The clicking and whistling sounds faded as they put distance between themselves and Windrunner, and within thirty seconds the water around the ship was still except for the gentle rocking of waves and the floating bodies of perhaps a dozen mermaids who wouldn’t be retreating from anything ever again.

Jake’s shadow serpents dissolved back into formless darkness as he released the manifestation technique, the energy cost having climbed to levels that were making his vision swim at the edges.

He caught himself on the ship’s rail and took several deep breaths, letting his bloodline regeneration start working on the various cuts and bruises he’d accumulated during the fighting.

Maureen was checking her crew, moving from person to person with quick efficiency, assessing wounds and determining who needed immediate attention.

Two of her people were injured badly enough to require serious healing—one with deep claw marks across their chest, another with a dislocated shoulder and multiple lacerations. The other four were functional, bloodied but standing, their weapons still ready.

"That was coordinated," Maureen said, coming to stand beside Jake at the rail.

She was breathing hard but not winded, her sword still in hand and showing minimal blood despite the number of mermaids she’d killed with it.

"They didn’t just attack randomly—they tested our defenses, probed for weaknesses, and adjusted their tactics based on our responses. That’s intelligent behavior for some mindless mermaids.

Jake nodded, still catching his breath. He agreed with her assessment.

"They were sent by someone. Mermaids don’t coordinate like that naturally."

"The pirate queen?" Maureen suggested.

"Maybe," Jake said, though something about the timing bothered him.

"Or we’re in someone’s territory and that was the warning to leave."

They stood at the rail and looked out over the water that had returned to its normal calm, the waves lapping gently against the ship’s hull as though nothing violent had just occurred. The earlier chaos felt like a dream to the current stillness. Except for the blood and bodies floating on the water, nothing would suggest that they had a huge fight with mermaids.

The evening was turning toward night, the sun dropping lower in the sky and painting the water in shades of gold and orange. The Skun Islands sat peacefully and empty in the gathering dusk.

"We should—" Maureen started. She was about to tell Jake that they should look around the islands once again to see if the pirate queen was on the premises. She thought if she controlled them, she must be nearby.

That’s when a strange sound cut her off mid-sentence.

It started low, a vibration felt through the ship’s deck before it became audible, a deep resonant thrumming that came from beneath the water and grew steadily louder.

Jake looked down and could see the water vibrating faintly.

The water itself began to vibrate, ripples spreading outward from a point perhaps fifty meters from Windrunner’s position, and Jake’s blood sense went wild with warnings as something massive registered below the surface.

Something very, very massive.

The water began to rise.

Not waves—the water itself was being pushed upward from below, displaced by something enormous rising from the depths. The surface bulged and broke, and a platform emerged, circular and easily a hundred meters across, made from what looked like compacted coral and stone fused together through methods Jake couldn’t immediately identify.

On that platform stood an army.

They weren’t human and they weren’t quite fish—something between shark-like humanoids standing upright on powerful legs with bodies that were massively muscled and covered in grey-white skin that looked thick enough to turn blades. Their heads were distinctly shark-shaped, with those dead black eyes and mouths filled with multiple rows of serrated teeth, and they wore minimal armor that looked grown rather than forged, with bone plates and coral fragments integrated directly into their flesh.

Jake counted fifty of them in the first few seconds before more kept appearing from the platform’s edges where they’d been concealed by the angle.

A hundred. Two hundred.

More were still emerging from trap doors in the platform’s surface, climbing up from whatever structure existed beneath the waterline.

They all carried weapons—spears tipped with bone, clubs studded with coral shards, nets weighted with stones, and a few carried tridents that crackled with what looked distinctly like electrical energy.

At the platform’s center, standing on a raised dais, was a figure that was clearly in command.

She was larger than the others, standing perhaps eight feet tall with a build that suggested both strength and speed, her shark-humanoid features more refined than the soldiers around her. She wore actual armor rather than grown plates, metal that gleamed in the setting sun and was marked with symbols Jake didn’t recognize.

A crown of woven coral and pearls sat on her head, and when she opened her mouth to speak, her voice carried across the water with unnatural clarity.

"Surface dwellers," she said, and her accent was strange, words shaped by a mouth that wasn’t designed for human speech but managed it anyway.

"You trespass in claimed waters. You kill servants of the deep. You bring shadow magic into our territory without permission."

She paused, her black eyes fixing on Windrunner with the flat attention of a predator assessing prey.

"By what right do you invade the domain of Queen Mershala?"

The shark-humanoid soldiers behind her raised their weapons in unison and began a rhythmic striking of spear-butts against the platform’s surface, creating a sound like war drums made from the ocean itself.

The platform began moving toward Windrunner with steady, inexorable momentum.

Jake looked at Maureen.

Maureen looked back at him with an expression that said she was doing very rapid tactical calculations and not liking any of the results.

"This," she said quietly, "is significantly worse than mermaids."

Jake’s mind worked quickly through the tactical situation, assessing angles and options with the sharp, organized thinking. In this type of situation, Jake’s mind worked faster than normal times.

Queen Mershala and her shark-humanoid army were waiting for an answer, their platform steadily closing the distance to Windrunner, and the rhythmic striking of spears against coral was building toward something that would probably end with violence if he didn’t provide a response that satisfied her.