Chapter 171: Mistress of the Silent Sea
"These kouto are fools. Feed them, and they'll follow you anywhere."
The voice that drifted across the shattered deck was hoarse and grating, like the final wail of a dying insect.
Yet its tone was casual, as though speaking of something utterly trivial.
Ambrose paid the kouto no mind. His attention was fixed on the ruined ship before him.
An ordinary three-masted vessel with a rusted iron swordfish as a figurehead, its hull was riddled with gaping holes and thickly crusted with barnacles and moss. It looked less like a seaworthy ship than one that should have long since sunk to the ocean floor.
Perched at the bow sat a fish-man shouldering a harpoon, his body half-rotted away.
"A shagin… zombie?"
Compared to the dull-witted, slack-faced kouto, the shagin was far more ferocious in appearance. The kouto had heads like catfish, but shagin bore the heads of sharks. Their proportions endowed them with strength; their physiques were built for violence.
There was no doubt that the creature before Ambrose was an undead. Its chest had decayed to the point that ribs and stuffing-like entrails were visible. Half its face had rotted away to bare white bone, with jagged teeth permanently exposed.