Chapter 143: The Toll of the Eastern Strait
The air above Pier Four in District One smelled of roasted grain, wet diesel soot, and raw ozone.
Fourteen heavy cargo vessels, flying civil ensigns from Panama, Greece, Liberia, and the Philippines, sat tied alongside the reinforced concrete quays. Massive electric portal cranes, powered directly by the high-voltage busbars routed from Vanguard-Zero, dipped their long steel booms into open cargo holds, bringing up forty-ton pallets of Australian wheat, medical helium cylinders, and barrels of unrefined diesel fuel.
On the central customs platform, Boss Victor sat behind an iron desk, his hard hat pushed back on his gray hair, checking off line items on a thick paper ledger.
Beside his desk, four heavy iron chests sat open, overflowing with translucent blue, green, and crimson monster cores collected as the Sovereign Sea Tax.
"Forty-two thousand metric tons of grain unloaded since morning," Victor called out, stamping a green customs release onto a stack of shipping bills. "Six hundred high-purity wyrm cores, twelve thousand barrels of industrial lubricant, and three months’ supply of medical resin for Saint Jude’s Ward."
He looked up at Chief Quartermaster Miller, who was sorting the freshly received cores into reinforced lead transport crates.
"Van Houten and his bankers spent six days drafting embargo papers in Switzerland," Victor added, a dry, tobacco-stained grin splitting his scarred face. "And in less than forty-eight hours, the merchant syndicates delivered enough raw commodities to run the entire peninsula through the winter."
Miller wiped sweat from his wire-rimmed spectacles, nodding with a cautious, lingering anxiety.
"The civilian market in Sector Zero has stabilized, Victor," Miller admitted, checking the digital readout on his ledger. "The price of bread in District Four dropped thirty percent this afternoon. But the core storage vaults under the fortress are reaching maximum density. We have harvested more than six thousand unrefined cores from the strait this week alone."
Footsteps echoed along the concrete pier.
Renan walked toward the customs platform, his dark woolen coat snapping against the cool sea breeze blowing off the harbor.
His violet eyes swept over the bustling quays, taking in the sight of hundreds of local dockworkers unloading the cargo alongside shadow skirmishers who carried heavy machinery with silent, effortless grace.
"The harbor is alive, Victor," Renan said softly, his voice carrying through the thrum of the diesel cranes.
Victor closed his ledger with a heavy thud, leaning back in his chair.
"It is more than alive, Sovereign," Victor replied, lighting a fresh cigar with his brass lighter. "It is profitable. The word has spread across every maritime exchange from Marseilles to Singapore. The Western blockade is a joke. If a ship flies our seal, they pass through our waters without paying a single dollar to Geneva’s insurance cartels."
Renan did not smile. He walked to the edge of the pier, looking out toward the open sea where the grey horizon met the low autumn clouds.
"A paper blockade dies when men realize gold tastes better than compliance," Renan said. "How many vessels are waiting outside the fifty-mile marker?"
"Twenty-eight more freighters holding at the perimeter," Victor reported, blowing a cloud of blue smoke toward the gantry cranes. "Including three fuel tankers from the Persian Gulf carrying crude oil for our refineries."
Renan reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a small, dark obsidian core harvested from the seabed during Arthur’s broadside.
Through his palm, the Sovereign core beneath his breastbone hummed with a low, restless vibration.
The six thousand cores collected from the foreign fleets had injected a massive reservoir of raw mana into his internal conduits, bringing his total core density to eighteen thousand eight hundred units, hovering right at the precipice of the next monarch evolution threshold.
Yet the vibration in his chest was not triggered by the cores in Victor’s chests.
It was responding to a cold, jagged pulse emanating from forty miles out in the open ocean.
Chief Quartermaster Miller hurried to Renan’s side, holding a handheld military radio whose speaker was crackling with severe atmospheric static and frantic voice transmissions from the outer patrol line.
"Sovereign!" Miller stammered, his knuckles white against the radio housing. "Emergency report from Vanguard-Zero! Shadow Colossus Vance has just raised the alarm along the fifty-mile demarcation line!"
Renan’s eyes narrowed into sharp violet slits. "Is the American fleet advancing?"
"No, Sovereign!" Miller yelled over the noise of the cranes. "It isn’t the Americans! The deep-sea rift beneath the scuttled British flagship just tore open! The residual necrotic energy from the sunken hulls has ignited an ancient breeding nest forty fathoms down!"
A sharp, concussive boom echoed across forty miles of open water, vibrating through the concrete piers of Pier Four with a low, sickening tremor that caused the sea gulls to scatter from the crane booms in panicked flocks.
Through the abyssal link connecting Renan’s soul to his shadow vanguard, Vance’s deep, mechanized voice resonated directly inside his mind:
Sovereign. Multiple Tier-S deep-sea abyssal entities have broken the ocean floor. They are feeding on the star-metal hulls of the scuttled fleet. The outer patrol line is engaged.
Renan did not issue a panicked retreat order.
He closed his fingers around the obsidian core in his hand, crushing the dark mineral into fine, glittering dust that fell between his boots like black sand.
"Victor," Renan commanded, his voice turning as cold and unyielding as the seabed rock.
"Standing by, Sovereign," Victor said, dropping his cigar and standing upright.
"Maintain the unloading schedule at Pier Four," Renan ordered, turning toward the fast transport cutter idling at the end of the pier. "Do not halt the merchant traffic. Keep the harbor gates open."
"And the rift at the trench?" Victor asked, his eyes tracking the dark violet energy flaring across Renan’s collarbone.
Renan stepped onto the deck of the fast cutter, his dark coat billowing as the hydraulic water-jets ignited with a high-pitched, screaming whine that parted the harbor spray.
"The trench gave us iron and steel," Renan said, looking out toward the boiling red horizon where Vance’s rail cannons were beginning to thunder in the distance. "Now it is giving us the biomass to open the soul forge."
The cutter shot forward into the open sea at fifty knots, leaving a towering wall of white foam in its wake as Renan raced toward the outer boundary where thirty-foot abyssal leviathans were rising from the black mud to test the strength of his new domain.