Skull, who was in the cell on Julius' right-hand side, seemed shaken as he gritted his teeth and looked at the cage.
"They're going to our village. It's all over." Lyra's voice became downcast, and Skull still had a fierce look on his face.
The handsome man soon relaxed and let out a breath. Seeing the resignation on the members' faces, Julius frowned.
He knew that they were going to escape this place. He saw it, after all...
But he didn't see them in their village; instead, they were fighting on some distant island.
Julius shook his head and focused on the current situation. There had to be something he could do to escape this place.
...
In the end, no idea came to his head. The prisoners who came from Dravenhold seemed to have resigned to their fate already.
The madmen, as they called themselves, seemed to wield the same power Wardens held in the real world.
If there was one thing that he found fascinating, it was that in this scenario, you could just be on your own, and then a blessing would find you.
There had to be some kind of system to it, but for him, this was his theory.
Not that it concerned how they were going to escape—it just made him wonder if this was some kind of past of the world they currently resided in.
In the end, it was something he didn't create as part of this world—it was all part of the world's machinations...
And he was a part of it.
'Thinking about this stuff makes me want to question every single scientific theory made...' he thought with a frown.
'I'm just mad... Yeah, I am.' He silently chuckled in the dim basement, and Skull frowned and glanced at him.
He was probably thinking that Julius had simply gone mad.
Well, he's not wrong.
"Listen up. All of you, the next time I come down to this basement, we're escaping," he said with a smile, and Lyra raised a brow as she stared at him. The invisible guy behind him only shook his head.
"Just be ready," he said, and then laid on his back.
"Kid, you better keep to your words." A deep voice reached him from the side of the barrels, and he looked very well to see the silhouette of a big man in the cage.
"I won't give up also." Another voice came from the extreme ends, and Julius simply shut his eyes and went to sleep.
'It's nice of them to finally talk to me. What a beautiful moment.'
...
The next day, Julius was brought up to the deck again, and he had to perform tricks throughout that day.
"Well, what do you think?" Julius asked as he performed his final trick and made three circular rings spin on each other.
"I'm impressed that you still have more tricks up your sleeve. Ylsa was certain that you would be thrown overboard by now. Hahaha..."
The crew laughed, and Julius laughed with them. He didn't know why the sound of his impending death was funny.
The giant guy wearing an eye patch came towards Julius again, and then, as he was about to grab him to bring him back to the basement—
Julius slipped out of his grip and stumbled forward.
"Captain! If I may. The basement is very dark, and I want to be a part of this crew," Julius said with a serious face, making the red powder smile on his face look like a joke.
"Nah, I have no need for a follower of the Rebel," Bern said with a yawn, and Julius gritted his teeth.
His brows suddenly furrowed, and a smile formed on his lips.
"Surely, the Almighty Bern wouldn't happen to be scared of my trivial power. You could wipe me off this ship without sweat, after all."
Bern raised a brow on the side of his face with no scars, and then he tilted his head in deep thought.
The giant man behind Julius stopped as he saw the captain's expression. Then he shrugged and waved his hand, gesturing for the giant man to leave him.
'Phew,' he smiled, and then bowed at the captain.
"I wouldn't mind the company of a clown." The captain chuckled, and Julius only kept his smile.
The night soon became dark, and then Julius stayed at the helm of the ship, glancing at the dark waters with a curious expression.
'Wouldn't it make sense if I just dive into these waters now and swim away?' A small smirk began to form on his face.
"Hope you're not thinking of jumping into the waters."
Julius raised a brow and turned his head as he heard a feminine voice behind him.
It was the woman with blue skin, who had her mouth sewn shut. She was right beside him.
Julius seemed startled at first as he wondered where the woman's voice came from if her mouth was sewn shut. Her calm grey eyes held a deep profoundness in them that he couldn't decipher.
And those eyes seemed to hold a deep curiosity as she stared at him with a raised brow.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" the woman asked, and then Julius shook his head.
"Ah. No reason in particular. I just wondered... hic... how you were talking with your mouth... hic... closed."
A frown found its way to his face, as this was a very bad time to be having hiccups.
"You seem thirsty. When last did you drink water?" she said, raising her delicate arms and pointing them to the waters.
Her skin was as smooth as marble, and her slender arm was unnaturally longer than an average human's.
Or was it her fingers?
Julius seemed mesmerized by her every move, and then he gulped—thus, another hiccup.
The woman giggled softly, making Julius frown at her.
As he opened his mouth to say something, a slow stream of water flowed into his mouth, and that was when he realized that the lady in front of him was actually controlling the water to enter his mouth.
"Don't worry, I've only brought up purified water," she said to him.
Julius didn't even have a choice in it, as he swallowed the water and then gasped for air.
"I'm Signe, by the way, Von the clown."
Julius looked at her with a raised brow. For some reason, when she mentioned his name, he heard a mocking tone underneath.
"Haha. It's nice to meet you too," he smiled.
At this point, he had almost forgotten about the name he took on for himself when he started entertaining the captain.
"Do I look ugly to you?"
Drawn by the sudden question, Julius turned to the woman beside him to meet a pair of grey eyes staring at him back, with constant tears coming out from them.
"No. I don't think so. Beautiful would be an understatement of how you look," Julius said to her, and she smiled, making blood spill from her lips.
"Don't worry, it's just the stitches. As a siren slave, our mouths have to be sewn so that we can't use the full power of our abilities, which is mind control," she explained to him, and then Julius shook his head and asked her about the crew.
Turns out that she had been with them for over a year, and they had taken over more than thirteen villages and cities in the East and in the North.
Their current destination, Dravenhold, wasn't so far anymore.
The next morning, Julius woke up in a soft bed, and he looked around.
He had been offered an empty room with only a bed, a wardrobe, and a mirror to sleep in, and it was the coziest sleep he had ever had in the last week.
BANG!! The entire ship shook, and Julius was thrown off the bed.
He stood up and walked out of the room, and his eyes widened as he saw Bern standing on one side of the deck with his hands outstretched.
They were being attacked!
But what could attack a 12-meter-tall ship from within an ocean?