Mazie’s backpack had been set down right at the foot of the steps of the general’s mansion, likely so it would be easy to find again later. Bray’s had been set down as well next to it, a bit more orderly than how Mazie’s had been strewn. But that was all now irrelevant since Krayat’s journey was over. If she didn’t find what she was looking for in there, she still had the secret lab to fall back on, but her hopes were high.

The thief would still need an escape route, but that should be infinitely easier. When she got to the door, though, the woman realized there was still one more hurdle in her way. A glimmering light moving down the door’s handle told her there was a biometric scanner on the handle. Not just a standard thumbprint reader either that she’d be able to fake. But systems like this always had some kind of security vulnerability, so she didn’t need to start panicking quite yet.

And then Krayat started to panic with every fiber of her being. Her world suddenly went spinning until she was faced with a gigantic mouth. The only thing now in her vision was two rows of teeth and a dark gaping void as she was being pulled into the maw. Krayat couldn’t move her eye at all, being held on both sides, unable to escape the monster’s grasp.

Just when she was about to lose hope, the mouth shut closed, and now a large nose was in front of her, giving her a few good sniffs. The nose recoiled in disgust, and the thief could finally get a better view of the hungry predator attempting to eat her. It was the Fiends For Hire’s pet, Pox, but now he seemed to have absolutely no interest in eating her.

The animal flung the eye away like discarding a piece of trash and then turned its attention towards the mansion. But the thief couldn’t let this opportunity slip by, even if she’d just been staring down death. The eyeball dashed forward at the creature before it could waddle away.

Two fingers spawned out of the eye and pinched together, gingerly nabbing a tuft of hair on the back of the koala-fox’s head—her touch so light, he wouldn’t even notice she was there. Krayat had no way of knowing just how ironic of a situation this was for the little monster, not that he understood the implication himself.

Pox went about his business, blissfully unaware of the parasite now latched onto him. The fuzzy creature strolled up to the front door and the pet door at the bottom opened at his presence. And just like that, the thief had infiltrated one of the most impenetrable locations of this compound. She let go of her mount rather quickly and watched him wander off to the kitchen.

Now it was time to explore, meticulously and carefully. There wasn’t much on the first floor, though that was to be expected. She did find some interesting information about their emergency plans in the general’s tactical room. It was mostly just drills and procedures, but it could be invaluable to know if someone were so bold as to try attacking their compound again.

There was really only one other room of interest: the door under the stairs. But for whatever reason that Krayat couldn’t quite put her finger on, something dismayed her from going inside or even getting too close. Her instincts hadn’t led her astray so far, so she wasn’t going to start doubting them now.

She chose to skip the second floor temporarily and opted for the third since she knew for a fact that Tize wasn’t home at the moment. His room was pretty boring and bland—rather typical of an ex-military type, or at least the few she’d briefly dated. Longstanding relationships had never been her forte.

But there was one interesting thing in the man’s room. He had his own personal dossiers on each member, including his own thoughts on them and facts that weren’t widely known. Now that was some actually good intel. The mansion was already paying off. That should at least be enough to prolong her beloved’s life, for a little while longer at least.

Still wanting to curry more favor, though, Krayat moved on to Feyjrusa’s room. Could it really be called a bedroom when it was basically just a wall of monitors with a pillow in the middle of the floor? There wasn’t much to see there, but the thief did take a picture of what was currently displayed on each screen.

In Kada’s room—which Krayat didn’t originally think she’d infiltrate because she was confused by the waterfall—the thief found a set of full blueprints for the resort that the woman had been building. That could be of some use since they weren’t on public record—that land now technically in international waters after being sold by the country who had previously owned it. If her ‘master’ didn’t want the intel, Krayat could surely use it to steal something later.

Moving on to Xard’s room, the woman took pictures of his current investigation board—basically a spider web of threads. She also dug through the files he had on criminals and recorded them all.

After visiting those two, she stopped by the large bath. Damned if she wasn’t tempted to go for a long hot soak to let out the tension of using her Curse this much. But she’d learned from experience that pools like these often had sensors detecting when someone was using them, in case an idiot fell in or if someone was in there for too long and possibly drowning.

