Chapter 3: Daily Visions and Dread
POV: Viktor
Dawn came like a punishment, dragging Viktor back to consciousness with fingers made of broken glass. His fourth day in hell, and his body had apparently decided that pain was now his natural state of being. Every muscle fiber screamed its own personal opera of agony as he forced himself upright.
The system interface materialized without invitation, cheerfully displaying his current status:
[CURRENT HEALTH: 9/10]
[CURRENT MANA: 39/39]
[STATUS: SEVERE PHYSICAL STRAIN]
[DAILY VISION AVAILABLE]
Viktor stared at the notification, his stomach clenching with something that wasn't hunger. Yesterday's vision had shown him glimpses of Blaviken—enough to confirm his worst fears but not enough to actually help. Today, he needed more. He needed details, specifics, anything that might give him an edge in what was looking more and more like a suicide mission.
"Daily Vision."
The world dissolved around him like watercolors in rain. Reality became fluid, time became negotiable, and suddenly Viktor was seeing through eyes that weren't his own.
Image One: A tavern, thick with smoke and the smell of unwashed bodies. A figure in black leather sits alone at a corner table, white hair catching the firelight. Amber eyes like winter storms study the room with predatory patience. Two swords cross his back—steel and silver, death's own instruments. The Witcher's medallion hangs at his throat, still as a held breath.
Image Two: A woman's hand, elegant despite the calluses. Between her fingers, a silver brooch catches torchlight—intricate metalwork that seems to shift and writhe in the flickering illumination. Elven script, maybe, or something older. Something that whispers of curses and broken promises. The hand trembles, just slightly, and closes around the brooch like a prayer.
Image Three: Cobblestones slick with morning dew that reflects the early sun like scattered diamonds. Beautiful, pristine, peaceful. Then the perspective shifts, and the wetness isn't dew anymore. It's red. It spreads in patterns that speak of arterial spray and final moments, turning the marketplace into a canvas painted in humanity's most visceral medium.
Viktor crashed back into his own consciousness with the subtlety of a kicked mule. The visions left him gasping, disoriented, and thoroughly convinced that his future held nothing but blood and regret.
[MANA DECREASED: 39 → 33.15]
[DAILY VISION USED]
[RESET TIME: MIDNIGHT]
"Geralt's already there." The words came out as a whisper, barely audible over the sound of his own ragged breathing. "He's in Blaviken. Right now."
The first image had been clear enough—the tavern, the isolation, the way the Witcher held himself like violence temporarily restrained. Viktor had seen that exact scene in the show, knew it was the calm before the storm that would earn Geralt his most hated title.
But the second image... that was new. The brooch, the trembling hand, the sense of desperate hope clinging to a piece of jewelry like a drowning person clutching driftwood. Renfri's hand, it had to be. But what was the brooch? Some family heirloom? A magical focus? A reminder of everything she'd lost?
"Details that don't help me survive." Viktor dragged himself to his feet, every joint protesting the movement. "Focus on what matters. Eight days left. Fifty-six MP to go."
The math was becoming his mantra, the only thing keeping him sane in a world that seemed designed to drive him insane. Numbers didn't lie. Numbers didn't care about destiny or prophecy or the weight of impossible choices. Numbers just were.
He forced himself through his morning routine—such as it was. A drink from the stream that tasted like desperation. A handful of berries that barely qualified as food. A few minutes spent examining his hands, which had developed a fascinating collection of blisters and calluses that mapped his journey from soft urbanite to something approaching functional.
Then it was time to train.
Days four through six blurred together in a haze of deliberate self-destruction. Viktor pushed himself past every limit he'd discovered and several he hadn't known existed. His runs became sprints until his vision grayed and his legs gave out beneath him. His weight training became an exercise in controlled falling, lifting rocks until his arms simply refused to obey anymore.
On day five, he vomited from exhaustion. On day six, he vomited from pain. By the end of the third day, he was vomiting from both, plus what might have been a concussion from when a particularly ambitious lift had gone wrong and he'd dropped a twenty-pound stone on his own head.
But something was changing. Something fundamental and terrifying and maybe, just maybe, hopeful.
His body was adapting.
Not quickly—this wasn't some montage where music swelled and muscles magically appeared. This was brutal, incremental improvement measured in fractions of percentages and paid for in blood and sweat. But it was improvement.
The runs that had nearly killed him on day one were now merely agonizing. The weights that had been impossible were now just inadvisable. His hands, once soft and unmarked, were developing calluses that spoke of honest work and honest pain.
