“Harper, you are telling me ghouls have already pushed into the timberland south of the valley?”
“Aye, Master Will. We fled north from Sodden Hill clean toward the Ina riverbank. Drowners and water hags haunt the shallows there, so we didn’t dare wade the crossings. We pushed into the deep woods instead, only to stumble into a whole nest of ghouls. Over thirty men in our company. I was the only one who made it out.”
“May Melitele hold them in her grace. May their spirits find peace.”
Will let out a quiet breath.
The man before him was a Cintran regular, a broken survivor of the southern front.
A novice had discovered him collapsed against the temple gates at midnight, his skin crosshatched with weeping lacerations and his soles worn to raw meat.
Between the scarred ruin of his cheek, his raspy, ruined voice, and a compound fracture in his forearm, one could taste the butcher’s yard that had swallowed Sodden.
Nenneke had dragged Will from his bed roll in the small hours.
Once their combined efforts set the bone and sealed the bleeding, Will teased out fragments of news between Harper’s feverish mutterings.
The struggle on the Hill had drawn over one hundred thousand soldiers, leaving more than thirty thousand dead under open skies.
The heart of the slaughter lay along the ridges of Upper Sodden, far south of Ellander’s calm fields.
When the deserter first mentioned ghouls, a spark of interest had flared behind Will’s eyes.
Ingesting toxic herbs had become as routine as drawing water from a well.
With no new poisonous roots left to harvest in the valley, he needed foul reagents from deeper waters.
Ghoul venom, for one, would do nicely.
Name: Will
Level: 3
Talent: Fountain of Life
Attributes: Vitality 9.0, Strength 5.7, Agility 3.8, Perception 5.2, Magic ?
Skills: Alchemy Lv.1, Swordsmanship Lv.1, Healing Lv.2, Life Meditation, Life Drain
Experience: 120/300
This past month under Tris’s brutal regimen had hardened him.
Daily bouts with live steel, followed by mountains of roast venison and bitter herbal draughts, had driven his frame through an aggressive growth spurt.
Vitality had climbed from 8.5 to 9.0; Strength had pushed from 5.1 to 5.7.
Agility crept from 3.2 to 3.8, while Perception rose from 5.0 to 5.2.
The glaring blemish remained his sluggish Agility.
Attribute points were too scarce to scatter lightly, so he had poured everything into raw bone and muscle.
He had no desire to imitate those feline School of the Cat assassins, skittering across rooftops like shadows.
He turned back to the cot, keeping his tone measured.
“Harper, did you ever hear the name Cirilla among the baggage trains?”
The soldier stiffened, a mixture of shame and fury twisting across his sunken cheeks.
“Of course. Lady Ciri is the Lion Cub of Cintra. Gone in the fire, she is. The Black Ones have patrols tearing up every hedge between here and the Yaruga looking for her.”
His fists clenched against the linen sheet, knuckles whitening.
“I am just a coward who threw his spear in the ditch. Couldn’t hold the line. Nothing on that hill but sheets of fire, green poison mists, and the screaming. You couldn’t see your mate’s face. All you could do was run. Even the Nilfgaardian heavy infantry were melting where they stood, nothing left of them but bleached ribs inside charred plate.”
Harper’s jaw trembled violently, tears carving clean tracks through the grime on his temples.
Will placed a warm palm against the soldier’s forehead, channeling a trickle of restorative calm to loosen the knot behind his temples.
Vitality could knit muscle and mend bone, but it could not wash away the ghosts of a broken mind. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Will guided the man gently back onto the pillow, pulling the wool blanket up to his collar.
“Rest now, Harper. You are within the Sanctuary of Melitele. Whatever you abandoned on the field, the Mother does not hold against you.”
He set a small clay bottle of apple brandy on the low stool beside the pallet.
“An old sergeant once told me the only true victor in a war is the man who wakes up the next morning. You lived. That is enough.”
Harper took the flask with trembling fingers, taking small, cautious sips against the rough wood.
Will stepped back into the corridor.
Healing takes its own time, as Old Cui proved every day.
…
“Have you taken leave of your senses, boy? You want me to play the middleman with Nenneke so you can go sight-seeing among corpse-eaters?”
Tris paced back and forth along the cloister flags, hands tucked behind his belt, glaring as though Will had sprouted a second nose.
“What is this, a tavern ballad about a young noble chasing thrills? Have you reached the age where you must run a good horse to death just to find some excitement?”
