In the middle of a forested realm with a suffocating, humid jungle environment, two people knelt half-naked before the eight people surrounding them. The first of the two—a short, black-haired man—held himself firmly as a figure in red robes scanned his body.
The other person, a tall woman dressed in nothing but her underwear, waited for them to finish as she kept eye contact with Rahal.
They had surrendered rather easily. That was a wise decision. Not only had they been surrounded, but Rahal and the elders had brought specialized tools to help restrain them, and they hadn’t been hiding them, either.
Rahal glanced at the scout who he had tasked with searching them. The man shook his head.
“Curses!” he swore under his breath as he turned to the short man. “You. What is your talent?”
“I can make fire burn fiercer with nothing but a glance,” the man surrendered the information easily.
Rahal called the name of one of the elders, and the woman pulled out a lighter. As she flicked it, the man displayed his talent by making the small flame rise rapidly. The elder flicked her lighter closed, and the fire petered out.
“And you?” he asked as he turned to face the woman.
“Put a weapon in one of my hands,” she requested.
“Jahir, plastic fork.”
The scout nodded as he extracted a piece of plastic cutlery from the bag on his back and placed it into the woman’s hands. She clenched and, with ease, created an ethereal copy of the fork in her second hand.
That means that neither of them had a storage talent.
Barring circumstances too extraordinary to realistically expect them, these two didn’t have any way to hide the items if they were in their possession. He sighed and pinched his brow. A headache settled right on the top of his scalp and made its way down. Absolutely fantastic; they had just spent a godforsaken month running around the interspace like idiots!
“We told you we don’t have it,” the tied-up woman said. “The only thing we did was take the heart essence. My companion is the one who consumed it. I know the spiritual value of such an item to those who walk the path of blood, and if you wish for satisfaction, you may take my head.”
She offered as she bowed, and surprisingly, her companion looked greatly amused at her words.
“I don’t need your fucking head,” Rahal swore angrily, his eyes turning bloodshot. He bit his thumbnail so hard that a big chunk of it detached. He spat it out as he marched forward and leaned in to stare into the woman’s eyes. “I need information,” he barked. “Tell me! What were you doing in that realm!? Who are you!?”
The short man perked up. “Ah, that would be a bit of a long story. But we did see who killed your patriarch,” the man shared, sneering.
Rahal spun wildly. “What!?” he asked. “Was it not the leviathan!? Who was it!? Do you know their location!?”
“I have no idea,” the man said, grinning gleefully.
He kicked the man in the face, pushing him over to the ground as he turned to the woman. “Are you more willing to speak?”
“My companion is telling the truth,” she said. “We have seen the beginning of the battle where your patriarch perished, but we fled immediately after. We only returned after a long time had passed, and even that was only due to my companion’s curiosity.”
“Bullshit!” Rahal spat. “What I think really happened is that you took the items on his body and returned later when you remembered the heart essence!” he accused as he jabbed a finger at the woman’s collarbone. “Now tell me what you did with it!”
The woman merely shrugged. “We have no way to prove our innocence,” she said. “Do with us as you wish.”
“All right,” he said as he kicked the woman in the gut. She buckled over as he started walking. “You will tell us everything you know,” he continued as the woman spat blood. “If I ever have any reason to suspect you’re lying, I will kill you both without hesitation.”
The man started laughing at that. “You will never believe us when we tell you,” he said. “So you might as well kill us immediately.”
“That’s for me to judge,” Rahal said. “Now speak!”
And spoke, they did. Their story was the single most confusing, nonsensical piece of information Rahal had ever received. And it wasn’t because it was a blatant lie, either. At least parts of what they were saying made sense.
The patriarch had been in the middle of chasing a blood-affinity ether construct tied to the concept of bloodshed. The beginning of their story lined up. But the details were… frankly absurd.
Rahal had established himself as likely the most important among the elders purely due to how well he wielded information. His memory was eidetic. So he could tentatively put the pieces together. There was a small problem—even children’s cartoons had a more believable plot than the tall tale these two shared with him.
The first thing they encountered was a one-star archhuman slaying a leviathan. This was the creature they had presumed to be the true culprit behind their patriarch’s death. And, apparently, it had died to a damn one-star.
Then, the spirit of bloodshed appeared to save the man’s life. As for why he needed to be saved? Apparently, killing a creature so far above one’s level overwhelmed one’s soul. The “usual” way to avoid it was to use a talisman of sorts. The problem was that he had never heard of this. Nobody had ever killed something so far above them at the first star. That was impossible. Or, it should have been.
Who were these people to speak of such things with such confidence? That didn’t feel like a deliberate detail they dropped to throw them off the trail.
