“Alright what is the situation!?” Captain Dio shouted as she entered the temple along with an escort of six guards under her command. She was just now arriving from the four way call with the other captain’s of the city to discuss Arthur’s findings and share any information they might have uncovered on their own, Captain Gracilis who did not have her district investigated was of particular interest and she immediately sent a team to double check.
“Sir Arthur ordered us not to allow anyone down into the basement and ordered us to tell him of your arrival. He is currently upstairs looking through the rooms just in case we missed something.” The leading detective said as he approached the Captain. “Would you like to speak with him?”
“Yes I think I would. Lead the way, detective.” Captain Dio followed the detective upstairs past the one detective standing by the stairs leading down into the basement, when they arrived on the second floor they found Arthur looking through the bedrooms. His primary focus was on the office connected to the higher ranking priest's bedroom.
“Sir Arthur, Captain Dio is here to speak with you.” The detective said upon Arthur throwing a pillow out of frustration. Arthur quickly turned around as he was started by the sudden noise.
“What do you have to report sir mage?” Captain Dio asked while walking into the room wondering what exactly was drawing Arthur’s attention. ‘He might make an excellent detective with how thorough he is. He obviously still requires the nessisary training, but I think he had the mindset for it.’
“Hello again Captain, I had the detectives search the building and they figured that a group of at least two entered the building and killed everyone in here. They started with the two in the hall, the first one they killed while the second was subdued and tortured for information before them being killed. Then they moved onto the last two in who were getting ready to eat dinner, they killed them one at a time before locking everything aside from one window towards the top of the tower, they used something to climb down and leave without being noticed for several days.” Arthur said as he exited the room and began walking down towards the basement with Captain Dio and the detective following.
“And what about you, what do you think about this? Do you think there were only two people here that did all this?” Captain Dio gestured to all the damage within the main hall as they stepped into it, she pointed specifically towards the statue of Velerin that toppled over.
“No, I don’t think it was only two people. I suspect that there were at the bare minimum three people involved in this attack. The first two would have been the ones to attack through the front doors and the third would have had a ladder at the back for them to escape. That was how I entered the building after all.” Captain Dio was a little surprised by the answer, it was simple and entirely plausible for what she saw before her. But she suspected that Arthur wasn’t quite finished with his explanation.
“But I believe there were more than just three. I assume Velerin was kind enough to give the few priests that he has actual divine magic, assuming he wasn’t an idiot he would have been able to cast a spell or two at the attackers before he was subdued. Unless he was outnumbered and outsmarted, that isn’t even counting the fact that they decided to destroy the statue here, likely knowing what would happen.” To further illustrate his point Arthur raised his hands above his head like he had claws, mimicking the werebeast.
“Now unless one of them was willing to give up their entire life for this cause they had they brought someone else, possibly a hostage, to destroy it and become cursed themselves. I don’t know very many people that would be willing to do that.”
As Arthur was speaking the lead detective with them noticed something on the floor, specifically something red like blood. He quickly squatted down while Arthur continued on about what he believed happened, the blood looked like it was splattered starting from the direction of the altar which meant that this wound might have come from the high priest. He looked around at the nearby furniture, on one of the nearby stone benches there was a thin white line that was just out of place against the dark grey stone, something that looked like it was caused by a blade.
‘Looks like our high priest is quite skilled with knives, but we didn’t find anything on him and I don’t see the knife that did this. They cleaned up but didn’t do that good of a job, they must have been in a rush for some reason.’
“Captain! Sir! I found something over here.” The detective shouted over to Captain Dio and Arthur, the two turned from their conversation to see what the detective was talking about. “Look here, a blood splatter.”
“Yes detective, we know about the blood on the ground from the attack. Seeing some on the ground isn’t exactly groundbreaking.” Captain Dio said with confusion evident in her voice, Arthur too was a little confused as to why the detective would point out a single blood splatter amongst everything else in the main hall.
“No you don’t understand, this blood splatter comes from the direction of the altar. This means that the high priest hit one of the attackers with something, specifically something sharp and throwable based on the thin white mark on the stone bench that you can see here.” The detective said as he pointed to the small white mark on the stone bench. Arthur walked over and crouched down to get a better look at it.
“He’s right. I think this confirms my theory about multiple attackers that overwhelmed our priest. There were several that surrounded him so quickly that he only managed to get one or two attacks off before he was completely overwhelmed and tied up, then they interrogated him while cutting him up if they didn’t get the answers they wanted until they had what they wanted.” Both the detective and Captain Dio went silent at the thought of how long that must have taken, how long the priest must have held out before giving up.
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“Are there any other details that we should cover?” Captain Dio asked in an attempt to move onto another topic. ‘The mage said something about the basement before and a secret doorway, that is probably very important. I’ll try and bring that up.’
“You're right, now that you are here we can actually look into the basement and the secret door that is probably down there.” Arthur led Captain Dio down into the basement to take a look at the discolored brinks down there in the shape of a door. The detective that was following them said he was going to speak with the rest of his colleagues while they did so.
