Azura already didn’t like their target. He had yet to even see the man, but just the mansion was enough. Austentatious didn’t even begin to cover it, and it was made all the more jarring by the fact that the few houses within 100 ft of the mansion were tiny. Probably because there wasn’t a ton of space in this town to begin with, and this noble in particular bought a bunch of space, so there wasn’t much left. Even worse the positioning alone was enough to make it clear why the noble lived here. The mansion was just about smack dab in the middle of the town. No doubt surrounding himself with adventurers was a method to skimp on guards. Not that it was going to help the man from people inside the town breaking and entering.
Which was exactly what he and his little party were doing. So far Victor’s info had been spot on, and he had been able to disable every security spell they had run into without issue. Though honestly he probably could have got through it fine even without the info, but he would never complain about things being easier than they would normally be. “I have a bad feeling about this. I didn’t recognize the name, but I do recognise his house. He’s actually pretty popular here. At least as far as nobles go. He’s polite to everyone, and doesn’t ever skimp on pay when he makes requests.” Sadly public facades were a terrible way to judge the kind of person a noble was, so that didn’t really help him decide who the bad guy was in this situation.
“Of course he does. He makes people go missing, so of course he wants to appear as someone no one would suspect. That’s actually how I got in this mess. I made the mistake of trusting him, and before I knew it I found myself cornered, and unable to pay back the debt he had tricked me into. My family was taken as collateral, and when I tried to get the police force involved i… I’m not actually sure what happened after that.” Victor frowned. “Actually I didn’t even remember most of that before. It would seem my memories are slowly returning.” He glanced at Victor who had a pensive look. There was no doubt the goblin’s memories weren’t the kind to look upon fondly.
“That’s exactly why I have a bad feeling. It’s almost always the nice nobles that end up being the worst.” Regrettably, that was true. There were exceptions of course, of which he liked to count himself, but there was no doubt it was true as a general rule. He found memories of Oveli being dragged up once more, and grit his teeth.
“Hopefully that’s the case. The worse the man is the less bad I’ll feel about killing him.” He hadn’t killed Oveli, but part of him wishes he had. Hopefully the man rotting away in prison was enough vengeance for the people the man had tormented. He took a deep breath to release the surging feelings. This wasn’t the kind of mission he could afford to be distracted for. He needed to focus, or he was going to find himself in a bad situation unprepared.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. If anyone could feel guilt for killing a person like Cornelius, then I’d say they are too pure to live in this world.” He had a feeling the goblin had wanted to say naive, but he couldn’t exactly blame the ex-noble for being wary of upsetting the people helping him. He knew well enough that most would view him as naive, but if that’s what it took to separate himself from his father’s legacy, then naive he would be.
“Well we’ll find out 1 way or another. We’re almost to the secret entrance.” Secret entrance was a bit of a stretch, unused would probably be a better word. According to Victor, the police force had dragged him through a tunnel into the dungeons where Cornelius was waiting for him. If he had to guess he’d say the dungeon was separate from the mansion, just in case anyone saw, but it was most likely connected by an actual secret entrance to get to the manor proper.
Victor hadn’t remembered the exact location of the tunnel, so it took them a little while to find it, but after about an hour they found it. It was covered by a trap door, hidden between a little ring of bushes. You wouldn’t see it at a glance, but anyone looking wouldn’t have too hard a time finding it. It wasn’t too far from the mansion, but far enough that the man could claim that he hadn’t known it was there. The trap door served to make him even more wary of the situation. The security spells on it were completely different. Not really better or worse per se, but clearly made by someone different. Probably to sell the idea he wasn’t involved with the tunnel at all. The man was cautious, and he got the feeling they weren’t going to catch him completely unaware, regardless of how carefully they make their way through all this.
“What’s wrong, can't you disarm this one?” He turned towards victor who looked curious, but not yet concerned.
“Of course I can, but I think we’re going to need to revise our plan a little. Cornelius is way more cautious than I had originally assumed, I doubt we’ll be able to get to him unnoticed. So I think rather than trying to sneak cautiously, I think we’ll have more luck going through everything as fast as we can.” Unfortunately that meant that they would have to fight Cornelius head on rather than attempt a sneak attack, but if they tried to sneak they ran the risk of the man escaping before they ever even reached the manor.
