Chương 28: The Octopus and the Drunk Mage

The sea had turned strange somewhere around day seven. Ivan stood near the bow and watched the water roll under the hull in that same heavy blue he'd first noticed from the hidden bay. Light did not flash off it the way he expected. It vanished into the blue before his eyes could follow it down. The air tasted colder out here. Salt mixed with something metallic underneath. Everyone had settled into patterns by then. The freed folk had stopped jumping at every creak in the wood.

Yara's people ran their watches like clockwork. Rys taught Ren basic footwork on the aft deck when the weather held. Elizabeth spent her mornings staring at charts and her evenings drinking whatever Rys and I had left off the Iron Chain's dead captain's storage. Ivan kept mostly to himself, his mood brighter these days. He walked the deck, checked ward nodes, and let [Mana Sense] drift over the water whenever he got bored. Yara had people responsible for the wards, so nobody needed him doing it.

A decade in a scribe office had simply taught him that bad arrays rarely announced themselves before becoming someone else's problem. Most days, he was checking because he was curious. Today, the mana beneath the hull stopped feeling like background noise. The color was part of it, sure, but the mana itself dragged beneath them in slow sheets. A tide shouldn't have felt that heavy, and weather didn't move with that much purpose. He frowned and leaned over the rail.

A dozen yards out, the surface rippled in a line too smooth for wind and too controlled for current.

"Uh, Rys?" He kept his eyes on the ripple.

"Is the tide supposed to do that?" Her footsteps came quick. She appeared at his side, followed his gaze, and went still.

"What," he asked, "Sirens again?"

"No." Her mouth tightened.

"Fucking hell." Ivan glanced at her. Rys usually had another sentence ready, even if it was only there to make him uncomfortable. This time she had nothing. Before he could ask what she had recognized, the ripple widened. Something pale moved beneath it. Big enough that the ship's shadow didn't cover it. The sea came up. A tentacle the size of a tree trunk burst from the water and slammed into the deck. Wood splintered. People screamed as the entire ship lurched sideways.

Ivan hit the rail hard enough to bruise ribs. His [Instinct of the Prey] screamed at him to move, and he rolled just as a second tentacle smashed through the space where he'd been standing. Shouts erupted across the deck. Yara appeared from below with her shield already up. Gareth came behind her with his sword drawn and glowing. Leo had his bow out before Ivan even processed that he'd moved. The Sea King surfaced. Oh. That was a fucking octopus.

A Sea King, technically, and one that had somehow ignored the Void Ship's magic. The ward around the vessel was supposed to make creatures like this avoid it. Ivan would have liked a few minutes to work out why that rule had failed. The Sea King did not give him any. Eyes ringed its central mass, too many for Ivan to count at a glance. Its gray skin kept shifting toward a sickly green as it moved. Then its beak opened, releasing a wet roar that shook the deck beneath Ivan's hands.

[Sea King – Level 71] Level 71 was bad. The failed ward bothered him almost as much. Elizabeth's staff hummed as she charged a spell. Marcus shouted for the freed folk to get below deck while Yara shifted her shield to cover the stairs. Rys stepped past it.

"Yara, keep Ren behind your shield." Her voice barely changed. Yara turned on her.

"What the hell are you doing?!"

"Keep the shield up." Rys rolled her shoulders and walked toward the rail.

"I fucking hate these things."

"That's Level 71," Gareth said.

"Rys, you can't just–" Rys jumped. Ivan opened his mouth to call her insane. Then [Mana Sense] lit up beneath her and the words never came. Three tails manifested behind Rys as she rose into the sky. They looked solid until blue-white foxfire moved through them and left afterimages across Ivan's vision. Inside [Mana Sense], the foxfire burned so brightly that he had to narrow his focus. He could not tell where Rys ended and the fire began.

The tails spread wide enough to slow her descent before her boots struck one of the Sea King's thrashing tentacles. The beast roared and tried to shake her off. She didn't budge. Her feet stayed planted while blue fire crawled up from her boots and wrapped around the limb. Then it detonated. Foxfire scattered in all directions. The Sea King screamed. Rys didn't stop there. Ivan had seen her fight before, in the slaver yard. She'd used claws and teeth there, taking whatever opening appeared.

Here, every step landed exactly where she wanted it. She ran along the tentacle while foxfire followed her boots and carved burning lines into flesh that didn't quite bleed. The Sea King thrashed harder. Another tentacle came at her from the side, and she stepped through it. Just phased right through the limb and came out on the other side with fire trailing from her fingertips. Some Spirit Dancer Skill, probably. Ivan couldn't tell what rule let her ignore the tentacle.

