EPISODE 42: Bake-Kujira (Part 2)

The rain of cannonballs and flaming arrows vomited by those three mysterious ships sliced through the darkness of the night, creating a scene of total destruction on the open ocean. The sound of cannon fire and roaring flames tore apart the dark silence of the sea.

At the bow of the Koreson ship, Zenoda stood upright. The powerful sea wind whipped his black linen coat while his right hand gripped the handle of the black Iado sword, which radiated its dark-blue mana glow. His sharp eyes tracked the movement of dozens of enemy skiffs — small fast boats — surging across the waves, trying to close in and board Master Vivaldi's trading ship.

(Didn't expect the Purple Snake organization to move this fast and deploy a combat fleet in the middle of the open ocean,) Zenoda thought, analyzing the situation with cold detachment.

He rotated his body slightly, turning toward the snow-haired girl standing beside him while maintaining her ice barrier.

"ELARA!" Zenoda shouted, his voice cutting through the roar of the waves.

Elara turned, breathing hard. "Yes?!"

"Freeze the sea right now! Stop those skiffs before they make it to our hull!" Zenoda commanded firmly.

At the extremely demanding order, Elara hesitated for just a second. Freezing actively moving seawater in the middle of the open ocean required enormous concentration and a massive amount of mana. "Ehh? Freeze the open ocean? Isn't that... Umm, alright! I'll do it!"

Elara ground her teeth and discarded every doubt. Recalling the mana circuit stability meditation method she had learned from Zenoda's mother over the past week, she closed her eyes for one second. She focused all her energy into the tip of her crystal staff, then slammed it hard against the wooden deck.

"FROST NOVAAAAAA!" Elara screamed.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACK!

A wave of blue-white cold air shot out from the hull of the Koreson ship, spreading rapidly across the ocean surface. The high-tier ice spell worked brilliantly. Elara successfully froze the surface area of the sea around their ship, forming a thick layer of ice that extended several meters in every direction.

Several of the enemy's fast skiffs that had been charging forward were suddenly and forcibly stopped cold. Their wave-riding momentum locked up in the instantly frozen ice. The masked snake-emblem soldiers on the trapped boats were halfway out of their minds with shock — their vessels seized completely immobile.

Watching his targets locked in place on the emergency ice field, Zenoda wasted no time. His dark eyes flashed with cold precision.

"I'm moving forward," Zenoda said briefly.

Without waiting for any signal, he leaped from the bow railing and launched himself down toward the ice field below. Using pure speed and the Iado close-combat style, Zenoda moved like a black shadow cutting through the night.

Shring. Click! Shring. Click!

The sounds of his short black sword's drawing and resheathing echoed at tremendous speed. Zenoda ran across the ice, moving past the trapped skiffs, and without a shred of mercy, cut down every enemy soldier caught immobile in the ice. In seconds, dozens of Purple Snake front-line soldiers fell dead before they could swing a single weapon.

After clearing the area below the hull, Zenoda jumped back to the deck of the Koreson ship. He looked at his two students, already standing ready with their weapons.

"Faizura, Ziryal! Both of you, come with me — we're boarding the enemy flagship directly!" Zenoda commanded, pointing at the massive black warship ahead that continued firing cannons. "We destroy their defensive structure from the inside!"

He then glanced toward the sky, where a giant lion-bird beat its fire wings overhead. "Annesia! Go with Valerius, provide us aerial fire support and distraction using his Griffon Familiar! And the rest — Karham, Agru, Linaya — stay and guard this ship tightly in case any other intruders break through!"

"UNDERSTOOD!" the entire group answered together with unified discipline.

Valerius grabbed his Flame Griffon's reins and launched high into the air alongside Annesia, who had already gathered an enormous fireball at the tip of her staff.

Meanwhile, Zenoda, Ziryal, and Faizura simultaneously leaped off the Koreson ship, crossing the ice boundary toward the churning open water to close in on the enemy flagship.

To move across the water without ice bridges, all three used their own unique energy manipulation methods tailored to their individual skills.

Zenoda moved at the front. He densified pure water-element mana beneath the soles of his feet. Every time his feet were about to contact the ocean surface, the water mana compressed into microscopic yet solid footholds, allowing him to run across the water as casually as walking on dry land.

Beside him, Ziryal the Assassin applied weight distribution technique — channeling his shadow mana through his clothing and weapons, reducing his body's effective weight to the absolute minimum so that physically he weighed no more than a feather, allowing him to dart across the waves without sinking.

