The village chief's house in Sapopan stood atop a small hill on the eastern side of the village. It was a detached three-story manor, with iron gates and iron fencing, flowerbeds and a pool in front, a family graveyard behind, and trees all around it.
At the sight of it, Victor could not help tilting his head and shooting Bowman a glance. He had not expected this bald man to be living somewhere so lavish. Even if land was cheap out here in the countryside, this was still far beyond what a village official ought to have.
But once the chief pushed the door open, the boy's doubts vanished, because standing in the hall with his back to the entrance was a mage in white robes.
He was admiring a mural that covered the entire wall, and its subject was obvious at a glance, the White Frost from Ithlinne's Prophecy, the frozen end of all things.
...
Some time later.
The room on the third floor was exquisitely furnished. Most striking of all, thin wooden slats had been fixed across the walls, holding neat rows of transparent glass panes in place.
With slightly pronounced cheekbones, curled hair parted down the middle, and dark round spectacles, the infamous criminal known as the Professor lifted his wineglass. "So, Azar, can you tell me why we're still here instead of leaving? Are we waiting for that investigator from Vizima to come upstairs and have a drink with us?"
At the sarcasm, the dark-skinned Zerrikanian mage, his body thick with muscle and covered in tattoos, piercings, and rings, let out two low chuckles. "Depends on the situation. If he's interesting, sharing a drink wouldn't be bad."
Then the door was pushed open, and a thin mage in white robes with a hooked nose and narrow eyes entered the room.
His voice had an unpleasant shrillness to it. "Professor, Azar, if you're in such a hurry to leave, then leave Volume Five of Apocalypse with me and you can go right now."
The ring on Azar Javed's lip gleamed as he replied in Common Speech with a strong foreign accent, "Forget it, Albert. Why are you in such a rush? First tell us about this investigator from the kingdom. What does he want? How did the talk with him go?"
Opening a fresh bottle of red wine for himself, the mage called Albert answered with a cold laugh, "The letter of introduction was written by Aryan, the new Baron La Valette. He came to investigate the dismemberment cases in the forest."
He raised his glass in greeting, then walked over to the wall and cast a spell, beckoning Azar and the Professor closer.
The spell triggered a signal. Mist clouded over the glass panes, and images began to appear.
Then all three of them could clearly see Victor resting in his room, with different panes offering different angles.
He had blond hair parted neatly, blue eyes, a pack on his back, and leather armor with a steel sword at his waist.
Standing before the wall of glass and observing for a moment, the Professor spoke first. "I don't know this man. His pupils say he isn't a witcher, and I didn't see him at Kaer Morhen that day either."
On the screen, Victor took the telecommunicator out of his bag, then sat cross-legged on the bed and began speaking into it.
Azar Javed, the Zerrikanian mage, studied the boy's muscles with a solemn look in his eyes. "A stranger I've never seen before, but he's an excellent warrior. Far better than a creature like the Professor, who relies on nothing but cruelty and treachery."
Behind his dark glasses, the Professor shot Azar a displeased glare, but said nothing.
"Heh heh heh!" Albert's laugh was sharp and grating. "It doesn't matter if you two don't know him. I know him, and that's enough. He calls himself Da Vinci, but even if he were burned to ash, I'd still recognize him at a glance as Victor Corion."
The Professor's lenses flashed. "Victor Corion, the Dragonborn Bard with the four scars on his face? It sounds as if he left quite an impression on you."
Hatred flickered in Albert's narrow eyes. "Bard my ass. He's really an apprentice witcher of the School of the Cat. Last year, five companions and I took a contract from Count Falwick of Moën to kill him.
"We set a trap, made our preparations, thought we were the cats, but in the end we were nearly wiped out. I was the only one who escaped. He's an extremely sharp, wary bastard, and very good at using the terrain."
Studying the boy on the screen, Azar stroked his chin. "Hmm... the screen doesn't show any scars. He didn't recognize you just now?"
"I was wearing a mask back then. He may have forgotten already, but I haven't. I swore I'd make him die in agony. Since he's landed right in my hands, it must be fate. Tonight will be the perfect time to test the power of the Licker."
"The Licker? What is that?" the Professor asked, puzzled.
"The name given to a certain creature in Volume Four of Apocalypse." Azar folded his arms and answered with contempt. "Don't waste your mind trying to understand it. That's a world a fool like you could never grasp, the conception of a true genius."
Catching the anger on the Professor's face, Albert remained just as unconcerned. Azar's words were absolutely right, and they matched his own thinking perfectly.
