Solo Streaming: My only viewer is Yandere Goddess

Chapter 70: Eerie Nightmares

The Kashima Maru had become a drifting tomb of cold starlight. As the fleet reached the absolute center of the Necropolis’s buffer zone, the ash-tide ceased its movement. The water was a gelatinous, grey medium that held the ships in a suffocating grip. Silence here was not the absence of sound, but a physical weight, which is a pressure that squeezed the air from the lungs of the two thousand survivors.

Ren Hanshin sat in the center of his cabin. The room was no longer a human living space. The steel walls were coated in a thick, crystalline layer of red frost, and the air was saturated with the heavy, cloying scent of lavender and ancient smoke. He did not sleep. At present synchronization, the concept of rest was a relic he had discarded. Instead, he existed in a state of Celestial Vigil, his mind unfurled like a map across the threads of the surrounding miles.

[Synchronization: 59.2%]

[Condition: Divine Obsession]

Ren’s body was perfectly still, his porcelain skin glowing with an amber-rose light that thumped in time with the heartbeat of the Heavens. His left arm remained bound to his chest by starlight threads, a useless anchor to his humanity that he refused to acknowledge.

But as the night of the Necropolis deepened, a period where the leaden sky turned into a void of absolute black, the Weaver’s presence changed. She was no longer a voice in the back of his mind. She was a physical manifestation of a Goddess’s obsession. The air in the cabin rippled. Thousands of red silk threads emerged from the shadows, weaving themselves into the form of a woman. She was taller than a human, her body made of swirling nebulae and shimmering silk. She did not have a face, only a veil of starlight that hid a beauty too sharp for mortal eyes to behold.

She approached Ren, her movements a fluid, hypnotic dance. She sat behind him on the frosted floor, her long, starlight arms wrapping around his neck. She pressed her cheek against his, and Ren felt a cold, electrical surge of intent that made his very soul vibrate.

[Weaver]: My King... Why do you still hold onto that broken limb. Why don’t you come to me forever?

Ren’s eyes, twin singularities of crimson fire, stared straight ahead. "The burial is not complete. The God of Death still breathes."

[Weaver]: He is nothing. A Thread that has already been snapped. Look at us, Ren. We are the Perfect pattern.

The Weaver began to stroke his hair, her fingers leaving trails of red sparks. This was the eerie night, a period where the Goddess’s jealousy flared into a terrifying possessiveness. She began to whisper into his ear, not of battles or power, but of a future where there were no ships, no survivors, and no Haru. A future where there was only the Loom and the Executioner, drifting in the infinite void.

Outside the cabin, the crew of the Kashima Maru was drowning in a nightmare. The Weaver’s presence in the physical world was a conceptual radiation. In the berths below, sailors screamed in their sleep. They dreamed of their own lives being unraveled. They saw their mothers’ faces turning into silk. They saw their childhood homes being folded into geometric shapes. The Silk-Sickness was spreading.

Tanaka stood outside Ren’s cabin, his hand white-knuckled on the hilt of his sword. He could feel the cold radiating through the steel door, a cold that felt like the end of time. He could hear the low, melodic humming of the Weaver, a lullaby that made his own heart skip beats in a desperate attempt to match the rhythm.

"Ren..." Tanaka whispered, his breath a cloud of grey frost. "Please... come back. The men... they’re losing their minds. They’re starting to see the threads, Ren. They’re trying to pull them out of their own skin."

Inside the cabin, Ren heard him. For a fraction of a second, a spark of the porter stirred beneath the silk. He remembered Tanaka’s laugh. He remembered the weight of the bags they had carried together, but as the spark flickered, the Weaver’s grip tightened. She leaned forward, her starlight veil brushing against Ren’s lips. She was cold. So cold that she made the Necropolis feel like a furnace.

[Weaver]: Ignore the ant, Ren. He is a frayed end. Focus on the silence and the thirst.

Ren’s right hand moved. It wasn’t his will. It was the contract. He raised his hand toward the door, his fingers shimmering with a lethal, amber heat. He could see Tanaka’s soul through the steel, a thin, stuttering white thread. It looked so fragile. So easy to cut.

’If I cut it, the noise stops,’ the thought echoed in Ren’s mind. ’If I cut it, the pattern becomes smoother.’

"No," Ren rasped, the word a jagged edge that cut through the Weaver’s humming.

The red cracks on his skin flared with a protestant light. He fought the movement of his own hand, his human intent clashing with the divine mandate. The friction was so intense that the steel floor beneath him began to liquefy into a pool of molten silk.

[Synchronization: 59.3%... 59.5%...]

