The cannonball screamed through the smoke-thick air, a raw force of fire, iron, and fury. Its roar ripped across the sky like the final judgment of a dying god, trailing a tail of smoke behind it as if hell itself had spat it out. It arced high, barely clearing the blood-slicked deck where the merman lay, broken and breathless. His gills fluttered weakly. His body was a mess of bruises and torn scales, leaking dark fluid with every shallow breath. Still, he watched. We all did.
Time slowed as the cannonball flew.
Not literally—but that's how it felt. Like the universe took a breath. Like fate had decided to wait and see what we'd done. That cannonball wasn't just metal. It was desperation. Rage. A scream loaded into a barrel and fired by a blue-haired girl whose hands still shook from everything she'd seen. It flew like it had purpose. Like it knew this was the only chance we had left.
The demon never flinched. He never turned.
He was still walking, slow and steady, toward me. Toward the brick clutched in my hand like it meant something. His face was a blank canvas of obsession. Whatever was left of the man he used to be was gone. No anger. No fear. No awareness. Just hunger. Just the brick.
And then the ball hit.
It didn't announce itself. There was no impact sound before the scream of metal turned into flesh-crushing finality. One second the demon was whole. The next, he was a sculpture torn apart mid-carving. The red-hot iron seared through his back, burning a hole through his spine. It carved into his guts, organs collapsing like ash under the heat, bones cracking and splintering like dry wood. It didn't stop there. The shot punched through his chest and erupted out of him in a burst of gore so violent, it painted the deck like a butcher's canvas.
His torso exploded.
Not figuratively. It blew open like a sack of rotten meat thrown from a rooftop. Ribs, muscle, blood—all of it went skyward in a wet, horrifying display. His body spun from the force, twisted midair, then tore apart completely. Chunks of what had once been him rained down. His upper body was gone. There was no time for his blood to save him this time. No time for regeneration. He didn't scream. He didn't move. He didn't understand he was dead.
He just ended.
And I laughed.
I laughed like a madman. I laughed as bone shrapnel buried itself in my chest and tore into my eye. I laughed even as the same cannonball that killed him tore into my shoulder, ripping my right arm clean off and flinging it somewhere behind me. I dropped to one knee, blood gushing down my side—but I didn't stop. I howled with laughter, head thrown back, lungs burning. It was ugly. Cathartic. Wild. It wasn't joy. It was release. It was relief. It was the kind of laughter that only comes after you've survived something you were certain would kill you.
The demon had fallen.
The thing that had haunted our every breath, whose presence warped the air itself, was nothing now but meat. Bits and pieces scattered across the ship, some still twitching but no longer healing. No longer coming back.
And for the first time, silence didn't feel dangerous. It felt earned.
I turned, breathing hard, my body failing piece by piece—but alive. Just barely. And I caught the merman staring at me. There was confusion in his eyes. A strange, wary disbelief. He looked at me like I was the monster now, like whatever I'd become to laugh in the middle of this slaughter was something he couldn't understand.
The girl was quiet. Rifle at her side, knees shaking, blue hair wild in the breeze. She just stood there, staring at me. Her eyes were wide, filled with something I didn't want to name. Shock, maybe. Maybe pity. Maybe fear. Or maybe something deeper—something raw. She'd seen the worst of people, and now she was watching what it looked like to lose everything but still smile.
My stump bled freely. My face was half-red from the shattered fragments that tore across it. My eye was ruined, pulsing with each heartbeat like a second heart in my skull. But I kept laughing. Because we'd done it. Because something in this damned world had actually died and stayed dead.
I grinned at her with broken teeth and blood-slick gums.
She didn't answer. She just stepped forward, slowly, like I might still collapse. Her hands trembled as they reached for me. And I let her.
We stood like that in the middle of the ruin—a girl who'd fired a cannon, a merman who'd fought with his last breath, and a broken man laughing in the wreckage. Around us, the sea rocked the ship gently, as if the ocean itself had calmed now that the demon was gone.
But in that quiet, I knew something else. The demon might have died. But we all left something behind. Or at the very least only I did.
And still, I laughed.