When Malysseus finally woke up, his head was throbbing. His entire body felt sore. Mentally taking stock of the rest of the damage, he noticed patches of skin that felt hotter than the rest. He was suffering from burns. His Mana channels were in tatters, making him concerned about his ability to use magic at all. He reached for the spark, rustling the bed sheets where he lay with a bit of wind. The magic hurt, but it still answered his call. It was there.

Malysseus was on the bed in his cabin, alone in the room. There was uneaten food on the nightstand next to him. He didn’t know how long it had sat there but ate the stale bread anyway. The water smelled horrible—as if they pulled it straight from the sea—so he ignored it. Instead, he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out the papers concealing the false bottom. He opened the false bottom, freeing his bottle of emergency rum.

The Captain drank heartily from the bottle, sighing with contentment as he finished his drink. The bottle returned to its place for future emergencies, and he realized he was wearing underclothes. His coat jacket and pants were, thankfully, nearby.

After suiting back up, he found his cigar tin. Finally, he felt blessed. The cigars were in outstanding condition, so he started a smoke. Sitting in his room, he played with the smoke using magic. He twirled the smoke in circles, formed it into shapes, and created tornadoes in the name of killing time. No one showed up to his room. He started to get angry, convincing himself the crew was ungrateful for everything he’d done. An hour later, not even Kewari or Gurten had checked on him.

Grumbling, he cleared the smoke from his room and went out to the deck. If they wouldn’t come to him, Malysseus would go to them. The deck was completely empty. The storm was also, notably, no longer surging around the ship. The bodies of the fallen squidlings had been cleared out at some point while he was out. Any evidence of battle had been scrubbed away, aside from a few places board patches were nailed into the deck. He slowly remembered why: the lightning magic. He had done it.

For some reason, Malysseus didn’t feel like celebrating the great accomplishment. He needed to uncover why the squidlings could appear with perfect timing as his ship was getting ill. There was no shot the situation was a coincidence.

There was no one on the bow. There was no one at the wheel, which was set to hold course. Malysseus took a moment to check the heading, slightly adjusting the wheel based on the results of his magic.

He checked by the infirmary—or at least, the small room that passed for it—but Kewari wasn’t in. His anger built at the feeling he was being forgotten. Still, he knew where to look for the crew by process of elimination. He made his way into the hold, stepping carefully through the trapdoor. His muscles were still a little shaky.

As he walked down the stairs, he heard a loud chatter below. Sailors were shouting over each other. Malysseus didn’t want that kind of nonsensical behavior on his ship. He continued down the steps so he could demand it stop, but the noise below fell completely silent.

Gurten and Kewaristood before the crew, who lounged around on the table and chairs everyone used for meals. Twelve faces stared at Captain Malysseus, who stared right back at them. Finally, Gurten broke the silence.

“Glad to have you back, Captain.”

Malysseus shrugged it off, “I feel like an elephant and rhino have been wrestling in my head, let alone the rest of me. What’s going on here?”

He limped his way to the front, passing by everyone in the crew. They all still watched him intently. There were other things in their eyes, too. He saw admiration, appreciation, and respect. Slowly, his anger from earlier started to fade away.

“We were discussing a situation,” Kewari admitted. “The ship is being threatened by an entity, and we’re not sure how to react.”

“What does ‘being threatened by an entity’ mean? Are there more squidlings around?” Malysseus fired off his questions, though the former was more rhetorical. He needed more details than ‘entity.’

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“Yes, Captain,” Gurten said. “Well, yes, but that’s not the entity Kewari is talking about. We’re calling it an entity because nobody has any idea what it is. It’s just an entity… underneath the ship.”

“I’m sorry,” Malysseus said, acting as though Gurten had slapped him. “Did you say ‘underneath the ship,’ or did my ears lie to me? Like I said, my head is still all out of sorts.”

“It’s definitely under the ship,” Gurten confirmed.

“Following us? Stuck to the bottom?”

“As far as we can tell,” Kewari said, “the entity is following us. It’s hard to keep track of because it seems to keep mostly at a depth we cannot observe.”