Back on the hunt, the thief checked out Drim’s room, which was ultimately disappointing. There were a few rare books she’d be happy to take and pawn, but history had taught her that people with rather specific hobbies and collections tended to notice when something was missing almost immediately. And she assumed she couldn’t pawn it off on one of the other members like she had with the arrowhead—doubting there were any other big readers in the house.

More of the thief’s instincts flared when she looked at a particular spot on one of the walls. It was suspiciously blank at a very intentional height, almost like there should be a TV or painting there. However, nothing she could find would trigger whatever secrets it held. Disappointing for sure, but she’d rather not linger too long to mess with it.

And lastly, onto Phon’s room—the one she’d been dreading the most. Even though she’d never met the girl, Krayat considered her somewhat of a rival. The master of avoiding detection versus the one who could see all. And rumor had it that the girl could also know all if she knew about someone’s existence.

Needless to say, the thief certainly didn’t want to get caught by her in particular. After she unlocked Phon’s door, Krayat made sure to reduce herself back to just an eyeball for now. She’d done some scans of herself, and the smaller her body, the smaller her aura was proportionally. Hopefully if Phon did see her shining dot, she’d think it to be a bug or a bird and nothing more.

Surprisingly, out of all the other Fiends, Phon’s room was the most boring and useless—unless her requestor wanted a few thousand pictures of Drim Drazah or an absolute zjikton of yo-yos. Krayat tried to peruse them anyways, her eye weaving in and out of the countless boxes, trying to find any that might be a rare collectors item. Her knowledge of the toy market was nonexistent, but limited-run collectibles tended to be labeled as such.

The thief paused for a moment at a yo-yo that had an eyeball on the front. It looked kind of creepy since it wasn’t connected to a head, but she had to assume that was how she looked at all times when floating around. It was really for the best that no one saw her in this state—hard to be forgotten if she was haunting someone’s nightmares.

Krayat then took a moment to stop and consider what she should do next. Maybe she’d go rifle through the girl’s recipes for anything unique, but she was really just grasping at straws at this point. It was certainly time to move on, but to where. Should she try to break into the secret lab again or make her way to Rishaki’s shop?

Or should she just leave? She’d certainly gotten enough intel to fulfill her request, but there was always more to find—to really let her greed run rampant. This was why she hated this caper in particular. Any other job, and she would have had a clear cut goal well in advance. This was also the longest job she’d ever been on, usually in and out in just a few minutes, but it had been damn near a full day now. Indecision was really starting to plague her mind.

But all of her options were suddenly reduced to one: survive. When the thief turned around to face the rest of the room, she found Phon Drazah standing there in front of her dresser. Just how long had she been there?! The eyeball started to quiver, leaking a small tear out of fear. She prayed that she was lined up with the yo-yo behind her, providing some camouflage—not that it would be particularly useful if Phon looked her way with her other vision.

But the Fiend in question didn’t seem particularly bothered by the thief’s existence at the moment. No, she was actually getting changed. If Krayat were a worse person, she’d be snapping countless pictures right now. They would certainly sell for a small fortune, so she almost chastised herself for wasting the opportunity.

Though even as an incorrigible thief, Krayat still had her pride. If she were to debase herself so low, she’d be stealing something worse than anything material from the girl, and she just couldn’t bring herself to do it—both as a master thief and a woman herself. Plus, her entire body—what little of it there was—was just too shaky at the moment and the pictures would look horrible.

The eyeball let out a metaphorical sigh of relief when Phon finished up changing and quickly teleported out of the room. She wasn’t going to waste a moment and sped directly for the door. The thief had no idea if Phon was gone for good, or if she’d just moved to a different part of the compound, but the woman wasn’t going to take the risk. Mawhg any more riches, Krayat was going to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Just as the eye was zooming over the counter, she suddenly plinked off something and rebounded backwards. There was a moment of writhing around in pain, since the thief had hit whatever it was eye-first without any sort of protection. After a few blinks to push away the pain, she finally got a grasp of what had happened.

Krayat had hit some glass, not a glass wall, but an actual glass. She spun around, finding herself surrounded, trapped under a cup like an insect about to be thrown outside. The woman looked up and found Phon leering down at her, a twisted grin on her face. Her mouth suddenly moved, but Krayat couldn’t hear the words.

Phon seemed to have realized this and vanished again for a moment, returning a second later with a whiteboard and a market. ‘Hello there’, she scrawled across the board. Phon then erased it and replaced the writing. ‘I guess you can’t hear me.’

