Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 17 - The Mirror Sea Grimdark *burp*
Pirate military dunked in cyberpunk/bodyhorror: Arkion and the Baltikons get the Kraken Pisces TOAD while cleaning it of Gisnepo occult murder artwork. Grief wears the face of an old friend.
The top saucer of the Sampo gleams dull gold under a dead sky—a coin flipped and forgotten. Wind screams across it, sharp enough to shave regrets.
Arkion’s crew stands ready near the rim. Atlas’s crew waits twenty metres off—no speeches, no ceremony. Just a nod, a half-salute, and both teams turn away, boots ringing on gold like punctuation nobody asks for.
“You got the schemas,” Arkion mutters, voice low enough the wind has to lean in to steal it.
Bartel—newest member, contractually required to be suicidal sunshine—answers from three body-lengths ahead. “I spin the filament. You pop umbrellas. We shoot the gap. Then do the flying-squirrel thing. Easy.”
Easy is the last word the universe lets him finish before lightning answers.
Filaments hiss. Umbrellas bloom—shimmering red-black parasails snapping open like blood wings. Two crews launch off the golden saucer, gliding out over the Baltic like drunken angels who skimmed the manual.
They drop toward the Mirror Sea.
Below them, the water lies unnaturally still, a black mirror reflecting nothing. In its depths rests the dark outline of the Kraken—a motionless shadow nearly two hundred metres long, tentacles coiled like sleeping serpents around a swollen, barrel-shaped body. No lights, no movement, just the faint, sick silhouette of something ancient and wrong waiting on the seabed.
Wind dies mid-breath. Parasails sag. Targets drift apart. Gravity shrugs.
They scatter.
Arkion’s red marble flares hot—crown cannons charging red overhead.
“Bartel,” he says, calm while falling, “I can feel the cannons behind us charging up already.”
“I am ready to eat!” Bartel flicks his hands; they flash white—he throws two slow-moving balls of light that settle around the Kraken below and begin to orbit it, underwater, camouflaged.
They punch through the Mirror Sea.
The Kraken’s hull opens—a grinding iris of black metal and barnacles—and swallows them whole.
The air inside hits like a wet slap: thick, warm, tasting of copper and rot. Corridors pulse with sickly fluoride light, walls slick with a membrane that breathes slow and wet. Low, constant stomach-growling rumbles through the deck plates—deep, hungry, patient.
Tall figures lurch in the gloom: corrupted Eesian Whites. Once flawless ceramic statues, now cracked eggshell husks animated by Gisnepo occult. Blood sigils glow faint violet inside the cracks. Joints grind like cheap porcelain. Frozen polite smiles while their limbs hack the air in endless murder loops.
The Baltikons move like terminators forged from lightning and spite—plasma flares crackling at fists and heels. They crash forward in practiced formation, wading through the first wave of dolls.
Twang. Morris’s shot caves a skull. Shards explode.
Another Baltikon zooms past in a red blur—plasma dash—shoulder-checks two dolls into pulp against the wall.
Ink sprays everywhere. It hisses where it lands on zerks, eating seams, whispering in guttural Gisnepese curses that crawl under the skin.
One Baltikon shakes his arm hard—wobble technique—ink sloughs off in black sheets.
“Seen worse on abandoned carts,” he grunts to Bartel, kicking a shard aside. “Don’t over-exert, kid. Save yourself for the condensers. We’ll need the juice if the Anomaly catches us.”
They clear the entry chamber fast—bodies folding, shards crunching under boots. Ink hisses where it touches zerks. No jokes now. Just grim efficiency.
At the branching veins, walls ripple like flesh. Everyone knows their point.
The crew phases through—in and out of the Kraken’s cells, vanishing into the guts toward the control nodes they need to hack to carjack the beast.
Arkion nods at Bartel. “I’ll escort you to the Heart Chamber.”
They move together—boots silent on wet deck—down one of the eight main corridors that radiate like arteries from the entry. The passage narrows, walls pulsing slow and sickly.
Halfway through the gut, the first cannon blast comes—red sun streaking down from the Sampo, visible through a translucent membrane overhead.
Bartel plants himself dead center, hands flaring daylight white.
His two white sparks orbiting the Kraken’s hull speed up, remaining underwater for camouflage. The Sampo’s sensors won’t detect the absorption tech until it’s too late.
The surge of energy from him attracts a wave of Gisnepo critters—spilling from side veins, waking up from their cells—scuttling porcelain spiders, ink-slick flayers with needle limbs.
Arkion meets them. For a moment, his Kaestus adds an intense red glow to the entire corridor.
He punches the nearest wall—red plasma surge rippling outward like a shockwave. The impact shatters half the wave in a burst of ceramic trash and black ink. The rest scatter, stunned.
Bartel catches the cannon blast clean—white lightning flooding his condensers, pure and bright. He feels uncomfortably energized.
