Chapter 427: The Day After the Leviathan?
...
From deep within the insides of a ship and one of the rooms that could be found within it, one would be able to find what someone could only assume to be the living quarters for a limited number of crewmates.
Small desks, wooden stools, a candle and its metal disk, as well as several bunk beds. It was a cosy, but empty room, with it only currently having one resident.
On one of the bottom bunk beds, a person with an ever-changing mask lay with both arms tightly wrapped in bandages, which seemed to have been recently changed.
It was Lillian.
And if it wasn’t for her stubborn mask, one would’ve been able to catch a glimpse of her beautiful sleeping face, which suddenly twitched and stirred.
She was waking up...
"Uugh..." Lillian let out a groggy moan.
Her eyes slowly fluttered open, her vision blurring at first before eventually regaining clarity of her surroundings...
Where was she...?
’Ah... Is this my bed...?’
Lillian looked around before turning to her right and wincing as she accidentally applied pressure to her arms. She raised an eyebrow as she looked down at her arms.
Why...
"Why are my arms wrapped in bandages?"
And why did they hurt so badly...?
Gently pulling herself up to a seated position, Lillian looked to the side and found the usual window seemed to have lowered itself. That was odd...
’Wait... Am I in Viesta’s bed...? Why am I in her bed?’
As Lillian continued to wonder why she was in the Cowgirl’s bed, she realised that she was wearing something over her face.
Upon taking it off, she was met with the sight of the Mask of Deceit, randomly attached to her face. How had it gotten onto her? Did it somehow sneak out of her ring during the night?
"Wait... Night? Didn’t we just come from the supply town?"
She distinctly remembered the Captain and the others being chased around by a crowd of people...
But for some reason... Anything after the weather suddenly turning horrid...
"I... My head..." Lillian raised her hand and tried to clutch the side of her head before wincing again at the pain in her arm.
What had happened for her to be in this state? And why was a partial bit of her memory missing...?
Lillian managed to create an arm made of water and bought a health potion. After drinking from the glass bottle and another, Lillian tore off her bandages and found her arms recovering swiftly...
However, during the small split moment where she was able to see the conditions of her arms... It frightened her.
Her muscles were almost completely shredded apart, along with her blood vessels. Did she...
Did she do this to herself?
’Did I... Somehow get drunk again?’
Was she going through her phases again?
"Hm... How odd."
Once she was able to feel and control her arms, she looked down and realised the blanket wrapped over her was a familiar black piece of clothing.
Wasn’t this her Fluttering Prowl, her black cloak?
Feeling the texture of the cloak and analysing it, she realised that it was indeed her cloak. Why was it wrapped over her?
And... Why doesn’t she feel any connection to it? She remembered that she had it stored as a Shard rather than just an Item inside her spatial ring.
"This... This morning keeps on getting stranger and stranger..."
Lillian stored it as a Shard, but kept it on—wrapped around her neck—as she stood up from the bed.
She gave the room a few glances before moving towards the door. However, she felt as though something about the way she woke up didn’t make sense...
Stopping in place, Lillian asked out loud:
"What day is it?"
Pulling out her phone, she looked down at the date and read it.
It was April 26th... Wasn’t this the day after she should’ve encountered the Twin-headed Seawater Leviathan?
Lillian quickly checked through the date, confirming whether or not her phone was configured correctly.
And the more she looked, the more her face paled.
Lillian quickly exited the living quarters and unintentionally ignored the fact that she was now in an unfamiliar set of clothes.
She quickly leapt out from the trapdoor of the deck and tried to summon her chestplate, boots, gauntlets, and shortsword.
Creak...
Upon landing on the wooden floorboards, Lillian felt a lack of comfort from her gear. She looked down and widened her eyes as she yelled in confusion:
"What the—!? Where’s my chestplate and boots?!"
As Lillian tried to feel the pull of her weapons, trying to will them out from her Mana Realm, she realised that only her gauntlets had appeared.
Where had her boots and chestplate gone!?
Lillian still sensed her connection with the shortsword, but for some reason, it was rather far away from their boat... At least a couple of hundred metres away...
Was she so drunk that she chucked it into the sea!?
She then looked up towards the sky and found the weather to be clear and bright, without even a trace of rain or storm cloud in sight.
It...
"What’s going on..."
It just didn’t make sense...
Lillian wrapped her hands around the sides of her head as she tried to make sense of her current situation. Had they somehow managed to dodge the Leviathan?
If so, how?
Lillian’s face then wrinkled painfully as an overwhelming migraine hit her like a tidal wave... She was getting hangovers now?
How many bottles did she down!?
As Lillian was going through a mild mental breakdown, a hand slowly fell onto her shoulder—catching her off guard as she suddenly swung the back of her fist at it.
Viesta, who was standing behind Lillian, shot her wide open and immediately stepped back. Fortunately, someone else was there to catch Lillian’s startled backhand.
"Arr... It seems yar arm is well enough to be swinging like this." Captain Righthook caught Lillian’s hand with little difficulty before letting go, "Yar body sure is quite tenacious, to be able to heal all that damage overnight without even a single scar, that truly is a miraculous body."
Lillian raised an eyebrow and tilted her head.
But, seeing as she could take advantage of the Captain’s compliment, she flicked her hair dramatically and stated:
"Heh! Someone with my beauty is obviously able to heal from something like that." Lillian hummed and slowly nodded, finally realising the reason for her wounded arms.
Lillian, who assumed that she had gotten into a drunk scuffle with the Captain, asked with a large and playful grin:
"So! I take it we got into a large fight? Who won?"
She watched as the Captain gave back a toothy grin of his own. She gave a casual sigh as she waved her hand back and forth, "Of course, I’m just joking~ there’s no way I could’ve—"
"What are yar talking about, matey?"
"Wha—! H-hey!?"
Lillian was then flung into the air by the Captain, who beamed as he yelled out, "WE WON! To think we would win against such a powerful foe like that!"
As the Captain’s word echoed out in a large boom, Lillian quickly covered her ears—intending to protect her eardrums—before slowly lowering her hands.
’We?’
What did the Captain mean by ’We’...?
And what powerful foe was he talking about?
Lillian’s foggy mind then processed... Could it be...
Could it be that the Captain was referring to the Leviathan?
Once she fell from the air and was about to be launched back up, she grabbed a hold of the Captain’s shoulder and asked with a shaky and uncertain voice:
"H-hey... Are you saying that wewon against the Leviathan...?"
"Hm? What else yar think I was talking about?" Captain Righthook raised an eyebrow before bursting into a loud laugh, "KAHAHA! Of course I meant the Leviathan! Yar even used my technique to deal the finishing blow against it, how could yar forget!?"
Lillian continued to watch the Captain laugh at her.
Her face went through a myriad of different expressions. The most common and expressive one was...
A complex and worried face...
Lillian then murmured out:
"I... I don’t remember that..."