Netori: Stealing The Hero's Party!

The very first night as they sailed the ocean, an hour or two from the shore a great mist had come to pass. It enveloped the ship, and everything around it, not even the ocean remained visible and the clashing sounds of waves were replaced by an eerie silence.

Raven could hear his own heart; feel the throbbing of his temples, and his sense had heightened so much that every sound every creak of the wooden floor felt like an alarm.

"Something's wrong…" It was obvious, but somehow nobody else had noticed. Reina continued to steer the ship like with so much a blink and Moxy kept playing with fire in the kitchen. As for the others? Sleeping sound in their bed, even though to Raven the sound of silence was a cacophony of screaming angels.

"Reina?" Pushing a finger against her face, Raven tried to get her attention. However, unflinching—like a doll, the blacksmith kept steering the ship into the heavy mist. "Reina! Stop the ship!"Nôv(el)B\\jnn

He tried screaming in her ears, but again she kept her hand firm on the wheel and steered the ship deeper into the mist. Raven looked at the wheel and wondered if he could man it. What little he knew of steering was drawn from his observation of only a few hours.

"Shit, no other choice I guess!" Stretching his hand forward, he tried to grab the wheel for himself, but to his surprise, his fingers phased right through the wood. In that very instant, he knew what was wrong and his eyes widened to reflect the same. "A horror…"

Lifting his head, Raven looked around trying to make further sense of the situation, before he could, however, the ship crashed into a massive rock protruding from the sea. Grabbing hold of the railings by the helm, he kept himself afoot.

'Did we fucking crash?!' Looking in the direction of the impact Raven noticed a cliff appear out of thin air. Keeping a grip on the railing, he cautiously moved closer. The closer he grew to the rock, the thicker the air grew and eventually as he reached it, he could his own breath turning into cold mist. 'What is this?'

Resting his hand against the rock, he felt all warmth being stripped away from his body. Even so, with a faint image behind the ice. Wiping the snow from the surface, he stared at that image for a while. A dark figure frozen solid within the ice, it had no face and no real body but the semblance of one almost as if it was a creature of pure darkness.

"That has to be the horror…" As soon as Raven muttered those words, the body began swelling up within the ice. Swelling more and more, the creature's body splattered into a pool of blood that shattered the ice and unloaded onto the ship, a flood of blood. "WHAT TH–"

"Raven! Wake up!" The illusion shattered by Mel's voice, Raven woke up and found himself on the ship's deck, lying on the ground with everyone surrounding him.

Trying to process what had happened, he didn't an inch and simply attempted to piece things together. However, before he could make sense of anything, a drop of blood dripped onto his face, breaking the illusion once more as everyone around him melted into crimson sludge. Covered in putrid guts, Raven felt himself drowning as the floor beneath him turned into a liquid.

The horror had taken hold, not just of his body by his mind as well, and the only thing keeping him from surrendering unlike the others, was the creature went for next. Appearing as an invisible creature with a fishtail, only made visible by the absence of blood wherever its body was moving.

Although Raven noticed her in an instant, while trying to get away his hands and legs were both frozen in crimson ice. Water bubbled out of the creature's mouth as it laughed at his attempt to escape. Watching Raven struggle even more, she reached with its sharp index to pluck out the mana-fused eye that had kept Raven Sane.

'AS IF!' The moment its finger scratched the surface of his eye, however, Umbra's blessing activated. Explore stories on empire

Feeling its power being stripped from its body, the creature tried to back away, but the draw of the fairy's power coursing through Raven held her firm and held her until the illusion froze entirely before shattering into a cloud of mist. Falling back on his feet, the mage wasted no time in confining the creature inside a box of elastic darkness.

The horror tried to escape by bumping itself against the walls but connected to Raven through the ethereal draw of corruption from its body, the creature couldn't run and shrieked as the elastic walls began squeezing around its scales.

In a matter of ten seconds, the horror's true form was revealed by the elastic walls sedimenting it in. Its face resembled a human but with fishlike bulging eyes and a mermaid-like tail.

"Is this a mermaid or just a horror-imitating one?" Moving closer to the creature, Raven couldn't help but wonder.

'Just how many mermaid monsters are there?' Reminded of what happened to Linkle inside the Arachne cave, he truly hoped they wouldn't run into another mermaid.

"Wh–what the fuck…" The voice of someone other than his own broke Raven's chain of thought. Turning around he noticed Reina holding her head at the helm like she was suffering from a severe headache. Noticing Raven from the only eye she had opened, she stared at him for a moment before questioning. "What are you…doing standing, a-at the deck so late?"

"Taking care of this monst–" Turning back around to face the monster, Raven couldn't find it inside the elastic prison. What he failed to realize, however, was that he'd sucked its corruption until nothing was left.

'Where the fuck did it go?' He asked himself, unaware that the creature's powers were to some degree his to command until he runs out of corruption again.