She was a shadow.

And she wasn’t talking about her elemental affinity, even if that was the case, but in the utmost literal sense. She was a shadow. Everyone’s shadow.

It was her job to spectate from where people couldn’t see her, their own shadows. She hadn’t been trained in combat but in subterfuge and infiltration. Not a hidden blade, but an unseen eye.

Her skills were as powerful as they were unknown. She doubted even divination-focused ten-star mages could detect her. Eleven-stars maybe could, but they would do so too late to matter. As for twelve-stars? Well, there wasn’t a twelve-star divinator in the world, but the very High Arcanist had difficulties finding her. It wasn’t surprising, the man at the top of the Arcane Sanctum was a scholar with hints of saboteur, not a warrior nor a hunter.

But enough boasting.

She had been tasked with a single mission: find the responsible for the failed operation.

Their late scapegoat and one of the agents were found dead, and whilst they left the hemomancer to rot and be found by the military, they retrieved the cryomancer without leaving a trail.

The first clue to the perpetrator’s identity was none other than the agent’s death. The cryomancer had used the suicide pill, meaning the perpetrator had ways to take the truth out of her.

Not many affinities had such powerful abilities.

The most obvious ones were Mind and Soul. They were known for altering a person’s cognition and leading them with compulsions. But there were affinities with unusual applications that needed to be taken into account. Shadow, Void, and Light were also capable of nefarious manipulations, but they weren’t well documented. Still possible though.

So, the perpetrator was either a mentalist, a mystic, a penumbra, a voidwalker, or an enlightened.

All five affinities were incredibly rare. Especially Void and Soul. They were not called ‘legendary’ for anything.

That already discarded ninety-nine percent of all mages.

The remote possibility that the perpetrator’s affinity was their secondary existed, but it was doubtful at best. One couldn’t just overpower a ten-star mage with a secondary, neglected affinity.

She first inspected the military personnel of Lan’el. Most of the soldiers were either arcanists or kinetics, but there were always some oddities.

No Mind, Void, or Soul soldiers, but she found two Shadow practitioners and three Light ones. The penumbras were all common soldiers, but one enlightened was a Sergeant and the other two were healers.

The shadow began to inspect the enlightened.

Healers usually knew how to deal with the mind, no matter their affinity, and it was the only group that contained a somewhat high-ranking soldier.

One week later, though...

She had stalked the three light mages and found nothing. The healers knew each other and spent a lot of time together, which facilitated her job. It was expected as alike drew each other like gravity.

The enlightened Sergeant proved quite a more challenging target. The woman tended to meet with high-profile soldiers like the heroes of Wyrm’s Landing. And whilst most people would be scared of the Ceaseless Storm, her problem was with the Arcane Veil.

Amira Kalyd, the eleven-star arcanist, was a delicate obstacle. She wasn’t nearly as powerful as her electromancer partner, but she was incredibly more sensitive. Anywhere she walked, the space would be littered with barriers of all kinds. Not just defensive, but also divination ones.

You couldn’t just sneak behind the Arcane Veil. Assassins would be detected far before they came close to a striking position, and even then, she wasn’t an easy target. The Arcane Veil was harder to kill than the Ceaseless Storm. It wasn’t even close.

But after going through all that trouble, she got nothing. But she was a professional, with centuries of experience, and knew that this was a positive outcome. She had reduced the possible candidates to a very limited and concrete profile.

That left only the penumbra soldiers on Lan’el. But as she had predicted, the Privates were also innocent. That was an easier job, as the best one was only of the ninth star and the other only a pathetic eight-star mage.

Upon the failure of the first hypothesis, she was forced to expand the scope of the investigation. That meant investigating any mage that possessed any of the five affinities. All affinities were rather rare and obscure, but there still were hundreds, if not thousands, of mages that possessed them.

The only saving grace was that the perpetrator had to be at least of the ninth star, most likely tenth as the fallen agent was of this star, so that greatly reduced the numbers.

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Not everyone was a mage, but most ellari were. Around an eight-five percent figure. And of that percentage, only one percent reached the nine-star. Then when factoring in the rarity of the affinities, the numbers were in her favor.

The shadow looked at the public registry.

Or more concretely, the government’s private registry. In theory, every citizen could look at any mage’s main affinity. No one did that. And yet the meritocracy kept another, more detailed record hidden.

There were thousands of mages of the ninth star and above, but only hundreds beyond the tenth star. She began looking there.

Adding all her clues and hypothesis, the final count of possible mages was twenty-seven.

Twelve penumbras, five enlightened (the discarded Sergeant being one of them), five mentalists, two mystics, and a single voidwalker.

She doubted the penumbras were capable of such feats, as she herself wasn’t capable of the complex Shadow compulsion, but she investigated them, nonetheless.

No match.

Then proceeded to the other four possible enlightened.

Also no match.

