??????

"It is invulnerable to—most things—but is not as far as I know preventing the end of the world. It may be causing it."

(The others seem to be accepting that he's speaking for them and are in any event too busy to worry about it.)

"Invulnerable is as invulnerable does."

Now Emil is standing on the beast's back, jade fire pooling around his feet, boiling away any water that splashes near him. And he funnels the sparks he picked up from the monsters into a particular gem...

and, for the next few seconds, things get odd. He is not literally in five, or twenty-five, or a hundred places at once; that would be silly. And the slashing blades from those phantasms don't do anything. But when the flickering is over, he swings, and swings again, and then thrusts his blade into the intersection of the two slashes, and it has the terrible weight of a hundred blows.

That breaks through the outer magical shielding that covers the surface of the creature and sets in on fire. Fire that is not being put out by the seawater splashing at high speeds and Sin's own resistance to fire, and that fire is rapidly spreading from the point of contact. The creature sways in place a bit more than it was, and then—

—a section of the monster's outer carapace including where Emil is standing and where the fire has spread, about a hundred square metres in area, is ejected out into open sea with what would be enough force to leave a medium-sized crater on land.

Being extraordinarily fast is a not insignificant part of Emil's entire deal. As the carapace launches into the water, he's already off it, flicker-boom creating another pool of jade fire, and he's on the offensive, slashing wildly (though not so existentially), intermittently producing more explosions.

Sin's magical shielding has already regenerated by the time he's doing that, and several of the creatures that boy called "Sinspawn" earlier, which are attached to Sin all over everywhere, are now being shot in Emil's direction like bullets, or perhaps more precisely like guided missiles, one after another tracking Emil's position with uncanny accuracy. Any that aren't destroyed and miss or are deflected open their "wings" and start shooting rays of light at Emil from the air.

At the same time, a much larger Sinspawn shoots up into the sky and then down towards the boat, a towering thing about four times the height of an adult human which looks much meaner than the smaller creatures.

The adds are not only not a problem, they're a gift. Intermittently he lobs a burning missile at one, chaining through their little shooting gallery, and gathers up a few more soulsparks from the fission of corpus and anima.

The big bastard... he'll keep half an eye on the situation on deck. If it looks too dire down there, he may have to distract himself. Right now, he's working.

The situation on deck is actually deteriorating very rapidly. The people there are clearly used to fighting but—not to this much pressure.

There's another creature with them, now, which wasn't there before and didn't come from Sin. It seems to be fighting on their side, though, and doing reasonable if perhaps not sufficient work to even the odds.

Damn it.

They can hold on for one more second, while he takes out another cluster of the flying turret-things, and then he'll have enough soulspark to repeat his flicker-flurry, in the convenient gap in Sin's carapace that he made earlier. Then he'll fuck off back to the ship and start helping them out.

This creature is different from the small ones, looking more like four insects that refuse to respect the square-cube law were grafted together than a single cohesive thing, but they coordinate as if they share a brain. As soon as Emil arrives, it summons a sphere of purple energy in front of itself that starts attracting everyone towards it like gravity's decided to change direction.

"I hate antigrav shit," says one of the fighters, sinking his sword into the deck to try to hold on.

"Me fucking too," says the one who'd been speaking earlier at the same time as he summons a forcefield between his party and the gravity anomaly.

What a coincidence. Emil also hates antigrav shit. He hadn't encountered it before, but some hates are very rapid-onset.

The problem is that, despite appearances, he's not teleporting when he flicker-strikes, just moving very quickly. And moving very quickly requires leverage on himself and on the ground, absent solutions like wings; and he has none of these things at this time.

So he's going to let go of the ground completely, move toward the singularity at his terminal velocity, and stab it.

There is... nothing to stab, unfortunately. It is not physical.

Fortunately (?) it doesn't last very long, anyway, and a few seconds after that (during which more small adds showed up) it winks out, and regular gravity reasserts itself, just in time for one of the insects the big one is made out of to lob a ball of foul-looking green slime directly at Emil.

He finds his feet quickly, though not quite quickly enough to avoid being slimed. Still, he's on fire again within a moment, and if the slime's going to do anything to him it had better do it quickly, before it evaporates and he starts macerating Sinspawn.

It burns—

—but this guy casts some kind of spell on him that completely heals the burn a fraction of a second afterwards.

And now this guy is joining Emil in dishing out the hurt, though he's... noticeably less effective at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly.

Belts dress lady also focuses on it, using elemental magic.

And everyone else focuses on the adds.

Emil is very good at killing monsters. He is especially good at killing monsters that spit large quantities of smaller monsters at him. This is, in a significant sense, his element. He doesn't get tired with the flames running through his blood; when he's injured, it lasts for bare moments; every iota of his being is focused into a killing shape.

Eventually, the monster dies.

And a few seconds after that, the harpoon gun that's connected to the cable attached to Sin snaps off its setting on the boat just as Sin is turning to the side again as it's been doing now and then, its momentum sending it flying straight in Emil's direction.

It never rains but it pours.

He slashes the gun off of the cable and grabs on, trailing behind Sin like some swashbuckling reprobate. If he can get up the rope and onto Sin's back again, he can try harder at killing the damn thing.

Sin promptly ejects the bit of its carapace the harpoon is attached to.