The gut falls quiet again—Arkion stomps the last critter. They can hear faint thrashing behind all the walls—the Baltikons are busy.
Press on.
The Heart Chamber opens ahead: a vaulted cavity thirty metres across, engines throbbing behind translucent membranes like a massive, exposed heart. Gisnepo occult junk litters the space—more Whites, taller than the ones back at the Entry Chamber, now assisted by automated turrets twitching on barnacled mounts, ink sacs ready to burst.
Two waves hit at once while they’re not even out of the doorway.
First wave: close tall flayers lunging with blade-limbs.
Arkion glows red—Kaestus phasing a plasma hammer into his fist. One swing crushes three into porcelain gravel, advancing to the center point of the Heart Chamber.
Bartel’s hands glow white 10000K and he lights up the entire stage—leg sweeping low, heel-kick shattering two more. Shards rain.
They move like mirrored lightning: red crushing, white piercing—fists, elbows, knees phasing plasma blades and hammers in and out, turning flayers to gravel.
Second wave: ranged mobs and remaining flayers, ink sacs bursting mid-air.
Arkion scoops a fistful of shards from the floor. Left hand forms a slingshot—thumb and index finger charged red.
Bartel mirrors—white charge.
They load, pull, release. It hits like a shotgun.
Porcelain gravel screams out—red shots exploding in small crimson fireballs, white shots bursting into blinding flares that scatter like miniature suns.
The chamber lights up like a war strobe.
Flayers shatter mid-leap. Turrets spark and die. Ink sacs pop harmlessly in the light and the liquid burns up in small explosions.
Silence. Just the low, satisfied thrum of the heart within the walls.
Bartel exhales, hands still bright from drawing energy from the orbiting condensers.
Arkion wipes ink from his hands, eyes already on the far wall—the black glass waiting.
“See you later, kid.”
The mirror ripples—inviting, patient.
Arkion steps through.
Tight corridor beyond—squeezing, wet, barely shoulder-wide. Walls breathe against his zerks, warm and possessive.
Ten metres. Twenty.
Then it opens.
The Brain Chamber.
Smaller than the Heart—classroom-sized, high vaulted ceiling—but wrong in every detail. Throne at the center: swollen cables of squid-nerve, yellow Vialence vials stacked like offerings.
On the throne sits the soulless Blue Brute—dark-blue vedantic nightmare swollen to grotesque deity size, empty static eyes reflecting nothing. Something pretending to be navigator.
Arkion greets it anyway. “Wrong seat, buddy.”
The brute moves first—lunge so fast it cracks the deck, fist the size of a boulder.
Arkion sidesteps—barely—feels the air split where his head just was.
Counter: red-flare elbow to the ribs. Impact like thunder. Ceramic cracks spiderweb across the brute’s torso.
It doesn’t flinch. Just grabs Arkion by the throat, lifts him, slams him through the wall.
They crash into the next chamber—squid-flesh ripping, ink spraying, coating everything in stinking night.
Arkion rolls, kicks off the wall, rockets back—red plasma hammer phasing into his fist mid-swing.
Connects. The brute’s jaw shatters.
It staggers. Roars. Swings wild.
Arkion ducks, sweeps the leg—brute topples, crashes through another wall.
Silence.
Then—footsteps. Slow. Deliberate.
The brute stands, half its face missing, still moving.
“Fuck.”
It charges.
Arkion meets it head-on—red flare building, second cannon charging overhead—
They collide mid-chamber, Arkion miscalculated, flies through another wall, sticks to the floor.
The brute already hovers over him, leg over Arkions’s head—crushing blow incoming—
NSS flickers. Half the team is busy still clearing their guts from violent Gisnepo trash.
Bartel—hands blazing daylight white—feels the surge coming. Opens the valve just a hair.
White lightning forks every vein.
Trash mobs shatter mid-lurch—ceramic explosions, shards skittering like hail.
The brute jolts. Foot frozen in air.
Arkion surges—red blazing—uppercut through its jaw.
Shards rain. The body topples, finally still.
He strides to the navigator throne, wiping ink from his hands like it burns.
Rips padding from armrests—exposes raw, glistening squid-nerves.
Sits.
Grips the wires.
Tendrils bite into Arkion’s palms. Pain blooms sweet.
“Yahu.”
The crew locks in—scattered through the guts, stances perfect, condensers blooming white.
Third cannon fires—red god fury streaking down from the Sampo.
Bartel reaches for it.
White lightning floods the condensers—pure, clean, daylight bright.
The sheer volume of power surges through him, heightens his senses even further.
He sees it then in the ceiling of the Heart: the entire ship struggling under two warring auras.
