"Is it a god?" Xue asked.
"It's right around here," Abbas crouched down to pat Xue on the shoulder, noticing that the little girl's body, wrapped in polar bear fur, was actually trembling slightly. "We'll go into its home together and kill it."
"I want to help too." Xue lifted her stubborn little face, and Abbas noticed faint flashes of gold stirring in the depths of her eyes.
"All right." Abbas sighed.
The submarine suddenly jolted, and the first mate's voice sounded very strange: "Our depth meter seems to be having some issues. We've clearly been diving the entire time, but just a moment ago, the depth suddenly decreased by several dozen meters."
"Surface," Schneider said, his heavy breathing sounding like a worn-out bellows.
The first mate nodded. He already knew that this man, who looked like a black samurai, was the director of the Execution Bureau of Kassel College. Although Schneider had not yet joined the Execution Bureau when he graduated, the name of the Execution Bureau director was by no means unfamiliar to an old alumnus.
There was no ice on the surface of the sea. The submarine broke through the water without the slightest resistance, the deck opened once more, and heavily armed elites and students stepped out onto it.
Everyone was struck dumb by the scene before them; it looked like a fairyland on earth, or the threshold of heaven.
The sea was completely still, without a breath of wind. The cyan clouds in the sky surged like waves, while the equally cyan sea surface was as smooth as a mirror. The isolated island reflected in the water was right there ahead of them, its towering trees and the ring of cliffs surrounding it an exact match for the painting. The only thing missing was the Grim Reaper who had arrived by boat.
Caesar was still releasing Kamaitachi. The whale song of Leviathan could no longer be heard; it seemed Leviathan might not have entered.
"Our communication and navigation equipment have both failed," the first mate said, his expression changing slightly as he turned to the others.
Schneider nodded. It was no surprise that there was no signal inside a Nibelungen; it simply meant their subsequent operations would have to rely entirely on themselves.
"Then let's go take a look at that island." Rybalko cocked the bolt of his rifle and walked over to Schneider's side.
Schneider gave him a slightly surprised look and said coldly, "You seem to have known what was here all along."
"I told you, I've been here before," Rybalko said in a deep voice. "That's why I've come back with a gun now."
"So Captain also harbors some secrets," Caesar said coldly. "Not just about Leviathan, but about this island."
"I left a friend behind here," Rybalko's eyes flashed with resolute grit. "I'm coming back to take him home."
Everyone was stunned. Only the crew members of the YAMAL spontaneously raised and clutched their rifles; it turned out they had all been prepared for this from the start.
Schneider nodded slowly. "If that's the case, it seems our goals are still the same."
Rybalko looked solemn.
"We are all coming to take our lost ones home." Hearing these words, Rybalko felt as though he saw blinding flames of fury erupting from Schneider's eyes, and he couldn't help taking a step back. A nameless, indescribable power was surging from this physically ruined man... like a vengeful god.
"Good!" Rybalko collected himself and gave a vigorous wave of his arm. "Then let's blow the god's head off together!"
"For those we've lost."
"For those we've lost!" With solemn expressions, the crew watched as the submarine cleaved through the glass-like sea and headed toward the small island.
Finger curiously leaned over the railing to look down, then suddenly tossed a spent shell casing into the water. The casing entered the water without a sound, quietly sinking and disappearing.
"Something's wrong with this water." Finger's expression shifted slightly.
"If everything were normal, how would we have ended up here?" Caesar patted Finger on the shoulder. "We prepared ourselves to face the unexpected before we came, didn't we?"
"Boss, you talk so righteously, but don't lump me in with you; I was kidnapped here," Finger muttered under his breath. "Being forced onto this ship in the first place is the biggest unexpected event of all."
"There's a railing over there," Xue suddenly pointed into the distance. "Is that a dock?"
"It certainly looks like a dock," Schneider said, his expression shifting slightly beneath his mask. "Why would there be a dock here? Could that person come back frequently?"
If someone only traveled here by boat occasionally, there would naturally be no need to go to the trouble of building a dock. But if that white Grim Reaper frequently visited this place, the existence of a dock here didn't seem so strange after all.
"Avalon only opens one day a year!" Caesar gasped in shock. "That means people come and go every year on this exact day!"
