Chapter 158: The Arbiter

Chapter 158: The Arbiter

Murphy quietly waited for a few moments, watching their movements.

Silas followed closely, his hand firmly gripping the stolen charms in his pocket. He kept his heartbeat steady — a psychological trick he had learned to prevent his spirituality from fluctuating and alerting enemies.

Murphy quickly jumped; before the first pirate sitting on a wooden barrel could even turn his head, Murphy was already behind him. A gloved hand clamped tightly over the man’s mouth, while the cold barrel of a revolver pressed firmly against the base of his skull.

BANG!

The pirate’s body went limp, his spiritual aura instantly dissolving into an ash-grey.

However, the second pirate, who had been relieving himself over the gunwale, noticed the sudden movement. His eyes widened from the gunshot, his hand instinctively reaching for a heavy, brass-hilted cutlass at his waist. His throat tightened as he prepared to scream.

He’s going to alert the tavern!

Silas moved, although he didn’t have an opportunity to chant an incantation for a charm, so he relied on his Authority. He locked his gaze onto the pirate and projected a sharp, concentrated burst of mental interference.

Cognitive deafness!

The pirate’s movements froze for a moment. To the man, the world suddenly turned silent, and the concept of ’screaming’ was temporarily erased from his cognitive functions.

That single second was all Murphy needed.

Bam!

Another muffled shot rang out. A bullet tore through the second pirate’s forehead, sending him tumbling backward over the railing and into the dark, churning waters of the harbor below with a soft splash.

Murphy lowered his revolver as the barrel emitted a faint wisp of acrid smoke. He looked at Silas, his eyes gleaming beneath the brim of his fedora with a mixture of surprise and approval.

"Impressive domain control for a low Ordinal. For a moment, even my perception of time felt slightly skewed." Murphy murmured, slipping fresh silver-jacketed bullets into the cylinder of his gun in ease to hide the fact that it didn’t need to reload. "But the appetizer is over. The main course may come soon."

Right as he spoke, Silas’s spiritual intuition violently throbbed. A sudden, freezing chill washed over his spine, making the hairs on his arms stand up.

From the dark, narrow companionway leading down into the ship’s lower cabins, the sound of footsteps echoed.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Along with the footsteps came a foul, suffocating odor — the smell of stagnant swamp water, decaying fish scales, and old blood. The murky grey aura surrounding the ship suddenly boiled, turning into a malicious blue that threatened to swallow Silas’s hearing entirely.

A figure slowly emerged from the darkness of the cabin stairs.

He was incredibly tall, with sickly mottled green skin under the nearly evening sun. His eyes lacked pupils, showing only the white part. In the place of his right arm, long, slippery tentacles, covered in barnacles writhed slowly, dripping a viscous slime onto the ground.

A mutated Ascended! An Ordinal 7 or higher of the Arbiter Authority. He had partially lost control!

Silas’s mind screamed in warning as a faint, chaotic whispering began to echo at the fringes of his consciousness.

Murphy stepped forward and lifted his hand toward Silas, gesturing him to stay behind as he pulled out a cigarette and ignited it. "I’ll handle the next. First, we need to take it out from the ship so we don’t accidentally ruin the wood. Go and check if people are outside."

The mutated Ascender let out a guttural roar, a non-human, animalistic sound. Its tentacles whipped through the air, slamming into the mast, splintering wood. Murphy simply tilted his fedora down and pulled out his revolver before a wind blew, blowing his long coat.

"You’re an Ordinal Seven." Murphy said flatly. "That means you should be intelligent enough to know you’ve lost control, but you don’t seem to understand that."

The Ascender lunged, its tentacles reaching for Murphy’s throat. He quickly sidestepped, sliding his boots across the wet deck as he moved his hand toward its temple and shot twice, spraying blood across the floor. Without waiting, Murphy twisted his revolver and shot the tentacles that reached for his throat.

The bullets tore through the tentacles, but the flesh regenerated instantly as the barnacles multiplied while slime dripped, a sigh of corruption spreading faster.

Murphy’s eyes narrowed. He had seen this before, but at that moment, the Ascended he was facing right now only had one Authority, which also seemed to be weakened, leaving a terrifying raw force.

"Who did this to you?" Murphy asked, his voice cold. "How did you get corrupted?"

The Ascender only screamed in response, its tentacles lashing out wildly as the white eyes were filled with nothing but pain and rage.

Just in the next moment, Silas returned and called out. "Mr. Law, it’s safe to bring it outside."

Hearing that, Murphy took a brief sigh and lunged at the corrupted being, his revolver gleaming in the dim light. He had to entirely ruin its body to finish the Ascended as he appeared directly behind the monster and threw his gun toward the entrance before slamming a hard kick directly on its back.

The Ascended’s body flew right toward the ship’s entrance, where Murphy already appeared and caught the gun before shooting its chest with four shots, then punched its face with another hand, pushing it back.

He tapped his temple, activating his Apprentice’s Eyes to see the world even more clearly and exploit the weakness of the Ascender’s spirit threads. They became visible, black and tangled, dripping with crimson blood. Between the spirit threads, one of them seemed different, reaching toward the endless sky toward nothing as if controlled by some ancient being like a puppet.

’A corrupted spirit thread.’ He had to cut that thread. But first, he had to get close, which didn’t seem to be a problem yet.

Murphy surged forward, his legs spinning in a deadly arc as he landed a kick on its face to throw it out of the ship. The Ascender’s tentacles lunged, but Murphy was faster. He ducked under one, sidestepped another, and drove his revolver directly toward his middle section and shot.

The creature screamed in a sound of pure agony, but Murphy couldn’t move further as the speed of its tentacles increased more than what he had anticipated.

In a blur, the slippery tentacle reached toward his throat, but Murphy pushed himself backward, avoiding the hit barely as he looked ahead, where its eyes glowed faintly.

"Arbiter eyes..." He muttered underneath; he knew that now it could know his movement and where he’d appear next, making it much harder for him.

The tentacle fell silently for a moment before rushing in with an unimaginable speed, forcing Murphy to step back even further. His eyes scanned all the threads to find the Embodiment, which had been forcefully pulled out of the Ascender.

Finally, his gaze lay upon its forehead, and in the back of its head, a thin spirit thread glowed. That was the true Embodiment of the Arbiter that he had to take, a mystical artifact that could be used to enhance speed attributes.

Silas, however, was already inside the ship to find the pirate leader to get the ship.

Without wasting another second, Murphy disappeared from the sight, appearing directly above its head, but the tentacles already knew his location as they caught his ankle.

BANG!

The bullet pierced through the tentacles as he twisted his body in midair, slamming his leg into the Ascender’s chin, pushing it backward before shooting multiple rounds as he landed on the ground.

Murphy spat on the sand beneath as his eyes locked into the being in front of him, and a mad smirk curled up, his mind turning excited as the obsession slowly took over. "It won’t end soon. Ah, so good"