This didn’t bother her. Whilst Shadow and Light had the capability to overwhelm mentally other people, the practice of such arts in these affinities was nonexistent.

She was surprised when the mentalists also resulted in no matches. She highly believed the culprit to be a mentalist, just because their affinity was the most likely to be related to compulsion incidents. It was also the only affinity in the list with multiple eleven-star mages, two of them, to be precise.

The pair of mystics also showed no result. Another eleven-star mage, and a healer at that, but the mystic had a solid background and alibi. Hmm... the woman in question did have a history with Lan’el after the Wyrm’s Landing... the shadow kept a tab on her.

As for the single voidwalker... no matches. That didn’t surprise her, that voidwalker was a known inventor in Kris’in. The man was being permanently watched.

But as the most likely candidates were slowly being crossed out of the list, she couldn’t stop the feeling that she was focusing her search wrongly.

The records, whilst incredibly detailed, were built upon a shaky foundation at best. It wasn’t mandated by law to inform the state about your elemental affinity (an obvious legal void she hated with passion), so it was completely possible the perpetrator didn’t even appear on the records.

It’s a likelihood.

She thought.

That could mean the perpetrator was a trained enemy agent meant to disrupt their activities. But who sent them? The draconids? An opposing faction of the regime?

The shadow cleared her mind.

She was better than to indulge her mind in fantasies.

For the time being, as she waited for new clues to be discovered or any sudden strikes of arcane revelation, the penumbra decided to stalk the eleven-star mystic. One by the name of Alatea Decourse.

The mystic mainly operated on the healing ward of the Academy of Applied Magical Arts of Ferilyn, but was also contracted, from time to time, as a healer by noble houses.

Today was a day like any other from her recent routine. The shadow stalked the soul mage from afar, fearing she could detect her soul or whatever those substance abusers did.

Today’s observation was also risky, as she had met with a colleague, another eleven-star healer. This mage was one of the two eleven-star mentalists she had previously investigated.

She had to watch from far away with feeble shadow constructs, almost undetectable with common mana sense, and possessed no cognitive or spiritual connection. They only relayed information with mana pulses, and she manually shaped those into coherent images.

The couple of women conversed for hours on end, until another mage made their appearance.

She didn’t know about the man. But his aspect was interesting. He was mostly unscathed, except for a gravely scorched left arm, but his clothes (which she recognized as the academy’s tunic) were burnt off and drenched in blood.

Yet he was unphased by that.

The man talked with the two eleven-star mages as if he didn’t care about their outstanding prowess, and the two women weren’t even worried about the man’s looks. If she didn’t know any better, she would say the man was nearly dead.

How?

She pondered.

It only took her a short span to find documents about the man in question. Edrie Nightfallen, nine-star arcanist.

Nine-star?

A mere nine-star could only hope and pray to stand before two goddesses that had reached the eleventh star.

Why was the man even allowed here?

Before the shadow could even notice, the mentalist had left the room and the man was laying on a pillow mount. Mystic Decourse appeared to be healing him, even if her spells made no difference to the man’s appearance.

She had time to kill, so by pure chance and boredom, decided to pry further on the arcanist’s life.

Arcanist Nightfallen was a ninth-year student of the academy and had excellent grades.

Then she noticed something.

Not about the arcanist, but the academy. A week ago, there was an outing to the Lan’el military grounds, the exact same place where the incident occurred.

Could any of the students be the perpetrator? She wondered. No, in any case, it would be a teacher. But this is a great clue.

The shadow proceeded to investigate every participant in the academy’s outing. Many students and professors attended. The students ranged from the eighth year to the fifteenth.

Around three hundred students.

As for the professors of the academy, there were only seven. One per year of students.

She first investigated the teachers, taking advantage of her current location in the healing ward of the academy.

No matches.

All teachers were either arcanists or kinetics. With a single instance of an aquamancer.

With a disappointing exhalation, she pried on the three-hundred-something students. Most were of the eighth star, so she instantly discarded them. Too weak. There was a mentalist in the tenth year, but he also was of the eight-star. She highly doubted the student was capable of manipulating a ten-star cryomancer into killing herself, but she highlighted him for later.

Then... no other match.

Twelve students were of the ninth star or more, but no one fulfilled the criteria.

Clueless once more.

As the shadow was going to leave the subject to rest, she found another interesting tidbit of information.

Edrie, the man laying in the mystic’s office, and another student called Marissa Farlon, had gone missing during the outing.

Weird.

The teachers hadn’t reported the incident to the authorities, as both students were already adults, and the two of them had come back to classes two days later.

It was hard to get the exact details, as this information was only recorded in the teacher’s lounge in a note, but information scavenging was one of her talents.

The Edrie man had raised her interest for other reasons before, but now she thought he and the other student may have been implicated in the incident. Keyword: implicated. She doubted two nine-star mages of Arcane and Air affinity, respectively, could have pressured the fallen agent to take the suicide pill.

Anyways, she kept her eye on the two students.