[I'm fine. How about you Liam?]
Shizuku's mental voice came through the Moon Mark connection. Her hands tightened around the Star Mark on the back of his neck, protective even while half-crushed under corpses.
[Still alive,] Liam sent back. [For now.]
He turned his head as much as the cramped space allowed. All he could see were Pariston copies. Dozens of them. Blown to pieces. Burned. Mangled beyond recognition. Some missing limbs. Some missing faces.
[The airship's still falling,] Shizuku's thought-voice was as calm as if she were commenting on the weather. [If we hit the ocean like this, we're all dead, right?]
[First of all,] Liam replied, [as long as the Star Marks stay intact, we won't die even if we splatter across the water. Probably. Second, you know that saying about working your employees to death?]
Shizuku's confusion rippled across the telepathic link.
[Keep copying!] Liam commanded.
Somewhere in the chaos, buried under a mountain of injured and dead Pariston replicas, Kortopi moved.
The rose-gold pentagram blazed on his forehead. His arms stretched out through the pile of bodies, hands trembling as Liam forced him to activate his Hatsu again.
But this time, Kortopi wasn't copying Pariston.
His left hand slapped against the airship's floor. His right hand extended into empty air.
"Divine's Left Hand and the Demonic's Right Hand."
Another airship materialized.
The original vessel was still falling, fire and smoke trailing behind it like a comet. Flames poured from every gap in the hull. The altitude counter in Liam's head, running on pure survival instinct, estimated they were below a thousand meters now.
Part of the outer hull exploded outward.
Pariston copies tumbled out like dead locusts, hundreds of them, spinning through the air toward the ocean below.
And then another airship appeared beneath them. Caught the falling bodies. Created a platform.
Then another airship below that one. And another. And another.
They materialized in rapid succession, stacking like building blocks, each one identical to the original: burning, smoking, structurally compromised. A tower of flaming wreckage growing downward from the falling ship toward the ocean surface.
At the top, Kortopi was burning through his aura reserves like his life depended on it.
Because it did.
In the manga, Kortopi had copied an entire abandoned skyscraper more than fifty times without breaking a sweat. Either his ability had insanely low aura costs, or this seemingly unremarkable Troupe member had reserves deep enough to drown in.
Liam didn't care which. He just needed Kortopi to keep going.
The Star Mark on Kortopi's forehead pulsed with Liam's will, and Kortopi's aura poured out like water from a burst dam.
Airships spawned in a chain reaction, one after another, extending downward at terrifying speed.
The stack of burning vessels plummeted together, and within seconds, the bottom ship hit the ocean.
The impact was catastrophic.
Kinetic energy transferred upward through the chain of airships like a shockwave, rattling every vessel in the stack. The topmost ship, still packed with surviving passengers, shuddered violently.
But at the same moment of impact, Pariston copies exploded out of the top vessel in a geyser of flesh and blood.
Hundreds more manifested instantly, packed so densely they formed a cushion between each airship in the stack. The kinetic energy hit the buffer layer, and the Pariston copies… burst. Turned to paste. Became red mist in the air like someone had detonated a dozen tomatoes in a blender.
The stack of airships teetered. At the bottom, where metal met water, a massive whirlpool formed.
The damaged vessels began sinking, dragged down by the vortex, belching smoke and fire as they descended.
At the top, more Pariston copies materialized. Endlessly. Like someone pouring champagne over a tower of stacked glasses at a wedding reception, except instead of champagne it was corpses, and instead of glasses it was exploding airships.
The tower collapsed. Airships broke apart, disintegrated, tumbled down into the maelstrom one by one.
And the Pariston copies fell with them, rolling down like a waterfall of flesh, splashing into the ocean by the hundreds.
The whirlpool subsided. The sea surface, which moments ago had been relatively calm, was now carpeted with Pariston bodies. A thick, floating layer of corpses, packed so densely they formed a makeshift raft.
The topmost airship, the one with actual living passengers, crashed down onto this cushion of meat and metal.
From a distance, it looked like a floating island. An island made of dead Paristons and sinking airship debris.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Liam kept Kortopi going until the man's aura finally bottomed out and he collapsed, unconscious.
[Did we stop falling?] Shizuku's mental voice cut through Liam's concentration.
