As the shadow emerged beneath the surface of the water, Fisher, who had anticipated something and turned around, was the first to detect the signs. His pupils contracted, and a black sword handle slid into his palm. He swiftly vaulted over the railing amid astonished stares and yelled out.
"Hey! What are you doing?"
Emhardt, floating beside Fisher, thought Fisher was just going down to claim some spoils of war and reflexively flew after him for a distance. It wasn’t until Fisher yelled in midair that he noticed the shadow beneath the water growing larger.
Next, he stiffened in midair as he followed Fisher’s silhouette. The trajectory flying towards Fisher abruptly traced a semicircle in the air, and quickly returned above the deck.
He decided to provide long-range support for Fisher, offering him a strong and decisive mental boost!
Meanwhile, the crew members standing on the sea ghost’s corpse had only just heard Fisher’s words. But their extensive combat experience led them not to observe the situation underwater. Instead, they immediately chose to jump toward the adjacent waters.
In a split second, a massive abyss-like maw suddenly appeared beneath the huge sea ghost corpse, its interior a dark red with rings of densely packed fangs that made the maw resemble a meat grinder. Upon closer examination, the range of this gaping maw was even larger than the sea ghost’s corpse itself.
The suddenly appeared sea beast aimed to swallow the entire sea ghost corpse!
At that moment, there were still several crew members standing atop the sea ghost’s corpse who hadn’t had time to leap away. A mere one-second delay meant it was no longer possible for them to jump into the sea to escape; jumping down now would be akin to a lamb entering a tiger’s mouth, tantamount to rushing towards death.
Just then, at this critical moment, a fluid, tongue-like mercury rope swiftly looped around the waists of those crew members, tightly wrapping their bodies.
Looking up, Fisher, who had vaulted over the railing, stepped onto the hull of the Iceberg Queen and, with his right hand gripping the Fluid Sword’s black handle, forcefully pulled, rescuing them from the jaws of the sea beast just before they were devoured.
The huge sea beast suddenly emerged halfway out of the sea, and by the time it clamped its jaws shut again, the prey the Iceberg Queen had fought hard to capture had already been swallowed.
Leveraging the inertia generated by the creature’s leap from the sea, its head also fiercely collided with the bottom edge of the Iceberg Queen’s hull. With a piercing metallic wail, the entire ship seemed almost to flip over due to the impact.
Massive waves instantly submerged the deck of the Iceberg Queen. The group, including Pahetz standing on the deck, held tightly onto the railing, executing a form close to a pull-up. However, their personal firearms and curved swords slipped from their grip, tumbling into the sea with the slanting floor.
Fisher, due to the ship’s gradual tilting trend behind him, lost support in midair. His Fluid Sword could no longer hold onto those crew members who had escaped the jaws of death, and he could only watch helplessly as he and they fell toward the sea.
At this crucial moment, Ossie, perched atop the mast, quickly narrowed her eyes. Instead of standing, she directly spread her massive wings and emitted a piercing, sky-cleaving chirp. Amid the fierce sea wind, her wings enveloped her as she dove downwards like a drill, piercing through the splashing waves to reach the falling crew members.
Her normally shoe-clad feet were fully exposed, revealing two powerful bird feet.
In midair, she grabbed a crew member with one foot, and then with a fierce swing, she threw them back onto the soon-to-be-capsized Iceberg Queen.
Just then, inside the Captain’s Room of the nearly capsizing Iceberg Queen, a chilling wind from the Northern Realm howled in. As it swept through, any sea water it touched froze into ice at that moment.
Inside, Captain Alagina, supporting herself with one hand on the Phantom of the Ice Prince, drove the elegant Thrusting Sword into the ground, hoping that the frozen sea water would support the capsizing Iceberg Queen.
However, her hand held, after all, only the Phantom of the Ice Prince. The ice formed from the phantom was thin and brittle. Perhaps it wasn’t noticeable in an ordinary combat against individuals, but certainly, it was insufficient to hold up the massive Iceberg Queen.
As expected, the next moment, the ice formed on the side of the ship cracked, while the ship itself tilted several more degrees towards the sea.
Feeling the increasingly precarious support of the ice, Alagina’s expression turned slightly frosty. The next second, the Phantom of the Ice Prince in her hand abruptly vanished, and she turned her head, reaching towards the cold ice block at the far end of her room,
"Ice Prince, I ask to borrow the force of your freezing power..."
Following her words, the entire ice block responded like kind. Its surface fiercely burst forth streaks emitting a cold light.
The Ice Prince’s true body within the ice block, enduring for long like a suppressed entity, emitted an unfamiliar and sacred cry at its illusionary state. Waves of frost radiated out from the Ice Prince as its center, and the True Body of the Holy Relic flew towards Alagina.