The guns in the SRT members' hands had hair triggers; they shot at the slightest pressure to prevent awakeners from stopping them. To make matters worse, while Arthur's life domain permanently connected him to every living being around him, he only had two life authority chains. Unlike intent strings, his authority chains couldn't be extended to affect multiple things simultaneously. Each chain could only influence one target at a time.
Arthur also needed to control precisely what his chain touched. His authority let him impose his will directly on his target with no mana buffer. At least until this fight was over, he didn't want to find out what would happen if his mind directly touched the anti-mage steel that snapped intent strings and caused a painful backlash.
Still, his almost ten thousand points of wisdom let him work quickly. He made the two men holding the grenade launchers unconscious first, and the others followed suit. Only three people managed to shoot before he could make them faint and pull their fingers away. They discharged a total of fifteen projectiles.
Arthur had read about how quickly bullets could move, but seeing it happen without magic was astounding. They were about seventy percent as fast as Sophie's peak speed, and she had over four thousand agility points and the B-tier Improved Speed skill. She should be fast enough to dodge the projectiles, but starting from a stationary position made it more complicated. The shooters were way too close, only seven yards away.
If she were alone there, this attack might actually spell her doom.
Fortunately, Arthur's life magic let him move twice as fast as his suitress. Moreover, with his elemental comprehension and affinity, he could use mana to ignore some of the inertia that slowed one's acceleration. His metal magic was about forty percent again as fast and powerful.
So, he used a life string to pull Sophie, himself, and the kidnapper aside. That was more than enough to protect the three people; the bullets would harmlessly fly into the next room. However, he wanted to test how well he could stop voidsteel bullets.
Arthur sent half his spheres, swords, and discs against the fifteen projectiles. Even as his weaponry moved, he turned it into highly condensed spheres to meet the bullets diagonally from below. He had read about ricochets and wanted to prevent the projectiles from going in an unexpected direction.
Unfortunately, the Tome of Laws hadn't mentioned bullets like those.
Each shell was like a mini-grenade triggered by the slightest resistance. They exploded into thousands of tiny pieces of voidsteel shrapnel. The internal explosion was powerful enough to make the fragments move slightly faster than the bullets. The shards also hit the other shells, causing all fifteen to blow up.
The tiny bits were absurdly effective against awakeners. They poisoned the air, preventing awakeners from entering the area or moving their intent strings around. Arthur, for instance, had used half of his metal arsenal against the projectiles, and it would've been lost to him if he were the average awakener.
He was an ascender, though. His domain permanently connected his will to metal and life without needing something like an intent string that could be easily intercepted.
First, the prince took care of the unconscious victims. They were more vulnerable than anyone in the room. He used his authority to shoot two spheres at a time in the women's direction.
Ten arrived faster than the fastest voidsteel shard, and Arthur turned them into what might pass as modern art. He produced a web-like metal structure attached to the ground and wall behind the victims. He had calculated the impact points for each incoming voidsteel shard and formed tiny but thick bowls on those spots to stop the voidsteel. The rest of the structure was thinner but strong enough to resist the impact's shock.
Arthur wished he had more metal to work with because he couldn't feel the voidsteel and had to estimate its velocity and density by what he knew and saw. The bowls might not be enough.
Still, that was the best he could do for the women. He had previously pulled them close to the dungeon's entrance and couldn't move them into the next room faster than the fragments would hit them. He also didn't believe they would be safer out of the dungeon, as the SRT might have other members waiting outside, ready to kill whoever exited. These seven certainly didn't care if the victims died.
The shrapnel arrived, and the wirework mostly held. Some voidsteel shards pierced through, but almost every one of them lost momentum and didn't cause harm. Arthur had further reinforced the bowls meant to intercept fragments heading toward a lethal spot, so even the few that pierced flesh didn't cause irreversible damage.
