Chapter 205: let’s go

The warmth of the engine hold didn’t last past the four-mile marker. By midnight, the old wooden lugger had hit the deep mouth of the northern channel, where the incoming sea tide fought the river current, turning the dark water into a jagged field of three-meter swells that slammed continuously against the bow.

Jun-ho stood on the open stern deck, his large rubber boots planted flat against the wet timber planks. He had buckled the stone-gray slabs of the Ashen Monarch Core Plate back onto his torso, the rough rock surface absorbing the icy sea spray instantly. His left hand kept a hard, steady grip on the new hemp wrap of The Ash Remnant, the square crossguard of raw black basin slag resting cold against his knee.

Beside his shoulder, Eun-bi had her yellow rain jacket zipped all the way to her chin. Her dark hair was tied back tightly with a piece of medical gauze to keep it out of her eyes, and her fingers were locked around the wet metal rail of the wheelhouse window.

"Radar contact!" she called out, her voice dropping its soft cabin register and returning to that sharp, practical public-sector drawl. She pointed her trauma scissors through the thick grey mist ahead. "Two naval patrol cutters from the Ministry’s central harbor detail. They’ve lined up broadside across the narrowest point of the channel, three hundred meters apart. They’re running a synchronized extraction grid on the water."

Jun-ho shifted his gaze through the fog. The two massive gray steel warships loomed like dark walls across the entry path, their high-power halogen searchlights pinning the channel in a bright, crisscrossing lane of blinding white light. Between their hulls, a long line of thick, weighted cable buoyed by blue plastic drums sat right on the surface—a standard Ministry line net laced with a high-density mana-lock weave meant to tangle a boat’s prop and freeze its core logic instantly.

"Tugboat Seven, cut your power and prepare for boarding!" a booming voice shot over the water from the lead warship’s loud-hailer. "You are entering a sealed maritime zone! Drop your anchors immediately or we open the line!"

Old Man Hak jammed the throttle handle back by two inches, his black-stained fingers shaking on the plastic grip as he looked back through the glass window, his face gray under his wool cap.

"The nets are too thick, kid! If the hemp touches the blades, the single-cylinder engine will blow its piston straight through the deck plates! I have to turn the rudder back toward the sandbar!"

"Don’t turn," Jun-ho said. His voice was quiet, completely dry over the roar of the diesel exhaust.

He took three long steps forward, his rubber boots leaving two dark, split tracks in the salt slime of the deck as he walked straight to the bow rail.

Inside his chest, the vast, expanded pool of four thousand mana points throbbed with a low, deep frequency that made the iron plates of his core plate armor hum in response. The gray notification lines flashed in the corner of his eye, perfectly silent.

[Hostile Constraint Detected: Ministry Line Net (Mana-Lock Weave).]

[Activating Trait: Ashen Domain - Phase 3.]

[Mana Cost: 500 per minute. Current Mana: 2200/4000.]

"Tae-woo, lock the boards," Jun-ho called out over his shoulder.

The five elite vanguards burst out of the forward hatch, their massive new frames making the boat’s bow dip low into the grey swells. They didn’t say a word. They stepped right up to the rail, their massive arms hoisting the wide blocks of dark basin rock, slamming the stone edges flat against the timber bulwarks to form a solid, unbroken wall of dark mountain rock that completely covered the front deck.

Jun-ho let the frozen ocean behind his ribs break its banks completely.

Whoosh.

A sudden, circular wave of thick grey frost blew outward from his boots, instantly turning the wet fiberglass deck and the churning salt spray into a solid, white sheet of ice. The transformation was massive; the perimeter line shot thirty meters out across the open water, turning the rough, black sea swells between the lugger and the line net into a flat, motionless disc of solid white ice.

The world inside the thirty-meter perimeter slowed down until the white water breaking over the blue plastic drums looked like slow, lazy drops of clear oil hanging still in the fog.

The lead warship fired its two forward pneumatic line launchers, the heavy iron anchors releasing with a sharp explosion of compressed air. Two heavy steel cable loops shot through the mist, aimed to hook the lugger’s bow and drag the hull into the stone pilings of the cliff.

But the moment the iron loops crossed the boundary of the Ashen Domain Phase 3, their kinetic velocity was stripped by half. The heavy steel lines lost their momentum, slowing down until they looked like lazy iron snakes floating through the drizzle. Jun-ho didn’t even drop into a defensive stance. He raised The Ash Remnant with his left hand, the five-hundred-fold matte-black blade cutting a clean path through the frozen mist as he brought the flat side of the heavy weapon straight down onto the first falling cable.

The steel line didn’t just drop; the massive physical pressure of his level-twenty-one strength blew the wire completely to pieces, the individual steel strands unraveling and snapping like old twine. The shockwave traveled straight back down the remaining cable link, hitting the pneumatic launcher on the warship’s bow with a violent, heavy thud that tore the iron frame cleanly off its rivets, throwing the gun mount three meters into the dark sea.

The old wooden lugger didn’t stop. It hit the frozen white sheet of ice at full throttle, the heavy oak bow grinding through the frost with a loud, rhythmic roar that sounded like a giant saw cutting through timber. The boat rode right over the top of the weighted line net, the mana-lock weave completely frozen and cracked into useless gray threads under the pressure of his domain before the blue plastic drums could even touch the prop blades.

"What tier is that boat running?!" the naval captain screamed from the high bridge deck of the warship, his face turning an ugly shade of gray as his artificial blue scanner eye let out a high, metallic screech of friction, unable to register the density signature. "The tracking loop is completely dark! Mages! Re-align the harbor grid!"

The three Ministry mages on the bridge deck raised their silver staves, trying to channel a high-tier stone barrier to block the channel exit, but the sixty-second skill lock from the watch inside Jun-ho’s pocket had already frozen their logic lines into solid gray boxes, leaving their silver staves dark and useless.

The old wooden lugger slid right past the broadside of the two gray warships, its hull clear of the net, its twin props leaving a long, brilliant white wake of broken ice and foam in the dark channel.

Ten minutes later, the blinding white searchlights of the Ministry cutters faded completely into the thick yellow fog behind them, and the grey frost around Jun-ho’s boots melted back into regular salt brine.

Jun-ho lowered his sword, his fingers uncurling from the rough hemp wrap as the grey text lines at the bottom of his eye began to clear away. Through the open window of the wheelhouse, Old Man Hak let out a long, shuddering breath, his black-stained fingers turning the tiller toward the dark, low outline of the northern island cliff rising through the mist ahead.

"The block is cleared, Jun-ho," Eun-bi said, her voice returning to that flat, quiet public-sector drawl as she walked back to his side, her bare thigh pressing against his shins for stability as the boat entered the quiet water of the northern bay. "The storage vault is less than a mile down the shore line."

"Let’s go take the cores," Jun-ho said flatly.