Chapter LXIII (68)- Silver and Sea Monsters

Kizu looked down at his drawing of two dancers. Probably his best attempt so far. The image probably made sense without even needing the onlooker to squint.

Apparently, the Student Council had access to an enchanted device that could temporarily replicate small objects like a small piece of parchment. After a week or two the object would slowly disintegrate, but by then the word would be out. He just needed to design a sign to post first.

He lay in his hammock with a drawing board propped up against his legs. One nice thing about the boat not yet being afloat was that it remained completely stable.

“What’s that?” Aoi asked. She looked over his shoulder at his work, her skeletons lurking behind her.

“Dancers.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t see it?”

“It’s not a technique I’m familiar with. Is it new?”

Kizu looked over at her. “What are you talking about? It’s a sketch for the Midwinter Ball.”

Her eyes widened. “Ah. Well. Maybe it’s a bit blunt to say that I don’t think that sign will draw any students to your event.”

“Can you do better?” Kizu grumbled.

As an answer, she held out a hand. Kizu reluctantly turned over the drawing board to her along with his drawing supplies.

In mere minutes, she handed him back a gorgeous sketch of a man and woman dancing. The woman’s dress twisted around her while still floating a few centimeters off the ground, implying movement. While the man stood tall and firm, in control and guiding her. There were no background details, but there didn’t need to be. Kizu figured that was a good call since it kept the focal point on the dancers without any distractions.

“Can I use this?” Kizu asked.

Aoi shrugged. “Sure.” Then she paused, examining her undead. “I wonder if any of you can draw. If you retain an echo of your soul, then you should each have talents from your lives, right?”

The skeletons just stood there, swaying slightly.

“That’s how I understand it,” Kizu said, trying to be helpful. “But the undead I knew actually still retained most of her soul. Most of my knowledge of mindless undead like these is from hearsay.”

“What was she like?”

“You mean Shika?” Kizu shrugged. He figured he might as well answer her questions since she let him keep her drawing. “She acted like any other girl. We kind of grew apart though as I got older though. We’re still friends, but it’s hard when she’s stuck at the maturity of an eight-year-old.”

“That’s so interesting. So, the soul requires the body to change?”

“Not quite. She could change her mind and become smarter just fine. But her brain stopped developing and stunted her. I’m not an expert on child psychology, but children think differently from someone like you or me. It’s hard to explain, but we basically just grew apart a bit as the years went by.”

Aoi considered this, then her eyes lit up. “I need to write all this down!” Then she scrambled over to a corner of the room and grabbed a giant book. She sat down at the table in the center of the crew quarters, opened it, and began madly scribbling notes down.

“What’s that?” Kizu asked, walking up to her.

“My new grimoire,” she said, not looking up from her book. “Every necromancer has one. My old diary has notes about necromancy and soul magic in it that are encoded, but now I have a place to keep an actual grimoire, so I’ve been working on transcribing them into it. Plus, my findings with my undead here as well.”

Kizu tried not to look guilty at the mention of her diary. Though he was silently impressed he never noticed anything that even hinted at a coded message when he had skimmed it. Granted, he hadn’t been looking for anything like that. But still.

Anata came over and stood up on her tiptoes to look at the grimoire Aoi wrote in. Aoi ignored her, as per usual, and continued to scribble madly in the book. While Aoi remained indifferent to Anata, Anata had become significantly more relaxed around the princess as the days went by. It was probably healthy for her to become comfortable with more people.

But, even as Kizu was thinking that, Aoi went to turn a page and her hand brushed against Anata’s face.

Anata yelped like a kicked dog as her flesh hissed. She scrambled back, clutching at her left eye with bits of steam escaping through her fingers while tears rolled down her face from her other eye.

Kizu dashed to her side, trying to discover what was wrong with her. He managed to pry away her fingers from her face, revealing a streak of exposed scarlet flesh that cut across her left eyebrow. It actively sizzled. The reek of burning flesh filled the crew’s quarters.

Kizu whirled on Aoi who sat, watching with wide eyes, with her grimoire still open in front of her.

