Maud opened the door and screamed out a curse when he narrowly dodged an arrow, by closing the door to counter the attack.

“Parasia Magia: Vast Eye!” 669 assembled his staff, which had been stored in his spacial pouch, and cast a tracking spell with his parasitic vision to catch the attacker, but their energy was long gone. Instead, they had set up a trap that activated when the door opened. He turned off his vision spell to return to normal sight, but kept his staff ready.

“Damn it!” Maud cursed and called out to his henchmen to catch the perpetrator.

A squad came rushing up to the corridor with an unsynchronized clamor that made 789 and 669 stifle a chuckle at their clunkiness. Rookies.

“Sir!” A group of henchmen bellowed out their confirmation of the order and rushed away to do their duty.

“How is it possible for someone to breach your locked office?”

“Not easy. But my key staff have access.” Maud entered his office and asked for 669 to cast his vision magic again to see if anything was out of place.

789 and 669 nodded. And performed their magic, with 789 smashing a blue pill between her palms to activate an image recapture as she had performed previously. They frowned when they saw nothing out of the ordinary. 669 caught a glimpse of a faint white whisper at the office’s grilled window and zoomed in on the fuzzy outline, which looked like a smudged lotus painting. It seemed they had set something above the writing desk then left.

“Lotus again.” He mumbled to himself.

“Did you find anything?”

669 dismissed his magic and looked up. He pointed to the crossbow contraption that was angled down to the door. 789 lifted herself up with her magic and carefully removed the weapon, gently drifting to the ground as she examined the device.

“Interesting. The wood is a form of beech I’ve never seen in these parts.” She mused and faced Maud with a cordial gesture and bluntly added. “We’re confiscating this weapon for further examination.”

Maud frowned and argued that he had to do his own investigations. “That thing almost took my life!”

“What did you want to tell us?” 669 soberly asked whilst keeping to his place and manners by showing his respects in a bow.

Maud sighed and rubbed his forehead, feeling a headache forming. “This whole Window Murders with lords is a nightmare.”

With the danger cleared he felt he could assume his seat at his power chair behind the desk. “You’re investigating the murders on behalf of the Royal Guard? I’d rather tell you what I know than those stiff posts.”

Maud explained that on the night of Marcus’s murder, he had seen one of his female workers arguing with the man and was pushed to ground by him, but before he could cause more harm to the woman, she scrambled to her feet and ran away.

“This Fairy Blossom used to be one of my top girls. You’ve met her before, 669. The blond thing with the sparkling gray eyes.”

669 recalled to one of the many faces he had passed through the soap house halls, and recalled a comely woman with flowing blond hair styled in a simple ponytail with a silver peony flower pin decorating the top of her head. Her image was innocent and attractive, so it was hard for men not to pass her by.

“I recall that something had happened to her, so she lost her rank among the workers.”

“I caught her stealing and had her punished. Her face got scared by one of my men so she couldn’t work on the top floor again.” Maud huffed.

“Scared?” 669 gulped. “Acid?”

“She stole from me! Acid is the kindest punishment to give a filthy whore.”

789 frowned, feeling disgust by the fact. Being a sex worker was by Majestic Will, but to steal was a serious crime. So no one would have questioned Maud’s actions. Yet…

“Did she actually steal from you?”

“I caught her red-handed with a sack of credits from my vault in her hands.”

“And how would she get that? It’s not like you’d have it lying around.” 789 was unconvinced the girl was guilty.

“She wronged me and that was that.” Maud closed the matter.

It was clear that the crime of theft was only used to give him the right to punish her. She suspected the woman had pissed him off for another reason, and he had used a means to get his revenge.

“Despicable.”

“And you just let her go?” 669 steered the conversation back to the topic.

“Of course not! She harmed my patron. I sent a squad of guards after her.”

“What happened to the guards?”

Maud said that he sent five guards but three of them didn’t return. The two that did said that they had lost track of her.

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“One girl could shake five of your guards?” 789 blurted with surprise. Guards were all from the Demon Domination Order, so trained well enough to ensure a common person couldn’t get very far once they were after them.

“Naturally she’s not who I thought she was.” Maud frowned, taking offense to her words.

669 sighed. “I agree. There’s no way the guards could be outsmarted by a mere common girl. And a worker at that. She’s been hiding her strength.”

“Then she’s living against her will.” 789 pondered the fact further.

“If that’s so, then it’s all the more reason to catch her. Tell me what you find out with the weapon.”

789 and 689 felt they weren’t going to get much more out of Maud so bid their farewells.