“How big is it?” Malysseus asked. Entity, entity, entity. He was finding the word more and more annoying by the second.

“It seems at least as big as the ship,” Gurten said solemnly.

Kewari added, “If not bigger.”

Malysseus felt his concern rising but dismissed the fears. He wouldn’t even consider such an unlikely without further proof. He would observe the hull with his own eyes. For now, the crew obviously learned more about the squidlings. He needed to know about that threat, too.

“What about the squidlings?” he asked. “They’re still around?”

“They’re following the ship somehow,” Gurten reported. “Don’t seem to be many left, but they have some method for sneaking into the ship without breaking the boards. We never take on water, but we keep finding signs of them in the kitchen. They’re poisoning the food.”

Poison certainly explained how squidlings could make a whole crew of sailors sick at the same time.

“What kind of poison?” Malysseus asked.

“It seems to be derived from contaminated seawater,” Kewari said. “I’ve been able to cleanse it with my magic, but it’s been a real thorn in our side. My Mana can never fully recover because every morsel needs to be cleansed before we eat.”

“Are they poisoning our water stores, too?” Malysseus asked.

“Yes, actually,” Gurten agreed. “How did you know?”

“One of them must have snuck into my room to poison my water,” Malysseus said. “I wonder why they didn’t poison the bread.” Malysseus noticed one of the crew members shifting uncomfortably. It was a slight twitch. He easily could have missed the motion if he hadn’t already been looking in that direction. The sailor was named Uro.

Everyone had the good sense to look horrified at the attempted poisoning of their Captain. He shrugged it off, “We’re just lucky their poison smells so bad. It doesn’t make a very effective poison. I’m guessing most of the other expeditions ran into the same collection of squidlings.”

“And they weren’t able to cleanse their provisions,” Gurten realized. “Ultimately, they had to decide between death by squidling or death by starvation. They wouldn’t have had a healer to cleanse the food.”

“That’s my theory, too, anyway,” Malysseus said. “Have we tried to capture one?” He looked to Kewari, who had been present when he blasted away the first attack. She shook her head, which he took as the only answer he needed. “Do we think we should? Maybe one of the ones sneaking into the kitchen?”

“We have tried,” Marcus said, speaking up from his seat. As he drew all eyes, the sailor awkwardly stood up. “I tried. They’re very slippery. They have some kind of magic. Makes it hard to grab them. They just slip away and disappear.” He sat back down, face flushed at admitting his failures.

Malysseus frowned as he thought over the problem. His thoughts strayed to the smell of the nasty seawater. The same smell he recently encountered in his cabin from poisoned water. That’s when he smelled the same scent wafting from Uro. He opened his magical senses as he looked over the crew, trying not to give himself away.

Trying to act as though he was still considering the problem of how to catch a slippery squidling, he inspected each person. His magical senses alerted him to something wrong with Uro, just as he suspected. The man was affected by some kind of illusion. Everyone else in the crew was clean, including Gurten and Kewari.

“Uro, can you show me where the entity has been previously sighted?” Malysseus asked. The other sailor smiled with teeth, which Uro never did because he was sensitive about how they looked. Malysseus was closing in on enough evidence to make him walk the plank. He had to make absolutely sure because if it was actually Uro, but something was wrong with him, Malysseus did not want to hurt a loyal member of his crew.

“Happily, my Captain,” Uro agreed. Malysseus followed the other sailor. Gurten and Kewari looked at him questioningly but stayed behind to deal with the quiet murmuring of the crew. They walked together to the deck of the ship. When they stood alone, and it was clear no one would follow, Malysseus turned on Uro.

“Gonna show me your real face now, squidling?” he asked threateningly, putting the pieces together. Uro-squidling grinned maniacally but didn’t drop the illusion. At that very moment, something powerful collided with the ship, causing it to rock violently.

The imposter’s smile deepened.

Malysseus looked down. His eyes widened as he saw the shadow underneath the hull, big enough to swallow the ship whole.