The Witcher: The Alchemist Who Walked the Witcher’s Road

On the third floor of Fergus' smithy, the two women ate the dumplings Angoulême had brought back while she recounted everything that had happened that day. When she got to the elven smith's opinion of the Dragonslayer, Yoana burst into delighted, tinkling laughter, her chest heaving with it.

"So in the end, Hattori still refused Victor? Now that's what I call a blacksmith with some backbone. A weapon should be practical. He can't just let him waste precious dark steel and dimeritium on some bizarre monstrosity."

Hearing that, Angoulême's expression turned a little odd. "No. Hattori grumbled for ages, but in the end he still agreed to forge him a two-handed greatsword with a blade five feet four inches long, one foot wide, three inches thick, and a hilt two feet long, named Dragonslayer."

"How is that allowed!?" After hearing the specifications, the woman smith could not help covering her mouth in shock. "That thing would be even heavier than the heaviest battering ram, close to the weight of three grown men. Just carrying it on your back would make walking nearly impossible, let alone actually using it.

"If that sword really gets made, the only thing it'll be good for is hanging in the shop so every customer who walks in can see the owner is a rich fool with more coin than sense.

"What was that elven smith thinking, agreeing to make something so utterly useless? Doesn't he have any pride as a master craftsman?"

"No, you don't understand." Angoulême suddenly looked weathered by life. "He couldn't afford to refuse. Because when it came to the very end, Victor stared the smith in the eyes and said..."

"Said what?"

"Could you do me this one courtesy?"

Yoana closed her mouth.

She discovered she could not blame the elven smith at all. After all, Tinboy had done Victor that courtesy, and so had Umutai. Did Hattori really dare refuse?

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Catherine gave another low coo. Angoulême patted Yoana's hand.

"It's fine. Don't overthink it. We've got a long time ahead of us. You'll get used to it.

"I've got something to do tonight, so I need to head out."

As soon as she finished speaking, Angoulême, who had never taken her gear off in the first place, hurried out of the room and downstairs.

...

Following Victor was easy, especially when she already knew where he was going. It was not until he stepped into the black safehouse in Farcorners that he noticed Angoulême was there.

"You came."

"I came."

"And in the end, you still came."

"In the end, I still came."

"You should not have come."

"But I am already here."

Pulling over a chair, the troupe member sat beside the captain, and together they looked at the boy undergoing the Trial of the Grasses. Compared to yesterday, his condition had neither improved nor worsened. There was no response when spoken to, and now and then his body twitched, proof that he was still alive.

"This is the first major hurdle, right?"

"Right. If all goes well, he'll push past the limits of the human body, start accepting the cells of otherworldly creatures, and step onto the path of the extraordinary."

Using two fingers, Angoulême lifted the straw hat resting by the bed. "Did you make this, Captain?"

"A lucky charm for Luffy. In Bell Town, a straw hat and Luffy together are practically shorthand for hot-blooded heroics. There's a happy story behind it."

"I believe he'll succeed, because he's using the improved formula you developed.

"From Vergen, through Ellander and Vizima, all the way to Novigrad, I've seen how hard you worked, studying and researching every step of the way. So this time it has to work."

"If effort alone guaranteed results, there wouldn't be so many tragedies in this world." Victor's tone was bleak. "I've got a bad feeling he's doomed. He'll end up the first sacrifice on my path through alchemy.

"So many people died in the past before anyone got results at all. There's no reason he should be that lucky."

The girl ignored him. She knew he was speaking in reverse, another one of his attempts to fool himself into not hoping too much, because if he really did not care, he would not have come here every night to keep watch.

...

The light evening drizzle had stopped. The cicadas cried mournfully in the dark, and frogs croaked all around them.

Then the slow, faint breathing suddenly turned ragged. Luffy let out a low groan of pain. Sensing the change, Angoulême turned to look at Victor and saw that his face had gone a terrifying shade of pale.

