### IV. The Molten-Shell Hermit
A Molten-Shell Hermit is what happens when the deep decides to parody civilization: a gargantuan crustacean that uses wrecks as shells, dragging ships like trophies, letting engines overheat while it eats slowly.
The heat wasn’t just mechanical failure.
The heat was the beast itself—radiating through stone-like carapace, boiling the water into a frenzy that turned rescue into a timed execution.
Hala’s voice screamed into Julius’s ear:
> “Get back! That’s not a wall—It’s alive!”
The Hermit pulled, dragging scout sub and would-be rescuer deeper into the fissure. Metal groaned. The cockpit glass threatened to burst.
Lance Oreo’s panic didn’t sound like fear for treasure.
It sounded like fear for a person.
> “We can’t leave him!”
And that was the moment the Love Pirates were forced to prove their banner meant something under pressure.
---
### V. The Love Pirates Choose Death Over Leaving
Julius’s answer was not heroic. It was matter-of-fact. Like law.
> “We save him or die trying. We don’t leave people to die.”
Orders snapped across comms like thrown knives:
* Lance: one gun only, no recklessness—aim for the eye.
* Hala: align the stern-chaser, drift the Exocoetidae into a firing lane.
* Anex: press the green button—ship hail. Wake the dead if needed.
Anex ran the console like it was born to war.
BWOOOOOOOM.
The Exocoetidae’s heavy sonar-hail slammed through the water. A sound you feel in your organs. The wreck vibrated. The fissure seemed to flinch.
Inside the cockpit, the slumped figure jerked.
Kaelen Vance woke up in his coffin.
---
### VI. The Shot That Changed the Shape of the Day
Lance fired once.
A single pearl-round streaked through silt and boiling bubble, and hit the Hermit’s glowing eye.
The rupture was immediate—neon-orange fluid and steam blooming outward like a violent flower. The beast screamed, a sound too deep to be sound, a vibration that made hull plates tremble.
Its claw spasmed.
It opened.
The scout sub dropped free, tumbling.
Julius clung to it as it spun, suit leaking air, heat crawling in.
Inside, Kaelen pounded the canopy and pointed—frantic—toward the manual release.
But the scout’s core was no longer merely hot.
It was glowing white.
Detonation imminent.
---
### VII. Smoke-Claws and the Cannonball Throw
Julius did not attempt finesse.
He did what he has always done in the moments the sea tries to claim him: he laughed at the danger with his body, and answered it with will.
Smoke poured from him—not drifting, not decorative—**solidifying** into thick, oily claws that gripped warped metal.
The canopy did not “open.”
It tore away.
Kaelen Vance stared up through emergency strobe-light and heat glare at a seventeen-year-old with void eyes and a fixed grin, reaching into a doomed cockpit as if prying open a child’s toy.
Julius grabbed the harness—hundreds of pounds of armor—lifted it with smoke-strength, and hurled the legend toward the Exocoetidae’s open hatch like a cannonball launched by faith.
Hala’s voice cut through:
> “Hatch is open! Bring him home!”
Then Lance fired again—not to kill, but to buy seconds. The second round slammed into the Hermit’s exposed joint as it reached again.
The crab recoiled.
The scout sub died.
KA-BOOM.
The core detonation hit like a god’s shove.
And Julius rode it.
Not gracefully. Not safely.
Like a lunatic surfing fire.
He and Kaelen slammed into the airlock chamber as the outer door sealed, pumps screaming, water draining fast enough to steal breath.
When the hatch cleared, Kaelen unsealed his helmet—scarred face, older eyes, the shock of a man who thought his story ended in a fissure.
His first words were not gratitude.
They were disbelief.
> “Kid… what the hell are you people?”
---
### VIII. Crab Cakes, Loot, and a New Passenger
Julius—still riding adrenaline like a drug—answered with the simplest doctrine the Love Pirates possess:
> “We’re the Love Pirates. We save people for a living. Don’t think nothing of it.”
Then—because Julius Applebottom has never been capable of a normal reaction—he asked to track the Hermit’s body for loot.
They did.
The Exocoetidae grappled the broken Molten-Shell Hermit and reeled it in before it vanished into the dark.
Inside the shattered dorsal cluster, where a heart would be, they found it:
A Large Fire-attuned Meito Pearl—the Ember-Heart—cannonball-sized, swirling with magma currents, radiating constant heat.
They also took:
* Molten-Shell chitin for plating and armor
* Tons of crab meat, which Lance treated like a personal religious event
Kaelen Vance looked at that pearl and said what every survivor thinks when they see power in a hold:
Sell it and be safe.
Keep it and become a problem.
---
### IX. The Cronus Argument and the Vance Decision
When Julius mentioned Cronus Peacock—dead in Port Azure—Kaelen froze.
He said the Gilded Cage had pinged nearby hours earlier.
Either Cronus wasn’t dead, or the ship sailed under a new hand, and that new hand wanted blood.
Julius’s answer was colder than it sounded:
Maybe it was Aliaster.
Maybe the Dynasty would never admit Cronus was evil.
Better to cover it, blame pirates, send a cleaner.
Kaelen asked for a cut if he guided them.
Julius denied him without apology:
> “Only the crew gets a cut.”
But he offered a truth that wasn’t charity:
> “Man a gun if you want. Or enjoy the ride.”
Kaelen did not kneel.
He stayed.
Not as a sworn Love Pirate—yet—but as a man who owed a debt and smelled purpose.
---
### X. The Drop Into the Star Caverns
They dove.
And the Exocoetidae did not groan like a normal ship.
It sang.
Julius explained what he’d built: a variable-density hull that didn’t fight pressure inversion—it used it, skipping along gradients like a stone on a pond.
Kaelen, veteran of thirty years of wrecks and navy prototypes, fell quiet the way professionals do when confronted with something that shouldn’t exist but does.
Then the black opened into false sky.
Bioluminescent drifts—“stars” scattered through water. The old name for the region returned like a rumor confirmed:
The Star Caverns.
A massive shape drifted parallel to their course: a Star Cavern Leviathan, ridged and glittering, its song vibrating through hull plates like distant thunder.
Julius offered the crew a choice:
Camp first—his old home—five minutes away.
Or straight to the jellyfish.
They chose the camp.
And to reach it, they took a current most sailors would call impossible and Julius called familiar:
The Light Mile.
---
### XI. The Light Mile and the Home Below
They strapped in.
Julius took the helm while Hala watched—memorizing every micro-adjustment, making notes like a future captain.
The Exocoetidae merged into the slipstream, and the cavern outside streaked into indigo lines. The “stars” smeared into a tunnel. The ship became the fastest thing in the ocean for five minutes straight.
Then, with a controlled bleed-off, they slipped into a calm pocket.
Ahead: a pressure curtain—expensive tech or ancient magic—sealing air from abyss water.
Beyond it: Blue Glow Cavern.
Julius’s old home.
A cathedral of azure pearl-light. A misty, breathable sanctuary. A shore of rock and a humble camp built from scavenged plates and stubbornness.
Hala stared at the loneliness and understood something new about her captain.
Lance stared at the dry rock like it was salvation.
Kaelen judged it as only a survivor can:
Defensible. Bottlenecked. Smart.
And Julius—grinning like the sea never taught him fear—said the line that deep-chart clerks later wrote down because it sounded too human to belong this far below:
> “And here we are… my home. Don’t expect too much. I didn’t have many guests.”
End of Part II.