There was another problem—the blood spirit’s arrival. They claimed that it hadn’t already been with the man but that it had come out of nowhere, only for the patriarch to soon follow after it.
That lined up with the fact that the patriarch could track the blood spirit. The issue with their story was that too many details lined up.
Afterward, several things led to giant skeletal heads rising from the ocean, which was when the patriarch started fighting them, and these two ran away.
It was rather uncharacteristic of Kraven clansmen to laugh. But the cackling of the elders was understandable.
Rahal, on the other hand, wasn’t laughing.
The woman stood still, her expression serene as she awaited their judgment. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of humor, even after the absurd story. The man, on the other hand, seemed to bask in its absurdity, openly cackling at them, so much so that it threw Rahal off.
He sighed. They had underestimated these two. While they were two-stars, they weren’t rookies. Ordinary methods of interrogation simply wouldn’t work on them. And he was confident that even torture would fail. Whatever it was about them, it had to be connected to their strange identities.
So it was finally time to ask the question that had been hanging above everyone’s head from the moment they first saw these two. “Why are the two of you wearing square contact lenses?” he finally said. “Is that the mark of some sort of cult?” he asked more himself than them. Then, he turned around. “Anyone here know of any organizations with such a thing as their signature?”
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“Actually,” the male spoke, looking mighty pleased with himself. “I believe that the way we got these was by—” Midway through his sentence, the space around the man’s mouth morphed, and his words turned into high-pitched squeals and whistles.
The surrounding elders readied their weapons. But there was nothing to fight.
After not even a second, the man stopped talking. His mouth was bleeding openly, his lips looking as if they had been cut apart. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”
***
Mark and Nahar boarded the floating ship that would take them back to Starhold. The gray, utilitarian, metallic interior reflected Mark’s mood quite aptly as he sat there, unable to get his mind off the subject.
It was frustrating. More than Madame’s silence and the confusing nature of the entire case, he was frustrated that, essentially, he didn’t deserve to know. His role there had been to take the blame he rightfully deserved, to confess his sins so that the man wouldn’t unjustly direct his anger at Madame.
Speaking of whom, she finally boarded the ship, too, and stepped into a small room to the side, leaving the two men by themselves.
Nahar moved over to sit beside him as he patted his shoulder. “What are your thoughts?” he asked.
Mark’s eyes momentarily slid to face the man, only having enough strength to raise high enough to side-eye Nahar’s knees as he dropped them to face the floor again. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Understandable,” Nahar said. He let the moment hang for a while as he patted Mark’s shoulder again. “But you’re being greedy.”
That startled him into finally looking the man in the face. “In what way?” he asked.
“You’re taking all the blame.”
That… That sounded like an excuse. Indeed, it wasn’t he who had sent Freddy to that camp, but he was the one who had sent him down that path. He hadn’t done everything, but he’d done enough. As scared as he had been to meet him, the fact that they failed to find that man was infinitely regrettable. More than anything, he wanted to come face to face and apologize. But he most likely wouldn’t get the chance to do that.
While the body might still be alive… the owner might no longer be the same person.
***
Narcisse walked past the two young men and into her private compartment as she breathed out. Her breath was shaky, and her mind was racing. With a shivering hand, she extracted a notebook out of her storage ring. It appeared with a pop of the air being displaced to accommodate it.
The notebook was a frilly pink item with numerous hearts and flowers drawn all over it. She flipped it open.
Her eyes scanned through the notes she had taken. All of her speculation and guesswork, all the details she had believed had come together perfectly. The timing of the camp’s destruction and the sporadic life force signature she felt, the specifics in the reports they had scoured through, and her own intelligence gathering unit collecting information beforehand.
Slowly, almost fearfully, she reached the ultimate conclusion of her speculation.
FREDDY STERN DESTROYED CAMP VIOLET.
Her talent was something that worked best when absolutely nobody knew about it.
It was Life Signature. It acted as a quasi-tracking ability she could put on a target and, if the target remained close, could sense its position. If someone was right before her, she could feel the intricacies of how that person’s body worked, both in general and at that moment.
She could tell when someone was preparing themselves to attack because she could sense the tightening of their muscles. It was even possible to partly infer whether someone was lying or telling the truth purely based on their physical reaction.
The further away the entity being tracked went, the weaker the ability became. It didn’t take much for the tracking aspect to stop working altogether. But the connection couldn’t be severed. Not even by entering another realm. Well, not through any means anyone had discovered yet, but nobody had even found out what her talent did, let alone how to counter it.
Although she couldn’t put it on infinite targets, she could use it enough times at once to always have a tracker on every individual that was important to her at that moment. One of those people was Freddy Stern.
