New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤
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Riding a three-masted sailing ship for the first time felt strange.
Marek almost thought it felt like stepping into the Age of Sail, then corrected himself.
This world was already on the edge of one.
As the ship moved downstream, he stood quietly with old stories of captains, sea charts, and impossible voyages drifting through his mind.
Angoulême suddenly gave him a light push from behind.
He nearly fell into the river.
At the same time, she grabbed his belt, so it was only a fright.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked first, round eyes wide, before he could accuse her of anything.
“You could scare someone to death, you know.” Since learning what she had survived, Marek found it hard to get truly angry with her.
“Nothing.”
Angoulême stepped forward to look at the river, putting on the air of a knowing older sister.
“Actually, I know what you’re thinking even if you don’t say it.
You’re upset that Zoltan doesn’t like you.”
‘No.
I forgot about that the moment he said it.’
“Don’t be angry.
He only cares about me, and he doesn’t know you.
He didn’t see Ciri’s face when she talked about you, so he doesn’t trust you.
He just thinks too much.”
‘That’s normal.
A child that calculating would make me suspicious too.’
Angoulême gripped Marek’s arms with both hands.
“Anyway, Captain, don’t mind what he said.
I absolutely believe in you.”
Let her misunderstand if she wanted.
It was not a serious problem.
“All right.
Thank you for your support, Angoulême.”
“But I have something I want to discuss with the captain.”
She released his arms, laced her fingers together, and lowered her voice with unusual embarrassment.
Honestly, seeing that posture from someone he was used to treating as a wild girl made Marek uneasy.
“Go on.
You don’t want to read today?
Or you need pocket money?”
“No.”
She drew a breath and forced herself to continue.
“It’s about the business.”
Marek said nothing.
He only looked quietly into her brown eyes.
“I…
think the virility tonic business makes good money, but it doesn’t seem very respectable.”
Her gaze dropped to the thin white scar across the bridge of his nose.
“I mean…
isn’t the Phantom Company supposed to help the wronged and punish the wicked?”
Under Marek’s gaze, she stammered through the words, but the meaning was simple enough.
Thank the gods she had realized it herself.
Otherwise, Marek would have been embarrassed to say the emperor had no clothes, considering how happily she had gone out under the Company’s name every day.
After speaking, Angoulême lowered her head and avoided his eyes.
She clearly understood that the new leather armor and sharp steel sword had not been cheap.
“Agreed,” Marek said simply.
“What?”
She jerked her head up and stared into his blue eyes.
His narrowed eyes curved with a smile.
“I said the Company will no longer sell virility tonics. New chapters come out on g.com first.
From now on, we focus on helping the wronged, cutting down the wicked, and building a reputation.”
***
Bucky was a carefree twenty-eight-year-old sailor.
He drank in great gulps, ate heartily, had a healthy body, no family burdens, and skilled lovers in both Flotsam and Vergen.
This journey to Flotsam, one of many in his short and happy career, unfortunately became the end of his life.
It was deep night.
The ship was held in the middle of the river by a magical anchor.
Bucky crouched at the stern and relieved himself freely while staring at the black forest on the bank.
Thinking of how many Scoia’tael might be hidden there with arrows ready for his throat made the hair on his body rise, and fear only made his business more urgent.
Then water roared.
A heavy crash struck the hull.
A tentacle.
Bucky’s eyes went wide, his mouth hanging open, as a monstrous octopus rose from the river like a hill.
Gray-red tentacles coiled around the wooden ship, layer after layer.
The hull groaned and cracked beneath a strength it could not resist.
Terror turned his body weak.
He emptied himself from both ends.
Not long after, a thrashing tentacle came down.
Darkness took him, and that was the end of his brief, undignified life.
At the same time, on a forested stretch of the Pontar’s bank, Marek dragged himself ashore in miserable condition, one hand locked around Angoulême.
“Fuck.
Which bastard said the Pontar was safe?” he cursed through his teeth.
Then he dropped to one knee, laid the waterlogged girl belly-down across his bent leg with her head lower than her body, and pressed.
Water erupted.
The girl could not swim.
From Marek’s perspective, nearly drowning her captain was proof enough that swimming lessons were overdue.