“I barely touched her!” Aoi said, raising her hands.

In the light shed from Aoi’s scrying orb, Kizu caught a glimpse of something on her finger. Kizu stepped forward and took her hand for a better look. She protested and yanked her hand away, but Kizu saw enough to confirm his suspicion. A ring with a fresh bit of flesh still coated on it.

“You wear silver,” Kizu said.

“What’s your point?” Aoi said. But then she paused, realizing what that meant. “She’s not human? Your niece is a monster?”

“Only half monster. She’s still my niece.”

“And which half of the family are you from?” Aoi asked, her eyes narrowing at him.

In response, Kizu grabbed her hand again, this time pressing his palm against the silver ring.

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“Let go,” she said, pulling her hand away. “I get it. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that your niece was half monster. Someone forgot to mention that to me when deciding to move into my ship. Otherwise I would have been a bit more careful.”

“Can you heal her?”

Aoi grumbled about it, but eventually removed her rings and set her hand over Anata’s wound. Anata flinched at her touch but relaxed when nothing bad happened. There was a slight glow. When she removed her hand, the skin had knitted itself back together, though a white line remained diagonally across her eyebrow. A millimeter or two in width and three or so centimeters in length, along the center of where the gash had been.

“There’s still a scar,” Kizu noted.

“I never claimed to be perfect. It takes years of training to become a proper medic mage. I just pay attention in my classes enough to cast basic spells to heal superficial wounds and clean breaks. I actually just learned how to repair hair follicles last week. So, besides that scar, the rest of her eyebrow should grow back fine.”

Anata touched her healed wound and looked at her fingers, looking confused as they came back without any blood. She looked a bit more dangerous now, the scar being right over her scarlet eye.

The image was ruined though as Mort leapt on top of her head, causing her to giggle slightly. He tugged at her hair then hopped onto one of the hammocks. As they began to chase each other around the room, Kizu couldn’t help but marvel at how quickly her mood shifted. He wondered if all children were like that, or if Anata was special in that regard.

Kizu left the crew quarters and went to the flooded cargo section of the ship. An air bubble over his head, he continued his repairs.

An hour later, Kizu looked down at his handiwork. The patch had mostly been sealed up from this side. Now he had to figure out what to do about the exterior.

He climbed back up onto the deck and looked down into the black waters. Using his spellsense, he could sense the magical creature swimming around in the depths. It never seemed to stop moving. Not even to sleep. For the last week, Kizu had half expected it to interfere with his fishing, but it never appeared bothered by it. And the previous day, he had tested the water by throwing large wood scraps into the lake. The creature at the bottom had made no sign of noticing them.

So, despite his better judgment, Kizu sat up on the gunwales of the ship, then he slid into the lake.

At first, he watched the creature closely with his spellsense. But the magical monster made no sign of diverging from its path underwater. Still, Kizu resolved to keep an eye on it as he swam down to the hole in the exterior hull of the ship.

The ship’s stern rested on a massive craggy rock that jutted up from the depths of the lake. It was extraordinarily fortunate that the ship hadn’t sunken any deeper into the water over the years.

Kizu created a bubble of air to breathe as he examined the extensive damage. He ran a hand down along the hull, transforming the water touching it into ice. He continued to cast his spell, building on his ice. Soon, he had a human sized chuck clinging to the side of the boat. He could feel the chill imitating from it into the surrounding water. Despite his shivering, he kept at it. When he had built a tumor of ice as big as a sakura tree, he swam back to the surface. His entire body shook, and the world blurred in front of him, but he managed to clamber over the gunwales and fall back to the deck.

Regaining his strength, he requested through his bond for Mort to bring Anata to him.

A minute later, both Mort and Anata joined him on the upper deck. While he felt Mort’s concern and confusion through their bond, Anata seemed to understand the situation immediately.

Out of the folds of her outfit, she took out a small object wrapped in a handkerchief. Unwrapping it, she revealed the familiar scarlet knife she had kept down in her room in the dungeon. She sliced her thumb open and pressed against Kizu’s damp arm.