[Yeah. Probably. Nothing's moving, at least.] Liam shifted his weight, testing whether the airship beneath them was stable. [I've done all I can. Time for Blinky.]
Liam braced his hands against the pile of corpses and pushed himself up. Bodies shifted and slid around him, dead weight pressing from every angle.
Shizuku raised one hand. Blinky materialized in a flash of pink light, the vacuum cleaner's single eye swiveling to face her.
"Blinky," Shizuku said, perfectly calm. "Suck up every Pariston copy inside this airship."
Blinky's mouth stretched into an impossibly wide grin.
The vacuum roared to life.
The Pariston copies didn't stand a chance. They warped and twisted like they were being pulled into a black hole, bodies compressing and distorting as Blinky inhaled them. One after another, they vanished into the vacuum's gullet, sucked away without a trace.
In seconds, the entire interior of the airship was clear.
Flames still licked at the outer hull, but inside, the space was suddenly, jarringly empty. The few remaining survivors lay scattered across the floor, some unconscious, some dead. Maybe a dozen people total. Some weren't moving. Some were breathing shallowly, clinging to life by a thread.
More than a dozen deaths, Liam counted automatically. Some probably died in their rooms. Never even made it out. Just got thrown around during the crash until something important broke.
Kortopi was sprawled on the floor nearby, silver hair now a dull grayish-white like it had aged fifty years in five minutes. The Star Mark still glowed faintly on his forehead.
He's not dead yet, Liam noted. Good. That would've been awkward to explain.
The only other person standing was Pariston.
He straightened up on the tilted floor, brushing wrinkles out of his suit like he'd just stepped off a leisurely stroll instead of surviving an airship explosion. His gaze landed on Liam and Shizuku, and he started clapping slowly.
"Manipulator," Pariston said, smiling that bright, infuriating smile. "And a spatial Conjuration ability. You two are genuinely impressive."
"Yeah, great, you're very smart too figure that out." Liam cut him off with a wave. "Can you shut up for five minutes? I'm busy."
Pariston blinked, surprised, then laughed softly. Looks like there's a healing ability too, he thought, watching Liam with renewed interest.
He gave Liam one last thoughtful look, then calmly walked toward the massive crack in the airship's hull. Outside, the ocean stretched to the horizon.
"Move!" Liam grabbed Shizuku's arm and hauled her upright. "We can't let anyone else die. God, I'm getting too old for this."
The survivors were a mess. Some were crying. Some sat in shocked silence, staring at nothing. Others clutched their chests, faces pale, still recovering from the suffocation and chaos.
When Liam and Shizuku approached, several survivors flinched back in fear.
Civilians. No Nen. Completely helpless.
For efficiency's sake, Liam took direct control of Shizuku's body via the Star Mark, essentially piloting two bodies at once.
Screams echoed through the airship as Liam and Shizuku moved from person to person, applying Star Marks to anyone critically injured. The healing passive kicked in immediately, regeneration accelerating, wounds closing, internal bleeding stopping.
Even if they'd been carried into an operating room right now, half these people wouldn't have made it, Liam thought, pressing a Star Mark onto a woman's broken ribs. But the marks will do the job.
His own heart condition was stable for now. No warning signs of another transformation. No blackout threshold approaching.
But he wasn't taking chances. Every death on this airship was another spike of cold-hot energy he'd have to absorb. Better to prevent them entirely.
What does saving you have to do with you? Liam thought grimly, channeling the Star Mark into an unconscious man's chest. I'm just protecting myself from suddenly aging into a teenager again.
After what felt like an eternity of emergency triage, Liam finally left the survivors in their confused, traumatized state and stepped out through the gap in the airship's hull.
Fresh air hit his face. Sea breeze, cool and salty.
Pariston sat on his "corpse pile," legs crossed casually, playing with a silver business card holder. He stared at the horizon, that ever-present smile still in place. "Beautiful, isn't it?"
Stop being creepy for five seconds, Liam thought, expressionless.
Shizuku stepped out onto the floating mass of Pariston bodies with obvious curiosity, testing her weight on the bizarre surface. "How deep is the ocean here? Did we fill it all the way to the bottom with copies?"
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