Arthur stood near the mainmast with two lengths of pale chain gathered in his hands, rain sliding from his gauntlets and gathering along the knuckles before falling to the soaked deck in uneven drops.
The captured crew sat huddled together beneath him, backs pressed against the thick wooden column that rose through the ship and continued upward toward the crow's nest, their wrists bound around the mast with Lucid's strange white chains. Some were sailors, some were fighters, and a few looked too young to have ever expected the sea to turn into a prison beneath their feet, yet all of them had gone quiet after the first three had tried to subdue Arthur. He quickly showed them why he was not to be messed with.
Arthur gave the final loop a firm pull, tested the tension, then stepped back with a slow breath.
"All done."
Lucid nodded as though Arthur had finished arranging chairs for an afternoon meeting.
Arthur regarded him with quiet, judgmental skepticism, the kind that had become increasingly familiar since meeting him, then shifted his attention past Lucid toward the girl seated near the base of the quarterdeck stairs. She had drawn her knees to her chest, both hands over her head, her bandana half loosened from the struggle and her rain-darkened hair sticking against her cheeks in tangled strands. Her white shirt had torn at one sleeve, the weathered short coat she wore over it hung crooked from one shoulder, her fitted trousers were soaked through, and the rapier that had rested at her hip had been kicked several paces away beneath a coil of rope near the starboard rail.
She rocked slightly, whispering to herself through clenched teeth.
"It is hopeless, it is hopeless, it is all hopeless."
Arthur did not blame her for reaching that conclusion.
Anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with Lucid would eventually understand the peculiar despair of facing someone who did not react to danger in the way the world expected. During the brief fight that followed their landing on the deck, the girl had drawn her rapier and attacked him with enough precision that Arthur had raised his brows despite himself. She was no amateur. Her stance carried the forward bite of a sailor's duelist, her footwork kept low against the pitch of the deck, and her blade moved with the quick, cutting rhythm of someone used to fighting near ropes, rails, and narrow gangways.
Yet her style lacked refinement.
Pirates often used a derivative sword style, from the Tempest sword style that Arthur used, It favored swift thrusts. While other pirates near Shenzhou waters used a derivative from the Ninefold Dao sword style, a harsher method built around circular footwork and sudden changes of angle.
There were also void pirates, worse by reputation and stranger by practice, though Arthur had rarely encountered them.
This girl had something close to Tempest style: The Tempest Current. in her wrist and something near the Ninefold Dao in the way she shifted her hips, but the patterns did not breathe together and so it created awkward moves.
She had attacked with courage, and courage had carried her farther than Arthur expected.
It had not carried her far enough.
Lucid let her cut him once across the jaw, then again along the forearm, then a third time through the side of his shirt, and each time the wound closed. After the fourth attempt, her blade slipped against a chain, sparks flashed white in the rain, and her expression changed. Arthur had seen that expression before on battlefields, when a soldier discovered that effort alone did not promise survival.
She stopped fighting shortly after that.
The rest of the ship had been easier.
Most of the crew were ordinary humans, or ordinary enough inside the logic of the rift. They had no awakened command over their Fate Threads, no decent martial training, and no resilience beyond what fear lent them. Illusions or not, they had moved like people, cursed like people, and bled when struck against the deck like people, which made restraining them unpleasant even if Arthur insisted to himself that none of it mattered.
He had met two who showed some talent, one with a boarding axe and another with a curved knife who lunged from behind the capstan, but neither possessed enough strength to make Arthur draw more than a shallow line of steel. He disarmed them with the flat of his blade, struck one in the shoulder hard enough to make him drop, and let Lucid's chains do the rest.
Those chains bothered him.
Lucid had given them to him without explanation, glowing softly between his fingers as if they were both sacred instrument and butcher's tool. They looked delicate from a distance, almost ceremonial, but Arthur had watched them rip through the belly of a sea monster and he could not stop wondering how much weight they could bear, how much force they could resist, how many bones they could crush if Lucid stopped pretending they were ropes.
Arthur kept that curiosity hidden.
Lucid crouched in front of the girl.
"Hey, cheer up. I am not here to massacre this ship."
The girl stilled.
Lucid tilted his head, rain trailing down his shoulders, mist hiding the upper half of his face with that same infuriating softness that made every expression impossible to read.
"That is, of course, assuming you behave with reasonable intelligence."
The second sentence came colder than the first.
Arthur's fingers tightened slightly around the chain in his hands.
He disliked that side of Lucid, the quiet turn from clumsy concern into something sharp, arrogant, and almost bored. Strength reigned supreme in the Scattered Realms, and Arthur knew that better than most.
The girl lifted her face.
For the first time, she seemed to truly see the mist covering Lucid's features.
Her breath caught.
