THANATOS VS The Iowa-class battleships.

The sea had been calm for six hours when the water beneath THANATOS began to boil.

It had walked out of the trench line without announcement — a mass of black bedrock armor rising from the continental shelf, green mist bleeding from the seams of its greaves, skeletal debris swirling in its wake like a retinue of drowned courtiers. The horned helmet turned slowly, green eyes sweeping the horizon. It did not know what it was looking for. It only knew that something had crossed into the shallows of its domain, and the abyss did not tolerate trespass.

Then the fog peeled back, and five silhouettes cut through it in echelon formation.

From left to right, THANATOS registered them without emotion, the way a mountain registers weather. A ghost-grey hull trailing lazy smoke — Illinois. A deep blue-grey commander riding the center line — Iowa. A dark hull banded in bright blue — Wisconsin. A hull painted in stars and stripes — New Jersey. And last, a hulk of red-and-black tiger stripes, green stars glinting on its flank, visibly unfinished, plating welded over wounds — Kentucky.

Iowa's bow angled a single degree. That was all. But THANATOS read it instantly: a commander's acknowledgment, cool and pre-measured. The titan's response was to plant its scythe — *Thanatos*, the long wooden haft groaning, the curved blade erupting with swirling green spectral light — into the seabed. Mist coiled up around its ankles. The message was as old as death itself: *turn back, or be buried here.*

Wisconsin answered for all of them. Her guns slewed with a snarl of hydraulics, and THANATOS saw the twitch before the flash — the impatient jerk of a warrior who had never once chosen restraint.

"Don't you *dare* ignore us!"

The broadside came first. Twelve sixteen-inch shells crossed the gap in a scream of displaced air, and THANATOS did not move. It simply *endured*. The impacts cratered its chestplate, drove it back three hundred meters through the surf, and shredded the mist into steam. When the smoke cleared, the armor had not cracked. The green eyes had not blinked.

Wisconsin's expression, even at range, twisted with fury.

Iowa was already moving, because she understood what her sister did not: that the first exchange had been a test, and the test had failed. "New Jersey — precision, disable the weapon. Illinois — flank, stay loose. Kentucky — you're the wall. Move."

New Jersey's reply was a single nod, weathered and certain. She had fought things that did not bleed before. She fired once, twice — not at the body, but at the scythe's haft where it met the blade, aiming to shear the joint. The shots struck true, gouging the wood.

THANATOS lifted the scythe anyway.

The blade swept, and the sea itself was cut. A crescent of green energy thirty meters tall tore across the formation, and Illinois — who had drifted too lazily, too casually into its arc — took the full edge across her forward turret. Her complacent mask shattered in an instant. Armor peeled like wet paper; she heeled hard to port, smoking, no longer bored.

"Okay," Illinois rasped, "that one *stung*."

Kentucky surged forward without being told. That was her nature — the unfinished one, the one who had never been completed and therefore had never learned to value herself. She interposed her damaged hull between THANATOS and her sisters, red-black plating flaring with green light as she vented her own boiler pressure to raise a crude defensive screen. THANATOS's next swing hit her instead of Iowa. Kentucky's bow buckled inward, a turret torn clean off and swallowed by the waves — and she held the line anyway, groaning, still shielding.

THANATOS did not slow. That was the horror of it. It had taken the combined weight of a battleship line and simply *walked through it*, scythe rising and falling in a rhythm like tectonic plates grinding — relentless, unhurried, inevitable. Each step drove green mist higher. Each swing carved the ocean into gorges. Iowa's disciplined evasion kept her alive; Wisconsin's fury poured fire into the titan's flank and bought her sisters seconds; New Jersey's veteran eye found every seam and exploited it.

But seconds were all they ever bought. THANATOS was not a target. It was a *deadline*.

The end came when Iowa read the pattern. She saw it in the titan's stride — the way its weight shifted *before* each swing, a tell as vast and slow as a glacier calving. "Illinois, bait the left. Wisconsin, all guns when it turns. Kentucky — one more wall. New Jersey, with me, *now*."

They executed it flawlessly. Illinois drew the scythe left. Wisconsin emptied every barrel into the exposed right flank. Kentucky threw her ruined body across the blade's path one final time, and the scythe buried itself in her superstructure, pinned for a heartbeat.

That heartbeat was Iowa's.

She and New Jersey drove forward together, point-blank, and fired into the joint of the scythe's haft — the same wound New Jersey had opened at the start. The wood split. The blade's green light guttered, and *Thanatos* tore free of the titan's grip, spinning into the deep.

For one instant, the unstoppable juggernaut stood disarmed.

And then THANATOS reached down with one massive gauntlet, seized the sinking Illinois by her keel, and *hurled* her into Wisconsin — both hulls crashing together in a tangle of screaming steel. It turned, unhurried, toward Iowa. It did not need the scythe. It had never needed the scythe. It closed the distance in three strides, and its fist came down like the end of the world.

Iowa evaded the first blow. Not the second.

The impact drove her under the surface, deep, her command tower crushed and her spine of a keel fractured. When she surfaced, listing and flooding, she could not rise to fight again. New Jersey, wounded and alone, held her fire — because there was nothing left to hold it for.

THANATOS stood amid the wreckage, green mist rising past its knees, skeletal debris swirling once more. It did not gloat. It did not speak. It simply turned its horned helm toward the horizon and resumed its walk, the tide of the abyss closing over the broken line behind it.

The Iowa-class had fought with everything discipline, fury, experience, and sacrifice could offer — and they had taken the titan's weapon. But the sovereign of the underworld was never its scythe. It was the weight behind it, and that weight had not moved an inch.