Zandith waited silently in the bushes as the patrols passed him on the path. He was dozens of kilometers from his base, and he was lucky enough to find some of those who were looking for him. They would find him all right. That was the plan. Make it look like he was defending his territory. Throw them off his scent.

“Still no sign of anything,” one of the men said into his wristpad. “Are you sure we’re looking in the right place?”

The reply came through immediately. “Keep looking. We’re not exactly sure what we’re looking for. It could be anything. Chief says we have three more hours before we wrap it up for the day.”

“Copy that,” the man sighed. He scanned the area around him, and looked right at Zandith without realizing it. Zandith was relieved nobody in the search party was capable of piercing illusions.

He emerged from the bushes, careful to mute his footsteps with an acoustic cloak. They wore minimal armor and each carried an Aetheric rifle. Were those passive shields? Zandith raised his hand. It wouldn’t matter.

Two red bolts leapt from his hand. They never got the chance to scream. The shots flashed into the backs of their heads. They collapsed to the ground like marionets with cut strings. Smoke rose from the victim’s heads.

Zandith’s armor confirmed the automatic distress signals being broadcast from their wristpads, triggered by the lack of vital signs. He smiled. His work here was done. He went to the nearest clearing in the forest and activated his suit’s thrusters. He took off slowly as to not leave any evidence of his departure in the form of charred leaves and dirt. The visual and acoustic cloaking would take care of the rest.

He observed the commotion from high above the forest. They were flocking to the area. Perhaps in a few days, he would need to take out a few more in a nearby area. That would keep them occupied for several months at least.

He flew along the edge of Sormera Valley, the mountain ranges undulating like a green, wrinkled blanket below him. He located his destination visually and steered toward it. The Rivercrest Mansion overlooked the valley from atop a hill. It was the perfect location. The nearest residence was kilometers away. He had set up secret surveillance cameras in the surrounding forest. If anyone was going to approach, he would know about it. They would need as much time as possible to hide their true activities. They needed to appear inconspicuous upon inspection.

He landed in the front courtyard, careful not to damage the marble-plated pattern weaving along the driveway. Any unexplained damage would arise suspicion.

He entered the mansion and went into the expansive underground wine cellar. The racks were mostly full of wine bottles that had each aged for over a century, but he never bothered to take a drink. He’d found that any amount of alcohol in his system made illusions much more difficult to generate and maintain. He never knew when illusions were necessary, so he never drank.

He walked straight through an unassuming cobblestone wall. It had taken a few days to get used to the experience. The illusion tech for the secret entrance had several redundancies and retained a high level of detail even from millimeters away.

The entrance chamber was a semicircle used for security and surveillance of the property, and it was currently unoccupied. He went down the stone-and-dirt hallway to the med room, where he found Specter One checking on Specter Five’s condition.

For many years, he had been able to keep only one or two people under a prolonged trance at a time. He’d always needed to use his trancing crystal to deepen the trance. The issue was that the trance of the other person would diminish greatly if he recruited someone new. That was when he decided to recruit a neurologist who could help him stabilize trances without the trancing crystal. The Crimson Vein then informed him of a potential target, a neuroscientist by the name of Judy who was making great strides to correlate neural activity and Aetheric energy. It had taken a few months to coax her into the right state of mind using subliminal techniques, but when her ambition and impatience grew strong enough, he seized the opportunity. The successful capture led to the beginning of what Zandith called the Specter Guild.

“What’s the status of Five?” Zandith asked immediately. Specters never needed a greeting from him, since they had part of him embedded within their own minds. They essentially walked around in an induced trance. Most of their original personalities were quarantined away in their own mindscapes. Specter One was currently measuring the trance depth of Five, who currently lay enclosed in a medical pod.

“Seven minutes away from the end of his entrancement session,” she stated, looking at the data projections above the pod. He looked at her suspiciously. Her dark hair was tied up in a bun again. He could have sworn it hadn’t been the last time he’d seen her. They normally didn’t have enough volition to even tie their own shoes. That’s why he made them all wear slip-ons.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“What’s your own status?” he asked.

“I am in mid-level two trance.”

Zandith grimaced. Too close for comfort. “After Five gets out, put yourself into a level three entrancement.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He left the med room to check on Specter Three in the new Coms room. Even from the hallway, he could hear that infernal keyboard clacking away. He had never found out why Three was so attached to that antique piece of junk, but each time he took the keyboard away, Three refused to do anything for Zandith, regardless of his trance level. That part of his personality stubbornly remained. Now Zandith was constantly worried the keyboard would break by accident. He had a few replacements hidden away in case that happened.

