Chapter 1731 - 240 - The Battle at the Black Pole (6)

"Anne, how are things going?" I asked Anne, who was currently in charge of operating the entire ship while keeping an eye on all of its systems.

"Pretty good, Master," she replied with a smile.

It was a perfectly natural smile, nothing like the stiff or artificial expressions you might expect from a machine. Anne was entirely artificial and didn't actually possess human flesh, yet she was expressive enough that, at times, it was genuinely difficult to remember that she wasn't a real human being.

"We're about to reach the threshold of the mainland, and we're already entering the deeper part of the sea," she explained while keeping her attention on the control panel. "Everything appears to be functioning properly, and I don't think we'll have any issues going forward."

"Good," I said. "I'm going to head up for a while, so if something goes wrong, let me know immediately."

"Copy that, Master," she replied with a small nod before returning her attention to the ship's controls.

With that settled, I stepped away from the control panel and headed toward the upper deck. The ship was surprisingly quiet considering how far we had already traveled, and the steady sound of the waves hitting the hull had almost become background noise by now.

When I reached the first deck, I immediately spotted Serune standing near the edge of the ship while staring out across the ocean.

"If you're going to lean that far over the railing, you're eventually going to fall, you know?" I told her.

Serune quickly straightened herself after hearing my warning.

Considering she still wasn't particularly good at standing properly, she really needed to be more careful. This was basically her first time walking around with actual feet, so expecting her to have perfect balance right away would have been unreasonable.

"Ah, really? Sorry," she said while taking a small step away from the edge. "It's just that... this is the first time I've ever traveled on a ship."

She paused before suddenly realizing something.

"W-Well, I guess it isn't really the first time."

I understood what she meant.

After being kidnapped from her kingdom and transported all the way to the Empire, she had technically traveled on a ship before. Calling that previous experience a proper journey, however, would have been stretching the definition of the word quite a bit.

She hadn't exactly been on a relaxing vacation during that trip.

"But this is the first time I've actually been able to see everything like this," she continued while looking across the ocean with genuine curiosity. "I had no idea traveling by ship could actually be this fun."

Well, at least she was enjoying herself.

Considering how unpleasant her previous experience had been, seeing her genuinely excited about something as simple as traveling across the ocean was actually pretty nice.

"By the way, Leon," she suddenly said.

"What is it?" I asked while turning toward her.

"Are the two of you angry with each other?"

She glanced toward Shredica.

Shredica was standing a short distance away while deliberately looking somewhere else, almost as if she had suddenly discovered that the horizon was the most interesting thing in the world.

"It seems like you two aren't really talking at all," Serune added.

"Well, that's just how Shredica is," I replied. "I don't think she's the type who would simply walk up to me and start talking about whatever problem she's having. The only time she'd probably do that is when it's something she absolutely needs to tell me, especially if it's urgent enough that she can't keep it to herself."

"I-Is that so?" Serune asked, sounding slightly confused by my explanation.

She seemed to think about what I had said for a few seconds before eventually accepting it.

I couldn't really blame her for being confused.

Shredica wasn't exactly the easiest person to understand.

"O-Oh, we're here," Serune suddenly said.

I immediately looked ahead.

What I saw was something I honestly hadn't expected to encounter in the Great Ocean.

The Great Ocean was divided into several different regions, and one of those regions was known as the Black Pole.

The Black Pole wasn't anything like the North Pole or South Pole from my previous world. Instead, it was more like the darkest ocean imaginable, with the entire surface appearing so black that it almost looked as though we were sailing across an enormous sea filled with ink.

The strange thing was that the water itself wasn't actually dirty.

It was surprisingly clean.

The darkness came from beneath the surface, where the seabed was so dark that it looked almost exactly like charcoal. Because of that, the darkness beneath the water made the entire ocean appear filthy from a distance, even though the water itself was perfectly clear.

It was an incredibly strange sight.

Beautiful in its own way, but also unsettling enough that I didn't particularly want to find out what might be living underneath us.

"It should take us around three days to reach the next island," Serune said while looking toward the distant horizon. "At least if we maintain this pace, that is. Hopefully, there won't be any external factors that could delay us along the way."

That was exactly why we had chosen this route in the first place.

Even the mermaids would have difficulty interfering with us here.

The Black Pole was so dark beneath the surface that even creatures accustomed to traveling underwater would struggle to see properly. If they tried to follow the ship beneath the water, there was a good chance they wouldn't be able to see anything useful at all.

At least, that was what we were counting on.

The entire point of taking this route was to avoid unnecessary trouble.

"Leon."

Shredica's voice suddenly came from behind me.

I turned around and looked at her.

"What is it?" I asked.

"There are dead bodies floating on the surface," she said while pointing toward the ocean ahead.

For a moment, I didn't really understand what she meant.

Then I looked toward the front of the deck.

The Black Pole stretched endlessly before us, its dark surface moving gently with the waves.

Except the ocean wasn't empty anymore.

The surface was completely littered with bodies.

There were so many of them that I couldn't immediately determine where the first one ended and the next one began. Some floated close together while others drifted farther away, slowly being pushed around by the current.

What happened here?