Gabriel Kovács, or "Hammer" as he was universally known, clung to the foremast yardarm, the world a dizzying, tilting nightmare below him.
The Aeternus, his home, his workplace, the only constant in his often-turbulent life, was behaving like a drunken whale.
Each roll was a sickening lurch, each pitch a gut-wrenching plunge. The horizon, usually a steadfast line separating sea and sky, now slashed across his vision like a guillotine blade, threatening to sever him from reality itself.
His knuckles, white and strained, ached from their death grip on the cold, unfamiliar metal of the yard. Metal. That was the first wrongness.
The yards of the Aeternus he knew were solid, dependable spruce, worn smooth by years of weather and the chafe of rigging.
This… this was something else. It felt like steel, impossibly strong, yet coated in a thin veneer that mimicked the old wood. Another layer of the ship's unsettling transformation.
And the gravity. God, the gravity.
It felt like an invisible giant was pressing down on him, trying to peel him from his perch and send him plummeting to the deck far below. A deck that seemed to rush up to meet him with every downward lurch of the ship.
His System-assigned role, Bosun Rig & Weapons, felt like a cruel joke.
He was a rigger, yes, one of the best. He could dance on the high wires of a tall ship in a gale, his balance preternatural. But this crushing weight, this alien drag on his every muscle, turned familiar movements into Herculean labors.
"Secure that damn halyard, Hammer!" Captain Mallory's voice, younger, stronger, yet still undeniably the Captain's, cut through the wind's howl and the groan of the ship's strange new timbers. "She's thrashing like a harpooned squid!"
"Trying, Captain!" Gabe roared back, his voice hoarse. The fore-topsail, a vast expanse of the new, unnervingly resilient kelp-fiber canvas, had partially torn free in the last violent gust.
Not a clean tear, but a brittle fracture, as Valeria had noted earlier.
Now, it flapped and thundered like a captured storm giant, threatening to rip itself to shreds and take the mast with it. If they lost their masts in this alien ocean, with no familiar land in sight and creatures of nightmare lurking in the deep… the thought was unthinkable.
He inched his way along the yard, his de-aged body now that of a twenty-six-year-old, though he'd been a solid forty-eight before the Rift. Moving with a strength he hadn't possessed in years, yet still struggling against the oppressive gravity.
His massive frame, which had earned him his nickname, was usually an asset. Here, it felt like a liability, more mass for the alien gravity to crush.
Then came the System prompt, an unwelcome intrusion in his already overloaded senses:
***
***
"No pressure then," Gabe muttered, spitting into the wind. XP. Morale. It was like this whole damn nightmare was a game, and they were the unwilling players.
But the warning about structural collapse was chillingly real. He could feel the foremast groaning beneath him, a deep, resonant thrum that spoke of immense stresses.
He reached the flailing edge of the sail, the wind trying to tear him away. He needed to lash it down, to somehow mend the strange, crystalline tear.
His rigger's instincts, honed over years of working on tall-ship replicas back in Hungary and then on the Aeternus, took over. He fumbled for the heavy-duty sail twine and needle he always carried, but his familiar leather pouch felt… different.
He looked down. Attached to his belt was a new set of tools, sleek, metallic, and utterly unfamiliar. One of them, a device that looked like a cross between a caulking gun and a welder, hummed faintly in his hand.
***
***
Bonding agent? He was a rigger, not a damn chemist. But as he focused on the torn sail, a series of options appeared in his mind's eye, overlaid on the flapping canvas: 'Flexi-Seal Patch,' 'Rapid-Knit Weave,' 'Structural Reinforcement Matrix.'
He mentally selected 'Rapid-Knit Weave,' the name sounding the most like something he could understand.
The device in his hand whirred, and a thin, almost invisible filament extruded from its nozzle, glowing with a faint blue light.
He aimed it at the tear, and the filament began to stitch itself across the gap, weaving a complex, incredibly strong pattern that seemed to meld with the kelp-fiber canvas, sealing the fracture in seconds. It was… astonishing. And deeply unsettling.
He worked his way along the yard, securing the sail, his initial fear slowly giving way to a grudging admiration for the new tools, the new capabilities.