The mage swallowed half a goblet of red wine in one gulp. "Heh, anyone who could write something like Apocalypse, 'Handsome Guy by the Sea' is a true sage devoted to science. If I had the chance, I would love to meet him in person. To hear his teachings would be supreme bliss."
Looking at Azar Javed, he continued, "How is your side progressing? Have you drawn Handsome Guy's name out of him yet?"
"Almost. That foolish witcher still hasn't seen through my disguise. I'm using him to open the mage's tower in the Outskirts. Inside is the last part of Alzur's manuscripts, which will completely fill in the missing part of our research."
Albert nodded in approval, then pointed at the screen. "He's using a telecommunicator to speak with someone. It's an old device used for long-distance communication, and only mages can recharge it. The person backing Victor should be one of the royal advisers, Triss Merigold or Keira Metz.
"We can't expose ourselves in front of a sorceress. A royal adviser can go straight to the king, and if she reports us, it'll be a huge problem.
"Don't worry. Tonight I'll cut off both the communication method and the portal route. Investigator Victor won't be escaping."
Azar Javed said, "Then I'll stay tonight and admire the results of your work over this period. We can also compare our understanding of Apocalypse."
"Ah, an excellent suggestion. I'm very much looking forward to it." Albert nodded.
...
In the room on the first floor, having been arranged into a warm and comfortable chamber, Victor took the telecommunicator out of the pack on his back. Judging the time to be about right, he sat cross-legged on the bed.
"Testing, testing. Can Michelangelo hear me? This is Da Vinci calling."
Far away in Vizima, Keira had just finished her conversation with the king and returned to her room, where she found the waiting message. Shaking her head, she thought Vic really was nothing if not persistent, determined beyond reason to use codenames for communication, and changing them every single day. She had no idea where he kept getting all these ridiculous names.
Speechless, she opened the line and replied, "Vinci, Vinci! This is Angelo. Signal clear. Respond if you hear me."
"...Sorry, please use my full name, Da Vinci!" his voice came through the receiver.
Keira blinked, wondering whether she'd misheard, but she could plainly sense a subtle resentment in his voice. He genuinely wanted her to use the full codename.
Though she had no idea why he cared, if Victor cared then there was nothing more to say. "All right, Vinci. No problem, Vinci."
"...Whatever you say, Angelo. For today's remote lesson, can you tell me how mage portals actually work? Why is it that sometimes they can open out of thin air, while other times they need a source of magical power to support them?"
Da Vinci abandoned any attempt to argue with Michelangelo. There was no way she could know the real reason, and she would forget it soon enough anyway. It was far more meaningful to use the time for the remote lesson.
The mystery of portals had troubled Victor for a long time. When he played the games, it always looked as though mages could open doors at will and move freely wherever they pleased.
But after actually coming to this world, he had learned from written sources about things like magical markings, and the fact that coordinates had to be fixed meant that teleportation was not truly unrestricted.
Even so, how exactly did portals work? He was still looking through fog.
For instance, not long ago during the battle at Kaer Morhen, that mysterious mage from Zerrikania had needed to harmonize with a Circle of Power before he could open a portal large enough to carry off the entire laboratory. But when Triss returned to Vizima, she had simply opened a portal and left.
What exactly was the difference between the two? All of this was secret knowledge belonging to mages, the sort of thing no books would ever explain. Luckily, he now had an adviser who could guide him.
And realizing that Da Vinci had given up arguing, Michelangelo pursed her lips in boredom. Compared with those dry remote lessons, the sorceress preferred chatting with the boy.
The peculiar sense of humor from Bell Town, far to the east of Zerrikania, was not always funny to her, but it was undeniably fresh.
Still, an agreement was an agreement, so Keira's voice turned utterly lifeless.
"Listen. Put in a way even an idiot can understand, the world is filled everywhere with magical power, or if you prefer, Chaos energy, and magic is the art of making Chaos submit to your own will.
"The cost of opening a portal requires drawing magic from the surrounding environment, and maintaining it does too. So strictly speaking, all portals require preparation. A teleport that looks instantaneous is only that quick because the caster is highly skilled at negotiation, or because they've already resonated with the magic in the surroundings in advance.
"But there are always exceptions, and those exceptional beings are Sources. They themselves are springs of magic..."
...
At dinner that night, Victor did not see the master of the house, Albert. The one who entertained him was Bowman.
Victor did not pay it much mind, however. He was busy chewing over the knowledge he had learned that afternoon, studying the common ground between magic and witcher Signs. Both could use simple gestures and the expenditure of energy to produce specific effects.