While that happened, Arthur also used his intent strings to command what remained of his deployed metal weaponry around him. He formed over a hundred heavily condensed tiny plates at the speed of thought.
His strings couldn't touch voidsteel, but he could circumvent the limitation with pure skill. He sent his plates flying against the incoming fragments, disconnected his string from the plates just before they touched the targets, waited for them to deflect the voidsteel shards, then reconnected with them. He positioned himself before Sophie and kept the kidnapper on the ground right before him. The prince would protect the man for now, but if something went wrong, the murderer would become a meat shield.
Unlike the women, Arthur could avoid the shrapnel by simply moving away. However, he was still set on using this situation to test modern firepower, and the low but real danger factor was relatively relevant to the experiment. If he couldn't protect himself from a seven-man SRT team's sneak attack, he would have to reassess how powerful being an ascender actually made him. And even if he could defend himself, he would determine exactly how dangerous those people were.
Sophie was no safer in the next dungeon room than behind him. If the shrapnel got to him, he would protect her with his body, and then she could deal with the aftermath. She would be better positioned for it if she was inside the room.
And if something went terribly wrong, she would also be better positioned to unsheathe his magic sword to protect herself regardless of what it would do to everyone else in the room.
Arthur's tiny metal plates worked wonders against the shards. Letting go of a plate at the right time and reconnecting right after it stopped touching voidsteel wasn't easy at the speeds he had to throw them, much less when he was dealing with so many, but his mind was just fast enough to make it work.
Meanwhile, the shrapnel reached the SRT members...
...and their bodies exploded.
When the SRT enchanted gear felt its magic getting drained, it triggered a self-destruction enchantment. The defensive equipment wasn't meant to be primarily used as an explosive, so the blast wasn't extremely powerful. It was too close to the women, though.
Arthur used his metal domain to turn the metal wiring into a paper-thin protective barrier and willed it to become as resistant as possible. Even so, he prepared to rush to the victims' side. There was still voidsteel shrapnel moving around, and they would soon reach the barrier and revoke his authority chain. That thin barrier would become useless without his continued will to make it resistant.
At this point, he decided it was time to learn how bad it was to have his authority chain touch voidsteel. He wanted to keep trying to fix the wall after each shard went through but couldn't see the voidsteel fragments through the explosion's flames. The only way to know when a shard had pierced the barrier was by feeling whatever feedback the anti-mage steel would cause to his mind upon contact. He hoped it wouldn't be too bad.
It wasn't.
In fact, it was the opposite of too bad. There was no negative feedback at all. Voidsteel could block his domain from an area and was immune to his influence, but it also couldn't remove his authority from something it was touching. It felt to Arthur just like the impact of any other metal shrapnel.
It made sense. Voidsteel worked mainly by absorbing mana. It was already a surprise that it could halve an awakener's stats at the slightest touch.
The marvelous discovery made everything ridiculously simpler. Arthur used a metal authority chain to protect the women and another to create a similar dome around himself, Sophie, and the murderer. He wished he had a third one to preserve the things on the table, but that wasn't to be.
The cave chamber shook from the explosions. Flames covered everything. The heat and shockwave were as harmless to the metal barriers as the voidsteel shrapnel.
In the following silence, Arthur first lowered his own barrier. The air was filled with smoke, and some things were still on fire. He sealed what remained of the shredded and burnt objects that had been on the now-broken table into a metal case, then turned some metal into a big and powerful fan, which he placed by the dungeon entrance. It quickly blew the smoke into the next dungeon room, clearing the air.
The seven SRT members had turned into unsightly gore. That was unfortunate; Arthur had wanted to question them. He used his authority to pick up everything not made of voidsteel, encase it, and store it in his ring.
Finally, he removed the women's protection. They were mostly safe and sound. A few had been pierced by shrapnel in non-critical areas, and he used his domain to force their bodies to push the voidsteel shards out. Then, he swiftly healed them.