He only knew it had passed through her and she was still moving. The Sea King tried to drag itself under. Rys planted both feet and yanked. Fire wrapped around three tentacles at once and pulled them taut. The beast's forward momentum stopped dead. She raised one hand. Foxfire condensed into a single point above her palm, then shot forward. The spear of blue-white flame punched through the Sea King's central mass and out the other side. Water boiled around the wound.

The tentacles thrashed once, went slack, and slid free of the ship. Ivan stared as Rys landed back on the deck in a crouch. The three tails remained behind her as pale blue shapes for one heartbeat, then faded into one. She stood, wrung seawater out of her hair, and said, "Well, it's dead." Only then did Ivan notice how hard she was breathing. She had spent something on that attack, apparently just not enough to slow her down until the fight was over. Rys stared down at the corpse.

"I need a bath. Ren, don't touch it. And if anyone serves octopus tonight, I'm throwing them overboard." Ren appeared at the rail with his eyes wide. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Aunty, you just..." Rys reached over and nudged his jaw shut with two fingers.

"Shh, mouth closed." Ren shut his mouth. Yara lowered her shield slowly. She looked at Rys, then at the floating corpse. Her mouth opened and closed without producing anything. Her gaze settled on the place where the three tails had vanished.

"Rys… I thought you were Level 55." No one on deck moved.

"That was nowhere near Level 55." Rys squeezed more water from her sleeve and ignored the question inside the statement. Gareth still had his sword raised, but the point had sunk toward the deck. Elizabeth looked from the dead Sea King to Rys and let out one short, disbelieving laugh. Rys didn't answer. She started toward the stairs. Ren followed a step behind her, still watching her as though the tails might come back if he looked hard enough. She ruffled his hair without slowing. Ivan stayed at the rail.

Level 55 made no sense anymore. But she had to be Level 55, otherwise she'd have been able to take care of the slavers who'd captured her and Ren on her own. Was it maybe a specific Blessing that made her stronger against sea creatures or something more deadly? She had been mana-starved after months in chains, dangerous in close quarters, and strong enough to survive. Ivan had built his entire estimate from that version of her because it was the only one she'd offered.

That version did not erase a Level 71 Sea King in under a minute. She's not a very truthful person, Ivan realized. Maybe she had never lied, and maybe Ivan had measured what she showed him and assumed there was nothing else but still. For some reason, Ivan felt a little irritated. The assumption had been his, sure. But how much else was she hiding? And why?

The days blurred with the night, and another week passed. Even with land due the next morning, Ivan was still working on both questions. He had spent an hour comparing routes from their destination Greyport, toward Asterion and another half-hour thinking about Rys's three tails. The route work had gone better. Eventually he gave up on the charts and moved to the stern, where the wind was colder and nobody needed him to pretend he had a plan yet.

I thought we were growing closer, he thought, but if both sides have so many secrets, were we being honest with each other at all? Rys had definitely noticed that he was curious about her secrets, but since he couldn't directly ask since then he might have to reveal his secrets, she acted unbothered and pretended everything was alright. Ivan played along but he wasn't sure anymore. As he was waiting in the stern, Elizabeth found him with a bottle in her hand.

"Ooh, there you are. I went to the chart room first but here you are," she said. Ivan glanced at her.

"Why?"

"That's where I found you the last time I was about to do something catastrophic." She leaned against the rail beside him and took another drink.

"Catastrophic… Is tonight's worry the bottle?"

"Probably." She inspected it.

"It's doing its job, at least." Ivan waited. Tomorrow was when they'd separate, so maybe she came here to share something important. Maybe something new she learned about the Consortium. She was drunk, but her eyes still tracked him too well for this to become an easy conversation. She exhaled through her nose. The sea wind pulled loose strands of hair across her face, and for once she didn't bother fixing them.

"We reach Greyport tomorrow."

"That's what your charts say."

"Yara takes the Order back out. Toward America. While you go inland." Ivan nodded. He already knew. Until she said it, tomorrow had only been a route on a chart. Now it sounded like goodbye. Elizabeth drank, then rested the bottle against the rail.

"I've been thinking about the trench." Ivan waited.

"The trench," she said.

"You were on one knee in the muck with what was left of a chalk stub. The Slime was tearing through the yard, and when I asked what you'd done, you told me to pay my scribes better." Ivan remembered her standing over him with her staff in both hands and her eyes fixed on his ink-stained fingers. Gareth had called him a trap. Elizabeth had been the one who told him to shut up.

"We were busy," he said.

"I noticed." She turned the bottle slowly between her palms.

