The third week came and went with no real development.

…I tried my best, okay? It just… It didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped, is all. Vann wasn’t too cooperative, and my crewmates were likewise unwilling to really be part of my efforts, so…

—But, in the end, it wasn’t as though they wanted it to go badly. For one, Vann didn’t even speak their language, so it was obvious that there were going to be some difficulties in communication. Not to mention that plenty of the members disliked him from the get-go for essentially stealing Coda’s room. I, of course, tried to deflect their blame on myself, but it was an impossible situation.

Barbariccia took the whole situation to heart and ran with it. Even after close to ten months, he still refused to consider me a full member, and now he was using this whole thing with Vann to try to convince everyone else that I was a traitor. He did so with little success, but a number of the members did share the opinion that my endeavor was a futile one. And after three weeks, I’m having difficulty in finding reasons to disagree.

Vann is not making much of an effort. I understand why, it’s perfectly reasonable, but it still upsets me that he isn’t fighting harder for his life.

I recommended that he try to learn Yinnic, but he refused. Something about how he didn’t want to spend his last month alive trying to learn a new language. He used the same excuse to dodge around a third of everything Coda cooked. Absolute insanity. Even weirder, he was completely fine with eating what I cooked for him, even though I’m objectively a worse cook than Coda is. When I asked him about it, he said that he liked the novelty of eating otherworldly food.

I tried to make him join in on game night, and on storytelling night, and theater night, but he loathed the hassle of translation too much to enjoy it.

So, in short, he would spend his days in Coda’s room, only emerging when forced to. And what would he do in there? Well…

A large portion of the time he spent there was used for writing letters. Yeah, it was weird. I used my own pocket money to buy paper and ink and a quill for him, and then a bit more to get wax and a stamp for the seal alongside the actual letters. It wasn’t especially expensive, but it was still perplexing. As soon as I asked him about it, he explained himself openly.

‘When I’m dead, I want you to give these letters to the people they entail.’

Yeah. No matter what I said or how often, he simply would not accept the fact that he would live more than a few weeks more. So, at the end of every week, he’d hand me a pile of letters and ask me to get them to the right person. Some of them were intended for people like family members—mainly his father and older sister—but the majority of them were for people I didn’t know, with titles that seemed a bit too lofty for Vann to know personally. Three of them were intended for various kings, one of them being Simel. I wanted to refuse it, but he forced it on me, chiding me about ‘refusing a dying goblin’s wish.’

So now my inventory contains a few dozen letters that I have no idea how to actually deliver.

Aside from that, if only to entertain himself, he kept me around. He asked me to talk to him, to tell him stories, to keep him entertained, and to make his last few weeks slightly less boring.

The only light in the darkness of his dreadful existence was Nazzo.

Although Vann refused to learn Yinnic, Nazzo was more than willing to learn Aetongue, which was anyways fairly similar to Eentongue, which he already knew since before. So, Nazzo slowly learned, and after a week or so, they could kind of communicate.

However, it wasn’t enough. Three weeks in, and he still refused to join us.

With not much else in terms of options, I went with what some might consider a bit of a hasty decision. But it was a last-ditch effort, so I took the chance.

I had actually asked for permission one week in, but it was only after three weeks that it went through.

“Are you still sure about this, Kitty?” Coda asks.

My eyes lie square on the small caravan cruising along the horizon. “I am,” I say, hands squeezing the railing. “If this doesn’t work, then…”

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“Then, you still have another week, right?” Nazzo comments, popping his head into my vision. “A week is a long time. Anything can happen.”

“Yeah,” I reply without much conviction. Maybe Vann’s pessimistic outlook has started to infect me, but with every day that passes, I’m less and less certain that he’ll turn around in the end. Sure, there’s a chance that he might proclaim his new alliance at the very last minute, but I doubt that kind of half-hearted commitment would last. It certainly wouldn’t be able to withstand the kind of scrutiny Coda would place on it.

Clapping his hands, Coda grabs the attention of the gathered members. “Alright, to your stations, friends!” He turns his eye to me. “And you—bring our rookie-in-training.” As I’m leaving, I hear him mutter under his breath, “Maybe with this, the kid will be lucky enough to die honorably instead of having to be put down like a drake…”

Numbly, I recognize that I don’t disagree with him.

I move down to the captain’s room, a path I could now walk blind. Before I enter, I knock in a certain rhythm, waiting for Vann to tell me that I’m allowed in. Sometimes this takes a second, sometimes I’ve stood waiting for tens of minutes. Never more than an hour, though it certainly felt like it at times. After less than a minute, I hear a call on the other side: “Come in.” I enter.

He looks up from where he sits at the desk, looking so much like Coda it briefly scares me. There’s a letter at the desk, one he’s still writing. If he didn’t put it away when I entered, it must not be too important. Still… “How much do you have left of that letter?”

