Laughter and easy talk filled the deck, voices rising and falling with the rhythm of the sea. The ship moved forward, unhurried and indifferent to the shadow that had already come aboard.
Two of the recently rescued sailors — Tinir and Salo — stood slightly apart from the others and exchanged a look that carried the quiet precision of men who have rehearsed a job together.
They were not castaways. They were Stand Users sent by DIO, and their abilities had names: Dark Blue Moon for Tinir, built for naval havoc; Red Fear for Salo, a power of living rust and rot.
They had kept their exhaustion well-practiced. Tinir found the Old Sailor and rubbed his temple with a convincing show of fatigue, voice hoarsened to just the right degree.
"We've been drifting all night," he said. "We can barely hold on. Could you find us somewhere to rest?"
The Old Sailor waved them below without any real attention to spare — a tired, absent gesture that revealed nothing suspicious. "There are still empty bunks in the lower cabins. Go on."
The light dimmed as they descended the narrow gangway. Tinir paused at a corner, swept the corridor with a quick look, and waited until he was certain they were alone before lowering his voice.
"Six of them in total. Four on deck, two in the cabins."
He watched Salo's face for the faintest reaction, then outlined the plan with the calm of someone who had already run through it a dozen times in his head.
"My Dark Blue Moon handles deck combat. I'll take those four. You handle the two below. Set the explosives first — then we move."
Salo's reply was soft and final. "Set the explosives first. We cannot fail like the others."
They separated and moved through the dim corridors with quiet, practiced efficiency, probing cabin layouts, pressing miniature charges into seams and behind bulkheads — making the ship itself a weapon.
The cabin where Joseph and Shintaro rested was quiet. Shintaro slept with the particular completeness of a body spending everything it had on repair. Joseph sat under the lamplight, a book open in his lap.
Footsteps passed the door — so faint they might have been the ship settling. Joseph's gaze moved to the crack of light at the threshold. A glimpse of a figure: uniformed as a sailor, but not one of the crew.
He closed the book. Rose without sound. Opened the door.
"Excuse me, sir — a moment." Joseph stepped into the corridor with a smile that could disarm more than one kind of danger. "You look unfamiliar. Did something happen out there?"
Tinir's heart lurched, but his face gave nothing away. He shaped his expression into post-disaster exhaustion, let his fingers find the hem of his shirt, let his voice carry a tremor that sat just where real fear would.
He told the story — small boat, storm, rescue that morning — each word calibrated to the image of a helpless castaway. Every detail fitted the part.
The caution in Joseph's eyes eased slightly — but didn't vanish.
"Looking for somewhere to rest? I know these cabins. I'll show you."
He moved down the corridor at an easy pace. Tinir followed, keeping his exhaustion on his skin, his mask intact, his internal calculation adjusting for the delay. If he missed the meeting point, Salo would adapt.
Joseph stopped at a door and pushed it open. "This one should work. The ship only has doubles." Tinir stroked his beard and offered thanks that sounded genuine. "More than enough — a hundred times better than the sea."
Joseph nodded, kept his distance. "I'm in the room diagonally opposite. Find me if you need anything." He turned and left — there was a bottle of cola waiting somewhere, and he had no concrete way to test this man's nature without making more noise than it was worth.
The door clicked shut.
The grateful smile on Tinir's face froze and slipped into something else entirely. He drew a flat, circular charge from inside his coat and pressed it into the shadow along the inner door frame. Then he sat on the edge of the bunk with his arms crossed and waited.
His mind filled in the image he wanted: the cabin erupting, the six of them consumed, himself and Salo returning to Egypt with the mission complete.
Jie jie jie...
Elsewhere, Salo completed his placements in minutes and settled into the shadow of a ladder, arms folded, cold gaze sweeping the corridor.
"This side is all ordinary sailors," he murmured. "The targets are on the other side." He waited three minutes. Tinir didn't appear.
He started moving — leather gloves whispering against fabric as he walked toward the agreed meeting point. "He's been delayed. I'll clear that side first."
Tinir slipped out of the cabin at roughly the same time, heading for the rendezvous. He found Salo approaching from the other direction, gave a small nod, and pointed silently toward Joseph's door.
Salo slowed to a stop five meters out.
The air behind him warped.
Red Fear manifested.
It had no face — only a massive megaphone where a face would be, wrapped in a dirty red-checked scarf. Its hands ended not in fingers but in two rusted scythes, edges stained with old, dark grime. Its legs seemed sunk into the floor as though they dragged soil behind them; blood-red sludge oozed from every seam and pooled at its feet, carrying the smell of rust and rotting earth. Protruding ribs. Skin like parched, cracked earth studded with dense pineapple-like growths. Nothing in it was soft. It was a thing built from resentment and grave soil, and it bent the light around it into something that made the senses want to look away.
Inside the cabin, Joseph had just settled back into his chair when footsteps swept past the door again — quick, no longer the drag of exhaustion.
The contradiction registered immediately. A man who claimed to be at his limit didn't move like that.
Joseph rose, opened the door —
— and came face to face with Salo's ice-cold stare and the hateful, towering silhouette of Red Fear behind him.
His reflexes did the rest before conscious thought could form: a lunge backward, the door slammed shut, the lock turned.
"Shintaro—" he started, then cut himself off with a glance at the sleeping form. His mind was already racing. The others were four decks up. He needed to warn them. He scanned the room for options. Breaking the door makes too much noise and alerts Tinir on deck. There has to be a quieter way.
Outside, Tinir registered Joseph's alarm and didn't waste a second — he turned and sprinted for the deck.
In the corridor, Salo raised his hand.
Red Fear's megaphone opened.
A harsh, discordant revolutionary anthem rasped out of it — metallic and grating, a sound like rusted machinery tearing itself apart.
The door lock answered first. Dark red rust bloomed across the metal latch, spreading with the speed of something hungry — crawling, eating outward. Within the space of three seconds the latch was unrecognizable. By four, it had begun to crumble, shedding fragments with a sharp, acrid smell of corroded metal. On the fifth second, Salo drove his boot into the door.
The room was empty.
The porthole glass lay shattered across the floor. Sea wind moved the open pages of Joseph's abandoned book. Beyond the broken frame, the night stretched over churning water.
Salo moved to the porthole and looked down. Dark swells, white foam, nothing else. He scanned left and right.
"Jumped into the sea?" he said, with a sound that was almost a laugh. "A fine choice."
He turned toward the corridor, Red Fear still lingering behind him. The megaphone head tilted faintly, as though listening for something it hadn't heard yet. The stench of rust and rot moved with it through the narrow passage.
On the deck above, Narancia's story about the training pool had just reached its punchline. Polnareff's laughter still rang in the salt air.
Neither of them heard what was moving beneath their feet.
[well, my day was quite shitty a family member got hospitalized and my new fic doesn't have any new reader or any feedback is it too expensive I don't know will post it on webnovel next week please support]
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