My Femboy System
Chapter 55: Through the Fog

Chapter 55: Through the Fog

There’s something about building a raft shirtless with a bunch of drunken nobles and sexually-frustrated outcasts that makes a man reassess how he got here.

Sweat stung my eyes, wood splinters dug into my palms like tiny accusations, and my pants had slid so far down my hips I could practically hear my underwear begging for a union rep.

I was still riding the high of the greenhouse turned bonfire, still vibrating with leftover adrenaline, and every single moment since had felt like we were rewriting scripture with our own blood.

Trees fell. Ropes tightened. And every time a nail was hammered, I imagined the Tower flinching somewhere, deep in its writhing spine of lies. I wasn’t just escaping this floor—I was evicting it.

"Are you sure this is going to float?" Leo grunted beside me, hauling another log into place. His biceps flexed in a way that would’ve made any straight noble question their loyalty to legacy marriages, and I watched two of them nearly walk into a tree while ogling him. "Because this wood is weirdly...squishy."

"It’s tropical," I muttered, wiping my brow with a piece of someone’s discarded shirt. "Everything here is squishy. The fruit, the air, the morals—"

"I saw a man licking a bush earlier," Miko added, walking past with a perfectly carved oar balanced over one shoulder like a fashionable war crime. "He said it tasted like orgasms and honeycomb."

"Sounds like Aria’s last attempt at a poem," I muttered, but my voice faltered as I looked over to where he was kneeling over bindings, tying knots with a precision that could only come from years of either military training or very specific types of self-bondage.

"I heard that," Aria called sweetly without looking up. "And for the record, orgasms and honeycomb are a tragic combination. The sugar alone—"

"Stop," I said, holding up a hand. "We’re building rafts here, not lube commercials."

"We can multitask," Willow chimed in from her pile of nobles, one of whom she was currently using as a chair while another massaged her feet and another braided her hair with vines and small golden charms. "Sex and survival go hand in hand."

Somehow—gods help us—we kept building.

One raft. Then another. Then a third. The first was a beauty, sleek and balanced, lined with planks and tied with rope blessed by desperation and Willow’s very questionable saliva.

The second was bulkier, thicker, less graceful but more stable, like a drunk centaur with excellent posture.

The third—well, the third was a patchwork mess, held together with sheer panic and Aria’s obsessive symmetry, but it floated. I didn’t ask how. I didn’t care. We were out of time.

The moment the last plank was tied down, we dragged them to the shore. It was chaos. Sand, shouting, wet ropes slapping like licentious eels. The nobles groaned, sobbed, and kissed each other goodbye like we were boarding ships to the underworld—which, given our luck, wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

Then Aria stepped forward. Hair tousled. Face flushed. Eyes alive with something far too bright to be simple victory.

"I can mark a path using the map," he said.

He dropped to his knees in the sand, spreading the old, dampened map across the shore like a priest unveiling holy scripture. His fingers moved with slow reverence, brushing dust from the corners, tracing the ink smear like he was coaxing a secret out of hiding.

Then he leaned in close, lips just above the parchment, and whispered something too soft for me to catch. His breath fogged the surface. The map pulsed—yes, pulsed—with faint light.

And then the sky cracked open once again

Not with thunder. Not with lightning. But with stars.

Real stars.

They blinked into existence like they’d just remembered they had somewhere to be. The false moon shuddered, flickered, then vanished like it had been caught in a lie. The painted sky peeled away, slowly, in strands of illusion and vapor.

And there, in the inky blackness above us, constellations burned through. Not all of them—but a path. A winding trail of stars that shone brighter than the others, curling over the sea like a necklace dropped across night.

We stared, absolutely breathless.

"Well fuck me sideways," Miko said, breaking the silence.

And just like that, we moved.

Nobles were shoved into groups—some still sleep-drunk and weeping into scarves. My party took the center raft. The best one. Willow insisted it was the only one with enough room for her and her designated sex pile. The second raft, bulkier, took the rest of the stronger nobles and Miko’s supply of oars. The third was the flotsam-and-prayers special, filled with giggling drunkards and two women who refused to sit unless there were cushions.

We pushed off into the sea just as the jungle behind us rustled with something too quiet to be wind.

I stood at the front of our raft, hands tight on the ropes, breath sharp in my chest. The waves lapped slowly, then faster. Fog hugged the surface like silk dropped into bathwater. Around us, the air buzzed—not with insects, but with something older. The Tower wasn’t chasing us. Not yet. But it was watching.

I let myself look back, just once.

The burning greenhouse was gone. The trees silent. The nobles who’d chosen sleep were nowhere in sight. Only the sea, the stars, and three rafts carrying fools, liars, and the closest thing I had to a family.

I let out a long breath and leaned back against the mast.

Then I thought of Vincent.

Had he already found the marked spot? Had he beat me there? Was he waiting on the other side, sipping wine through a straw with his missing fingers and that goddamned smile of his?

No. He was alone, and missing half a hand might I add. Yet still, the thought rested in the back of my mind.

"Hey!" came a moan from behind me.

I turned.

Willow was on her back, legs wrapped around the noble from earlier—Sir Shriek-and-Swoon himself—now naked, red, and moving like a man possessed. She was chanting softly in his ear, and he was thrusting like salvation depended on pelvic velocity.

Aria watched them.

With interest.

His lower lip was caught between his teeth. One hand clutched the edge of the raft. His legs were crossed. Barely.

I leaned over. "You okay?"

He squeaked. "Y-Yeah, I’m fine!"

