After they extracted all the information they could out of Vivienne, Momo and her crew made good on their promise. But before they handed the artifacts over, Momo add one last minute qualification to the exchange.
"Vivienne," she said, rubbing her hands nervously. "Will you become my Loyal Follower?"
"Your what?"
Momo explained the concept to her. She had read the description in the Demagogue skill tree several times before proposing it, and as far as she could tell, becoming a Loyal Follower forebode someone from betraying the Demagogue it was attached to. If they did betray them, they'd suffer a huge and near-permanent stat penalty.
"It's just that, if I'm really going to hand over these ultra-powerful artifacts, it'd be really nice to have a failsafe in case you try and use them against me," Momo said, shrugging.
Surprisingly, Vivienne eventually agreed.
Kami disarmed all of his many visible (and invisible) traps, broke into his own safe using nothing more than a paperclip, then reluctantly slipped the artifacts into Vivienne’s open, over-eager hands. Much to Momo’s surprise, the knight didn’t immediately put them on. Instead, she wrapped them tightly in charcoal paper, crumpled the sides so they were as secure as a child tucked into bed, and stuffed them in her backpack.
“I need to put them on under the right conditions,” she explained, not elaborating further. She then gave Momo a hard, considering look. If the woman wasn’t so traumatized, the look might have even been pleasant. But this was Vivienne, so a thick cloud of wrong place, wrong time, wrong choice of necromantic mentor sat eternally between them.
They didn’t hug, or even shake hands, but Momo, being Momo, couldn’t help herself. She gave Vivienne a small salute, tipping her hat downwards. Vivienne just frowned, shaking her head tiredly in response, but Momo could tell there was a small amount of amusement hiding behind all of that bristly exterior. An appreciation that went unsaid.
“For what it’s worth, I hope Sera doesn’t kill you,” Vivienne said.
Momo grinned. “That means a lot.”
As Vivienne climbed up the ladder towards the upper decks, a courier swooped down through the hatch just above her, shooting through the hallways to land just in front of Momo’s nose.
Congratulations! For viciously gaslighting a pair of Excalibur knights, prancing around in a town full of mummified bodies, and helping a Holy Knight betray Kyros, your major class, Nether Dokkaebi, has been upgraded to level 3.
You have gained the skill [Nether Displacement].
[Nether Displacement]: By manipulating the Nether, allow your body (and all attached materials) to pass through previously impassible surfaces, such as doors, walls, and even other people! Use it to reach into the chest of your enemy and remove their uselessly beating heart, or to fetch a snack from the fridge when you’re feeling too lazy to open it.
Momo smiled wide and turned to Grimli, who looked, as always, mildly terrified.
“I have something I wanna try.”
—
Momo had Grimli set up a line of apples on the main deck, just by where the children were manning the nets. She then spent the next half an hour giggling to herself as she bobbed her hand up, stole an apple right in front of their faces, and sucked it back down into the cabins below. The kids absolutely loved it. They kept begging her to disappear bigger and bigger items, until she was pulling down chairs, then ropes, then barrels, and finally Dusk, who clawed her in the face in response.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Our captain surely has an interesting way of boosting morale,” Gita whispered to her gloomy husband. “I’ve never seen the kids more excited.”
“She’s weird,” Ribeye muttered. “But I can’t lie, she makes it work.”
—
Unfortunately, the jovial antics only lasted so long. Ribeye had mapped out a new course to Karahtan, but just as they tried to get the boat moving, they discovered that no matter the wind in the sails, the hull just wouldn’t budge. It swayed madly, jiving back and forth in the shallow water. After a quick investigation, the unlikely culprit became apparent.
“Barium Sea snails got the hull, goddammit,” Ribeye spat, holding one of the accused mollusk’s in his hand and growling. “We’re beached.”