Immediately the world shuddered before him. His sense went into overdrive as everything burst into life. The chill from the water amplified to the point where he almost blacked out, but he clung to consciousness as the sensation wore off.

Feeling much better, Kizu heated up the water still on his skin, causing small tendrils of steam to arch up from his body.

“Thank you,” he said to Anata.

He found a dry piece of cloth from his pack and wrapped her finger in it. It only took a few seconds of pressure for the blood flow to clot.

Anata looked proud of her work, and she smiled up at him, her open mouth showing her extended and sharpened canine.

“I’m going back in,” Kizu said to her. “I think I almost have it. You and Mort wait here for me. I might need more help in a minute.”

With that, Kizu swung his legs over the railing and dropped into the lake.

It took three more stops back to the surface to refill on blood from Anata before he finally got a result. The chunk of ice stretched all the way across the bottom of the boat, far under it. But Kizu was careful to not have any of the ice attach itself to the stone.

The ice’s cracking and popping echoed in the water all around him as the stern of the ship finally slowly ascended to the surface. Kizu watched his work with pride as, for the first time in centuries, the back of the ship finally breached into the open air above.

Only then did Kizu notice a shift from below.

He almost missed it, but as he observed his ice with his spellsense, the creature altered its trajectory. Now it moved in his direction. Kizu abandoned his air bubble and rapidly swam towards the hole in the ship’s hull. As he slipped inside and created a new air bubble, he looked behind him towards the creature.

It glowed. And not only from his spellsense. A faint purple emanated from it, illuminating it in the dark water. He had expected a sea monster similar to the one that he had run into while exploring the underwater ruins with Anata back as a spirit, but this was something else entirely different. Five extremely long legs sprouted from the main body, twirling, twisting, and paddling it upwards. As it approached, Kizu realized that the main body looked almost fungus-like as it undulated. Not including its flexible limbs, the massive jellyfish creature was approximately a third of the size of the ship.

It floated next to the ship, not quite breaching the surface. It winced back as one of its legs brushed up against the iceberg that suspended the ship.

Then, ripples went through the water. As the current of water touched Kizu, his vision blacked out as throbbing agony overwhelmed his senses. He breathed rapidly in ragged and disorderly gasps, barely managing to maintain the air bubble spell as his skull felt as if it was collapsing inwardly under an ocean of pressure.

Then, without any warning, the creature drifted away and returned to the depths below. In less than three minutes, its dim light winked out in the darkness. But Kizu could still sense it below with his spellsense. His head still rattled with pain, but it was manageable.

His arms shaking, neither from blood loss nor cold this time, Kizu resumed his repairs to the ship. Despite the monster’s visit, or rather, because of it, the ship needed to be fixed as soon as humanly possible. Kizu did not want to spend another day creating an iceberg to float the ship up.

The repairs weren’t pretty, but Kizu managed to patch the hole with boards and then slabbed a gunky sealant over the slight spaces between the wood.

From there, the only thing that remained was draining the interior. Thankfully, he had a plan for that.

“Kizu!” Aoi said as he exited the captain’s cabin. “What are you doing?”

“Oh good,” Kizu said. “You’re still here. I was worried you’d gone back to your dorm for the night.”

“The entire ship righted itself in the water suddenly! What was that massive blob in the water? Did you create that? Why is the ship covered in ice?”

“A sea monster. And ice floats, it’s one of the first things every novice brewer learns,” Kizu said, tired. Then, before she could question him further, he continued. “I blocked up the hole down below so we should stay afloat now. But I need your help emptying out the water still in the hull.”

Aoi made a face. “I am not carrying buckets.”

Kizu sighed. “Not your physical help. Just command those skeletons of yours.”

Her face lit up with the idea, likely excited by the prospect of using her necromancy. She put them to work. The undead thralls lined up between the captain’s cabin and the gunwales. They passed buckets of water between each other before throwing the contents overboard. It took hours just to get about a fourth of the water out, but they continued tirelessly.

Kizu waited until the ice melted under the ship, proving it to be stably afloat, before going down to the crew quarters and passing out on his hammock.