"Want a turn?"

"Shut up."

Miko, further back, rowed in silence, occasionally guiding nobles on rhythm. Leo sat beside the edge, scooping seawater over his face, letting it drip down his arms and neck like he was cleansing more than skin. But then—he froze.

"Cecil," he said, voice low. "Something’s under us."

I turned. "What?"

"I said something’s—"

The water exploded. The thing that rose was not a shark. It was shaped like one, sure. Long body. Serrated back. But the face—

Gods.

Its face split down the middle like a fruit gone bad. Three sections, blooming open like a hungry flower, each lined with concentric rings of jagged teeth. Rows of red. Rows of blood. Its eyes were small, twisted, and wrong.

I didn’t move.

Because Miko beat me to it. In a blur, he vaulted forward, using the oar in his hand like a spear. It cracked across the thing’s eye. A shriek like metal on wet stone filled the air.

More followed, dozens, maybe more. The sea churned with scales and hunger.

"Defensive formation!" I shouted, already drawing my dagger. "Aim for the eyes! Or whatever passes for them!"

The nobles screamed, flailed, some jumped overboard in pure panic. The second raft took a hit. I watched a man get dragged off the edge in silence, his scream cut short by water.

One leapt at ours, Leo gutted it’s stomach in one solid blow. I turned to face another arising from the waters behind us, but then I saw Willow with her palms to the surface of the raft, shouting something in a language older than paper, and suddenly chains burst from the ocean—red, molten, glowing with sigils. They whipped around us, snapping, dragging some of the beasts downward. The water turned dark red. Then boiled.

Steam hissed.

The creatures screamed and scattered. And then it was quiet. Just blood on water and the stars above, still shining with brilliance. We stood in silence, chests heaving, blades slick.

Then, slowly, carefully...we rowed.

Not as fast. Not as loud.

And when we passed deeper into the fog, it welcomed us—not with darkness, but with whispers. Little threads of sound. Not words. Not yet. But I could feel them coiling into my ears.

Secrets, stories, and memories from times long forgotten.

I made my way to the front of the raft and sat down, legs splayed, arms resting on my knees. The stars above still glimmered, that path still winding forward like a promise waiting to be broken.

Miko joined me.

He sat down beside me without a word. Just exhaled.

"You okay?" I asked.

He nodded, wiping sweat from his brow.

"I’m doing better now," he said, voice quieter than usual. "Seeing you back like this. Swinging axes. Setting fires. Leading cults of horny nobles into shark-infested water."

I snorted. "Oh yeah? You missed the chaos?"

"I missed you in it," he said. "The real you."

That made me pause.

"Careful," I muttered. "Say something sweet like that and I might kiss you."

He looked at me. Serious. Then grinned.

"Only if Aria gets jealous." NovelFire

We both laughed, loudly, brightly, as if the world around us seemed to quiet just a little. And just then—Aria’s voice cut through the fog.

"Cecil! Something’s coming up!"

I stood. My heart thudded. And up ahead, through the mist—

Something massive loomed in the distance.

At first I thought it was a wall.

Just that. A massive, moonlit slab of darkness looming through the mist, big enough to block the stars and too wide to be anything natural. It rose from the sea like a god’s forgotten monument, still and silent and made of something older than time and varnish.

I leaned forward, squinting against the fog with narrowed eyes and a stomach that suddenly didn’t feel like playing along. The raft shifted beneath my feet, but whatever was ahead of us didn’t move—not a sway, not a groan, not a creak—just this impossible, monolithic shape jutting out of the ocean like it had been stabbed into the horizon by some vengeful celestial drunk.

Then I saw the ropes. Then I saw the wood.

And then my heart did a backflip straight into my throat.

It wasn’t a wall. It was a ship.

A galleon. Massive. No—absurd. So tall it made towers look like toys. So wide it made our raft feel like a discarded bar of soap. The hull was black, ancient oak, lacquered with time and maybe blood, rising so high into the sky that I had to tilt my head just to catch sight of what might have been sails, furled like sleeping serpents along towering masts.

Lanterns lined the lower decks, flickering gently in the dark, casting long golden strips of light over barnacled beams and chain-wrapped supports. It wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t dead either. No. It felt...patient. Like it had been waiting.

For us.

Leo let out a low whistle, eyes wide as he pulled his soaked hair back from his face. "That’s a damn house. That’s three houses stacked and wearing armor."

Aria, gripping the mast beside me, stared upward with lips parted and eyes wide like a boy seeing heaven in silk and nails. "This is what the map marked," he said, voice barely audible over the soft lapping of waves. "This is the location. Not an island. Not a platform."

"A ship," I finished, breathless. "A mother-fucking warship with delusions of being a continent."

Willow, sprawled over the side of the raft with one leg dipped lazily in the water and a nobleman massaging her foot like his inheritance depended on it, raised a brow and purred, "I’ve ridden smaller things with more enthusiasm, but even I’m impressed."

The nobles whispered, some pointing, some sobbing, and one immediately pulled out a quill to start sketching, like this moment needed to be immortalized on overpriced paper. I was too busy watching the edge of the hull, where something else caught my eye.

Another raft.

Not one of ours.

Smaller. Cruder. It bobbed lazily against the hull like a dog trying to hump a statue—pathetic but oddly committed. The raft looked like it had been built by someone with too few tools and far too many bad ideas. But it floated. And next to it?

A rope ladder.

Molded and rotted, hanging down the side of the ship like an invitation from hell.