There came various noises of exclamation and surprise from three of the other four, but Russel moved directly into bodyguard mode, drawing and aiming his gun in a single, smooth movement.

Not that I was standing where he was aiming any more. With skills like [Far Step] and [Timeless World], he had no hope of tracking me with his childlike stats. He was the second one to vanish into my [Inventory].

While I'd been fairly sure the skill would work on them even against their will, given their lack of intrinsic mana, I had no idea if it was safe. They had no mana circulatory system to burn, and mana normally passed straight through them, but things like healing magic still worked. They had to interact with mana somehow. That meant there was a reasonable chance I was cooking the pair of them. I was simply prepared to take that bet, given their crime.

That didn't mean I wanted to risk the others, who were visibly unhappy about the situation even if they'd let it happen, but I didn't see much choice. I couldn't look inside my own [Inventory] to check the condition of anything stored within. I didn't want to leave the others alone here, but I lacked anywhere to immediately eject Harry to check he was still raw. The Obsidian Spires dungeon came closest, with my finger in a safe location and none of them sharing Maximilian's capability of fighting, but all they needed to do was die to a monster and they'd respawn outside. Heck, with my finger on the staircase, and them not expecting it, they may well fall to their deaths without any monsters needing to lift a tentacle.

Instead, I nabbed the other three and moved on to my next option; finding a room somewhere in the ark and locking it closed. Assuming I hadn't cooked them, the time dilation of [Inventory] gave me a few minutes to play with, which would be enough. As long as the front door was still open, but if not, I had the option of abandoning them in the corridor. It wasn't as if there was anyone around there to help them.

Thankfully, the doors still stood open. Perhaps my telling off had caused them to sulk, or they'd glitched due to the damage, but either way, I seemed to have unrestricted access to the ark.

As would everyone else, but again, that was not an immediate problem.

Picking a random dormitory, I ejected them. Thankfully, the resulting noises were grunts of surprise, and not screams or sizzling. [Mana Sight] showed no damage either, so I rammed the door closed before they could take stock of what had just happened, the time dilation of [Inventory] working in my favour.

Alas, I hadn't fully thought through the 'locking it closed' step. Unlike the doors of the outside world, the dorms did have locks, but they were on the inside. From the outside, a key was required, and even if I had the key, they could just unlock it from inside again. Nor did they have handy hooked handles I could shove my sword-staff through and jam in place as if I was in some sort of action movie. The doors were made of the same hihi'irokane and adamantite blend as the walls, so there was no hope of welding one shut with a flame grenade. Given that it opened inwards, I couldn't even stack anything heavy outside. The best I could come up with was to detonate an ice grenade.

I reopened it a crack and tossed in a finger to keep watch on them, activating [Shelter] to protect it, then pulled the door and dropped a grenade. Ice sublimated from the air, successfully freezing the door shut, then I piled up my entire supply of ice crystals in the hope they'd keep the ice frozen.

Russel had a gun... Probably not many bullets, though, and the ice was on the outside. He certainly wouldn't be able to shoot through the door. Did any of the others have anything else they could use to escape? A fire crystal? [Mana Sight] didn't pick up anything magical aside from their rings, but I couldn't trust the ice to hold them for long, even if they had nothing. They wouldn't have time to get far before I teleported back to my finger and recaptured them, but I didn't want them interrupting my search for Cluma.

Shouts and swearing came from within as they finally reacted to their capture—the entire sequence of events over in seconds, from their perspective—but I ignored them. They could rant as much as they liked. I was going to find Cluma myself, then get Darren to send them home. After this stunt, keeping them seemed like far too large a liability.

Racing back to the System control room, a search for people called Cluma produced a surprisingly large list, but a search for 'Cluma' produced one. The System knew who I meant. Alas, the resulting deluge of information was far too dense to parse, merely succeeding in giving me a headache, and I couldn't find anything that seemed like coordinates. Was I going to need to solicit help from the dragons again and get the information via the administrative interface?

No... I was forgetting Dominic. Given that he wasn't with the rest of the Earth group, it was a reasonable assumption he was with Cluma. He hadn't been attached to the System for long, and was deliberately avoiding buying skills. He'd be a far more sensible target for my hunt than Cluma.

I switched the target of my search, resulting in a compact chunk of data that was still dense, but not impossible for my inferior fleshy brain to process. Sure enough, embedded among the incomprehensible river of numbers and data were the coordinates of the System shard. The shard that was embedded in his soul, which was in turn embedded in his body, which I hoped was near Cluma's body, which I hoped still had Cluma's soul living in it. It was a surprisingly long chain, but I had confidence in each link.

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From the coordinates, he was north-east from Dawnhold. A teleport and a short while with [Timeless World] was enough to get me there, where I found a village, but no sign of the hugger I was looking for, nor her captor.

"Excuse me!" I called to the first person I saw. "Have you seen a cat-girl, Cluma, about my age? Or an older human, Dominic?"

"Why yes, you just missed them," she answered. "Dominic looked a little spooked, the poor chap."

Dammit! He knew I was coming? How? "Where did they go? How long ago?"

"They set off east, and only a few minutes,"

She pointed in a direction that was indeed eastish. "Thanks," I called out, [Timeless World] already activating as I sprinted in that direction.