But with every upward surge of the ship, as the deck fell away and the vast, alien ocean stretched out below, another, older fear gnawed at him: his aquaphobia. The deep, dark water. The crushing pressure.
The thought of being submerged, trapped, unable to breathe…
He was ten years old, a scrawny kid growing up near Lake Balaton in Hungary. His older cousins, boisterous and cruel in the way only teenage boys can be, had dared him to swim out to a dilapidated fishing platform far from shore.
Gabe, desperate for their approval, had accepted. The water was cold, deeper than he'd expected. Halfway there, panic had seized him. His limbs turned to lead, his lungs burned.
He'd started to sink, the dark water closing over his head, the sunlight a distant, mocking shimmer on the surface.
He remembered the terror, the certainty of drowning, the feeling of the lake's muddy bottom sucking at his flailing feet. One of his cousins, finally realizing he was in genuine trouble, had dived in and dragged him out, coughing and spluttering, his pride shattered, but alive. The fear, however, had never left him.
It was a cold, hard knot in his gut, a constant reminder of his vulnerability, a stark contrast to his powerful physique and his 'Hammer' reputation.
He'd learned to live with it, to function despite it, even choosing a life at sea a strange irony. On the surface, in control, he was fine. But the thought of the abyss below… that was his private hell.
Now, clinging to a mast on an alien world, with an ocean ten times wider than Earth's yawning beneath him, that private hell felt terrifyingly close.
The Aeternus was their only refuge, a tiny island of sanity in a sea of madness. And it was his job, his System-assigned, XP-rewarding job, to keep her bones intact.
He finished with the foremast and moved to the main, then the mizzen, the process repeating itself. Each repair was a battle against the wind, the gravity, and his own internal demons.
The crew below watched him, their de-aged faces upturned, a mixture of hope and fear in their eyes. He was their Bosun, their Hammer. He couldn't falter. He wouldn't.
As he secured the final line on the mizzen-topsail yard, the ship gave a particularly violent lurch. For a horrifying moment, his grip slipped.
The world tilted, the alien sky and the churning sea swapping places. He saw the deck rushing up, the faces below contorted in alarm.
The cold dread of the deep, the memory of Lake Balaton, flooded him. This was it. He was going to fall. He was going to drown in this alien sea.
Then, something slammed into his back, hard, knocking the wind from him but also arresting his fall. He gasped, his fingers scrabbling, finding purchase once more on the yard. He looked over his shoulder.
It was Riku Tanaka, the young Gunnery Cadet, barely nineteen but already radiating a strange, System-enhanced confidence.
Riku had somehow scrambled up the rigging with an agility that defied the crushing gravity, his small frame a blur of motion. He had one arm wrapped around the mast, the other pressed firmly against Gabe's back.
"Gotcha, Hammer!" Riku yelled over the wind, his voice strained but determined. "Can't have our best rigger taking an unscheduled dive!"
Gratitude, sharp and overwhelming, washed over Gabe, momentarily eclipsing his fear. He nodded, unable to speak. Together, they finished securing the last of the damaged rigging. As they did, the System chimed again.
***
***
A wave of warmth spread through him, a feeling of accomplishment, of power, that was undeniably pleasant, despite its artificial source. He looked at Riku, who grinned back. his youthful face alight with a mixture of adrenaline and pride.
"Nice work, Cadet," Gabe managed, his voice still rough. "You… you've got good instincts."
Riku's grin widened. "Learned from the best, Bosun. Just trying to keep up."
As they carefully made their way back down to the deck, Gabe felt a subtle shift within him. The fear of the water was still there, a cold stone in his gut. But now, there was something else too.
A sense of shared purpose, of reliance on these new, strangely gifted crewmates. And a grudging acceptance of this new reality. The System had given him a job, a terrifying, demanding job.
But it had also given him the tools, and perhaps, the strength to do it. He was still Gabriel Kovács, the rigger from Hungary with a fear of drowning. But he was also Hammer, Bosun Rig & Weapons of the starship Aeternus. And he would not let her, or her crew, fall.
The horizon still tilted like a guillotine. But now, just maybe, he felt a little more ready to face the blade.