Warlock Apprentice

The warm sunlight of spring would have helped them enjoy the day in a pleasant mood… yet what they were looking at contributed oppositely.

At first, they thought it was cooking smoke coming from a chimney or a campfire, which meant they found a settlement.

They did arrive at a small village, which was built just outside the forest. However, there were no inhabitants. Or what should have been the inhabitants were now lifeless corpses impaled on stakes outside every burnt house.

There were mainly male villagers who were put on the stakes after having all their limbs cut off, while naked women were randomly scattered on the ground, chests and stomachs ripped open. The kids in the village weren’t spared either. They were in the same terrible condition as their seniors.

At first, Tulu was furious to see the entire village slaughtered clean. But then he started getting terrified when looking at the last expressions on the villagers’ faces.

Hatred. Hatred that wasn’t humanly possible to express by someone alive.

Tulu saw many corpses during his career as a sailor, such as headless bodies left behind by a sea beast, chunks of soldier chopped up by his enemies, or an unfortunate mortal man who ended up as a monster feed for a wizard.

But this… This was worse than everything he had seen yet.

Angor chuckled. He found a black object from his bracelet and tossed it out of the boat.

The woman was terrified for she thought Angor was attacking her, but she failed to run away when she felt a strange force keeping her in place, and she could only watch as the object was upon her face.

But instead of receiving a hit on the head, she saw the object spreading bigger and covered up her body.

She felt warmth.

By the moment the strange power vanished from her, the flying boat was already gone.

…

“Why did you help her like that, Mister Padt?” asked Tulu.

“I’m a gentleman after all. Shouldn’t a gentleman help a freezing lady in distress?” Angor raised an eyebrow.

“I-I see… Does Mister Padt have a liking for her type?” Tulu muttered the last part in a small voice.

Angor scoffed. “My gosh. Didn’t you see she’s pregnant? Telling from the size, it won’t be long before birth. Do you want to see her giving birth in this middle of nowhere without proper clothing? That’s the least I can do.”

“Pregnant?!” Tulu just realized that the woman wasn’t holding a bag. It was her baby bump.

Then her action could be explained. It was very natural for a pregnant woman to be suspicious of strangers, let alone strangers on a flying boat.

“But… why would someone like her be in the forest, in the middle of the night?”

Angor was also wondering about this question. He recognized her accent to be from the Goldspink Empire, and she was probably nobility, telling from the condition of her well-kept skin and the piercings on her earlobes.

But he wasn’t going to find out why a noblewoman ended up here. Not his business.

“Let’s just head to the way she told us. Maybe we can find something there.”

Angor had been carefully observing the brief conversation between Tulu and the strange woman, and he did notice that the woman looked strangely furious when giving Tulu the pointer.

It was unlikely that she hated Tulu THAT much, which meant… she was trying to guide them to her enemies of some sort.

But this didn’t matter—they needed to find people anyway. Anyone would do.