Faizura, meanwhile, used the pure wind repulsion from his Gale Body. Each time his feet would contact the water, a small burst of wind energy released from his soles, generating upward thrust that let him skim the ocean surface like a flat stone skipped horizontally.

From the sky, Valerius and Annesia began their assigned roles. The Flame Griffon vomited high-temperature fire laser, while Annesia launched a barrage of massive fireballs in rapid succession against the enemy ship's deck. The relentless fire explosions created mass panic on the enemy vessel — destroying their cannons and creating a perfect distraction.

Exploiting the smoke from the explosions above the enemy deck, Zenoda, Ziryal, and Faizura launched off the waves in high synchronized jumps. Their bodies vaulted over the ship's railing and landed smoothly on the deck of the Purple Snake flagship.

The moment they touched down, dozens of snake-scale-robed enemy soldiers immediately surrounded them. Zenoda swept the area with his eyes, cataloguing the weapons the soldiers carried. Every one of them held a short sword of a distinctive design he recognized from his recent memory.

(Iado swords?) Zenoda thought, his eyebrow drawing slightly together. (Uncle Morlak said Iado was the characteristic weapon of wanderers and the middle and lower classes in the Southern Continent. If an armada this large is staffed entirely by Iado users in bulk... I suspect all of these people aren't the organization's core soldiers — they're probably just a group of hired bandits and Ronin serving as cannon fodder.)

"Die, intruders!" the bandits roared, surging forward with Iado blades drawn.

Zenoda didn't hold himself back. He stepped forward with cold precision, swinging his black Iado at terrifying speed. His draw-and-sheathe technique created flashes of dark-blue streaks that crossed every incoming blade and throat of every approaching bandit. Ziryal and Faizura moved on his left and right, eliminating enemies from their blind angles with daggers and wind.

But in the middle of the massacre Zenoda was unleashing, a silver streak launched at supersonic speed from the direction of the ship's helm room.

SHREET!

A weapon — a Naginata, a spear with a curved sword blade at its tip — came shooting through the explosion smoke, aimed with lethal accuracy directly at Zenoda's heart.

Feeling the killing edge threatening his life, Zenoda's combat instincts reacted instantly. He stopped his swing at the bandit in front of him, twisted his body ninety degrees, and immediately raised the Iado vertically to intercept the spear thrust.

CLAAANNNG!

The impact of hard metal rang out across the deck. Sparks lit the smoke. The force behind the spear thrust was significant enough to make Zenoda's mortal feet slide one centimeter on the wooden planks.

As the thick smoke thinned from the shockwave of the collision, a silhouette appeared — a tall man gripping the wooden handle of the Naginata. He wore a deep-black robe and a mask shaped like a snake's head, radiating a dense purple mana aura — the aura of Miasma.

"Oh? Your physical strength and blocking reflexes are very unusual for an Academy student," the snake-masked man said in a sly, hissing voice, pressing the spear harder. "Could it be you... are the one responsible for the failed mutation of Meoda and the arrest of the entire Duke Thundra household circle in the capital of Koreson?"

Hearing the question emerge from this mysterious figure's mouth, Zenoda's dark eyes narrowed sharply. His analytical mind engaged immediately.

(Huhhhh... He knows the specific details of the confidential Thundra family arrest that King Ronan hadn't even announced to the public yet?) Zenoda thought, looking coldly at the snake mask before him. (His Miasma aura is also extremely dense. Could it be... the man in front of me is one of the seven supreme commanders or core leadership of the Purple Snake organization itself.)

Zenoda gave no answer. He maintained his flat expression, refusing to provide any information.

The snake-masked man chuckled softly at his opponent's composure. "Oh... you're quite a cold and boring man, aren't you."

In the next instant — without a breath's pause — the man rotated his wrist with skillful precision. He drew the spear back as though it moved through space itself, then swung the Naginata's curved blade horizontally at tremendous speed, aiming to sever Zenoda's right wrist holding the sword.

Zenoda saw the deadly arc and didn't panic. With the full extent of his pure high-level reflexes, his body bent backward to an extreme angle, letting the spear blade sweep empty air only one millimeter in front of his chest. He then leaped back several paces to establish a safe distance.

The snake-masked man gave an impressed whistle, spinning the Naginata lazily above his head with a dismissive flourish. "Oh... you're genuinely very fast, boy."

Zenoda straightened his stance, bringing the black Iado down to his side. "Who are you, really? What rank do you hold within that cursed organization?"

