a chaotic storm of red-black lightning that crackled and spat like a caged beast.
It felt less like a weapon and more like a wild, feral thing—something alive that had been disturbed from centuries of slumber and was now fully awake and angry.
The presence radiating from it was overwhelming. A terrifying will. A thirst for blood and battle that dwarfed the killing intent of any pirate Argentus had encountered. It felt ancient. Powerful.
"I see..." Argentus whispered.
He wiped a trickle of blood from his lip—his nose was bleeding slightly from the pressure—and a feral grin slowly spread across his face. Not fear. Not hesitation.
Excitement.
"You're not just a piece of metal, are you?"
The spear pulsed again in response, sending another wave of red-black lightning snapping outward like a whip. The bolt struck the stone near Argentus's head, missing by inches, leaving a scorch mark and the smell of ozone.
The weapon wasn't waiting passively for a wielder.
It was testing anyone who dared approach.
Waiting for someone strong enough to claim it.
Argentus took a step forward.
Immediately, the pressure intensified. It felt like wading through molten lead—every step requiring exponentially more effort than the last. The red-black lightning whipped against his skin, not burning with heat but searing his nerves directly with pure, primal dread.
The spear was screaming at him. Not in words, but in emotion.
A cacophony of a thousand dead warriors, a thousand fallen beasts, all the lives this weapon had taken over centuries of service, all rejecting his touch simultaneously.
YOU ARE NOT WORTHY.
"Shut... up..." Argentus rasped through clenched teeth.
Blood began leaking from his nose in earnest now. His vision started to blur at the edges.
He took another step.
His knees trembled violently, threatening to buckle. The pressure was crushing—like being at the bottom of the ocean, like having a mountain placed on his shoulders.
His vision began to tunnel, the edges turning gray and fuzzy. The air was too thick to breathe properly. His lungs burned.
His consciousness was slipping away like sand through fingers, grain by grain. Darkness encroaching from all sides.
He was going to pass out before he even touched the hilt.
It's over, a small voice whispered in the back of his mind.
His eyelids fluttered, growing heavy.
His body began to tilt forward, balance failing, ready to succumb completely to the crushing weight.
His hand, still extended toward the spear, began to drop.
I promised... Mom... everything... the world...
(END OF CHAPTER)
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