Maroon bolts—dark, almost brown, thick as clotted blood—pulse from the walls, the Whites’ cracks, the ink itself. Gisnepo’s old occult rot, fighting for control. Which is normal when trying to carjack Gisnepo vassal property, but…
Over it, a misty violet haze seeps from the corridors where the others stand.
He keys Clarity. “Why is this—”
The channel boots him hard.
NSS: Pending.
Bartel stumbles toward a nearby cell, falls through the rippling wall—and lands in Morris’s corridor, boots crunching on porcelain shards to avoid the pooling ink.
Morris stands bathed in violet mist—streams of it pouring from his eyes, his mouth, his pores—flowing outward, soaking into the ship. The whole hull drinks it in, plates shifting to the same glassy purple sheen.
Bartel’s skin crawls.
He extrapolates: the violet is coming from all of them. Every Baltikon who carried the purple eye-fleck. That means: everyone but him.
Cut to Arkion; sits, hands cramped—can’t let go. He cracks his neck, reluctant, fighting something—He assumes it’s the Gisnepo corruption that’s trying to take him over. A low curse escapes—half growl, half prayer.
He exhales. Opens his eyes.
Violet floods out, thick as smoke.
He blinks, confused. His vision flickers—violet bleeding at the edges.
A voice surfaces. Familiar. Impossible.
Martin?
Martin’s voice—raw, broken, the same voice that died in Siberian snow a year ago, the voice that had been shouting his name when Rupert’s Vase exploded into sand and glass and silence.
“Get… me the… wet croak …”
Silence.
“Did that little shit just croak?” disgusting burp.
It makes him laugh. Arkion’s breath catches. “No. You’re not—”
The purple dust in the air gushes in.
They hear whispers. Gisnepo?
The Gisnepese are commenting, “she took charge, she took charge of the vessel.”
The voice keeps going, patient, sad…
Something crawls—cold, segmented tendrils of black ink slithering up Bartel’s legs, locking him in place. Gisnepo’s old occult defense, still active.
Then—violet bleeds through the ink, corrupting it.
Glass thorns erupt around him—purple, sharp, wrong—caging him tight, inches from skin.
Not Gisnepo anymore. Something older.
A hissing voice fractures the air, ancient and glitching:
“Good boy… keeps… the light… gurgling croak …burning… or friends… thick, wet belch …taste the deep…”
Bartel’s heart hammers. He jerks instinctively—tries to step back.
The spikes answer. They inch closer. A hair’s breadth. Then another. Sharp tips kissing the edges of his zerk, promising to pierce if he breathes wrong.
He freezes.
Then surrenders.
Right into the—calm, impossible—and the Voice of Monad whispers like honey:
Touch that dial again.
His right hand—still free enough to move—is pinned against his thigh by the ink tendrils, fingers splayed. The Kaestus palm faces inward, glyph-dial hidden against his leg.
He feels it there: the small, raised rune-valve. The one that woke up Mr. Crazy Laos just the other night. That dial.
Dead water effect outside vanishes. Mirror Sea ripples for the first time in weeks.
Martin’s voice again, faint: “Groak…blind… Burp.”
Next blast loads—fires.
Swoosh.
The Kraken bolts—violent black squid lunging toward the Sampo like it suddenly remembered an appointment.
Martin, softer: “Ughhhhhh… side…”
Violent black squid-Kraken bolts from the depths — tentacles whipping, ink trailing, classic sea-monster terror. Violet corruption gleaming on its skin like oil.
Bartel shifts his wrist—barely a centimeter.
Spikes close in. One pricks the back of his glove, drawing a thin line of blood.
He stops breathing.
He curls his fingers inward, thumb searching blind along the Kaestus edge.
Another twitch of his leg. Spikes answer, shrinking the cage to the width of a coffin.
His thumb finds the rune-dial.
Presses.
SHRIIIIIIEK
The Kraken breaches the surface—body bloats, tentacles fuse into a thick tail.
Mid-air, it curls into a gigantic tadpole—bulbous head, stubby limbs sprouting, tail thrashing like a propeller.
Lands with a tidal-wave SLAM. Water explodes upward in slow-motion violet sheets.
Coils again—this time limbs lengthen, tail shortens, skin warting over.
Launches higher—now a teenage frog the size of a destroyer: gangly, awkward, but already terrifying.
SHRIIIIIIEK
Is a deep, wet, earth-shaking groak that rattles the fleet’s hulls.
Body swells to battleship scale, warts like boulders, eyes glowing violet.
A crown of ancient barnacle-thorns tops its ridiculous head.
It lands on the Sampo’s lower flank with a cataclysmic KONG—webbed feet sticking like magnets.
Massive tail (still remnant from squid phase) whips around and SLAPS the Sampo’s hull.
The megastructure doesn’t even flinch—just a distant, indifferent thud echoing through the metal like a god swatting a mosquito.
Continue reading:
Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 18 - Capricorn
Daegan stands before the mirror that isn’t a mirror.