He glances down at it, then back up at me. “Only a few sentences, and the sign-off. How so?”

“Finish it, and then we have to go,” I say stoically.

The quill falls out of his hand, rolling to a stop atop the letter. He stares at me without picking it up. “...Is it time?”

“It is.”

“I see. In that case…” He fumbles for the quill a little, eventually grabbing it with trembling fingers. “This won’t take more than a minute. Will you leave me for a moment? I’ll call for you when I’ve finished.”

“Of course,” I say, leaving the room and closing the door behind me. After what I counted to be two minutes and five seconds, he calls for me and I enter. He’s standing in front of the door, with a small pile of letters in hand. I glance through them only briefly before putting them in my inventory, noting absently that the most recent one, upon which the wax seal has yet to fully dry, has a few wet spots on it. I don’t ask him about it. Instead, I simply say, “Are you ready?”

“I am.”

Nodding solemnly, I lead him up to the deck. The thunder of canons is already exploding across the sky, plumes of smoke billowing from their wide-open steel mouths. Our victim doesn’t have any openings for canons, leaving them wide open to such an attack. Once we’re close enough, we shoot the harpoons. I’m not surprised when Coda calls for Vann to join us in taking the deck.

When I take his arm to lead him across the double-chains acting as our ramp, I find him trembling. I squeeze his arm a little. “It’s okay,” I whisper to him. “I’ll be right beside you, so just try to… Enjoy it.” As I’m saying the words, I can feel the absurdity in it, but it’s the truth. From my personal experiences, if he doesn’t enjoy it the first time, he won’t enjoy it the second, third or fiftieth times, either. And if he can’t ever enjoy this—the most crucial part of our job—then…

I shake my head, pushing down the thoughts with a heavy swallow. He’ll enjoy it. He has to. At the very least, he needs to be able to stand it.

We board the small vessel, I reap the neck of a nearby sailor, and Vann freezes in place. Scar and Cir run past us, darting for where I previously told Coda I could smell the captain. I move to look at Vann, maybe to tell him something calming or encouraging, but a sword lodges itself in my chest before I have time to. Briefly annoyed, I sink my teeth into the neck of the sword’s owner, my jaws clacking together so easily I might as well have bitten through whipped cream. After chewing for a second while pulling the sword out, I swallow and almost instantly regenerate the damage done. I turn to Vann. “Hey, Vann, are you—”

His terrified, trembling eyes turn to me. Or, rather, a spot that coincides with where I’m standing. Ah. Yeah, no, he is not okay. I move closer to him, but he recoils away from me with a gasp. All things considered, he seems to be having a bit of an episode. Why would he…?

I turn to look at the deck. It doesn’t look like that of his own ship in the least, but with these bodies covering it, and with me standing right in the middle of it…

I look back at him. He’s having a flashback. Because of me.

My jaws tighten and I feel the urge to squeeze my eyes shut. But that wouldn’t help. It’d only make things worse. Maybe if I touch him on the shoulder, or tell him something nice, then… I shake my head. Excuses. Justifications. What he needs right now isn’t me, it’s…

On the other side of the deck, I notice Nazzo, trying and half-failing to once again fend off a sailor. Always thrown into the frey, never suited for it. With one eye over my back to make sure Vann isn’t murdered where he stands clutching the railing, I stride across the deck, effortlessly killing Nazzo’s enemy before putting a hand on his shoulder. “Nazzo, could you help Vann?”

The grateful smile on his face swiftly twists into a confused frown. “Help… Vann? Why? How?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “He needs someone to stand next to him and not be threatening. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why that can’t be me.”

“But why does he…?”

“Nazzo, you’re his friend, right?” With that half-veiled accusation, Nazzo has no choice but to nod in reply, indignation shining in his eyes. “Good. If you stand next to him for a few minutes, maybe he’ll tell you why he needs it.”

Not waiting to hear his excuses and reasons for not being able to do what I’ve asked of him, I grab both his shoulders, spin him around to face where Vann stands, and then I send him away with a push on the back. I watch his path for a few seconds to make sure he gets to Vann alright, and that he doesn’t do something dumb. Thankfully, he’s able to do his duty of standing still quite well, leaving me to my own without hindrance. A sailor comes charging at me, and I’m just about to disembowel him when I remember how I’m still in Vann’s line of sight. So instead of gorily discharging him, I simply grab his neck and crush it in one hand.

I dispatch the rest of the sailors on deck in a similar fashion, the pillaging being successful in all areas but one. In the end, we take the captain and a few key persons hostage, the harpoons doing their job by ensuring that they can’t escape us without sinking.

That’s all a bit overshadowed though by the fact that Vann was still in a state once we got back, and even when we got him all calm and secure in his room, he wouldn’t come out, or even talk to us. He wouldn’t even open for Nazzo.

It was up to me.