"I checked the collar afterward. Properly this time." Her thumb traced the glass.

"It had been built to take commands from one handler. Somehow, you cut that handler out and fed the control lines into a mesh. The collar still carried commands, but there was nobody left at the end of them for the Slime to obey. That level of interference takes a lot of time to apply, you know?" Ivan turned his head. Most mages would have looked at the broken control post and stopped there. Elizabeth had followed the surviving array far enough to reconstruct his work.

"Then it woke up," she continued, "and went straight for the largest knot of aura in the yard."

"Yes, the General."

"The General, Yara, Gareth, and me."

"Sorry. I couldn't make it tell the difference."

"I know." Elizabeth took another drink, smaller this time.

"It nearly ate us. But it also stopped him from killing us, and in the end you saved us. So it's all good." The ship creaked under them. Somewhere below deck, someone laughed in their sleep or talked through a dream.

"Leo had the last group moving when the Slime came over that trench," she said.

"Earlier, and those people would still have been in its path. Any later, and the General would have reached us before it did. You got the timing right."

"I guessed."

"No, you calculated." Her eyes dropped to his right hand.

"And then we found you unable to hold the chalk. Am I right?" Ivan rubbed his thumb against the side of his finger. He could still remember the tremor.

"Well, I had a potion."

"Stop lying. You drank it after." That sat there for a bit. Elizabeth had not come out to discuss array theory. Or at least, not only array theory.

"A team of enchanters would need hours to make that collar," she said.

"You changed its governing rule in the middle of a fight, half-empty, using chalk while the General was shaking the yard apart."

"Uh, you're welcome?" Elizabeth looked at him for a few seconds. When she spoke again, her eyes had left his hands.

"In the yard, I told Gareth that we couldn't read your true Level. Maybe I was wrong about that part." She looked back at the sea.

"Maybe your Level really is what the System says. It just isn't telling us much about what you can actually do."

"Elizabeth, I'm just a Scribe."

"Scribes can't do that." Ivan said nothing. Elizabeth's grip tightened around the bottle.

"Fine, don't answer me then. Whatever. Different question. Why did you stay?"

"What?"

"Rys and Ren were moving. Leo had the prisoners. You had a path into the trees." She turned toward him now.

"You stayed in a drainage trench beside a collared Slime until you had nothing left. Why? That was honestly stupid, you know?"

"I mean Yara was at the front gate because I asked her to be."

"So you thought dying in the mud would fix that?"

"No." Ivan looked down at the wake.

"I thought the Slime might." Elizabeth did not laugh.

"That's not what I asked." Ivan knew. The collar topic had been easy to avoid, strange System secrets that he could just feign confusion about. But now she was getting personal.

"There isn't really any deep meaning. I just didn't want to leave people to die, I wouldn't feel like I betrayed myself," he said. For once, Elizabeth had no theory or correction ready. Ivan rested his elbows on the rail, wishing they were still talking about arrays. At least then he would have known where to look.

"My turn, then. Why is the little sister of the Citadel's City Lord chasing slaver routes on a borrowed ship? It just doesn't make sense." Her mouth tightened.

"Okay, even if we ignore why you came here to begin with, you could've gone back to your brother after the bay incident," Ivan continued.

"Instead you're here beside me, folding space until your knees stop working just to help former slaves. Why?" Elizabeth looked down at the bottle.

"For some of the same reasons, probably." It was barely an answer, but Ivan let it go. She had still told him more than before. The wake hissed behind the ship and broke apart in the dark.

"We split tomorrow," she said.

"Next time I see you, I'll be asking again. When I'm sober." Ivan looked at her.

"About the collar?"

"About you, stupid." Her thumb stopped moving against the glass.

"The collar is just where I noticed. I want to know more about you."

"You're very sure there's a next time," he said. Elizabeth scoffed.

"There had better be." Then, quieter, "Stay alive until then."

"I'll try." She looked at his hand again.

"You said you were trying in the yard. We found you in the muck unable to hold a piece of chalk. Give me something better than that." Ivan's first answer was another qualification. Probably. If nothing went wrong. He kept it to himself.

"All right, Elizabeth," he said.

"Next time." Elizabeth held the bottle out. Ivan took one swallow. It tasted terrible. He handed it back quickly. She gave him a dazed smile and walked toward the stairs. Ivan watched until she disappeared below deck. Tomorrow they would reach land. The Order would turn toward America while Ivan, Rys, and Ren continued inland from Greyport toward Asterion. He'd gotten used to having Yara's people nearby. Soon there would be no Order at his back at all.

With Rys and Ren, he'd then try his luck by moving toward Asterion. The journey had just started.