I picked up a rather large rock, then activated [Sky’s Wrath] on it, lifting it up. It started rising high into the sky at a quick pace, and my mana fell steadily to support its ascent.
***
“What… the hell?!” I said, pale after nearly exhausting all of my mana.
MP: 472/9,359
“It’s still not as high as it could go?!” I huffed in exhaustion.
“Well, of course not. Based on what you said, you’d need to spend 20,000 MP just to lift a single object to its maximum altitude. In any case, this should be enough. I have a feeling that the rock won’t hit harder no matter how much higher it gets from this point.” Nico said.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Have you ever flown high into the sky and simply decided to fall down for a bit? It doesn’t take long before you reach the highest speed you will get to. At some point, the air pushes back against you as hard as the earth is pulling you, limiting how fast you could go. If you dive like an arrow, that speed will be higher than if you spread your limbs out, and that rock is going to have to push quite a lot of air to get to the bottom.” Nico answered.
“Yeah, sure. Is there anything I should be aiming for?” I asked, to which Nico summoned a shield of order on top of a rocky outcrop.
“Try to drop it on my shield. Hopefully, it will punch through and hit the rock pillars beneath.”
I nodded and dropped the rock from the sky.
It didn’t take long before the thing started to spin erratically and move about randomly.
“Why is this thing so hard to control?!” I yelled, and I eventually ran out of mana trying to control its direction.
The rock ended up falling past the other side of the mountain, where I didn’t even get to see its crash.
***
I was cutting another rock with the use of really small mana blades. It was starting to take the shape of an arrow.
“Try to make it as symmetrical as you can; an uneven arrow is hard to hit anything with.” Ati commented.
I did as he said and ended up with what looked like an arrow without an arrowhead carved from a branch; a straight line that morphed into a point near the bottom. I even added four fake feathers at the top at the insistence of Ati. He said something about it giving the rock arrow stability mid-flight.
“This is as even as I could make it. Let’s try again now.”
My mana had recovered to nearly half of its capacity, so I used about four-fifths of it to lift the arrow over our heads. Then, I dropped it.
Surprisingly, the arrow was much easier to control. As the arrow was falling down, it began to pick up more and more speed, eventually reaching a truly shocking velocity. The arrow screamed as it fell from three and a half kilometers in the sky and crashed right into the center of the shield, punching a massive hole in the middle of it.
The problem was that the arrow exploded into tiny pieces on contact with the shield, and the rapidly approaching shrapnel was the last thing I saw before it blew my head off my shoulders.
***
The arena faded again as the other two were moved to an equivalent distance from me and each other. No one said anything. This time, it wasn’t shock that kept everyone quiet, but disbelief mixed with awkwardness.
With a face as red as a tomato and butterflies dancing in my stomach, I tried to play it off as nonchalantly as I could.
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“I like that it punched through a powerful incantation, but it’s nothing I can’t achieve with a simple arcane breath. I could even carry the rock and drop it myself if I needed something to drop on something particularly sturdy, so this isn’t worth the trouble. Why did a mythic class give me a mostly useless skill like this?”
Mercifully, the others played along and decided to stick to the topic.
“Well, to be fair, what happened was the fault of the projectile itself, not the skill.” Nisos said.
“I did see Tameryian airborne troops carry heavy, steel, teardrop-shaped ‘arrows’ to drop on enemy buildings and troops. It’s not a farfetched idea that we’d get better results with that kind of weapon. We could even make use of something particularly sturdy like froststone, since accessing the third layer isn’t difficult for us.” Nico suggested.
“Well, whatever. Let’s get back to this skill later when we have something we could use. A little chat with Baltasar is long overdue.” I said, eager to put the whole topic behind us.
The others humored me, and we followed Jezibel out of the arena and to Baltasar’s residence.
***
It wasn’t long before we finally approached a rather shabby home, even worse than many rural homes around the area.
“I thought this guy was supposed to be rich and greedy. Where’s the fancy mansion and the army of guards?” I asked.