Arthur was really curious about whether he could use his domains while his body touched voidsteel, but now wasn't the time to test it. More enemies might arrive anytime.
Following that, he turned the fan into floating metal dust, which he used to pick up all the voidsteel shards and objects lying around. Unfortunately, he couldn't put the fragments and guns into his spatial storage. Voidsteel would shatter the folded space. He would require a special enchanted object to encase the voidsteel, but he didn't have any. Well, he suspected he had one in his storage safe, but now wasn't the time to open the safe, either.
"What in Fate's name?!" Sophie finally exclaimed. Her eyes and mouth were wide open as she looked at Arthur. "Your magic can ignore voidsteel?!"
"To a point," Arthur replied.
He wanted to remove his helmet to let her see his smile, but it was too dangerous, considering someone might just pop into existence from the entrance corridor at any time. Whatever she could see with her blood vision would have to suffice.
Speaking of his helmet, he asked, "Do you have a spare helmet and weapons?"
She had left her two enchanted short swords on the floor and her helmet on the table. They were no longer enchanted after the voidsteel touched them.
Sophie shook her head. "Head Maid Lauquenbur said we had already damaged all my allocated equipment in our practices. Whatever remains belongs to you." She lowered her voice. "She said I should ask you." She didn't have to point out she had been embarrassed about it for whatever mystical reasons she might have.
Arthur nodded. He also only had this set of defensive equipment. He should have considered protecting Sophie's things, but they had been viewed almost as expandable in the dungeon, and it had slipped his mind while he focused on everything else.
"We're too vulnerable to ambushes here," he said. "I wanted to see this dungeon disappear, but now I don't want to give the League time to amass more forces outside this dungeon. Who knows what other means they have to deal with awakeners?"
Sophie nodded, the amazement in her eyes turning into fear. She was very well aware that she would likely have gotten hit if not for him. She might have died.
"I underestimated them," she acknowledged.
"Me too," Arthur replied. "We better remember they had twelve hundred years to learn how to kill awakeners better." It was a lot less than that since magitech became a thing and started quickly advancing, but the point remained.
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"We'll stay here until we recover our mana—" he started saying but never finished the sentence.
Suddenly, the world twisted. His senses became disjointed, and he couldn't tell up from below. Then, there was an instant of complete darkness, followed by him finding himself outside the dungeon.
The dungeon archway crumbled into dust; it was gone.
Arthur wasn't the only one who had been taken out. Everything that wasn't part of the dungeon was also present, except whatever was made of voidsteel. The sudden influx of people, metal, and broken wood cramped the room.
Three other SRT troops—one female—were inside the voidsteel room, and Arthur didn't hesitate for a second to disable them. He also kept them afar from him and prepared to protect himself from another explosion at any second.
Fortunately, nothing happened when their equipment touched the voidsteel floor and became useless. The strike team obviously had carried non-standard equipment, which only made sense; it was pretty stupid to have someone explode when attacked.
The prince's domain told him no one else was alive on the mansion grounds. His Mana Sight revealed the security personnel had been killed and piled into one of the three newly arrived vans.
That made it for Arthur. These people were all involved, well-armed, and had tried to kill Sophie. If not for his presence, they would've succeeded, too.
They had crossed his bottom line.
He had never practiced spells meant to affect one's autonomy or memories, but that was about to change. He had three test subjects and doubted that wouldn't be enough of a learning experience to master the spells and get information out of them. But just in case he messed up, he would leave the only female SRT member for last. He didn't want to use an unknown enchanted item, but the mind-controlling necklace might work on her.
He wouldn't do it immediately, though. Tamara had some experience gathering information from unwilling subjects, and he wanted her to oversee the procedures to ensure he didn't miss anything. In fact, the only reason he didn't let her deal with it was that he suspected the experience might push his life comprehension a little further.
The SRT team had blown apart the metal dome he had created outside the null chamber. Arthur used the dome's metal to grab the three enemies and seven women, then moved to the mansion's living room. That place had more angles for him to get attacked from but also more paths to escape to.