"Urgh... hhh... water... I need water... it hurts... it hurts so much... why does it hurt this much? Urgh... ahh..."

The girl remembered what Victor had told her before. Luffy would only wake up in two situations. One was if the Trial of the Grasses succeeded and he opened his eyes again as a witcher.

The other was...

Sure enough, it was visible to the naked eye. The muscles that had looked so firm and powerful just moments ago were now shifting and writhing unevenly. In some places they suddenly caved inward and shriveled.

After pressing lightly to examine him, Victor let out a long sigh.

"A severe rejection response. He got through the first stage and broke open his body's limits, but in the second stage, it looks like the foreign cells failed to integrate."

Luffy's eyes flew open.

He had regained consciousness already. He had heard every word Victor had just said. He looked at Victor with pleading in his eyes.

"Boss... please, Boss, save me... save me... I can't die here. Didn't you say it yourself? I'm Luffy! Straw Hat Luffy! I was going to become a witcher, gain power, and take my revenge. I really can't die here!"

His voice was hoarse, rising and falling wildly. The new Grass Draught had successfully wrung every bit of potential from his body, but during the process of combining with the mutagenic inducer cells, his body had gone into violent rejection.

That kind of thing happened often. In the end it was nothing but a coin toss left to fate. But looking at Luffy's face, that once clean and handsome face now webbed with bulging veins carrying brown-black streaks beneath the skin, and the desperate attachment to life in his eyes, Victor was forced to turn his head away.

He did not want to lie to him.

"I'm sorry. I can't save you. There isn't any medicine that can save you. You're dying. Just as I told you before the trial, the success rate wouldn't be higher than fifty percent. I'm sorry, but you failed."

Victor's verdict clearly pushed Luffy over the edge. He struggled frantically, making the iron bed rattle and screech.

"No! You're lying to me! That's impossible, impossible! I can't die here! It's not supposed to be like this!"

As Angoulême watched clumps of Luffy's hair begin to fall out one after another, a chill ran over her skin. She could not help stepping forward two paces.

"Vic, is there really no way?"

Victor turned his head to look at her. "If there were, I'd want to save him too. But I can't. At least not now. Without a power that can overturn cause and effect, there's nothing to be done. His body is already collapsing, like a line of toppled dominoes."

"It was you! It was you who set me up on purpose, wasn't it!? Because you didn't dare use the Grass Draught on yourself, so you used me as your test subject instead, didn't you? You murderer! You murderer!"

Most of Luffy's hair had already fallen out. With the brown-black veins bulging all over his body, he looked like some kind of demon as he screamed and cursed.

Angoulême frowned. "How can you say that? This was what you wanted. The boss cared about you more than anyone. And now that you failed, you're trying to shove the blame onto him?

"I'm telling you, you deserved this! You brought it on yourself. This is exactly what you had coming—"

She was about to step forward and keep cursing him out when Victor raised a hand to stop her, then shook his head, telling her not to say anything more.

Then he moved closer to Luffy.

"I'm sorry. I really can't save you now. I don't think I owe you anything, but if... if you have any last wish, or anything left unfinished, tell me now.

"If it's within my power, I'll do it for you."

"Blegh... ptoo!"

The subject spat a mouthful of thick, bloody phlegm at Victor. He did not even try to dodge and let it splatter across his leather armor.

"You hypocritical bastard. From the first day, I knew you looked down on me, just like those slavers did!

"You only saved me to satisfy yourself, to make yourself feel good. You think that makes you noble? You're not a good person at all."

His eyes were horrifying. His left eye was starting to twist into something like a beast's pupil, while his right eye bulged outward, as if in the next instant it would burst free of its socket.

"One day... you'll inject this Grass Draught too, won't you? I curse you! I curse you with my life! I curse you with my soul!

"When your turn comes to undergo the Trial of the Grasses... you'll suffer ten times, twenty times more than I did. You'll die a hideous death. You'll drown in your own blood... ah..."