After the meal, he still thought nothing of it and returned to his room to sleep. But once he lay down, he felt a faint unease circling in his mind. It was as though he had forgotten something, something important that absolutely had to be remembered.
Earlier, with so many other things on his mind, he had not paid attention. But now, in the dead quiet of night, that unease became especially clear. It meant danger was drawing near.
Rolling out of bed, Victor sat upright and began to meditate, replaying the fragments of everything he had experienced that day through his mind.
In the morning he had entered the village and bought local goods.
Then he had met the village chief, Mister Bowman, the big man with no hair, no eyebrows, and no beard.
After that, at the manor, he had met the hooked-nosed, narrow-eyed master of the house, the white-robed mage Albert.
Wait... narrow eyes!?
The sleeping memory jolted violently awake. Some things had not been forgotten, they simply could not be recalled for a while. The moonlit platform. The vivid hatred in those narrow eyes. That throat-slitting gesture.
A chill crawled over his skin. Even if he could not instantly connect all the scattered clues the way a detective in a novel might, one thing was certain, staying here would only give someone else the chance to murder him. The boy immediately got to his feet and started putting on his gear.
He pressed the telecommunicator and tried calling Keira, but nothing came out except a wash of static.
Just as he had expected, communication had already been cut off, which meant a targeted portal was even more impossible.
He took out the herbal satchel and slung it over one shoulder, stuffing both the telecommunicator and his pack inside. Since he had already fallen into the trap, there was no longer any reason to keep cards hidden.
So then the question became, what exactly would be coming for him?
Gently pushing open the door, the boy noticed that the manor, once bright with lamplight, was now completely black. Around his ears drifted faint hissing roars and the patter of crawling.
Drawing Blazing Strike, Victor flicked the guard and let fire flare bright, and in that light he saw a Licker on the ceiling.
It was crouched there, its whole body hairless, its ruined eyes marked by many destructive knife scars, the joints of its fingers thickened and evolved into claws, its brain exposed directly to the air, and a long tongue hanging down from above...!
At the sight of the monster's appearance, Victor felt a surge of nausea, because he could clearly imagine how a Licker had been made.
He had killed plenty of near-human monsters before, drowners, ghouls, rotfiends, sirens.
Their appearances all shared certain similarities with humans. But at the same time, each possessed some decisive difference. A drowner's gills, a ghoul's structure, a rotfiend's bodily fluids, a siren's lower limbs, any of those made the distinction perfectly clear.
But a Licker... every part of its structure could be matched to something in the human body. From a distance it looked like a human flayed of its skin.
Its metabolism pushed to an extreme frequency had made its claws terrifyingly sharp, and the brain exposed to the open air was its weakness.
If someone else had faced it today, someone who did not understand the nature of a Licker, or if you preferred, this sort of creature, they might have cried out in panic and been torn apart in a storm of attacks. But Victor had already known deep down. From the moment he stepped out into the darkness and saw the manor blacked out, he had had a premonition.
At this point, he could already state with complete certainty that every worst possibility in his mind would come true one by one. The Licker was only the beginning.
With those thoughts running through his mind, Victor calmly moved to a distance somewhat closer to the creature. He tapped the guard to extinguish the flames, and from then on relied only on the faint light of stars and moon outside the window to see.
With a flick of his finger, a crown dropped to the floor a short distance in front of him.
Hearing the sound, the Licker launched itself from the ceiling. Its claws whipped up a gust of wind, and the tips drove themselves with a crack into Radovid's profile on the wall.
Terrifying strength, Victor thought, beginning to circle behind it.
Confusion made people weak. The correct way to deal with a Licker was not actually difficult, you simply had to move slowly, slowly, silently, and make sure not to step on any foreign object underfoot.
Stay quiet. Quieter still.
Once he was in position, he watched the Licker crawl about in confusion. Blazing Strike moved through the silence at an almost impossibly slow speed, until, at the instant it came close enough, he exploded like a beast and slammed the thing's exposed brain hard into the floor.
Kill it!
Its savage howl burst out in a piercing explosion of sound. The monster flailed its claws madly, but it could not reach the attacker behind it. Having struck, the boy stepped back a few paces and simply waited for it to die.
When the roar gradually weakened and finally fell silent, he stepped forward, pulled out the steel sword, and ended the Licker's suffering.
...
One fact could now be confirmed, the mage called Albert was an accomplice of the people who had robbed Kaer Morhen.
And that fact led to one good piece of news and one bad one. The bad news was that he had almost certainly created more specimens than just this one. The good news was that Victor had made up his mind to kill him.
You're the one, Albert!
Never in his life had the boy wanted to erase someone so badly.
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