Momo, her oversized tricorn slipping over her eyes, stared at the hull of the boat with all the menace and commanding presence of a baby monkey. She had tried to scare the snails off in a myriad of ways: [Yar Har Har]ing them until Ribeye’s ears bled, knocking them off with a bat, and now, finally, aggressively gazing. Despite all of her efforts, not as much as a single mollusk disconnected from the ship. They were stuck fast like gum to a school desk.
“So, we’re stranded?” Momo asked miserably.
“Like a whale dropped on a mountain top,” he said with a grimace. Momo took that for a yes.
She looked off into the ocean, dejected. She had encountered many trials and tribulations during her time as captain, but nothing could have prepared her for the invasion of a thousand microscopic sea snails, their slimy blue gel coating the ship’s wood. According to Ribeye, the snails’ trails were made up of liquid baryte, causing them to give off unpredictable magical effects; some of the snails bore fiery holes through the hull like laser beams, others ate away at the wood like ravenous termites.
“There’s only one reliable way to kill ‘em,” Ribeye grunted. “You have to smoke them out. You put a giant vacuum-sealed net around the hull, get ‘em snug in there, and then pump enough excess fireball smoke inside that they faint from the lack of oxygen. That process won’t take long, but repairing the damage they’ve done with their freakish slime will. Probably a week at best, if we get all the children in on it.”
Momo gripped the tiny, morbid box in her pocket. She imagined it swallowing Morganium whole, sucking every soul out of its many skyscrapers, picking out bricks from its teeth like animal bones. She imagined Sumire, sitting lonely in the throne room, gazing out the window as a dozen different combatants climbed the city walls like fire ants. There were so many different ways things could go wrong. There were so many different ways she could lose the one person on this mortal plane who actually believed in her.
She didn’t exactly have a week to spare.
“There’s got to be a different way,” she said, breathing in.
Grimli, who had been standing politely by her side, cleared his throat. He then held up his hand, showing the gleaming, golden sphere trapped inside.
“I believe there is, your highness.”
—
The plan they agreed on was thus: most of Kami’s crew would stay aboard the ship to smoke out the snails and fix the hull, while Momo, Kasula, Grimli, and Nyk would travel on Vra’ta to the Vagrant Dune’s capital. There, Momo would seek out Lione and figure out how to disable the box while Kasula hunted for clues about the Soul Splitting Dagger.
Naturally, there were already problems.
“I’m terrified to open the jar,” Momo admitted, holding the glass up to her face to see the minified dokkaebi sleeping fitfully inside. “What if she’s mad at me for not opening it sooner?”
“Of course she’s going to be mad,” Kasula said. “If that was me, I’d be pissed.”
“If you’re trying to give me confidence, you’re failing.”
The elf laughed, and the waves rolled. The pair of them sat on the beach’s edge, enjoying their last nighttime ritual before the two embarked on the next segment of their journey. Momo had come to enjoy the simplicity that was floating along at sea. She had assumed, prior to the voyage, that sleeping in undulating bunkbeds with no land for a hundred miles would be a claustrophobic nightmare, and it was, but it also turned out that there was a certain level of routine to it that dulled Momo’s usual anxieties.
She always knew what she’d wear in the morning (the same, vaguely clean rags from the day before), and what she’d eat (a bunch of shish-kebabbed insects, or, if she was lucky, Dusk’s leftover tuna), and what role she’d play (typically, glorified kindergarten teacher masquerading as a sea captain).
Now, she had no idea of what was to come, only that she’d be riding into the unknown on the back of a mechanical wolf, no saddle, and it would probably give her a rash.
“Look, sometimes you just have to rip the band aid off,” Kasula added after a moment, seeing Momo’s horrified expression. “If the nymph tries to kill you, I’ll interfere. Probably.”
Momo glared. “How reassuring.”
“Eh. It’s only an incredibly powerful contract killer stuck in a jar. You’re overthinking it.”
Momo shook her head. Oh, screw it. Taking a long, deep breath in, she uncorked the jar.