The battle for Ren’s soul was a struggle of identity. The Weaver was a goddess of Fate, and she had decided that Ren’s fate was to be hers alone. She began to manifest more of herself, her silk threads wrapping around Ren’s chest, binding him to her like a lover and a prisoner.

"Niisan?" The door to the cabin didn’t open, but a sapphire light began to bleed through the cracks. Haru was standing in the hallway, her sapphire core erupting in a brilliant, defensive blue that pushed back the red frost.

The Weaver let out a sound, a high, piercing screech of conceptual jealousy. The lavender scent in the room turned into the smell of ozone and burning ozone.

[Weaver]: The Blue Light... It disturbs the Loom! Cut it, my King! Cut the sapphire core!

"Go away, Haru!" Ren roared, his voice a harmonic explosion that shattered every lightbulb on the deck. "Stay away from the door!"

"I won’t!" Haru’s voice was a human scream that pierced the divine silence. "I saw the men in the infirmary, Ren! Their memories are turning to silk! You’re eating them! You’re eating everyone!"

Ren lunged to his feet, the Weaver’s starlight form clinging to his back like a parasitic shadow. He tore the cabin door off its hinges with a single, silk-reinforced swing of his arm. He stood in the doorway, a porcelain god draped in the shimmering, semi-transparent body of a goddess. His starlight hair was ten feet long, drifting in the air like a web. His eyes were a blinding white.

Haru stood her ground, her sapphire light a shield against the crimson storm. She saw the Weaver, the terrifying, faceless entity wrapped around her brother. She saw the way the Weaver’s fingers were threaded into Ren’s skin, pulling the muscles, directing the heart.

"Let him go!" Haru screamed at the Goddess.

The Weaver tilted her starlight head. She spoke through Ren.

"The mud dares to command the sky?" Ren’s voice was a chorus of a thousand voices, a divine echo that made Haru fall to her knees. "The sapphire is a stolen jewel. It belongs to the Deep. We are the Weaver. We are the End."

Ren raised his right hand, the Weaver’s silk coiling around his fingers like a viper. He aimed it at the sapphire core in Haru’s chest. The intent was clear. ’He was going to weave the core. He was going to remove the one thing that kept his sister human.’

"Niisan... please," Haru whispered, her sapphire light dimming. "Don’t... don’t leave me alone with God."

Ren’s finger flickered. Ren remembered the hospital room. He remembered the smell of the cheap medicine. He remembered the promise he had made to a dying mother. ’I will protect her.’

The weight of that promise hit him like a mountain. It was a mortal weight that the Weaver’s silk couldn’t lift. Ren’s hand diverted at the last second. The bolt of crimson mana missed Haru’s chest by an inch, punching through the hull of the ship and vaporizing a hundred meters of the ash-tide beyond.

Ren collapsed to his knees, his hands clawing at his own chest, trying to tear the Weaver’s manifestation away from him.

"GET... OUT!" Ren roared.

The Weaver let out a soft, disappointed sigh. Her starlight form began to dissolve back into the shadows, but as she vanished, she leaned in and kissed Ren’s temple.

[Weaver]: You are so stubborn, my King. But the grave is patient, and the silk is long.

The lavender scent faded. The red frost on the walls began to melt into grey brine. Ren lay on the floor of the ruined cabin, his breathing a jagged, wet sound. He was covered in a cold sweat that glowed with a faint, amber light. He looked at Haru, who was still on her knees, her sapphire light a small, trembling spark.

"I... I can’t stay on the bridge," Ren rasped, his human eyes returning for a brief, agonizing second. "The Weaver... she’s using my eyes to see you as a target."

"We’re almost there, Ren," Haru whispered, her voice full of a soul-crushing grief. "The towers... they’re right ahead."

Ren looked out the shattered door. Through the swirling ash of the Necropolis, the Gate of the Silent Queen was visible. It was a massive, bone-white archway guarded by two thousand-foot tall statues of weeping skeletons.

The eerie night was over, but the nightmares were just beginning. Ren Hanshin stood up, his porcelain skin glowing in the dark. He felt the thirst returning, the hunger for the God of Death’s soul. He realized that the only way to escape the Weaver’s obsession was to finish the contract. He had to kill a Sovereign to buy back his own mind.

[Synchronization: 59.7%]

He walked past Haru without a word. He didn’t look at Tanaka. He walked to the prow of the ship and stood there, a needle of starlight aimed at the heart of the dead. The Kashima Maru drifted through the gate. The fleet was now in the inner sanctum of the Necropolis. The living had reached the end of the world, and the Executioner was ready to bury the ocean.