"Isn't that perfect?" Abbas said. "Whether it's a god or a devil coming in, it saves us the trouble of having to hunt him down."
Caesar nodded, his Golden Pupils already ignited. "Just as I wished."
Seeing Caesar's Golden Pupils, Rybalko couldn't help but freeze. In his memory, that man surnamed Chu also possessed a pair of eyes just like these.
"There will be a lot of those giant snakes on the island," Rybalko warned. "Be extremely careful."
"Understood." Caesar waved the submachine gun in his hand. "Last time they ambushed us, so this time it's our turn to ambush them."
The submarine did not dock at the pier; instead, it stopped some distance away to one side, lowered assault boats, and the group rode them racing toward the shore.
Abbas looked at the water being silently sliced open behind the assault boat, noticing that not a single droplet of spray was kicked up.
The structure of this Nibelungen seemed different from that of the ordinary world. Abbas frowned. Although the Nibelungen they had encountered previously were independent spaces, their interiors basically followed the operating laws of the original world. Yet in this Nibelungen, not only was time frozen, but the wind and water seemed to be frozen as well—or were they actually gliding not over seawater, but over the sky reflected as the sea?
What kind of person, or rather, what kind of dragon, designed a Nibelungen like this? And in the coffins stored within the stone houses carved into the cliff face, were there humans or dragons inside?
This Nibelungen seemed suffused with tranquility everywhere, yet everywhere it revealed an uncanny eeriness.
The assault boats roared ashore, and the elite operatives leaped out of the boats, the muzzles of their guns instantly sweeping their surroundings in unison, terrified that some monster might charge out from somewhere at any second.
Yet nothing happened; an utter stillness gripped the surroundings.
"Too quiet," Caesar said. With Kamaitachi's hearing, he couldn't pick up any extraneous sounds at all.
"Are those... cypress trees?" Abbas looked at the towering trees on the island, a puzzled expression crossing his face.
"They look very much like them," Schneider said. "If time is frozen here, trees can theoretically grow infinitely."
"So quiet." Finger scuttled sneakily behind Abbas's back. "Is this place haunted?"
"Hard to say," Caesar shrugged. "This is the land of the dead, after all."
Rybalko turned his head to look at them strangely. This bunch of odd passengers seemed to be discussing some superstitious ghosts-and-monsters topic yet again.
"Do you think there are dead people in the land of the dead?" Finger pressed even closer against Abbas's back.
"I imagine so," Abbas jerked his chin toward the ring of cliffs encircling the island. "What else do you think those coffins are holding? Vampires?"
"Then aren't we just here to pad their population numbers?" Finger's eyes went wide instantly. "Hey, hey, didn't you say before we came that we were here to slay dragons? How did this suddenly turn into a suicide mission?"
"Slay dragons?" Rybalko looked at him again. The speech and behavior of these passengers were truly rather bizarre; sometimes he even wondered if they had time-traveled right out of some animated series.
Realizing he had let slip more than he should have, Finger shrank back behind Abbas under Schneider's glare.
"Let's head inside and take a look," Caesar changed the subject. "Let's see what's in that valley."
"There are steps over there," a crew member said. Right at the edge of the valley, a flight of steps wound its way upward along the cliff face.
The operatives from Kassel College all froze when they saw those stone steps, then exchanged glances with one another.
"Looks like they were made for people to walk on," Caesar muttered in a low voice.
Rybalko couldn't help but look solemn.
"Could it really be that Grim Reaper?" Abbas also spoke in a low voice.
"Hey, hey, don't scare me," Finger sneezed nervously. "You can run into the Grim Reaper here? Please, do you guys have any idea what line of work the Grim Reaper is in? He's here to collect lives! Usually he doesn't come looking for us, yet here we are actively seeking him out? Please, you guys might have more money than sense and be tired of living, but I'm not!"
Abbas and Caesar each grabbed one of the struggling Finger's shoulders, and Caesar smiled as he said, "Since we've already come this way, how can we not get acquainted with the Grim Reaper? Maybe you can buy him a drink so that when your time comes, he can hook you up with a good reincarnation."
"I'd rather be a beast of burden in my next life than cut this one short!"
Caesar ignored the struggling Finger, walking to the very front of the formation, squatting down, and touching the stone steps on the cliff face.
