When morning came, the rays of the sun shooting into his eyes, Rubeus was forced to leave his bed. His back had a few aches, but a few muttered spells cleared up the worst of the pains. A cup of tea, a potion mixed in, fixed the rest, and he could stand at his full height feeling ten years younger.
Breakfast was a simple dish of sausages, eggs, ham, toast with plenty of butter, and some beans on the side to make his doctor feel heard. Another cup of tea was served alongside it, this one enjoyed to its fullest as Rubeus allowed the growing heat to warm his bones properly.
The purple robe to signify his position was donned, the Royal Mage feeling a new air as he looked in the mirror. His beard had grown longer without his notice, making him mutter a few more spells to adjust it to the painting he had next to him. The hairs on the top of his head received the same treatment, a servant cleaning up the strands as he left his quarters behind.
Such a bright sun, such a fine day, yet I still feel the itch.
Rubeus didn’t scowl as he walked down the street, greeting those who were happy to meet him on their morning treks, yet he idly wondered what had gone wrong for him to feel this way. Had he drunk too much the night before? No, that couldn’t be. It’d only been two ales, each just a medium in strength, and he had consumed a potion before bed to stop any chance of a morning headache.
Yet it was still there, pinging him every few seconds from the back of his head.
It was only when he reached the seventh floor of the building for experimental laboratories that he figured out the truth. Inside his laboratory, hidden under a small pile of various gizmos and side-projects he needed to start back up on some time, was a map that glowed in a deep orange color.
One of them is dead.
He idly remembered how he’d muttered his wish for the deaths of the White Fangs last night. The world had apparently heard him, as Fang, the leader of the trio, had succumbed to some injury or another. By what the map couldn’t say. It had been inside the Dungeon, though the exact floor couldn’t be specified. The fact that he could see it was there at all meant that the death had occurred in the upper half of the Dungeon, yet anything more was impossible to discern.
“Should’ve spent another week on this,” Rubeus muttered absentmindedly, wishing he had invested the needed time to make the map holographic so he could observe it in three dimensions instead of this top-down nonsense. “No matter. Where are the other two…”
Surprisingly close to the castle, inside one of the gated areas where he couldn’t enter without the permission of a Royal or one of the highest-ranked servants. Annoying, though that begged the question of how they had managed to get inside. The darkness of the night perhaps? Their location was in the corner of one of the storage rooms, where none would look without being ordered to, so Rubeus wouldn’t be surprised by that, yet… there was likewise the chance of another party being involved.
Fang, fool and annoyance that he was, wasn’t a weakling. Rubeus wouldn’t have hired the old mercenary if he was. Could he still have died to the drakes that came right before the halfway mark in the Dungeon? Perhaps, but he felt that it wasn’t the case.
What if…
Muttering words he hadn’t in many years, Rubeus began to search through the history of the laboratory he stood in. It was a slow process, when not helped along by the Mana-Density of the Dungeon, but his reserves were strong enough for something as simple as this.
With a twist of his fist, time began to reverse. Not literally, what he saw around him was merely a projection of the past, but it didn't matter to him. Rubeus didn’t need to interact with anybody who’d been here directly. He just needed to know that they had been here at all.
He started a full day back at first, seeing himself and Grace working on their own projects. He’d left not long after, with the usual excuse of managerial meetings. She always believed that, not questioning it too deeply, so it had become a frequent reason for his early departures.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Nothing here yet, however.
Time flowed faster for a moment, hours passing until the chime was heard and Elijah Ceade stepped into the picture. Not a surprise, since Grace had already mentioned his visit along with what they’d talked about.
But was she telling the truth? Rubeus bent his left index finger just a little and allowed the recorded sound to be replayed for his own ears.
“— and while the macro-scale operations of the secondary matrix can be seen as giving only an approximate of the actual solution, getting seven digits of importance is so close to the real solution that it can be used without having to use the full formula anyway, which is very good since that full formula requires a set of operations which grow in numbers exponentially with the increase of the —”
He turned off the sound once again, believing Grace’s words completely at that. If there was one thing and one thing only that apprentice of his was good at, it was talking at length about a project that should’ve been easily completed in a few weeks and not so many months that had already been spent. At least she had the spirit to continue through the struggles, showing off a great work ethic that he was happy to have around.
Maybe I’ll keep her as a general assistant when she gets rejected by the council.
Rubeus skipped through the rest of the time with the Wind Mage in the room. He noticed they briefly moved over to his area, but it was barely for a few minutes and they left soon after anyway. It all fit together with his own experience of meeting them at Elijah’s store not long after that.
So they hadn’t messed around with anything. Good to know.
But then… if Grace hadn’t returned to the laboratory later that day, then why did his sensor record somebody entering during the early night?
Skipping ahead to that hour, he noted the door opening the smallest fraction before closing once more. In the room’s recollection, he could see nobody moving through, yet steps did appear on the ground where they had walked.
Somebody in the city has the gift of invisibility.
Not just the common Mage’s invisibility either, since Rubeus’ protections would’ve dug through that and revealed the person’s identity instantly. No… whoever had walked through his laboratory had been both powerful and protected from his abilities.
“What did you do, rogue?” he questioned as he followed the steps around the laboratory. They had only spent five minutes inside, yet those five minutes had been spent without a moment’s peace. They checked through his shelves, shuffled around his papers, and seemed to have even inspected some of the side projects on his desk.
Rubeus wasn’t shocked by that, since many would love to steal his works, but it was when they went to the corner table that held the tea bags and other refreshments that he truly began to feel anger brewing inside him. And when they opened it all up, inserting some liquid inside them before closing it up again and leaving, his heart began to at twice its normal speed. After making sure they did nothing more before leaving the laboratory behind again, Rubeus went to study what had been done.
The few Spells in the field of identifying liquids without tools he knew told him everything he needed to know.
“A poison to cause severe illness, yet not one serious enough to be lethal when consumed in this amount,” Rubeus murmured. Somebody wanting him dead wouldn’t have gone to such lengths, and they certainly wouldn't have used something so weak. “Enough to pause my work yet not enough to arouse suspicion.”
Truthfully, it would have worked. If he had gained a serious fever now of all times, Rubeus would not have questioned it in the slightest. His recent days had been the perfect example of overworking an old body, using Mana at speeds he should’ve allowed the youth to do, and his sleep hadn’t exactly been as full of peace as it could’ve. If he had suffered a fever, he would’ve allowed another to take over until he was recovered and ready to perform a ritual without fear of messing it up.
The perfect plan for somebody wishing to delay his plans.
Somebody had caught onto him. Somebody with powerful people behind them. One of the other Royal Mages? A possibility, yet he feared it was somebody outside his nearest circle as well.
And with the death of Fang, his plans were starting to truly be threatened.
The Dungeon.
That ritual needed to hurry up and be ready, so he could finish what he had started.