“Are you sure? You haven’t had any trouble disabling the security spells, what makes you think he’ll notice us.” He sighed. He debated on how much information he needed to give to explain it. Not to hide information, but he had learned that most the time giving all the technical details just made people get bored and stop listening.
“This security is linked to another source, so if the magic stops he’ll know. I can work around that easily enough, but if he was cautious enough to set it up like this, then I imagine that there will be a lot more security inside, and the odds of me being able to find and disarm everything in there before triggering anything are infinitesimally small.” Not even counting the likelihood that there was a trap on the inside of the trap door that would go off if this security wasn’t disarmed in a specific way. The security wasn’t designed to be strong, it was designed to alert Cornelius that something was up, and it was designed very well for that task.
“I see. That makes sense, Cornelius isn’t a combatant by any means. It makes sense he’d rather run away than try and defend a location. Do you think we should try and go through the front door instead then?” That wasn’t a bad idea, Since that’s the part people regularly see, and it would definitely be connected to him it wouldn’t be too odd if the security was a bit more standard.
“That’s not a good idea. He had someone try and break in not to long ago to steal some of his stuff, so he upped the security a lot, and this stuff leads straight to the adventurers guild. If we go that way we’ll be swarmed by adventurers in minutes.” He sighed. Guess it was a good thing Jackson was here after all, otherwise he probably would have gone that route.
“Ok speed through the dungeon entrance it is then. Do you know where the secret passage is? We don't have the time to find a way to open it naturally, so we’ll just have to blow it open.” He wasn’t the biggest fan of this approach, but They didn’t have enough time to try for a stealthier infiltration. They would need days to properly prepare for that, and they didn’t fancy hiding a goblin lord in town for that long.
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“It’s the wall at the far end. The only spot that isn’t covered by cell bars.” Well that made things easy. The only thing they’d have to worry about was Cornelius managing to get out of the mansion before they got to it. He estimated a 50/50 on that. It pretty much depended entirely on what he was doing when the alarms started ringing. Although they did have the advantage of him having to make it look like he was leaving casually since he couldn’t let it be known, that he knew about the dungeon or the secret passage to his mansion. Assuming he had security spells on the passage itself and didn’t just assume someone had found the dungeon. Someone would have to stay outside in case the man left the mansion fast enough. Luckily he didn't have to worry about who to pick.
A copy formed beside him. “Make sure Cornelius doesn’t escape.” Victor raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t comment on his unique magic. His copy nodded and ran off to keep tabs on the main building. Of course he had already taken precautions in case there were other hidden exits they didn’t know about. With that taken care of they made their way down into the dungeon. Thankfully devoid of any prisoners. Well at least devoid of any living ones. A few of the cells still had corpses in them, but he didn’t imagine they had been dead very long. After all, it didn't smell like rotting corpses in the dungeon yet.
Hopefully they would all get a proper burial after all this was over. He didn’t have the time to observe everything though, so they ran through the surprisingly big dungeon at breakneck speed as he prepared his sword. to break open the wall with force. He grabbed an ice shard with his left hand and filled it with enough mana that it cracked. He threw it quickly at the wall. The shining white star hit the wall and exploded in a white mist freezing the entire wall solid. Then he launched his sword forward with force causing the wall to shatter into pieces without them so much as breaking stride.
Normally he’d consider overcharging a shard to be rather wasteful, but sometimes he had to do what he had to do. The secret tunnel wasn’t much different than the dungeon. Same black rock walls, same smooth floor, honestly the only difference was the lack of cells lining the walls. In fact if he had to guess he’d assume that both this tunnel and the dungeon had originally been the same tunnel. Not that any of that mattered right now. “How long is this tunnel?!”
It was longer than he’d expected. They had been running full tilt for over 6 seconds, meaning they had covered well over 200 yards, yet they still couldn’t even see the end of the tunnel. Clairvoyance wasn’t helping much either For whatever reason any light he sent out seemed to get devoured by the darkness, which was not a good sign. Not many people used shadow magic, but those that did tended to be more devious than strong. Even Katy leaned more to the side of cheap tricks. Not that it was a bad thing. He had seen first hand how effective it could be, and that’s why it worried him.
