After leaving the blacksmith's shop in the Trade Quarter, Angoulême carried two bags of alchemy materials in her hands.
She still remembered the look Victor had worn three days ago, that morning when the two of them went back down to check the sewers again. When he heard her say the sense of danger hadn't weakened—only that it had shrunk into a smaller area—his expression had been a messy mix of fear, excitement, and anticipation.
Right after that, he'd turned around and gone straight to the smith, ordering two sacks of silver shot and demanding the man melt the ingots down into pellets as tiny as possible. Then, once they got home, he'd rushed into the basement to do alchemy, barely leaving the house for days. No one knew what he was making—except that even the materials had to be fetched for him.
Angoulême opened the door and walked into the alchemy room, then shook the boy awake from his nap in the lounge chair. He took the materials from her, opened one bag, grabbed a handful of the pellets, and let them slip through his fingers, rattling softly as they fell back into the sack.
"Well? Is it usable?" she asked.
"If it isn't, we're still stuck with it. The rest is up to alchemy." Victor tipped the entire bag of silver pellets into the cauldron of boiling water, then shot Angoulême a look. "What? You've got a lot of questions written all over your face. Ask now. What comes next is something I've never done before, so I'll need to focus."
His expression was serious. Angoulême knew that when he got like this, you didn't circle around the point—you spoke plainly.
"Alright. First: what kind of monster are we dealing with this time?"
"The target should be an alp—also called a 'phantom.' An ancient bloodsucking creature that came into this world during the Conjunction of the Spheres."
"A vampire?!" Angoulême's face shifted. A werewolf hiding in Vizima had already been shocking enough. Now there was a vampire too—something even rarer?
…Though for her, it wasn't the first time she'd seen one.
Victor went on, "Don't look so stunned. It's not some grand, glorious breed. If it were a true Higher Vampire, it wouldn't be living in a place like that. They blend into our lives. Most of the time you can't tell at all—and even a witcher's medallion won't react to them. Those are the real apex predators.
"But the one we're facing now? It doesn't even come close. Do you remember what that dwarf said? What sounds he heard?"
Angoulême pulled herself out of her thoughts, tried to recall, and tested an answer. "Help?"
Victor rolled his eyes at her and gestured for another try. She dug deeper: ah—mom—don't kill me—those were even less useful. Finally, she said, "Where is she?" Or… "She's in there?"
Victor clapped his hands once. "Both are the right answer. The dead men's last cries used 'she' for the killer, which tells us the attacker looked humanoid—and that her feminine features were obvious." Noticing Angoulême's confusion, Victor explained, "Don't forget it was pitch-black down there. They went in with torches. If the difference wasn't obvious, they wouldn't have been able to tell whether it was a he or a she at all.
"Next: more than ten people went in. With that many torches, they still lost track of the enemy and had to call out to each other to point out where she was. That gives us two possibilities. Either she's so fast the eye can't follow… or she can vanish from sight for short bursts.
"Last: the scouting party was wiped out in about three to five minutes. But before the wipe, there were sounds of fighting coming up from below. So we've got one good piece of news and one bad one. The good news is, her speed isn't so overwhelming that she can't be resisted. The bad news is, she probably turns invisible—or turns to mist."
After hearing that, Angoulême hesitated. "Boss… if it's that dangerous, should we drop it? This is work for a fully trained witcher. Yaevinn shouldn't be expecting us to deal with a vampire."
Victor's eyes were unshakable. "You're right. But I haven't been able to get alghoul marrow—the thing I need to trade for that 'Improved Swallow' formula I told you about. Kalkstein posted the reward a month ago, and I still haven't gotten it.
"Alghouls only show up where ghouls gather and there are plenty of corpses to feed on, and there's almost no room around Vizima for them to thrive.
"But Kalkstein is willing to accept a substitute—vampire blood. So if an alp has shown up, I want to try my luck.
"If we can take her down, I get that formula. Even if the improvement isn't huge, you don't get anywhere without starting somewhere."
Angoulême fell silent for a moment, then accepted his reason for wanting to tackle a monster like that. "Then why do you think it's an alp, Vic, and not some other kind of vampire?"
"If it were a fleder or a garkain, an ekimma, or a katakan—those types tear bodies apart. Badly. A garkain's favorite pastime is shredding corpses until the blood paints the walls of its lair… and then rolling around in the victim's guts.
"But down in the sewers—an enclosed space—we didn't smell a heavy stench of blood that day. So based on what we've got, I've narrowed it down to two lesser vampire types with 'cleaner' feeding habits: an alp, or a bruxa.
"This isn't like the werewolf. The difficulty is different. Sure, she'll still have speed and monstrous strength—but with a silver sword and vampire oil, if we can cut her, if we can drive steel into her body, it'll be lethal. And we have one huge advantage: we know where she's active.
"A bruxa usually returns to a normal human form in the daytime. Their habits are the closest to Higher Vampires. So if we went in during the day and you still felt danger, that means she was still there. That's why I'm leaning toward an alp—and her biggest threat is mist form."
Angoulême was about to speak again, but Victor lifted a hand to stop her. He already knew exactly what she wanted to ask—how they were supposed to deal with mist.
"A proper witcher can counter mist form with Signs. Yrden can lock it down, Aard can blast it away, Igni can set it alight—each of them can work.
"And even though I'm not a full witcher, I can make something the world doesn't have yet—at least, not in any text I've ever seen—to counter her. The idea is to take a Grapeshot bomb—what some people call a beehive bomb—and replace half the iron shrapnel with silver shot. I'm confident this new bomb will disrupt a monster's transformation and damage a mist-form body."
As he spoke, Victor's voice rose with excitement. "And of course, your boss always aims for the best. He won't be satisfied with merely disrupting a transformation. Then he thought—what if the silver is even finer, so fine it's basically dust? Fine enough that the monster breathes and the silver gets into her body?
"The power of that… just imagining it is terrifying."
He leaned into the idea, almost giddy. "This special-grade bomb—I've decided to call it Moondust."
There's an old truth: showing off only matters if you're doing it in front of someone who actually understands what you've done. Otherwise, it's like wearing a tailored suit in a room with no light—nobody can see it, and nobody cares.
So after Victor finished his grand lecture, he met Angoulême's blank, half-understanding stare and could only wave her away in defeat.
"Forget it. Just know your boss has a plan. Go get some sleep. And on your way up, hang the 'no entry' sign so nobody comes downstairs. Don't let Dandelion wander down here and interrupt me by accident. The cauldron will explode."
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