[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: UNBREAKABLE WILL]
[Requirements Met: Continue training despite severe physical distress for 72 consecutive hours]
[REWARDS: +0.2 STAMINA, +0.1 STRENGTH, 50 SYSTEM POINTS]
The notification appeared on day six, right after Viktor had finished what could generously be called a workout and more accurately be described as an extended suicide attempt. He stared at the golden text, his vision still swimming from exhaustion.
[STAMINA INCREASED: 3.9 → 4.4]
[STRENGTH INCREASED: 1.0 → 1.1]
[CURRENT MANA: 44/44]
[SYSTEM POINTS: 50 → 100]
Half a point of Stamina in three days. Viktor laughed, a sound with about as much humor as a dying animal's last breath. He was ahead of schedule, barely, but the cost was becoming increasingly obvious.
His hands shook constantly now, fine tremors that spoke of overtaxed nervous system and muscles pushed beyond their design specifications. His reflection in the stream showed a face that was growing gaunt, eyes that were developing the kind of hollow intensity usually associated with religious fanatics or the clinically insane.
And the headaches. God, the headaches.
They'd started on day five, right after his second Daily Vision. A dull throbbing behind his eyes that felt like someone was using his skull as a drum. By day six, the pain had evolved into something more sophisticated—sharp spikes that stabbed through his temples whenever he tried to concentrate.
"Must be the visions." He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, trying to massage away pain that seemed to live in his bones. "Too much, too fast. System overload."
[WARNING: MENTAL STRAIN DETECTED]
[EXCESSIVE USE OF PRECOGNITIVE ABILITIES DETECTED]
[VISION ACCURACY DECREASED BY 5%]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: REDUCE FREQUENCY OF ABILITY USAGE]
"Now you tell me." Viktor's laugh turned into a groan as the movement sent fresh lightning through his skull. "After I've already fried my brain."
But he couldn't stop. Not now, not when he was so close. The visions were his only advantage, his only way of preparing for what was coming. Without them, he was just another victim waiting to happen.
He used his third Daily Vision anyway, despite the warning, despite the way the very thought of it made his head throb worse. He had to know. Had to see.
The same tavern, but from a different angle. Geralt's hand resting on his sword hilt, not threatening but ready. A woman enters—tall, elegant, dangerous. Dark hair, dark clothes, darker intentions. She moves like a predator, like someone who's made peace with violence. This is Renfri, the cursed princess, and she's everything the stories said she would be.
The marketplace again, but earlier. People going about their business, buying bread and haggling over prices. Normal life, innocent life, the kind of mundane happiness that was about to be shattered by forces beyond their understanding.
A flash of steel in sunlight. Not Geralt's sword—something smaller, more intimate. A dagger, maybe, or a throwing knife. It catches the light like a falling star, beautiful and deadly and inevitable.
Viktor came back to himself lying flat on his back, blood trickling from his nose and his vision sparking with colors that had no names. The pain in his head had evolved beyond headache into something approaching mystical experience—the kind of agony that made you question the fundamental nature of suffering.
[MANA DECREASED: 44 → 38.15]
[MENTAL STRAIN CRITICAL]
[VISION ACCURACY DECREASED BY 10%]
[STRONGLY RECOMMEND CESSATION OF PRECOGNITIVE ABILITY USAGE]
"Five days." The words came out slurred, like he was drunk on pain. "Fifty-six MP to go. I can... I can do this."
He couldn't do this. Not if the visions kept tearing his mind apart from the inside. But he also couldn't stop, because stopping meant going into Blaviken blind, and going in blind meant dying.
"Catch-22." He wiped the blood from his nose with a shaking hand. "Use the visions and go insane, or don't use them and go dead."
Neither option seemed particularly appealing.
Viktor dragged himself to the base of a large oak tree and slumped against its trunk, letting the rough bark dig into his back. The forest around him had taken on a crystalline quality, every sound amplified and distorted by his overtaxed nervous system. A bird's song became a symphony of pure agony. The wind through the leaves sounded like whispered threats.
He closed his eyes and tried to meditate, tried to find some small pocket of peace in the chaos of his own mind. But peace was a luxury he couldn't afford, and meditation felt like trying to calm a storm by asking it politely to stop.
Five days. Fifty-six MP to go.
He could do this.
He had to do this.
Because the alternative was watching Geralt of Rivia paint Blaviken's marketplace red with the blood of people who deserved better, and Viktor would be just another victim in a story that was already written.
"I can do this," he whispered to the darkness behind his eyelids. "I have to do this."
The forest whispered back, but its words were lost in the static of his own breaking mind.
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