—

Meanwhile, on the side of the city at the same time, Emelia was purposely strolling through a circular clearing of a dense section of an evergreen pine tree forest carrying one of the arrows that had attacked the Cannon Fodder 4Hire team at the Poirot Mansion.

Her eyes glared at the sight before her where three henchmen bodies were sprawled on the ground, obviously dead and for some time judging by the corpse decay. But to leave them out in the open was clumsy work. If the killer was trained, there wouldn’t be any evidence of the kill. She knelt down to examine them. There was no obvious cause of death by the physical eye, so she used her poison magic to trace the outlines and saw one of them was clutching a small coin in a fist. It was made of refined beechwood: the same wood as the arrow.

She switched off her magic and retrieved the coin, which had blank faces on both sides. But as she ran her finger over the surface, an image of a lotus shimmered to the surface before fading.

“Lotus?” She frowned. Someone was obviously leaving about a clue but for what reason and for whom.

A low hum and sound’s of something rushing for her head had her spun around. She gritted her teeth, as she dodged a folly of arrows. Unsheathed her dual short swords of red crystal from her hip sheaths and made them spin midair. They spun into a fierce whirlwind for the group of rushing bandits, which were disguised beneath flowing camouflage green cloaks.

“Red beady eyes?”

The bandit's intense, glowing red eyes were the only features she could see beneath their hoods as they moved. They rushed for her like a pack of wild animals out to kill.

“Their movements are too animalistic. Strange.” Her frown deepened.

“Poison Magia: Shard Stab!” She shouted.

The blades reformed into a pin shower. The bandits cried out with pain and surprise. The sudden rush of fine needles were stabbing paralysis poison into their bodies. Within minutes, the bandits were a motionless heap on the ground before her. She cautiously stepped toward the one close to her. Her forehead creased with her frown.

“Strange.” She mumbled, as she carefully moved the head to one side to see more of the man's face.

“Lotus?” Her voice betrayed her concern at seeing a fearsome red symbol of lotus flower on his forehead that faded from her view. And was more alarmed to see that her attack had only rendered him unconscious. There was a powerful magic keeping his virya still active, so his life was still running. But based on his condition, likely as a puppet. But before she could take a closer look at what magic could be involved, a loud cry and bolts of fire magic intercepted her.

“Adler!” A docile looking woman shouted. She was wearing the bandit's cloak. Her hood was down, revealing her flowing blond hair held up in a simple ponytail and youthful features. Half her face was covered with a painted red and black mask. She rushed for her with another firebolt swelling in the palm of her outstretched and well manicured hand.

Emelia assumed a fighting pose with her dual crescent-shaped blades ready.

“Leave!” The woman screeched at the top of her lungs, then changed into a mad laugh.

She raised his arms and triggered her magic to make them glow with orange heat. Her laughter eased into the reciting of a poem. It wasn't any useless poem, but a prose chocked filled with word power. With the woman’s heat magic activated, the poem became a magic spell. She was reciting a poem for damaging magic. Fine beams of fiery light sprinted for the unconscious body at her slipped feet covered in silk pink material with a Peony symbol stitched onto the fabric.

The woman’s voice was more audible, reverberating around the clearing.

“Why?!” Emelia panted, as she danced around the shower of fiery needles.

“Poison Magia: Mist Shield!”

A wall of green poison mist cloaked her body to deflect the fiery needle attack. And braced herself for another round. The needles changed direction and were lodged into the back of the unconscious man.

“Alder. Fool” The woman landed next to the unmoving body. She gathered the fiery needles to form a flame dagger shape on the man's back.

A blast of flames from the unconscious man caused Emelia to stagger backward. Before she could stop more of the unconscious man's blood to spill out to the group, a physical red crystal dagger was sticking out of his back. He was rooted to the ground within a glowing red barrier shield.

“Flame Magia: Recovering Kairo Pack!” The woman said to trigger a spell through a laugh, which activated a change to the dagger.

It melted into the man's body, making the barrier glow brighter. The barrier's light radiated to all the other unconscious bandits surrounding them.

The glow eventually subsided. The wounds on the man's back had been healed.

The woman faced Emelia with a look of warning, then clapped her hands to stir a concealing mist around her and the man. When the mist cleared, they were gone.

Emelia gasped when the other bandits on the ground began to stir to consciousness.

“Where am I?” One stirred to consciousness.

She stepped closer to the man's face, which was slowly being raised toward her.

“You have five seconds to tell me what happened to you.” Her left hand was raised to show the man a fearsome ball of poison magic, hovering half an inch over her palm.

The man's eyes widen with both fear and understanding. He gulped and nodded.