“Watch your step, this stairway feels quite stable but it is quite old.” Arthur said to Captain Dio as he led her down the old steps. Thankfully they remained stable all the way down despite Arthur’s inner worries. Arthur quickly conjured up a small orb of fire as a light source and led the Captain to the discolored bricks.
“Here they are, the bricks here are several shades darker than the other surrounding bricks. But they are also in the shape of a doorway, the only problem is that we have no way of opening it.” Arthur even ran his hand over the bricks to show that it wasn’t just a layer of dust or something else that made the bricks look darker.
“An interesting theory, but what are the risks if you are wrong about this and there is no secret door here? We wouldn't need to worry about ruining the wall or anything would we?” Captain Dio walked up to the wall and inspected it herself. She had to admit that something was different about them, at the bare minimum they were newer than all the other bricks and she saw no others that were worn down by anything and needed replacing. There weren’t even any other bricks that had been replaced with newer ones.
“Well worse case scenario we open up an ugly hole in the wall that leads to dirt and needs to be filled in with new bricks. But I assume that would easily be within the budget of the city, you would probably just need to pay for the bricks, whatever is used to connect them, and one person to do it.” Arthur said while not even looking at the Captain, he was far more focused on the wall. He even decided to start testing random bricks to see if pushing on them would open the door.
After a minute of thinking while Arthur grabbed at random bricks Captain Dio eventually spoke. “Very well, you have permission to break down this wall and see what is on the other side. What equipment will you need for the task?”
Arthur took notice of this and quickly turned away from his groping of the wall and tried to think about what he needed for such a task. “Well… I will definitely need a pickaxe and a two handed hammer- no make that a pickaxe with one flat end so it can be hammered into the wall.”
“That would be a war pick, it is basically a pickaxe on one end and a small war hammer on the other end.” Captain Dio said as she began to walk back towards the stairs. “Inform me of any developments that occur, if you do find something behind that wall I should be the first to know about it. The lead detective Lyco has a communication orb with a direct line to me, so keep him with you at all times.”
“Of course Captain, I will also need one or two people to help with actually breaking this wall down. So could you tell someone up there to come down and help with that?”
*********
Captain Dio sent down two of her subordinates of the guard with the war pick and hammer he requested, Arthur also made sure that Detective Lyco was down there with him while the two guards took turns breaking down the doorway. For some reason the bricks that made up this small portion of the wall were far more durable than any others within the room, they even tested out the nearby bricks to see if it was just them or the tools but the bricks cracked and broke apart far easier than the darker ones.
“Could this be the work of some sort of divine magic cast upon these bricks to keep them from breaking?” Detective Lyco asked while the two guards took a short break, the bricks in question only had a few small cracks on them from several minutes of striking and hammering the war pick into them.
“That is definitely a possibility, but these bricks might just be made of something other than stone. It could be some sort of metal that we are striking instead.” Arthur ran his hand over one of the small cracks that the two guards managed to create. It certainly felt like a stone brick but it was definitely far more durable than any brick he knew of.
Arthur tried to channel his geomancy skill and manipulate the stone that the bricks were made of, but something was interfering with that process. The bricks appeared to be rejecting his mana in some way that wasn't possible for normal bricks to do. “These bricks must have been enchanted in some way, I cannot even interact with them with my magic.”
Once the two guards were done with their break they started up once again and specifically targeted the bricks that had already put a few small cracks in, they placed the pointy tip of the war pick in the small crack and used the hammer to push it deeper and deeper breaking the bricks apart. Since the bricks in question were likely enchanted this took far longer than it normally would have, but eventually with several other strategic strikes a small hole opened up and gave the group of four a small glimpse of what was on the other side.
“That is certainly something.” Detective Lyco muttered as he looked at the hole that led to darkness, like Arthur suspected there was a passageway or a large hole that led to something. Arthur even moved his conjured flame towards the hole and they were able to see more of what looked to be a stairway carved out of the stone that followed a small tunnel down below.
“Contact the Captain, I think this falls under the category of a development.” Arthur said to detective Lyco as he took the war pick from the hands of the one guard and began swinging at some of the loose bricks. With about five more of the dark bricks knocked out of place Arthur was able to stick his upper body through and take a proper look inside. The passageway that led down was around human height with very little room to spare, and he could feel a small air flow from down in the tunnel's depths. The flame that he conjured up went with him to illuminate the passage, but he still couldn’t see the end.
Arthur removed his upper body from the hale and handed the war pick back to the guard he took it from. Detective Lyco was speaking with Caption Dio through his communication sphere, his did not project the image above into the air, instead it kept the image contained within itself. “Good news Captain, we found a tunnel on the other side of the wall. Unfortunately most of the wall is still in the way as the bricks appear to have been strengthened by magic of some sort.”
Captain Dio was silent for a moment before she asked her lead detective. “What about Mage Arthur, can you put him on? I suspect that he has an explanation.”
“I am right here Captain.” Arthur announced his presence as he stepped beside detective Lyco. “Someone dug a tunnel down below the temple starting from this wall. I don’t think they were made by humans as the tunnel can barely accommodate most of us without bending over. Adding armor and bending over becomes a requirement.”