"Me?" the man laughed emptily, his voice echoing in an eerie way through the darkness of the night. "Hahaha! Call me Purple Snake, as some fools on this continent know us. But... I'm afraid I don't have much spare time to play around longer with you Koreson rats tonight."

Zenoda furrowed his brow — his cosmic instincts suddenly caught a massive energy fluctuation rising from the ocean floor at extreme velocity directly beneath their fighting position. "What do you mean by that?"

The snake-masked man didn't answer in words. Instead, he looked upward — staring toward the ocean surface beside the ship with eyes that carried both genuine terror and mad satisfaction.

WOOOOONNNNGGG...

A whale call — enormously hoarse, hollow, and doubly resonant like a voice rising from a grave — suddenly erupted and split across the ocean. The low-frequency sound wave was so massive it created enormous ripples on the water's surface and vibrated the entire wooden structure of the enemy flagship.

BWOOOOOOOOSH!

The ocean surface beside the ship exploded with devastating force, ejecting water dozens of meters into the air. And from within that explosion of ocean water... a colossal creature of mythological scale broke through the night.

Faizura's eyes on the mast, and the eyes of every person on the Koreson ship, went wide with pure, undiluted horror.

The creature that surfaced was a colossal whale well over one hundred meters in length. But the creature possessed not a single ounce of flesh, skin, or blubber on its body. It was purely and entirely a massive Whale Skeleton — a bleached, dull-white assemblage of bones radiating an intensely dense fluorescent green spirit-mana energy that pulsed from every gap in its spongy framework. Two points of green light blazed inside its empty eye sockets, staring down at the entire armada with ancient fury.

The Ocean Calamity had arrived: Bake-Kujira.

The mystical creature half-hovered above the water, then brought its colossal bone tail down directly onto the center of the Purple Snake flagship where Zenoda was standing.

CRASHHHHH! BOOOOOOM!

The enemy's massive wooden warship was immediately and completely split in two — reduced to worthless splinters by a single swing of the bone whale's tail. Screams of panic and death from hundreds of hired bandits filled the night as their vessel sank in seconds.

Watching the arrival of the living catastrophe, the mysterious snake-masked man who had been Zenoda's opponent smiled behind his mask.

"It seems... my time in this performance has ended," the man hissed with practiced cunning.

Without wasting a moment, the mysterious figure stepped backward off the collapsing deck and fell into the ocean. Remarkably, the moment he touched the water, his body elongated and curved supernaturally, then swam away from the battle area at tremendous speed — moving through the water like a giant sea serpent. He fled, abandoning his own soldiers to die.

In the middle of the rapidly collapsing and sinking deck, Zenoda witnessed a horrifying scene all around him. Some of the hired bandits who had fallen into the ocean were trying to swim to safety. But the fluorescent green aura radiating from the Bake-Kujira swept across the water surface. The moment the green water touched the skin of the bandits, the grey-colored essence of their souls was forcibly extracted through the pores of their skin — absorbed into the bones of the whale — while their physical bodies dissolved, shattered, and vanished into the ocean in seconds.

"Instructor! This place is collapsing!" Ziryal shouted, leaping to avoid a falling mast, alongside Faizura trying to maintain his balance with wind.

Zenoda recognized the critical situation. If Ziryal and Faizura fell into seawater already saturated with the Bake-Kujira's green aura, their mortal souls would be destroyed instantly like the bandits. He had to get them back to the Vivaldi ship as fast as possible.

Zenoda stepped forward, sheathing his Iado. He concentrated his entire human water-mana circuit into both palms.

"Ziryal! Faizura! Catch this!" Zenoda called out.

He drove both hands forward toward the chests of his two students and released an extreme high-pressure water manipulation spell — a Water Cannon. Two cannon-scale water pillars launched from Zenoda's hands, hitting Ziryal and Faizura with precise targeting.

BOOM!

The repulsion from the high-pressure water blasts was overwhelming. Ziryal and Faizura's bodies were hurled like bullets through the air, crossing hundreds of meters above the sea, and landing safely on the ice field below the Vivaldi ship's hull.

But from the effort of channeling his entire human water energy to save both students, Zenoda's own body was driven backward — losing all momentum to make his own escape from the sinking ship.

Just as Zenoda was about to bend his knees and leap clear using his remaining physical strength, a colossal shadow eclipsed the sky above him.