It was true that in this age, most people could not swim.
That did not stop Captain Marek from deciding to add another rule for Company members: everyone had to learn.
Under the moonlight, the three-masted ship had been ruined beyond recognition by the enormous octopus-like monster.
One of the thing’s tentacles was as thick as Marek’s body.
A single lash would crush a person in armor into paste.
The answer to a beast like that was probably not a witcher, but a cannon, if this age had cannons.
Or perhaps a very large bomb fed straight into its mouth.
He shook away the thought.
Angoulême had finished coughing up river water and rolled onto her back, breathing hard.
Marek stood and watched the ship’s final moment.
The mountain-sized beast sank back beneath the river.
The whirlpool of its descent swallowed the last wreckage.
Moonlight rippled across the water, and the ship was gone without a trace.
After a while, Angoulême spoke in a hoarse voice still edged with fear.
“What was that monster?”
She had seen monsters before.
Ghouls, rotfiends, even kikimores did not frighten her easily.
But that thing’s size was enough to silence even her.
It was hard even to curse it.
“Looked like an octopus,” Marek said with calm, unfunny cheer.
“A very large octopus.
One tentacle would feed us for days.”
Angoulême clearly did not share Lambert’s taste for cold humor.
She only glared at him.
Since the joke failed to relax her, Marek coughed lightly.
“Whatever it was, we walk to Flotsam from here.
Luckily, it shouldn’t be far.”
Angoulême stood and checked her equipment.
Then she cried out.
“Ah!
Your magic herb satchel.
The fall into the water had been too sudden, and Marek had focused on saving her.
He had not paid attention to the satchel, thinking he could find a moment alone and retrieve it later.
He had not expected Angoulême to notice first.
That was only a small matter.
The important question was something else.
He turned his head toward her.
“How do you know it’s magical?”
“Ciri told me,” the wild girl said as if it were obvious.
Heat rose faintly in Marek’s face.
So she had known all along.
Then many of his attempts to hide it must have looked ridiculous to her.
Of course Ciri had known.
They had lived together for half a year, and he had never deliberately hidden it from her.
Back then, he had never imagined leaving his home world behind.
“What else did she tell you?
Did you tell anyone?”
“When Ciri and I shared a bed, I asked about you.
She told me her brother had a magic herb satchel that could hold a lot of things.”
Angoulême held her hands in a circle before her chest, roughly the size of one cubic meter.
“She said it was precious to you, and that you carried it everywhere when you went out.
The potion that saved me came from inside it.”
“As for your magic bag, that is one of our hanza’s secrets.
I would die before telling anyone else.”
Moonlight lay like water.
Beneath Angoulême’s wet blond fringe, the certainty in her eyes seemed entirely natural to her.
Marek was suddenly moved.
He would never trust another person so completely.
He would never be capable of such unquestioning loyalty.
But that did not stop him from admiring and liking people who could.
He relaxed, and also realized something he had overlooked.
Magic in this world already included spatial enchantments and folded-space spells.
If people mistook his satchel for a rare magical artifact, that did not matter much.
The people he truly needed to hide it from were mages who knew what they were looking at.
They could not discover that the satchel had nothing to do with magic, and was instead a rule-bound creation of Impossible Alchemy.
So he straightened and held out one hand, palm up.
His voice was clear and bright, and the words tore open empty space.
He said, “Come.”
The night wind moved through the forest.
Summer insects sang in layered noise.
He said, “Satchel, come.”
Before Angoulême’s stunned eyes, ripples spread through the void.
The Bottomless Herb Satchel appeared from nowhere and dropped into Marek’s hand.
A startled yelp came from the trees.
The sound cut through the Phantom Company’s conversation and revealed that someone else had seen everything.
In an instant, Marek barked, “Stop her.”
He hooked the satchel over his shoulder and ran toward the sound.
Angoulême moved before he had even finished speaking.
She shot away like an arrow from the string, all wild instinct, far faster than Marek could run.
Within minutes, Marek had fallen far behind in the chase.
Fortunately, after continuing in the same direction for a while, he could faintly hear the ring of steel on steel ahead.
Good.
Angoulême had caught her.
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Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.