Proper Northern humor, dry as seasoned kindling.
Will offered an unimpressed stare.
Without a word, he drew his Skellige blade and drew three clean, shallow slashes across his left forearm.
Under Tris’s narrowing gaze, the scarlet lines welled with dark beads, then sealed shut in five seconds flat, leaving behind pale, unmarred skin.
After the wolf pack in the glade, Will had taken time to reflect.
Flinching from pain was useless in this line of work.
He lacked the altered nervous system of a witcher to dull his senses on command, so he had taken to nicking his own flesh every dawn until the bite of iron felt like nothing more than an itch.
Tris held up two open palms, shaking his head.
“Fine, fine. You are tough as salt pork, I know it. But convincing Nenneke? You might as well ask Duke Hereward to give away his coin.”
“Convince me of what, little Will?”
A cold, heavy voice echoed from the shadowed archway.
Both men jumped half a pace, Will feeling as though a chapel bell had tolled directly inside his ear.
Nenneke had a knack for carrying the sovereign weight of a high priestess wherever she walked.
Tris offered Will a pitying smirk, whistled a bawdy marching cadence under his breath, and vanished around the stone pillar without looking back.
Will rubbed the back of his neck, searching for the right words.
“I need to harvest ghoul claws, Mother. The roots in our nursery aren’t doing much to build my tolerance anymore.”
“Where do you intend to look?”
“Down toward Sodden, along the northern bends of the Yaruga.”
“Very well.”
“Wait… what?”
Will blinked, leaning forward to ensure his ears hadn’t played tricks on him.
“You agree? Just like that? Three days back, when I asked to track that rogue hill bear, you threatened to lock me in the crypt.” You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
Nenneke tapped him firmly atop his crown with her wooden knuckle, reaching into her pocket to produce a silver amulet etched with Melitele’s crescent.
“Watch your tongue. The novices have all put on weight eating the wild game you drag back every week. Take this. If you run into something your steel cannot split, crush the stone. It carries an anchor to my chamber; I will pull you through.”
“May your name be praised, Mother Nenneke. Next time I catch the goddess in my dreams, I’ll tell her to keep your joints limber.”
“You… insolent whelp!”
A bright grin broke across Will’s face as he slipped the chain beneath his linen collar.
Hearing her speak of teleportation stirred an itch in his ribs; he wondered how formidable his dormant conduit would become once he found a proper way to ignite it.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t kill him in the process.
Nenneke’s jaw tightened.
The staff in her grip dipped toward the stone, her shoulders slumping slightly.
What else could she do?
She could no longer hold him back like a sheltered foundling.
She had already guessed where his steps were leading him.
In truth, part of her wished the boy were entirely ordinary; no matter how bright the goddess’s favor shone, the gears of destiny would eventually drag him into the dirt.
She only prayed he would survive the crossing.
By afternoon, Will had strapped two flasks of necrophage grease and three days of hard tack to his saddle roll, carrying fifty silver crowns in his pouch.
The three hundred crowns he had earned over the past few months rested safely in the iron chest beneath Nenneke’s floorboards.
He climbed the timber stairs to the attic loft to gather dried bundles from his private nursery.
Pushing the heavy oak door open, he paused.
A neat leather roll and a scabbarded longsword lay across the center of his workbench.
Will slung the bundle over his shoulder, a strange warmth settling behind his ribs.
That old rogue Tris.
The man could read his movements from half a mile away without turning his head.
Finding himself under Nenneke’s roof and Tris’s tutelage had been the purest stroke of fortune in two lifetimes.
Back in his previous existence, he had been just another nameless orphan grinding through ninety-hour workweeks at an enterprise software shop, nursing a ruined spine in a cubicle.
He was profoundly glad he had clicked that midnight report about Project Polaris and the new Witcher title before his vision faded, or he never would have recognized the dirt beneath his boots.
He drew the fresh steel an inch from its wooden scabbard.
His eyebrows rose.
The straight crossguard, the square iron pommel, the blackened fuller…
standard Nilfgaardian heavy cavalry issue.
Could it be?
Old Cui had worn the sun on his chest?
No wonder the veteran turned tight-lipped whenever tavern singers brought up the empire.
Serving in a military machine built on slave tithes, iron discipline, and imperial paranoia was not the sort of memory an old soldier dusted off for company.
He should have guessed earlier.
In all the world, only Nilfgaard organized its hosts into regular brigades, divisions, and standing regiments.
Tris had those drill manuals carved into his marrow.