For whatever reason, the words had looked much blurrier the second time, but the thief still acquiesced and attached an ear to the side of her eye. Phon then tried saying something again, but Krayat still couldn’t really hear it. She didn’t know if it was because of the distortion from the glass or if it was because she was getting lightheaded for some reason, even without the head. The thief suddenly started seeing spots and her world went black.

◆◆◆

An amount of time had passed when the eyeball woke back up. How much, she didn’t know. But something was different. Instead of her glass cup prison, she was now in a mesh one, likely used to hold pens or possibly a teeny-tiny trash can. “Hello there, Krayat,” the woman’s captor wasn’t going to give her a moment to rest, it seemed.

“I did a lot of digging on you when you were passed out,” Phon crouched down and met her at eye-level. “For starters, your Curse. I guess that was my bad for not knowing you still needed oxygen in that form. Almost killed you by accident. Oopsie, sorry, not sorry.”

“There was also something interesting I found out about it. You’re currently stuck in that form while you’re under this cup. It seems you can only change your shape if you have the room to do so. Definitely a major caveat, though I doubt it’s hindered you much in the past. You could probably bring out a few fingers to try and aide your escape, but don’t think about being able to push it, since I put some of Drim’s books on top to weigh it down.”

“And what good would escaping do you anyways at this point? Since I know your name now, there’s nowhere on Rathe you could hide from me. Though, it is weird. I do only know part of your name. Somehow, you yourself have managed to forget what your last name used to be, and it seems no one else knows it either. Oh well, it won’t protect you, so it’s a pointless abnormality.”

“But let’s move on, since you’ve been a very naughty girl, Krayat. I know that you’re here to rob us, and I know that you’ve been here to rob us before,” Phon pulled out a vial from her pocket. “I grabbed this as well while you were unconscious. You probably don’t even know what it is you stole, but I’m sure you recognize this, yes?”

The eye didn’t confirm either way, too broken from processing what was happening to give any actual responses.

“You know, I’m sure one of its creators would like you meet you,” the girl’s smile turned even more fiendish. “She was looking around for that missing vial for quite some time, practically tore their lab apart trying to find it. Not to mention the turmoil from the accusations that were thrown of who could have taken it. I never would have imagined the thief would come back here of her own volition.”

Ahvra suddenly popped into the room next to Phon. The then-child immediately turned into an adult, flailing her arms wildly in panic. “Ah, Annoying Convenience! I was in the middle of splitting atoms! Do you have any idea what— Well, we’re all still alive, so I guess it’s fine. Why have you brought me to your room?”

“I’ve gotten you a present, Ahvra,” Phon pointed to the mesh cup. “You should be thanking me.”

Ahvra crouched down next to it and looked. “Oh, an eyeball sewn to an ear, how intriguing. Wait, is this a Fiend eye?! You know just what to get me! Did you rip it out of someone’s head or have you been grave robbing? Wait, it moved! This is alive?! A person?!” The girl shifted between an adult and a child several times before whirling her head back to Phon for answers.

“This is your thief, Ahvra,” Phon explained. “The one who stole the vial of Gizmicros during the raid. She’s a Fiend who can compress and morph her body. It makes all the sense in the world now how she was able to steal from us before, but I guess she got too greedy.”

“Oh, so can I dissect—I mean torture her for information?!” the Witch corrected herself, as if that option was any better.

“Well…” Phon grinned again since things seemed to be going how she wanted. “With a unique body like hers, how long do you think she’d be useful for your experiments? Something like a living cadaver there to be your meat slab for however you see fit?”

“Uhh, let’s see. One, two…” Ahvra began counting on her fingers. “Seven. At least seven hundred years if I keep de-aging her so that she lives forever alongside me. So can I take her now?”

“Go ahead and calm down a little bit,” Phon patted Ahvra on the head like she was an impatient child. “This woman has only been caught in the act, so let’s not dive right ahead to her sentencing. We should give her a chance to repent for her crimes. And I can think of something more useful to our overall goals than her being your little dissection buddy for life.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Krayat?” She returned her attention back to the eye. “All you’d have to do is get injected with this vial and follow some simple instructions. Do that, and we’ll let you walk out of here today, free as a bird. Well, as free as you can be since you’re trapped in someone else’s cage. So what do you say?”

