Gunmage-Chapter 14: Breaking Point

The captain slumped against the wall, his body sagging like a puppet with its strings half-cut. He wasn't dead. Not yet. But he was tilting over the edge, staring into something neither Lugh nor any sane man could comprehend.

Lugh's breath hitched. His hands, reaching out instinctively felt like they belonged to someone else.

"What's wrong?" His voice cracked. A flicker of something foreign—genuine concern—etched itself onto his face.

Veyland flinched, recoiling as if Lugh's mere presence burned him. His pupils were like needles in a vast abyss.

Empty.

"It's no use, kid"

His voice scraped against the silence like rusted metal.

"I can feel my mind slipping"

Lugh's stomach twisted. No. That was impossible. A man didn't just feel himself going insane.

"What? How?! That's—"

"—Impossible?"

Veyland let out a breathless, humorless laugh. He propped himself up on one elbow, the dim light casting deep shadows across his face.

"This war... it took everything from me."

Then, the words changed. Bitter and poisoned, they spilled from his lips.

"I hate Ophris."

Lugh blinked.

"I hate the people."

A cold pressure formed in Lugh's chest.

"I hate the language."

Veyland's face twisted, and suddenly, the words were not in Ophrisian anymore. He spoke in Heiro now, his speech slurred.

"And I hate you, Lugh."

It was not a scream. Not an accusation. It was a fact. A sentence pronounced without fury, without spite—just exhaustion.

Lugh's fingers twitched. A heartbeat pounded inside his chest—his own?

Veyland's lips pulled into a thin, terrible smile.

"You're young, but you're not a child. No, you... you are the personification of everything that is wrong with that rotten kingdom."

Everything fractured.

Lugh's breath came sharp and fast. His fingers curled, nails biting into his palms. He should have let it slide. Should have ignored him. Should have been focusing on the inhuman things clawing their way toward them.

But he couldn't.

"You lost everything?"

Lugh's voice was colder than it had ever been. He refused to speak in Heiro.

"Have you forgotten who invaded first?"

A flicker of something, surprise, maybe amusement, crossed Veyland's face, but it was fleeting.

"Our priests were killed. Our temples burned."

His voice was distant now, his eyes unfocused.

"We couldn't remain idle."

"Bullshit."

The word left Lugh's mouth like a gunshot. Flat. Hollow. Dead.

"Heieg has always wanted our resources. You just made up an excuse to start a war."

The conversation continued, a dance of accusation and justification, of a man too far gone and a boy being dragged after him.

Two separate tongues. Two separate worlds.

Their words cut into each other, unraveling something deeper than just logic.

Veyland exhaled.

"Who can tell what the truth really is?"

Something shifted behind his eyes. Lugh knew what it was.

He was fading.

The darkness was eating him from the inside out, slow, methodical. Lugh had seen people die before, but not like this. Not aware of their own unraveling.

"I'd have asked you to help me find the answer, but..."

His gaze fixed on something unseen. His lips twitched.

"Live long enough to become the doom of your countrymen."

Lugh's heart slammed against his ribs. He met Veyland's empty gaze, and for the first time in 10 years, his voice wavered.

"Die in obscurity. Forever a slave to your homeland."

Veyland smiled.

BANG.

Lugh didn't see it happen—only the aftermath.

This chapt𝓮r is updat𝒆d by ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom.

The captain's head slumped against the wall, his grip still firm on the revolver. The sickly crimson bloom spread across the grimy metal, too bright, too real.

Something broke inside Lugh. A seam, a thread, an invisible thing that had kept him together.

Stay calm, Lugh. Stay calm.

Stay calm.

STAY CALM! DAMMIT!

The world spun. his hands clutching his head, his breathing shallow and erratic, panic rising like bile. His body folded into itself, shaking, shuddering.

Veyland was dead.

The sergeant was dead.

The brown-haired spy. Dead.

The soldiers. Dead.

And Lugh?

Lugh was still here – each death a hammer blow against his fragile state of mind.

Coming here had been a terrible mistake, the worst decision of his life. He should have stayed in the alleys, scrounged for food, saved every meager coin, and one day, escape that city of nightmares.

This world was too unforgiving, too cruel. Why was he still alive? At this point, Lugh craved nothing more than to curl up inside a resource crate and disappear.

But he couldn't, he wouldn't. The more the world tried to kill him, the harder he would fight to survive. There was no time for tears, no time for despair.

Picking up the heavy machine gun, he pushed open the armory door and stepped out. His legs sank ankle-deep into icy water.

Water?

Shit

The hull must have been breached. The water was rising rapidly. Lugh began to run, the 15-kilogram machine gun a dead weight in his arms. His footsteps echoed through the flooded corridors. Then, he heard it. Splashing sounds, not his own, coming from up ahead, steady and rhythmic.

He dropped to the floor, the cold water soaking his clothes, and extended the bipod of the machine gun.

Be patient

Three of the inhuman apparitions emerged from the shadows, their movements slow, deliberate, rifles gripped in lifeless hands, vacant eyes scanning for survivors.

Lying prone in the darkness, Lugh was invisible. He squeezed the trigger. The muzzle of the machine gun erupted in a blinding flash, a storm of bullets tore the human puppets to shreds.