They couldn't have travelled far in a few minutes; Cluma might be fast and inexhaustible, but Dominic wasn't, and even if he talked her into carrying him, he would slow her down. With the time dilation of [Timeless World], I knew my chances of finding them were high. But of course, logic was rarely a good treatment for fear. What if he decided to execute her? Would she fight back? He had a gun, and she wasn't as bulletproof as me.

A minute's run failed to find them, and there was no way they were that far ahead of me. It seemed unlikely they had any means of moving faster, or they wouldn't have been in a village so close to Dawnhold. More likely was that they'd simply changed direction after leaving the village. Alas, I lacked any kind of tracking skills, so I spent the next half hour criss-crossing the landscape, until a lone human popped up in my [Mana Sight] range. With him in my sights, it was mere seconds before I got into [Soul Perception] range, which revealed both that his chains were loose, and that there was another blurred soul behind him. Found them both.

I didn't slow down or relax [Timeless World], not wanting to give him time to react, and instead blasted straight at Dominic, tagging him with [Inventory] as soon as I closed in. Like the others, the kidnapper didn't even have time to react.

"Huh? Peter?" exclaimed Cluma, popping into visibility. "Did you deal with the new plague outbreak, then? And it was mean to send me away like that, even if you didn't think I could help. What about everyone else in Dawnhold? And why did you teleport Dominic away?"

That explained how they got her, then. No force involved, thank goodness, and now that she'd dropped [Non-detection], I could see with [Mana Sight] that she was unharmed. I sagged with palpable relief.

The final question contained an inaccurate assumption, though; I hadn't teleported him anywhere, but left him in my [Inventory], which meant I was on a time limit. No... Actually, that was silly; I'd left a finger behind in my makeshift prison cell, so I simply ejected him there, deliberately aiming him at Harry. The pair crashed into each other in a satisfying tangle. Alas, I hadn't left an ear behind to hear it.

"Sorry," I replied, deciding not to contradict whatever lies they'd fed her for now. Trying probably wouldn't go well, anyway, given that she couldn't comprehend Dominic lying but did know I could. Alas, that also meant it would be really weird to do what I really wanted, which was to rush in and tightly hug her and never let go. She had no idea of the danger she'd been in, or my relief at finding her.

Actually, this was Cluma... She didn't need excuses for hugs, whichever end she was on, so I dived in and squeezed.

"And we're sending the Earth scientists home," I added, as a sort of non-explanation for why I'd vanished Dominic.

"Oh, good. They aren't nice people," she replied, hugging back, and not giving any indication whatsoever that she thought my behaviour strange.

"Is that why you've been avoiding the institute?"

"Uhh... Maybe?" she suggested, looking shifty. "They were just always... rude. Like that Graham from the merchants' guild. They always treated me like I was stupid."

I checked up on the rude scientists, who had been highly agitated since I sent over Dominic. He hadn't actually seen me, given the magical speed of my approach, but the others could put two and two together easily enough. His appearance would have let them know I'd found Cluma, and that they no longer had leverage over me.

Hopefully. There wasn't anything else they could have done, was there? I did a quick scan from the finger I'd left back in my own village, picking up Mum safely in the living room. There was no sign of Darren, but he was probably outside, out of my sensory range. Mum wasn't panicking, so he hadn't gone missing. It didn't completely discount the possibility of them talking her into handing him over, but it seemed unlikely. They'd have needed someone to watch him, and there were no more of them missing. I'd go check everyone was still there, but I could spend time with Cluma first.

With Cluma safely in my arms, my anger and fear bled away, and I could think a little more clearly about my next steps. I'd wanted to send the Earthlings home. Heck, I still did. But it wouldn't end well. Could we purge them of all dangerous pathogens before sending them back? Everything I knew about healing magic implied that using it on them, even in combination with things like potions of cure disease, wouldn't render them safe. Things that weren't pathogenic to us could potentially be fatal to Earth humans. Sending them back could doom the planet, however careful we were, and despite my desire to be rid of them, that wasn't a risk I was willing to take.

But what other options did we have? I still believed that exposing them to the Law against their will would be murder. Had anything actually happened to Cluma, perhaps I would have just killed them all; I certainly had no remorse over the fate of Maximilian. But Cluma was safe and unharmed, and I couldn't justify it to myself. Nor could I just put this incident behind us and send them back to the institute; they'd proven a willingness to exploit the Law, and to use others to get to me, and that wasn't something I could ignore.

So what would I do with them? Imprison them forever? Keep them imprisoned until they 'willingly' agreed to subject themselves to the Law?

I'd always been a fan of the status quo. Outside of emergency situations, I tended to leave things as they were, and not risk rocking the boat. Sometimes events ran away from me, hence how we'd ended up building the institute, but that hadn't been something I'd planned. Here, there was no status quo option. Or if there was, it was pretending the kidnapping had never happened and sending them back to the institute. I couldn't risk it. They might make another attempt at Cluma or my family.

I could still delegate responsibility for the decision and inform Serlv of what they'd done. I was fairly sure her response would be, by my definition, murder, whether of the body or mind. It wouldn't be me doing it, but that fact didn't make the option any more palatable. I'd still know I'd caused it.

Just what was I supposed to do with them?