Lastly, he fixed the telephone wires and called the hotel.
The prince only needed Tamara, but Graham should also come. The hotel was even less safe than this place if the League wanted him gone. They had to regroup.
A receptionist picked up the call and redirected it to the penthouse. The grand knight answered and said Tamara wasn't there, but she periodically returned from her book search to check for news. Arthur gave Graham a brief summary of what had happened, shared the mansion's address, and ordered him to come as soon as Tamara appeared.
"Don't let anyone stop you," the prince added, "not the League nor the police. We might be at war with the League, and the local authorities will obey them when dealing with awakeners."
Arthur really hoped that wasn't the case. Fate, nothing would make him happier now than finding the League was only partially corrupt instead of being rotten to the core. That was disheartening, but there was nothing he could do about it.
"Yes, sir," Graham replied.
The prince hung up and took a deep breath. He was still tense, but the lack of immediate danger let him relax slightly. He turned to Sophie, who sat beside him, looking down. Her eyes were unfocused, and her brainwaves were a chaotic mess.
"How are you holding up?" he asked.
"Poorly," she confessed. "I'm... I'm scared, Archie. It's all just so... so confusing. A level twenty biomancer almost enslaved me. Me, a level fifty-five awakener. And these unawakened could've killed me. Everything's... wrong. Twisted."
Arthur knew it wasn't wise, but he took his helmet and head cover. They wouldn't work against voidsteel, anyway. He smiled supportively and hugged his suitress.
"Indeed," he agreed as he grabbed her hand. "Things are not right."
Sophie hugged him back. She didn't cry this time but felt almost as bad as she had inside the dungeon.
"Don't focus on the negatives," he cheered. "Some unawakened attacked us, but others sold us a car. You liked it, didn't you?"
His words didn't have the expected reaction. She shook her head and didn't take her face from his neck.
"I appreciate what you're trying to do, Archie," Sophie said so low it was almost a whisper. "I really do. But I'm not a child. This is too serious. You can't distract me with a new shiny toy."
The prince sighed. "You're right. Sorry." He looked pensively at the ceiling while running his fingers through her hair. "But the point stands. There are nice things in this world. It's not all bad. I'm curious about magitech, especially the intent-conducting mana crystals. Can you imagine awakeners of all elements building enchanted items? It changes everything."
Sophie didn't reply. She was usually a ray of sunshine but wasn't in the mood. The recent experiences had shaken her to the core.
Arthur said nothing else until Tamara and Graham arrived.
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Nothing happened while Arthur and Sophie waited. The prince had already suspected the SRT had come to kill witnesses and erase all evidence, and the absence of any other official action was further proof.
Tamara and Graham arrived an hour and a half later. The grand knight immediately started guarding the area while the battle maid guided Arthur through the interrogation process.
Back in the dungeon, the battle maid had introduced Arthur and Sophie to frisking and removing an enemy's enchanted armor. It quickly became evident that she had only brushed the subject.
The first step was making the suspects naked, thoroughly confirming they had nothing on them, then cladding them in harmless attires.
Arthur could see enchanted objects with his Mana Sight, and most awakeners could feel enchantments with their mana sense. Still, Tamara insisted you should always act like an enchantment might block your senses. The solution was using as many senses as possible to ensure the interrogee was clear of anything dangerous. That included biomancy, smell, hearing, tact, and sight. The prince did not like doing most of that, but he reminded himself that these people were in on the kidnapping and killing of innocent women. They deserved worse.
Tamara also told Arthur not to trust his senses until the very last step of the entire interrogation. Reading postures, microexpressions, and even feeling hormones and brainwaves to ascertain truth from lies wasn't 100% trustworthy. Those signs could be controlled with enough training, especially by a biomancer. However, he should take note of when said signs told him one thing and other evidence pointed in a different direction. It would reveal something was wrong.