The Bake-Kujira opened its enormous bone jaw wide — directly below Zenoda as he fell from the collapsing deck. A spiraling supernatural gravitational pull — a green spiritual vacuum — seized Zenoda's body and dragged it into the darkness of the whale's open mouth.

Zenoda watched that darkness swallow him whole. His dark eyes went wide.

"DAMN IT!" Zenoda cursed loudly, before the colossal jaw closed fully and swallowed him completely into the belly of the oceanic calamity.

THUD!

Ziryal and Faizura crashed hard onto the thick ice layer below the Vivaldi ship's hull. Both of them immediately scrambled to their feet, gripping their chests that ached terribly from the impact of Zenoda's water-rescue launch. Their breathing was ragged.

Above on the deck of the Koreson ship, Elara — who had been watching the battle with anxious eyes the entire time — watched Ziryal and Faizura return without the black-haired young man she had been waiting for. A deeply terrible feeling immediately seized her chest.

Elara ran to the ship's railing, looking down at the two water-soaked adventurers below.

"Ziryal! Faizura!" Elara called, her voice shaking badly with fear. "Where is Zenoda?! Why didn't he come back with you?!"

Ziryal and Faizura went completely still. Both of them lowered their heads deeply, refusing to meet the Princess's eyes. Faizura drew a breath that felt impossibly heavy, and adjusted his cracked glasses with violently trembling hands.

"Your Highness..." Faizura said, his voice hoarse and catching in his throat. "...Master Zenoda... umm, he sacrificed himself to push us back here. Zenoda... was just swallowed whole by that monster whale."

Hearing that terrible verdict delivered from the intelligence operative's mouth, the entire world around Elara seemed to shatter into fragments. Her hearing went hollow with silence.

The snow-haired girl went motionless. The crystal staff in her right hand slipped and fell, clattering against the wooden deck. All strength left her leg muscles instantly. Elara's body gave out and she fell to her knees on the ship's deck, tears streaming down her cheeks immediately.

The promise that night in Kaigan... the words "you will be the only man who becomes my King" resonated in her head, destroying the last of her mental defenses.

Elara looked up at the dark night sky — and screamed hysterically with all the force she had, her voice shattering the silence of the ocean:

"ZENODAAAOOOOOOOAAARRRGHHHH!"

The Princess of Koreson's cry of absolute despair tore through the hearts of everyone who heard it. Karham and Agru, standing nearby, clenched their fists until blood came, holding back a fury and grief too deep for words.

"What kind of creature... what the hell is that bone whale?!" Agru roared, driving his fist against the ship's railing until it cracked.

Cedric, standing near the helm deck with his face pale as a corpse, pointed toward the whale monster now floating calmly amid the sea-smoke.

"That is... the Bake-Kujira," Cedric whispered, his voice trembling entirely.

Agru turned sharply. "You know something about that monster, Cedric?!"

"That... that is the mystical creature that the Captain and Master Vivaldi told me about just a few hours ago in the helm room," Cedric answered, every part of his noble body shaking with fear.

Right at that moment, Master Vivaldi and the ship Captain came running out of the helm cabin with faces carrying maximum tension.

"Damn it... I never imagined that cursed legend would actually appear in physical form at a critical moment like this!" Vivaldi snarled, his hand clenching tightly around his gold dagger.

"What exactly do you people mean?!" Karham demanded, stepping forward with red eyes holding back his rage, his protective aura blazing unstably. "Explain what that creature is!"

The Captain swallowed with considerable difficulty, staring at the green bone whale silhouette in the distance. "It's... it's the Bake-Kujira, ladies and gentlemen. An ancient creature from the primordial age of the oceans. Every sailor in the world believes that its existence is the absolute symbol of misfortune, catastrophe, and unavoidable death for anyone who sees it."

"Then what do we do to save Instructor?!" Karham roared with frustration. "We can't just let him die in there!"

The Captain could only shake his head in helpless resignation. "If someone has already been swallowed into its jaws... no one has ever survived. Their soul would be melted and destroyed by the whale's spiritual energy within minutes."

In the midst of the despair flooding the Koreson ship's deck, Cedric suddenly looked upward at the night sky. He remembered something.

"Wait a moment..." Cedric murmured. "Where are Valerius and Annesia? Weren't they flying up above this entire time?!"

Meanwhile, far up in the night sky, behind a layer of thin dark clouds.

Valerius and Annesia were still on the back of the Flame Griffon, which was slowly beating its fire wings so as not to draw the sea monster's attention. Valerius's face was deeply tense and covered in cold sweat. He had just witnessed with his own eyes how the entire enemy ship had been destroyed and Zenoda swallowed whole into the colossal Bake-Kujira's jaw.