She jerked backward so violently that her shoulder struck the stair behind her, then scrambled away on hands and heels, boots sliding across the rain-slick planks.
"No, no, stay away from me!" She repeated in horror.
Lucid paused.
Arthur also went still.
The girl clutched the torn front of her shirt closed with one hand and pointed at him with the other, her defiance returning in a trembling, desperate form.
"What monster has Vex sent after me?"
The name struck the deck harder than thunder.
Arthur's gaze sharpened.
Vex?
If she was fleeing Vex, then the matter was uglier than a pirate raid and stranger than a simple rift scenario. The Second Tier Shield Arsenal of Vex possessed one of the strongest marine branches in the Scattered Realms, second only to Shenzhou in certain waters and superior in others depending on route, weather, and politics. If Vex truly wanted one ship erased, one smuggling route cut, or one fugitive buried beneath the waves, then this vessel should already have been splinters.
'So why is she alive, and why did the rift choose her?'
The girl's eyes flicked to Lucid's chains, then to the mist across his face, then to his bloodied hands.
"No, I will not let a filthy demi-human rape me." She continued. "I will die by my own hands!"
Arthur looked away.
Shame came faster than he expected. Rain hissed against the lanterns. The bound crew muttered, then fell silent when Arthur's gauntlet shifted near his sword.
Lucid remained crouched.
For all his talent, all his reckless strategy, all his impossible habit of turning disaster inside out, he was remarkably terrible at hostage situations. Arthur wondered again where he had been trained, if he had been trained at all. No settlement near Materna's border produced someone like him by accident. He hid something. Of course he did. Everyone hid something, but Lucid hid his well.
The girl's hand moved.
Arthur saw the knife before Lucid did, or perhaps he only thought he did.
A small blade flashed from inside her boot.
Lucid lunged.
He caught her wrist before the point reached her throat, shoved her arm outward, and kicked the knife across the deck. It skittered beneath the helm and vanished into shadow. The girl cried out as Lucid pinned her with one knee against the planks, holding her arm above her head while trying, with very limited success, not to look like exactly the monster she feared.
"Do not be stupid!" Lucid shouted.
The girl froze beneath him, face flushed with panic, fury, humiliation, and rain.
Lucid seemed to realize a heartbeat too late how this looked.
Arthur closed his eyes for one long second, some of the hostages whispered something.
"Mother Alisia preserve whatever scraps of diplomacy remain on this ship." Someone whispered in a hushed tone.
Arthur Couldn't agree more.
"Huh... What! I am not interested in you!" Lucid blurted, voice cracking with a mixture of panic and indignation.
The girl stared at him from where she was pinned.
Lucid tightened his grip only enough to keep her from struggling toward another hidden weapon.
"I already have a girlfriend! Someone waiting for me in my head!"
Arthur titled his head, what did he mean by that?
"No I mean! I'm already taken!"
The storm seemed to pause around them, if only because every living soul on the deck needed time to suffer through that sentence.
Arthur sighed.
Lucid continued, apparently deciding that the first explanation had not damaged him enough.
"And she is much prettier than you."
The girl blinked.
Arthur stared at him.
The girl stared at him.
Lucid, still crouched over her, frowned beneath the mist as if receiving further criticism. He looked back at Arthur, taking note of his look.
"What! This is de-escalation!"
"Lucid your hand..."
He had his hand on a place that was very... very inappropriate. No wonder why she had that thought. He quickly repositioned his hand in another manner that was less suggestive.
Arthur covered his mouth with the back of his hand, pretending to wipe rain from his lips.
It did not work very well.
The smile came anyway, small and unwilling.
So that was the root of it, or at least one root among the many twisted ones Lucid seemed determined to drag behind him. The muttering. The distracted pauses. The way he sometimes answered questions no one on the outside had asked. The way he called out to someone when he thought no one could hear. Arthur had seen warriors develop coping mechanisms to endure battle, had watched commanders speak to dead comrades before giving orders, had known soldiers who carried dolls, broken pendants, prayer cards, stolen ribbons, and locks of hair through fields where sanity became more burden than blessing.
Perhaps this was Lucid's version.
An imaginary girlfriend in his head.
Arthur felt a painful swell of pity before he could stop it.
'Poor guy.'
Lucid looked back toward him.
"What is that face for?"
Arthur lowered his hand and forced his expression into something stern.
Arthur stepped closer, letting the chains in his hand clink softly so the crew remembered they were still being watched.
"Practicality would serve you better than panic," he said, keeping his voice level. "We need answers, and you are clearly important to this rift. That makes you valuable, which means you are safer alive than dead." He addressed the girl who was pinned down.
The girl's gaze moved between them, frightened.
Lucid finally released her wrist and moved back one careful step.
She sat up slowly, rubbing the place where his fingers had held her, then gathered the remains of her pride around herself like a cloak.