It didn’t take much longer for him to figure out the problem, only another couple seconds, but in a situation like this every second was precious. “It’s an illusion.” He created several magic circles below each of them and a few on the walls. They started as a dim silver before they seeped black before exploding outward with a sound like shattering glass. Now they realized the tunnel wasn’t 1 path. They were on a path that made a giant circle, but there were other branching baths as well. He groaned, they didn’t have time to carefully choose which path to take, but there were only 3 different paths. He made the last copy he could. “Copy run the circle 1 more time to make sure there are no other paths. Jackson take right, Victor take left, and I’ll take the center.”
All 3 nodded at him, and he and his party dashed down the tunnels occupying the wall of the giant loop. He wondered idly whether his bad luck would mean that he wouldn’t find the noble,... or if he would.
***
Jackson wasn’t really a fan of this situation. He figured at some point they would have to acknowledge that this guy was too crafty for them to try and speed run his defenses like this. They should have scouted and done some more research first. Victor had only really known the first layer of defenses, and he was getting the feeling those were the least dangerous. He hadn’t even noticed the illusion, and it would have probably taken a bit longer for him to have realized there was no way the tunnel was that long. The kid realized it pretty quickly, but they still lost precious seconds on an already nearly impossible job.
Even worse they had to split up to try each route, which had the effect of none of them having someone to watch their back, and leaving Victor on his own. If he was honest the latter bothered him more than the former. He didn’t really trust the goblin, admittedly more because of his nature as a monster than anything they had said or done. He got the feeling Victor was hiding something, and he had no doubt it was important.
Still at the same time he didn’t really get the feeling the goblin was lying, so he was in a pretty rough spot. Thankfully he didn’t have much time to ponder as he made it to the end of this tunnel in less than 4 seconds Unfortunately that end had a door that was almost definitely trapped, and he didn’t really have any ragged attacks like the kid did. He knew how to use shards of course, any adventurer worth their salt did, but he didn’t have the kind of control necessary to crack them without them exploding in his hands. So anything he did with them would require him to form a spell with, which he was rather slow at.
Which left barging through and tanking the trap as his best option. This pearl guy better be the worst kind of scum on the planet, because they were having to put in a lot of effort to make sure the man was taken out properly. He tackled the door knocking it off its hinges, and was met by a horrifying sight. “What the f-” He wasn’t being paid enough for this. Even with the city's safety as payment.
***
It quickly became abundantly clear to Azura that the Pearl patriarch needed to die. Less than a second after running down his tunnel he ran into a swarm of horribly mutated people. If he hadn’t witnessed something like this before he probably would have assumed they were just humanoid monsters, but no he knew better. These things had once been human. He dealt the only mercy he could on these poor people. He killed them quickly, and what he hoped was painlessly. Each quick slash of his sword burning several heads to ash in an instant.
He wondered just what it was that nobles gained from this kind of research. It was one thing when it was a 1 off, but now he knew for sure that there were at least 2 people doing horrific experiments on people, and if there were 2 there was probably more. Just what were they hoping to achieve? Maybe this time he’d get to talk to The noble for a bit himself before wiping his hands of this mess.
After killing all of the mutated victims in the area he continued his full speed sprint down the corridor. His clairvoyance was still mostly locked, but once he had broken the illusion he could at least see about 20 ft in any given direction. Not super useful, but enough that he wouldn’t be snuck up on easily. The deeper he went though the more twisted the creatures became. Not just people, but even monsters that were horribly altered, and even some pseudo chimera’s. Thankfully much less powerful than a real chimera, but the number of enemies served to bog him down, no doubt that was their intended purpose.
The more experiment’s he killed the more sick to his stomach he felt. This was truly horrifying. Cornelius was a monster, far worse than anyone he had ever met. Even Oveli had the decency to kill most of his experiments when he was done with them. Horrifying as it is, that was still infinitely better than leaving them alive to suffer indefinitely. Despite the horror around him he killed mob after mob of the patchwork enemies and continued rushing forward.
Eventually the hallway opened up into a wide circular space, and he immediately knew that there was something truly awful in this space. It didn’t take long for his suspicions to be confirmed as the ceiling opened briefly dropping a giant monstrosity into the room. It was huge. Easily 15 ft high, and 6 ft wide. It was in a vaguely humanoid shape, Its face had a pair of glowing red eyes, and there was a pitch black miasma surrounding it. As if that wasn’t terrible enough it also released a horrible stench. Why wouldn’t it though? After all, it was made of human corpses.