"Annesia..." Valerius said with a shaking voice, turning toward the red-haired girl behind him. "I... I saw it clearly. Master Zenoda was just swallowed by that strange green whale. That creature's power is too irrational for the two of us to fight from up here. Should we... should we fly back down to Master Vivaldi's ship immediately, report this, and begin planning a retreat?"

Hearing the retreat proposal from Valerius, Annesia did not scream in panic or break into tears the way Elara had below. The fire mage girl sat up straight on the Griffon's back, her reddish-brown eyes focused sharply on the Bake-Kujira's glowing green belly below them. There was no fear in her face — only calm and absolute certainty.

"No, Valerius," Annesia answered in a tone that was firm and completely cold. "We are not retreating one single inch. We stay here and prepare to help Instructor regardless of what happens next."

Valerius ground his teeth in confusion. "But, Annesia! You heard that creature's roar! Zenoda was swallowed whole! Logically, he—"

"Throw away your stupid logic, Valerius!" Annesia cut in sharply, her eyes flashing. "You don't know who my Instructor actually is. The mana resonance bond between me and Instructor since childhood in Kaigan cannot be deceived by any illusion of death."

Annesia clenched her fist, focusing her energy-sensing instincts. "Right now... inside the belly of that cursed whale... I can still feel the mana wave that belongs to Instructor. And listen carefully — his energy is not dimming at all. On the contrary, Instructor's mana right now feels so powerful, so massive, and completely unaffected. I am one hundred percent certain that Instructor is still alive in there!"

Annesia then pointed downward toward the Koreson ship's deck where the rescue water blast had sent two figures landing. "On top of that, I can see from up here that two people were thrown safely onto the ice — and by the movement posture of one of them, that's Ziryal. I'm sure he's already reported the situation to Karham and the others below."

Valerius drew a long breath, trying to trust the instincts of the girl behind him. "Alright... in that case, what's our plan from up here?"

"We continue flying and tracking the whale's movement from its sky blind spot," Annesia commanded, her eyes locked on target. "Keep tracking Instructor's mana coordinate inside it. And be ready... we attack that creature with the biggest surprise strike we have, the instant any opening — however small — appears from the inside!"

"Understood! GRIFFON — rise higher!" Valerius called, urging his massive Familiar to continue orbiting in the cloud darkness, standing watch over the night.

Cough. Cough.

Zenoda slowly opened his eyes. An overwhelming dizziness drove into the back of his head like a spike. He coughed, spitting a small amount of strange-smelling green liquid from his mortal mouth.

He pushed himself upright and scanned the surroundings. The place he was in bore no resemblance whatsoever to the inside of an animal or a normal whale's anatomy. There was no flesh, no stomach, no blood.

He realized he had been deposited inside a pocket dimension — a strange boundless world — where every surface of vision in every direction — sky, ground, and the air between — was saturated by a dense, dimly glowing fluorescent green.

Around him, on a field of thick green energy that resembled viscous liquid, Zenoda witnessed a harrowing sight. Several Purple Snake bandit soldiers who had been swallowed alongside him were crawling hysterically. But the air of this dimension acted like high-tier acid to mortal souls.

Zenoda watched directly as the grey-colored soul essence of the bandits was forcibly extracted through the pores of their skin by the dimensional pressure, leaving their physical body material to melt, disintegrate, and vanish into ash within seconds. Their souls were refined into fuel for the bone whale.

Feeling the same dimensional pressure beginning to creep across the surface of his own mortal skin, Zenoda experienced a wave of extraordinary pain — burning through every nerve in his body. His mortal reincarnation vessel screamed in agony from the spiritual erosion. His skin began to redden and blister.

(Tch... damn,) Zenoda cursed internally, pressing a hand to his tightening chest. (This ancient creature's spiritual body apparently possesses an absolute ability to forcibly absorb every life essence from mortal beings and systematically destroy the physical vessel material from the inside.)

Zenoda glanced at his belt pouch, briefly considering whether to summon his faithful attendant.

(In an emergency like this, I could technically chant a spell to call Mincilia out in her Grey Owl form to neutralize this dimension...) Zenoda shook his head quickly, abandoning the thought. (No. I can't do that. This pocket dimension is saturated with the pollution-toxin of a high-level dark spirit curse. Forcing Mincilia out in a place this contaminated could cause her fragile avatar form to be infected with the corruption or severely damaged. I have to resolve this on my own.)