By the end, Luffy's voice was growing weaker. His fingers were hooked into claws as he clawed uselessly at the iron bed. His bulging right eye never burst out after all. Instead, it collapsed inward and shrank, and the muscles that had once been powerful now withered into dry, blackened flesh like old cured meat.

He vomited mouthful after mouthful of red-brown blood clots. The spasms wracking his body left him unable to curse anymore.

A few minutes later, the Skelliger boy Luffy, once known as Luf, died in Farcorners, in a desolate abandoned house no one knew about.

...

Victor stood there with a blank face, staring at the heap of flesh that could barely still be called a human shape. His throat felt tight, and when he spoke, his voice was dry and hoarse, almost unrecognizable as his own.

"So, Angoulême, what do we do now? I'm realizing I may not be as strong as I thought I'd be. My head's gone a little blank. Do you remember what we're supposed to do next?"

"Of course I remember. According to what we agreed beforehand, we should begin the dissection, confirm the cause of death and the reason for the failure, and make sure Luffy's death wasn't for nothing."

"Do you think, given his state of mind before he died, he'd want us to dissect him? He seemed pretty angry."

"With someone like that, it doesn't matter what he wanted. Honestly, we never should have helped him in the first place. We should have left him to fend for himself. Ungrateful, unreasonable people like that don't deserve saving. It's a good thing he failed. If he really had gained extraordinary power, I seriously doubt he could have controlled himself."

Angoulême was still furious over what Luffy had said before dying.

Knowing she was defending him, Victor said quietly, "You saw what he looked like while he was cursing me, didn't you? Believe me, it really hurts. It really is that hopeless. Letting him curse me a few times doesn't cost me anything."

After that, neither of them felt like saying another word.

They stood there in silence for several minutes. Then Victor picked up the straw hat by the bed and laid it gently over Luffy's face.

After that, he opened his herbal satchel and took out two oil flasks. One he poured over the iron bed and all over the corpse. The other he scattered while walking through the room, splashing it carelessly over anything flammable.

Knowing what Victor was about to do, Angoulême said nothing. She turned, opened the door, and left first.

Not long after, the captain stepped out and joined his troupe member. The trail of spilled oil stretched all the way to his feet.

Drawing the Sword of Prometheus, Victor flicked the guard with a finger, and flames sprang up at once.

...

The empty house would soon burn to the ground. There were no nearby homes, so there was no risk of the fire spreading.

On the walk home, the cicadas still cried mournfully, frogs croaked on all sides, and the sky overhead glittered with stars.

Lost in thought, the boy looked up and was startled to discover that the Winter Maiden had already appeared in one corner of the sky.

Winter was coming.

After confirming the thought in his mind, Victor rubbed his nose. "Angoulême, you still remember Luffy's story, right? I don't need the details. Just tell me this. If he had successfully mutated into a witcher, where would he have gone first? Who would he have killed, or who would he have saved?"

Kicking a stone at the roadside, the troupe member did not need to see his face to know from his voice alone that the captain was serious this time.

After organizing her thoughts for a moment, the girl answered simply and crisply, "He would have gone to Faroe in Skellige. He would have killed the slaver pirate Hammond and rescued his lover, a woman named Liss."

"Liss? So it wasn't Nami or Hancock after all..."

Ignoring the captain's muttering to himself, she went on, "But I don't think we need to bother. When you asked for his last wish just now, it was obvious that, compared to his enemy or his lover, he'd rather use his time to curse you."

Victor stopped walking and looked up at the starry sky with a soft sigh.

Used to this by now, Angoulême folded her arms across her chest and waited in place for whatever Bell Town proverb her captain was about to come out with this time.

"By Melitele, there are only two things the more I think about them, the more wondrous and awe-inspiring they become to me: the blazing starry sky above me, and the moral law within me.

"I can choose, and I choose this."

//Check out my P@tre0n for 30 extra chapters //[email protected]/Razeil0810