Jezibel shrugged.
“Baltasar is the cheapest, greediest gremlin of a man on the face of the continent. No one knows how much wealth he squirreled away, but some people guess that it’s about as much as a small bank. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t spend any money on anything unnecessary. He doesn’t have any family or friends, lives in this miserable shack, and eats watered down soup, even though he’s certainly wealthy enough to live like a king.”
“Huh. What’s the point of money if you aren’t going to spend it?” I wondered as Nisos moved forward to knock on the door.
“Mr. Baltasar! May we have a moment to speak with you?” he said.
“Some people keep money for a rainy day, to buy something expensive, or to pay off debts. There are all kinds of reasons for people to live below their means.” Ati said as we waited for a response from inside.
But we heard nothing.
We knocked again twice, but we did not get a response. There was no sound of activity inside.
“Maybe he’s not home?” Ati asked.
“Unlikely; I asked around while you guys were coming back from the desert, and the neighbors said he didn’t leave his home in the past few days.” Jezibel said.
“Stand back. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Nico said, as she summoned a golden round shield and a short sword before she kicked in the door.
The door didn’t even break the hinges, but instead shattered into little pieces on contact with Nico’s boot.
She walked straight inside without hesitation, and the rest of us followed her.
Inside, we found Baltasar’s bloody, decomposing corpse.
“We were too late. Damn it.” Nico said with a scowl.
“Judging by the body’s state, he’s been tortured and killed days ago. I would even say he was killed before we arrived in Tyr.” Ati said, pointing to the faint yet familiar signs of privacy enchantments on the shack’s walls.
I held my nose and tried my best not to throw up, as I stepped away to a comfortable distance from the body.
“Abyss take me, that smell is putrid.”
“Well, what now? We’ve reached a dead end.” Jezibel said.
Nico dispelled her shield and sword, then kneeled next to Baltasar’s corpse.
“Not necessarily. I have a class skill that might be able to help us.”
She raised a hand over the body’s head.
[Testimony of the Silent].
A golden hue surrounded Nico’s hand and Baltasar’s head, and Nico’s expression grew grimmer and grimmer.
The glow faded, then Nico stood up and faced us.
“Baltasar was tortured to death by the assassin’s guild for the location of his stashed wealth.”
“I can’t believe they turned on him just like that. I kind of feel bad that his entire life’s work is now in the pocket of his killers.” Nisos pondered.
“I don’t. He tried to get my father killed just to beat out a competitor from the market. He deserves worse.” Jezibel said contemptuously.
“That’s the thing; he never gave away the location of his wealth, even after days of torture. The assassins left this place emptyhanded.” Nico said.
I whistled.
“Wow. That man truly deserves the title of greediest man on the continent.”
“There’s more. I think I found our next lead on the guild. Unfortunately for us, it’s a bigwig in the city’s administration. A woman that goes by the name Arshut is the middle-woman between the council and lower ranking city officials. She’s been using her influence to move away patrols from this area while Baltasar was being tortured.”
“Why is someone like that working with the guild?” Nisos asked.
“It’s possible that they threatened her, took a family member or a friend hostage, offered her some reward, or something else entirely. It’s even possible she’s a member of the guild herself. We’ll have to find out straight from her.”
“How are we going to do that? She probably has government assigned guards. Maybe Councillor Gebal can help us?” Jezibel said.
“Not really. He’s just one councillor; he doesn’t have enough influence to remove the guards of a top official. Even if he could, should anything happen to her, he’d be to blame. He’s not likely to agree to help us with that.” Nico responded.
“It’s also likely that there are members of the assassin’s guild watching her, so it won’t be easy to question her.” Ati added.
“I have an idea that might help us interrogate Arshut and deal with both her guards and the assassins. There’s just one catch.” Nico said.
“What’s that going to be?” I asked.
Nico smiled.
“The entire city’s guard will be turning the city upside down trying to catch us.”