The second step was a few rounds of questioning "in the dark," as Tamara called it.
That meant they asked questions from an ignorant standpoint. They didn't go through what remained of the kidnapper's research material, his spatial storage ring, or the few objects the SRT people had carried. Starting in the dark was time-consuming but also made the questioner less likely to be led around by their own bias.
There was no magic or information-gathering technique involved in that step. They only asked questions and weren't forceful when anyone refused to answer. They kept the murderers bound and apart from each other, but that was all. The mansion had enough rooms, and the voidsteel guns were very convenient to keep the kidnapper from using magic.
The prince asked questions of everyone in private, with Tamara butting in now and then. Just cross-checking the answers already revealed inconsistencies and ruled out many lies. It also took things in ways Arthur might not have considered if he were just looking for answers on specific subjects, proving the strategy had its value.
The third step was checking physical evidence.
Most of the documents that had been on the table were shredded or burnt, but Howard's spatial storage ring had been a rich source of information. It had multiple personal things, including the kidnapper's LID, family pictures, clothes, money, and bank cards. It also had some books on life magic—primarily on the brain—a phone with an attached enchanted long rod, a few boxes of documents—including letters with accomplices—and two notebooks.
The SRT members had only carried dog tags and wallets, but the three black vans outside were a different story. They contained personal objects, documents, and poorly cleaned corpse residue.
Matching the evidence against the four people's accounts revealed everyone had lied to some degree.
Thus came the fourth step, evidence confrontation.
The prince exposed lies, and this time, he was more forceful. He still only used words, though he showed anger and raised his voice. That revealed many new things, but a lot was still hidden.
So, he moved to the fifth step, magic cleansing.
Arthur went through everyone's brains, looking for signs of modification. The kidnapper was a mind specialist biomancer. He used the necklace on his victims but was perfectly capable of subtler manipulation.
Indeed, the prince found many signs of magic manipulation. All SRT members had become less resistant to doing things against their morals. They also became more likely to turn a blind eye when someone they admired did something wrong. Those two things were no different from turning them into perpetually drunk fanatics. There was also plenty of memory manipulation.
Arthur didn't remove the false memories because of the likely psychological harm, but reverting the other changes wasn't as impactful to their psyche. There was a lot of crying when they recovered their sense of self and revisited their actions with a sober perspective.
It didn't escape Arthur's notice that this step came only after the three had already been interrogated as suspects. That was for plausible deniability. Tamara had temporarily sacrificed the comfort of potential victims to get as much information from them as possible. Comparing what they said before and after being freed from the mental manipulation would also help uncover some hidden truths.
The prince decided never to do it again unless the world depended on it. Victims shouldn't be emotionally abused like that. Checking for magic artifacts on them wasn't so bad, though. Someone might've implanted the artifacts to control them.
Still, the maid wasn't a monster. Arthur and Tamara treated them much more softly afterward. The three were even untied, though they were kept locked in their respective rooms and denied external communication. Sophie prepared them hot chocolate, and no matter what she said, the distraction provided by the marvels of modern magitech kitchenware helped calm her down.
The sixth step was more questioning.
Arthur almost skipped it, but Tamara convinced him to only ask nicely and leave if he felt the victims wanted him to leave. The three SRT members were emotionally exhausted—also by design—and the lies they had just told made them guilty. That sometimes translated into them doing their best to hide their lies out of embarrassment. More often than not, they revealed everything, even unrelated criminal activities, in search of redemption.
That was enough for Arthur to get a broad picture of what was happening in the world but not for him to understand the details. Especially because many of the SRT people's memories were blocked, and the kidnapper remained tight-lipped. He was obviously waiting for rescue, though his hope faded with each passing hour.
Then came the time for the seventh step: mind control.
"Are you sure about it, master?" Tamara asked.
"Yes," Arthur replied. "He deserves it."
