Industrial Cthulhu: Starting as an Island Lord

The team members felt as if a mountain was pressing down upon them.

The Banshee stood in front of them, blocking the dazzling sunlight. She glanced to the left and right before her somewhat puzzled gaze landed on Kyle, who still had a copper whistle in his mouth.

"You called for backup?"

"Yes!" Kyle saluted.

The tall Banshee paused slightly, then took off her helmet. Her golden hair billowed in the air.

"Lady Nini!"

"It's Lady Nini!"

"Heavens, it's actually the real Lady Nini, I saw Lady Nini with my own eyes!"

Several new recruits of the Holy Guard began whispering excitedly. Nini was immensely popular within the Holy Guard. If nothing else, she had stocked up plenty of dried fish using her fish-herding magic in advance—if not for that, food supplies might have been rationed during the last war.

Nini placed five of her hands on her hips, while the sixth held her helmet. She enjoyed the gaze of those around her for a moment before she asked Kyle:

"Where's the enemy?"

Kyle pointed at the murlocs still crawling and charging on the ground not far away.

Nini bent down, lowered her head, and looked at the murloc for a moment. Then she carefully reached out and poked it.

The murloc responded with a strange screech.

"So it's still alive. I thought it was a corpse."

She examined the murloc's cracked skin for a while, then paused as if silently conversing with someone.

Kyle had heard before that these Banshees could directly talk to people far away through their minds—what a convenient ability.

Soon, Nini came back to her senses. She circled around the murloc a few times, then stopped and fell into thought, five hands taking turns stroking her chin.

"Ah, my lady, that murloc!"

Suddenly, one of the Holy Guard soldiers whispered out loud. Kyle and Nini quickly looked toward the murloc.

It seemed to have exhausted its last ounce of strength, lying flat on the ground, appearing completely dead.

Before their eyes, the murloc began to melt like a block of ice, quickly turning into a puddle of semi-fluid black matter. The dark mass then slowly condensed into wriggling black worms.

"Pollution?"

Everyone was familiar with this phenomenon. Most islanders had contact with steam engines. Aside from the earliest few, the later models all used Entity Pollution as fuel.

Since the war broke out on the island, they had regularly dragged monster corpses from the battlefield. Once transformed into pollution, the remains would be fed into steam engines for combustion.

What they saw in front of them was undoubtedly pollution.

"How long after death does a monster corpse become pollution?" Nini muttered to herself.

"A full day after death," Kyle answered without hesitation. He used to be a stoker, which was exactly his area of expertise—he knew it like the back of his hand.

The group's eyes returned to the black, wriggling semi-fluid mass.

"It turned to pollution immediately after death…" Nini dazed again for a second, then nodded. "I see. I understand now."

"The seabed is exposed. There's no seawater left here at all. I just asked the other observation posts—monsters everywhere are slowly dying and turning into pollution. Moreover, this pollution—"

Nini stepped aside to clear a path.

The mass of pollution seemed to have its own will. It was completely uninterested in the living humans nearby, instead slowly creeping toward some direction outside the island.

"This pollution is gradually moving toward Gem Bay, toward the monsters at the Pirate King's Court. Even without seawater, that place still draws them in."

Nini turned her head, facing the sunlight, and gazed into the distance—toward the direction of the Pirate King's Court.

Suddenly, darkness fell over the group. The sunlight was blocked by something massive above them.

And not just them—an entire surrounding area fell into shadow.

The patrol squad and Nini raised their heads together.

Half the sky darkened as if something loomed above the clouds. They saw it soon enough.

A massive, oval-shaped shadow appeared before them. A painted maw full of sharp fangs emerged from the rolling clouds—it was a colossal airship with a yellowish membrane. Steel struts like spines supported its frame, glinting in the sunlight with a cold, lead-gray metallic sheen.

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Strips of white clouds were pulled into long trails by the airship. Multiple propeller blades spun slowly in different directions, driven by a roaring Clamorer engine.

When its full form emerged, even the sun was reduced to a dim, blurry disc. Its rear ring-shaped tail rudder sliced through the clouds.

Several people were so terrified they fell to the ground. That behemoth hovering in the sky seemed ready to devour them in the next second—or like the sky itself was about to collapse. It felt as if the entire world was on the verge of destruction.

But the airship didn't descend. It didn't even notice them. It simply moved straight ahead. What had just passed over them was nothing more than the shadow of something unimaginably enormous.

"That... that is..."

"The new airship. Lord Hughes calls it the *Sky Canopy Behemoth-class*. A very fitting name." Nini hugged her helmet and looked up at the massive airship.

"Apparently, they were originally going to build ten airships. But Hughes suddenly changed his mind and asked the researchers of the *Moths Chasing Fire* to make one big one instead. So they merged the original plans, added tons of materials, and created this behemoth."

The air currents stirred by the airship lifted Nini's golden hair. She smiled and said, "I even forged some of the steel hoops on that ship myself. Just filling it with hydrogen took a whole day. Those gas bags stacked up into a mountain."

Kyle swallowed hard. He had fallen down in fear earlier. Though he was now standing again, his legs were still trembling uncontrollably.

"L-Lady Nini... this airship... what's it for? Didn't we stop fighting?"

"True, there's no more need for war—but Castel Island is running out of fuel. Look, we've got so many factories on the island, each one devouring an uncountable amount of pollution every day as fuel. Without murloc and Arm Monster corpses, the factories would have to shut down, wouldn't they?"

Kyle froze.

He had never thought about that. He was just a stoker. To him, fuel seemed like something that appeared out of thin air, always ready on the transport trucks.

If there was no more fuel, the boilers would stop, the factories would stop, and he would lose his job—returning to the days when he couldn't even afford to eat.

"No, we can't shut down! My lady, we can't stop the war! We have to keep fighting the murlocs! We need the fuel!" Kyle gripped his gun tightly.

"That airship is going to get fuel," Nini said with a smile. "It's heading to the Pirate King's Court—to bring back a piece of fuel that will never burn out!"