“Do we have any word from the Vein?” Zandith asked.

“In fact,” Three replied, his eyes scanning the wide projection in front of him. He was able to quickly browse and select using only his eyes and blinking, while his hands remained at the ready on the keyboard. “We do.”

He opened the message and read the contents. “Scythe, we request an opinion from you. Our research on our current subject is slow and ambiguous. It could be of great scientific value to collect data from a more predictable specimen. We propose Domrik Lazen as our target.”

Zandith laughed, but let Specter Three continue. “We understand there is risk involved, but the reward may be great. We will use our own agents, and we will use our best encryption methods to ensure the data they collect won’t be tracked. We have acquired another research asset, but its value for our studies is currently unknown. We will inform you what we learn about it.”

Zandith frowned at that last sentence. Why were they referring to a research subject as an “it”? Nevermind. Their proposal was intriguing, and while he would never willingly approach Domrik, their offer to carry out the mission made it more plausible in his mind. The one advantage they had over Domrik was that Domrik didn’t have someone tech-savvy at his disposal, like Specter Three.

If he authorized the mission, how many would they send? He had tried to get them to kill Domrik years ago, but each time they deployed their massive squad, Domrik just seemed to know he was in danger and move to a safe place just before they could trap him. It was like trying to grip an ice cube. One way or another, he escaped and survived, and the next time would be more difficult. They never got within eyeshot of him.

But what if they sent only a few? Would they be able to get closer then? There wasn’t too much of a risk, other then perhaps the agents being captured and interrogated. They could arm them with termination modules for security.

“Tell them to send three agents with termination modules,” he said. “They get one chance.”

Specter Three typed in the short response and sent it. Zandith left the room when Three started typing something else. He would need to remember to mute the keyboard with an acoustic cloak next time.

He looked in the med room and saw Specter One getting into the pod while Specter Five held the hatch. Five was the most recent recruit, the famous businessman Damron Wellfire, the owner of the new Rivercrest Mansion. He had actually entered the mansion auction before he was captured by Zandith, so there was less of a controversy when Zandith forced the issue.

He was a bit on the rotund side and had a full head of silver hair. Zandith recruited him because of his business in Aetheric mining, Abton Industries, but his disarming smile and bright eyes were a bonus. It had been obvious from the start what his weakness was. Zandith had told the Crimson Vein to take out his wife and daughter about a year apart from each other, and to make the deaths look like accidents. Wellfire then fell into a deep depression, into which Zandith swooped and entranced him. He was now a slave to his own desires, and he didn’t even know it. All he knew was that he miraculously got his wife and daughter back. As long as Zandith kept the trance deep enough, he would never realize it was a dream.

“Specter Five!” Zandith shouted, jolting the sleepy man to alertness. “Don’t you have a meeting with your investors today to discuss the changes to your business plans?”

Wellfire’s face lit up. “Why, yes I do!”

“Excellent!” Zandith moved aside and gestured with both hands to the exit. Specter Five waved to him on his way out. Zandith allowed more of Wellfire’s personality to express itself because he was a public figure. If he started behaving strangely, that would put doubt in everyone else and he would lose his influence. Currently, he wore a mask of strength and positivity to hide his despair, so that’s what Zandith allowed. Maybe he would tweak Five’s behavior in a few months to portray an illusion of personal development.

Zandith went to the latest addition to the newly-dug secret base. It was a square cavern no more than ten meters across. In the middle was a five-meter-wide hole emitting a faint smell of dirt and smoke. He peered over the edge. Only a red dot could be seen at the very bottom of the continuously deepening hole. He had used Five’s influence to obtain an efficient Aetheric drilling machine. It bore the circular hole in the ground, then made the hole deeper by superheating whatever was below it. It then took the excavated material and climbed back to the surface, where Specter Two, the janitor, and Specter Four, the assassin, took relayed the material to a secure location on the property. He was thinking of turning the molten stones and dirt into some sort of decoration. That would cause far less suspicion than piles sitting everywhere from his secret drilling project.

After confirming that the drilling was proceeding as planned, he proceeded to the final item on his to-do list for the day: assist in Eredore’s covert invasion of Sylga.