"Very fresh, as if they're cleaned frequently," he murmured thoughtfully. "They're almost the exact same height and width as ordinary steps; the person who carved them should be about the same build as an ordinary human."
"Would there be ordinary humans in Avalon?" Schneider said meaningfully.
Caesar nodded, understanding Schneider's implication. The Dragon Kings they had encountered previously—from Constantine to Norton to Jormungand—all possessed ordinary human appearances. Living in human form was no big deal to a Dragon King, so the person who frequently walked these stone steps was naturally very likely a Dragon King as well!
Could it be the King of Oceans and Waters? Leviathan's twin? Is that why Leviathan was standing guard in the Arctic Circle—to protect this Nibelungen?
No one could provide answers to these questions, save for the master of this Nibelungen.
And that master might arrive at any moment.
"Hurry up, let's head up to the cliff," Schneider said.
"Th—what is that?" The first mate's voice rang out, though it had completely lost its composure.
The group crowded forward rapidly. The first mate was standing right at the entrance of a stone cave, staring inside with a look of utter shock.
It was a coffin crafted entirely from gold, etched with intricate totems. Both ends of the coffin were locked down tight with massive iron hoops, and those iron hoops were firmly anchored into the ground.
"There really aren't vampires or zombies in here, are they?!" Finger was about to scream when Abbas shoved a hand over his mouth.
"What are you afraid of?" Abbas said. "Even if there really are vampires in inside, they aren't crawling out of that. Looks like someone knew whatever was in there was trouble, so they locked the coffin down with iron hoops."
"Where did he get so much gold?" Caesar asked, somewhat perplexed. If every single stone house in this valley held a coffin like this, just how much gold would it take to cast them all! Even someone as lavish as Caesar couldn't help but be dumbfounded by this extreme, extravagant collection. There were hundreds of caves here, which meant it would take nearly a thousand tons of gold! This surpassed the gold reserves of the vast majority of countries in the world.
"Unless he has some method of extracting gold directly from the Earth's crust, there must be some way he managed to fish all this gold out of the world," Schneider said in a low voice. "And then to cast all that gold into golden coffins like these... his methods surpass every enemy of the past."
The Execution Bureau operatives understood what Schneider meant, and a chill ran through them. If this Dragon King had been hiding in human society, stirring up trouble like a festering bone-cancer and growing steadily stronger, an enemy like that would be terrifying. It meant he possessed political power and clout within human society, commanded human hearts and human nature, and might even have planted countless contingency plans throughout human society. An enemy like this was the most terrifying kind, because you wouldn't even know where it was hiding, yet it would have already infiltrated your ranks and understood you completely.
Caesar was the first to climb to the summit. Looking around, he could see the entire small island, and looking further out, he could see the end of the cyan sea merging with the cyan sky. A hazy mist obscured the boundary where sea and sky met; that was likely the edge of the Nibelungen. The core of the entire Nibelungen was clearly this isolated island. The cliff face surrounding the island was neatly honeycombed with these stone houses holding coffins, while the towering trees in the valley were gloomy and mysterious—life and death bizarrely intertwined on this isolated island.
Caesar suddenly thought of the notes left by the archaeological team leader found at the research station, and a sudden jolt went through his heart.
"Could this be Valhalla?" Caesar looked at Finger, who shrank his neck and turned his head to look at Abbas.
Hearing this, Abbas froze. "Why do you say that?"
"Remember when I told you about the notes we found from that scientific expedition team?" Caesar said in a deep voice. "In their description, they referred to Avalon as 'Valhalla.' And in Norse mythology, Valhalla is a place that gathers fallen heroes, where they are resurrected and die in battle day after day, endlessly, to hone their skills and strength. Even Sæhrímnir, the divine boar of Valhalla's feasts, is killed and resurrected infinitely. The Valkyries ride white horses charging between the two realms, bringing back those fallen warriors, and their armor gleams brilliantly in the night sky—that is the shining aurora borealis."
Abbas shivered violently. The valley full of golden coffins, the interplay of life and death, and the "Goddess's Skirt" aurora they had seen upon arrival—this Avalon genuinely bore a thousand tangled threads of similarity to Valhalla!
Then what about the master of Valhalla? Who was he supposed to be?
Could the Grim Reaper who came to this Valhalla every year actually be the Allfather of Norse mythology?