Just as Zenoda was enduring the pain raking through his body's muscles, a voice — enormous, hoarse, and dimension-shaking — suddenly resonated from every direction of the green sky above.

"Oh... what a remarkably interesting mortal," the ethereal voice said, radiating ancient satisfaction. "Truly a remarkable achievement... You are the first mortal in one thousand years to survive and remain upright inside this dimension for longer than one minute without immediately melting to ash."

Zenoda looked upward at the green sky. Green light particles were gathering and condensing there, forming a manifestation of a whale spirit — somewhat smaller than its massive skeletal form outside. The spirit form hovered in the air, looking down at Zenoda with two blazing green eyes.

Zenoda stood straight-backed with a face as cold as ice, ignoring the burning across his skin.

"What exactly are you?" Zenoda asked in his absolute tone of authority, showing not the slightest trace of fear.

The whale spirit form released a terrible dual-layered hum. "Me? I am the manifestation of the rage and resentment of this open ocean. Across all of mortal civilization's history, many names, titles, and terrifying monikers have been given to me by humans... But I most frequently hear that the sailors of your world call me: Bake-Kujira."

Zenoda held the spirit's gaze. "So if you are the guardian of the ocean... why did you attack our fleet and swallow me whole into this repulsive place?"

The Bake-Kujira roared in fury, causing the green dimension to shake violently. "Because you... you greedy mortal humans always bring destruction and ruin to this sacred ocean! You foul my sea with your disgusting rotten blood from your pointless wars! And what enrages me most... you destroy each other, fire poison powder charges, and sink the wooden objects you call ships! All the metal carcasses and chemical toxins poison my waters, causing them to rot and destroying the ecosystem of the creatures under my dominion! You deserve to perish!"

Hearing the ecological indictment rooted in the ocean lord's pure fury, Zenoda exhaled a long breath.

"I understand your anger over this ocean pollution, Lord of the Sea," Zenoda said in a calm but firm tone. "But listen carefully. My companions and I on the Koreson ship had absolutely no intention and no desire to harm this ocean. We were lawful travelers on a voyage, who were suddenly and without provocation attacked by the snake-masked people of the Purple Snake organization. We were forced to defend ourselves. In this matter... my companions and I bear absolutely no fault for this contamination. I hope you possess the wisdom to understand this situation... and release me peacefully right now."

Hearing the request for release from a human trapped inside its own belly, the Bake-Kujira burst into laughter — the sound echoing with mocking contempt.

"HAHAHAHA! What an outrageously foolish and incredibly arrogant human being!" the Bake-Kujira's laughter resonated with contempt. "You are inside the absolute domain of my soul! Inside this Spirit Realm, I am the law! If I refuse your request... if I decide not to release you and instead allow your soul to be completely eroded here until you die... what exactly will you do, little rat?!"

Zenoda lowered his hands to his sides. He slowly closed his eyes, drawing a short breath to gather the focus of his entire energy circuit.

When he opened his eyes again, an absolute silence — one that transcended the boundary of the dimension — immediately seized every part of the green world.

Both of Zenoda's eyes... were no longer the dark black of a mortal being. His pupils faded completely, shifting dramatically to Pure Gold — radiating a brilliantly sacred divine light of an extraordinarily blinding level. The true god aura of the sleeping soul of Ursilium had begun seeping out through the seal of his humanity.

Zenoda looked at the Bake-Kujira's spirit form in the air with the gaze of a universe's creator looking at a small ant.

"Then..." Zenoda's voice was no longer a mortal resonance — it shifted into a multi-dimensional timbre of vast, immense weight, capable of cracking the stability of the pocket dimension around them in an instant, "...I will forcibly destroy this soul dimension of yours from the inside... until you beg and vomit my body back out."

The Bake-Kujira froze solid in the air. Its primordial instincts suddenly screamed with a pure horror it had not felt since the birth of the world. The gold aura beginning to radiate from the teenager before it felt so sacred, so boundless, so lethally final — that every trace of green energy in its Spirit Realm began to dim and tremble with fear.

Zenoda allowed the golden aura to wrap around his body.

"Never regret the choice you've made, Lord of the Sea," Zenoda threatened with absolute finality.

Instantly, the area around Zenoda's eyes and his entire body blazed with an overwhelming golden light — preparing to unleash a divine purification explosion that would shake the open ocean from within the belly of the oceanic calamity.