Mind control was achieved by affecting the brain in specific ways to make the target more malleable. It had different levels, from light behavioral change to turning someone into a mindless puppet.
The SRT had suffered extreme behavioral change. They weren't random fanatics who chose to get drunk and then made something stupid. Instead, someone had changed their brains to make them permanent fanatical drunks. Arthur wouldn't touch them, even though they had attacked Sophie. They were victims and entitled to their unwillingness to speak the entire truth when captured and bound by strangers.
Their sins fell on the kidnapper instead.
The prince had already uncovered that the necklace was an example of absolute mind control. Similarly to a vampire's powers, it worked by overwhelming the target's brain with hormones and sensations the target already had. It was the equivalent of shutting most of their conscious minds down and having their instincts take over. Depending on how it was done and how long it persisted, it might cause permanent impairment.
That was the level of mind control Tamara was talking about. Arthur would start simple but ultimately end there. He would pile different techniques on top of each other in a very permanent way. The processes involved were delicate and mana-costly, and reversing the changes was exponentially more expensive. The prince didn't have the mana to spare on in.
In other words, he was probably about to turn the kidnapper into a babbling moron for life—and he was fine with it.
Arthur had played nice since he left the dungeon. He had adapted to the modern times and obeyed the rules. However, it was evident that the books he had asked Tamara to buy wouldn't fully represent the world's current state of affairs. He needed first-hand accounts for that. He didn't mind having a mass murderer pay the price for that.
"I'm not talking about him, master," Tamara replied. "I'm worried about you. Using mind control for the first time is like killing for the first time. It changes you."
Arthur smiled. Indeed, having absolute power over someone was bound to affect someone's psyche. Yet, he was confident he wasn't as vulnerable to that.
"I was raised to become king," he replied.
The crown prince had been raised with the certainty that he would have almost absolute power over the lives of his subjects. It was an easy path to tyranny. Everyone who had taught him had taken great care to not let him develop undesirable personality traits. So, if anyone was prepared to not let the power over an individual go over their heads, it was him.
"Master, this is different," Tamara replied. "A king's subject might obey unwillingly, out of fear. When you're done with Howard, he'll willingly do everything you want. He'll become the perfect puppet. Having a taste of such indisputable dominance has been the unmaking of many once-respected biomancers."
Arthur nodded. "I understand. I stand by my decision."
Tamara was unhappy with that, but she guided him through it anyway.
An hour later, the prince had to admit she had been right.
That level of obedience was something else altogether. It was like having a human puppy. Dwight Howard would say and do whatever Arthur wanted him to do, and if the prince told him to be happy about it, the man's hormones would make him happy.
Arthur had never felt so disgusted with himself before. Subjecting anyone to that was wrong. He vowed never to do it again, even if someone tortured Sophie. He would just torture them back instead; it would be more humane.
The only "saving grace" to his conscience was that Howard deserved much worse for what he had done.
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This interrogation's second-to-last step was cross-checking everything he had learned from Howard with the SRT members.
Howard had revealed everything he knew, but he might've believed in a lie. Indeed, Arthur found five inconsistencies. However, they were related to the SRT members' altered memories; thus, Howard's words carried more weight. The biomancer's memories were untouched.
Usually, the actual second-to-last step would be to talk to the unconscious victims, but their memories had been heavily meddled with. Arthur couldn't trust anything they said unless he unsealed their memories, which was likely to traumatize them. Tamara said it would be a waste of time. They just skipped it.
Finally, the last step was using his senses as a filter for everything he had learned.
Arthur had seen who would lie to him, how, and when. Now, he matched it and the gathered information against their posture, microexpressions, brainwaves, and any other tell-signs that might expose a lie. He used it to categorize which information was more likely to be true when all previous steps suggested more than one piece of data had the same weight.
The sun shone brightly on the horizon when the prince finally understood everything, from Howard's sins to how the League operated.
Surprisingly, while things were bad, they weren't as dire as he had feared.