The eyeball nodded vigorously. Anything to escape the other future that had been laid out before her.

“Excellent!” Phon cheered ever so slightly with her hands. “And it wouldn’t matter if you agreed anyways, because this vial is empty! I already injected you while you were out cold.” She threw the empty glass vial behind her and it shattered against a wall. “Mallea will clean that up later.”

“Now back to your new endeavor. You may consider yourself a big shot, a master thief well above your peers. But to us, you’re basically a nobody. We have no use for your talents, at present anyways, and from what I dug through in your profile, you have basically no information to offer us either.”

“What we want is the person behind it all, the person controlling you. I’m sure you’d want that as well, would you not? So you can already see the additional benefits for cooperating. You may not be able to find them on your own, but I have an idea for how to help corner them. Ahvra, didn’t Nathym have a failed experiment recently?”

“Uhhh, those filtering straws, yes?” the little scientist took a moment to remember. “If I recall, they were too good at filtering, and removed anything beneficial from the water, essentially leaving it as a poison for humans. Nothing that would have immediate effects, but could hurt their internal organs over a century or so.”

“Good enough for this gambit,” Phon shrugged at the possible harm. “I’ll teleport you to Nathym. Explain things and have him modify it with a tracker. I’ll pull you back in a few minutes. Oh, and take this contact with you and have him extract what he can. Remove anything too confidential, but leave what wouldn’t be harmful to us in the long run.”

Krayat panicked again, not even realizing that her contact lens had been removed, but that should be the least of her worries at this point. “With Ahvra gone, I’m going to let you out of this cup and ask you to turn back to normal. Don’t do anything stupid, because I’ll just bring you right back, and I won’t be as nice the second time.”

The thief did as she was asked, and Phon gave her a thorough pat down. She confiscated the historical arrowhead and a few other knick knacks that Krayat had stolen. However, she let her keep Roque’s remote because she thought it would be funny. Not long after that, Ahvra was teleported back into the room.

“I also had Nathym modify the contact so that we could see through the lens,” Ahvra explained before she handed it back over.

“Good, that makes things convenient,” Phon was happy that she got to be lazier. “I was planning on tailing you to see who you meet with, but now I can just watch through this and find them later. A job for another day. So here’s the straw. Hand it over to your handler along with any intel that we left you. If we see it pop up on the market any time soon, that will give us a trail to follow.”

“Oh, and don’t think about betraying us,” the girl had to make sure to hammer home. “Or I’ll find your ‘special someone’ myself and see to their death with my own hands. Who knows, maybe if you do a good enough job, I’ll save them myself someday if you come beg me. Now off you go, shoo shoo.” Phon waved her fingers to the door.

“Uhh, wait, uhh,” Krayat was having a hard time finding the words since she was so gutturally shocked that she was just being let go so easily. “The compound is probably being watched. They’ll get suspicious if I leave on my own, or if I was escorted by either of you. I need to latch onto a lower ranking member to walk or drive me out of the front gate.”

“Alright, fine,” Phon didn’t care about such a minor detail. “We’ll arrange a ride—”

“Wait just a second!” Ahvra interjected. “We can’t just let her go. Bad person must be punished for crimes, and I was promised a dissection! I won’t keep her long. Can get the basics of what I need after one… two…” she started counting again. “Five, no wait, I can do it in three dissections. Won’t take but a few hours.”

“Eh, you won me over,” Phon shrugged. “Three dissections. Have fun, Krayat.”

Before the woman could protest, she was teleported away.

◆◆◆

Back in Bisomote, Krayat’s eye drifted slowly to a back alley before she turned back into her full-bodied form. Her head was still swimming from the anesthetics, all those dissections just one big blur. It was late at night now, and she’d been given a ride by Rezin.

The boy hadn’t been told what was happening. Just that for an important mission, he had to go buy any video game he wanted from the store before it closed. The timid lad didn’t ask any questions after that, blissfully unaware of the eyeball riding along in his back pocket.

All Krayat wanted to do now was crash. It was late at night, and she was exhausted, still repeating in her mind the follies and mistakes that had led to this outcome. But her night was just beginning. She still had to meet her requestor’s proxy and hand things over, acting as if everything went perfect. But first, another drink.