One of the most valuable aspects of her talent was that she could tell the general health of anyone she used it on, even if the connection was fragile. She had maintained her connection to Freddy in case she was ever handed an opportunity to retrieve him.
Because how dare those bastards? Their heinous act had tarnished her reputation, and the amount of trouble she got into for allowing someone under her protection to get kidnapped was astronomical.
They would pay for this, she had vowed back then. Given enough time, she would get her revenge. The story of poor old Freddy, the victim of a nasty conspiracy, would air before millions of people, showing the city lord and clan patriarch as the monsters they were.
It would have been a hit at their reputation that only she could deliver, probably enough to stain it for the next hundred years, if not forever.
Until Janhalar, that crafty old bastard, decided to ship the poor man into a mining expedition on Faralethal. She had believed that it was over back then. Not even she could save someone in that situation. The whole expedition was set up in a way that made it functionally impossible for anyone to escape. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to sever the bond with the young man.
His life, even through the one-dimensional hole she was viewing it through, was a bloody spectacle. His physical condition suffered the types of ups and downs and lefts and rights that would leave anyone flabbergasted as to what the hell was happening to him.
But nothing he had gone through prior could even begin to compare to what she felt on the day that camp was destroyed. That man had had an ocean of life flowing into him while he himself kept nearly dying over and over.
It was only after her spies caught wind of the news that she made her conclusion. Freddy Stern had found some form of unique treasure and acquired the fire affinity. Then, he proceeded to wreck the camp, nearly dying to the defenders in the process.
Everything lined up perfectly. Well, it mostly did. As to how he received such a massive burst of power so suddenly, it could only be attributed to the X variable—or, rather, the hypothetical treasure.
She took a deep breath and let the exhale wash some stress out of her body. Well. There went that hypothesis. Apparently, he had actually discovered what seemed to be another Great Anomaly and had his body stolen by some form of horror beyond comprehension. Wonderful. Whether he had been fully or partially overtaken by those things was still a mystery, but one thing was certain—according to her talent, his body was still alive.
But… They had run around enough to conclude that that body was nowhere nearby. As it had been lost in the caverns, it no longer really mattered. This cave system was so far away from Starhold that that creature would likely never again interact with another human being. With some sadness at the unfortunate turn of events, she focused on her connection to the man, ready to sever it and move on.
However.
A frightening possibility wormed its way into the back of her mind—what if he hadn’t run off into the caverns? Even that undead seemed to be intelligent, so it was unlikely that the man had been possessed by a mindless beast.
It also must have had the same, or a similar, talent as he himself; otherwise, the influx of healing would make no sense. Her mind blanked out for a moment.
For a while, at least, whatever was in the man’s body had spent a prolonged period in a seriously damaged state. She had tried analyzing it and had concluded that he was likely suffering from severe burn injuries, most likely as a byproduct of an untrained body using the fire affinity-slash-treasure so liberally.
But why hadn’t it healed? She had first concluded that it might be related to whatever he was using to get that power, either backlash or a trade-off that he couldn’t simply nullify with his healing. A spirit ability could justify such a phenomenon.
But what if that wasn’t the case?
What if the man, or the thing possessing him, had pretended to be one of the survivors and waited for the rescue team?
Hastily, she rushed to the stack of papers in the corner of the room. She skimmed through one report after another. Eventually, she spotted something suspicious. One of the people rescued was a severe burn victim; apparently, an employee. On what basis had they concluded this? What evidence did they use to prove the man’s identity? She dug deeper.
What she found chilled her to her core. An ID…? That was it?
Surely, they must have tried harder than that; she needed to know.
And eventually, she discovered what she had been looking for:
Faralethal Activity Excavation Site: Camp Violet: Destruction Investigation Report
REPORT: CVDCSR-00056
Report topic: Rescue and Recovery of Subject: Peter Vane.
But it didn’t hold the answers she wanted to hear. “Oh dear…” she breathed out as she put the papers down. There was no more room for doubt. She would confirm it by paying a visit to this man named Matthew, but she had a feeling she knew what she would find.
This ordinarily wouldn’t be her concern. But this was an opportunity. She couldn’t destroy Basilisk by airing his dirty laundry out for the world to see…
But he was the sole owner of this expedition. He was the one who would be held responsible for the risks that the reckless slave camps had taken. They only needed to be this far away to ensure none of the prisoners could escape and that nobody could rescue them. Had they been closer, it would have been easier to prevent something like this from happening.
A small smile appeared on her lips.
She had to compile her evidence first. But it would no doubt be enough.
It was time to give the empress a little update.