Without pausing, Lugh scrambled to his feet, grabbed the gun, and continued his frantic flight away from the lower decks. If his theory was correct, the other monsters would be converging on the sound of the gunfire.

After witnessing their impossible coordination, Lugh had speculated that they were controlled by some kind of hive mind. They had been wrong before, but that was only because they had underestimated whatever force was controlling them.

Lugh refused to make that mistake again. He wouldn't underestimate them, not ever. It was better to believe they were capable of anything.

He quickly took up a position in a stairwell, a natural choke point. He would wait for them there.

Just then, he heard a loud snapping sound.

"What was that?"

Lugh whirled around, but saw nothing in the gloom.

The snapping sound came again, and he pinpointed the source. A section of the wall was cracking, fissures spreading across the damp wood.

Hmmm?

Lugh barely had time to register the danger when—BOOM!—the wall shattered. Splinters of wood and metal shredded through air as a torrent of pitch-black water surged into the corridor. The ship lurched violently, tilting at a sickening angle.

It's sinking.

The realization slammed into Lugh, and he abandoned all thoughts of fighting. He had to escape, to reach the main deck.

He ran, his boots slipping on the slick floor, dodging and weaving through the flooded corridors, occasionally encountering more of the inhuman soldiers.

He mowed them down with bursts of machine-gun fire or evaded them with desperate, frantic maneuvers. His luck was holding, for now at least.

No, his luck was terrible.

Trying to escape a sinking ship while being hunted by inhuman monsters was not a situation born of good fortune.

The incline of the corridors grew steeper and steeper. By the time Lugh reached the entrance to the main deck, the ship had already overturned, its hull pointing skyward at a terrifying 90-degree angle.

Behind him, he could hear the inhuman soldiers closing in, their senses honed to his presence. What was he supposed to do now? Start a perilous climb down the hull? To where?

"Arrghhh! F***!!"

Lugh screamed in frustration, uncaring of who or what might hear him.

Then, a deep thunderous groan shook the vessel, so intense that it cut through the cacophony of the storm.

Below him, he saw the ship beginning to split in two, the massive structure succumbing to the combined forces of gravity and its own immense weight.

Lugh's perception of direction shifted again as the front half of the ship snapped like a twig. He grabbed onto a protruding piece of metal and braced himself for the inevitable.

Wooden boards and metal plates were ripped away like paper as the crumbling ship accelerated its descent. It crashed into the churning, red-tinged sea with a deafening roar, and Lugh was flung meters into the air.

His body slammed into metal with a painful crack.

Lugh felt something break, but he didn't scream, didn't even feel the pain.

Because, as he was tumbling through the air he saw the sky.

And the sky saw him.

The sky!

Lugh wondered why he had ever been afraid of it. Above him, a perfect, bewitching replica of the Devil Sea stretched out endlessly, an inverted ocean hanging in the heavens.

He didn't question the impossibility of it. It felt...natural.

This time, the waters weren't inky black or luminescent red. They were transparent, offering a glimpse into the abyss beyond. Mythical creatures, ripped from the pages of an author's imagination, swam in vast, swirling schools.

Serpentine dragons with scales like obsidian mirrors, graceful sirens telling stories in languages older than time, coral reefs that formed intricate, mesmerizing patterns, patterns that whispered ancient, unspeakable secrets.

Lugh watched in fascination, transfixed by their alien beauty.

Then it changed,

The coral formations twisted and writhed, their beautiful designs dissolving into a grotesque, pulsating corruption that promised the utter annihilation of sanity. The majestic dragons transformed into abominable masses of flesh and shadow, pulsing and seething with dark energy. The graceful sirens degenerated into the familiar, wretched, four-limbed creatures that haunted his nightmares.

And at the heart of it all—something stirred.

Lugh couldn't comprehend its form, he only knew it was alive.

In the next instant, it opened its eyes, a gaze, cold and infinite, fell upon him.

Lugh's mind shattered.

Agony unlike anything he had ever known tore through him, deeper than flesh, deeper than bone.

He screamed.

In one horrifying instant, he was being beheaded by a graceful elf with eyes like polished amethysts, her expression serene, almost gentle.

In the next, he was drowning in the fetid, oily waters of the Devil Sea, the taste of brine and corruption filling his lungs. He watched himself writhe in agony, he watched others suffer the same torturous fate.

Suddenly, he was everywhere and nowhere at once, a multitude of alien perceptions assaulting his brittle mind.

His blood vessels imploded and his right eye exploded in a shower of gore and tears. His throat tore raw from screams he didn't remember making.

Icy hands grabbed him. pulling him, dragging him.

The inhuman soldiers had found him.

They hauled him across the shattered wreckage. He kicked and thrashed, trying to claw his way back from the abyss, his one remaining eye a swirling vortex of terror and pain.

It was no use.

"Leave me alone!" he shrieked, his voice cracking.

They dragged him to the splintered railings, their grip like iron, and tossed him overboard.

Lugh plunged into the churning, crimson waters of the Devil Sea.

The icy shock of the water a fleeting distraction from the infinite agony that consumed him.

He sank.