Seeing Sarah running towards them in panic, the two friends stood there completely petrified. The person in question on the other hand revealed a look of joy on her face when she saw them. She quickly started heading to their location at a rapid pace, almost as if she would die if she didn’t reach them.

It didn’t take even a couple of breaths for her to already be standing right in front of them. Although only after hearing her rough breathing did they finally snap out of their stupor and urgently ask what happened to make her so anxious. “Did something happen? Why are you in such a bad condition like this?”

Ariel didn’t waste time on the small talk and got straight to the point. They then patiently waited for her to catch her breath and didn’t rush her to speak, since it would be hard to get her thoughts together while under pressure and panting like this.

The wait didn’t take long and Sarah started speaking as soon as her breathing got a little better. “It’s Erna. She needs help fighting against a large group of people who attacked us. They seem to be some kind of assassins” Unfortunately even after this her words didn’t contain the details.

After understanding a bit of what happened, Brendon stepped up and started calming his sister down even further. “Relax, take deep breaths and tell us where it took place.” Sarah’s red eyes, that seemed to about to burst into tears, slightly calmed as she continued telling her story. “At the café, we were talking and eating, when a sudden surprise attack happened from some people dressed in black, only latter did we notice that they were assassins.”

Hearing the location and the specifics of the events that took place at the café, Ariel and Brendon felt an ominous feeling in their heart as they looked at each other. Ariel was the quickest to react and spoke up. “There is no time to get more help, we have to hurry to the location, let’s go.”

Under Ariel’s command the three of them started rushing back to the café at the fastest speed they could muster. Although the location was pretty close, every second mattered in such a situation so they didn’t even think about resting. When they have reached the building, there didn’t seem to be any other people around and also no sound coming from the actual café.

Feeling anxious, they quickly rushed in only to witness a bloody scene where they saw about thirty corpses of, men dressed in black, drowning in their own blood. Sarah felt slightly sick looking at this picture, but held it together.

Ariel and Brendon had less of a reaction from it however they still turned slightly pale as they scanned the room for Erna. Noticing that their friend was nowhere to be seen they suddenly became frightened. Ariel rushed into the room and once more carefully looked it over.

His fear deepened as he didn’t see even a strand of her golden hair, only bodies signifying that she put up a good fight before being taken. However he was also glad that he didn’t see her corpse as it meant that she was kidnapped and her life should still not be extinguished, for now.

As he was furiously thinking about what to do now, he heard a grunt coming form one of the bodies on the ground near him. Just now he was about to search them to see if he could find out their identity, but luckily enough there was still a person alive, to interrogate.

Turning his eyes to look at the direction the voice was coming from, Ariel saw another, black clothed person like all the rest, who had a medium body build. If you get a better look at them, those clothes do look like something that only a beginner assassin would wear.

Coming closer to the person, he spoke to him with zero emotion in his voice. “You have a minute to tell me who sent you and where is Erna.” The injured assassin however only laughed as he replied. “Do you really think I would betray my comrades like this?”

His words unfortunately only served to anger Ariel more as he spoke in even a colder voice. “Then I will show you several of my methods to make people speak.” As he bent over and put his hand on the assassin’s chest, a large amount of Mana started gathering around him, he didn’t feel like wasting time.

Outwardly nothing seemed to be happening, but suddenly the assassin’s body convulsed and he started screaming from the feeling of pain coming from inside of him. Sarah and Brendon completely didn’t understand what Ariel has done, but just in time for them to raise the question, he explained to everyone.

“This is a way of torture I invented, I am currently freezing you from inside out, your nerves, blood vessels, inner muscles, will all be slowly frozen, and believe me, the pain will only get worse if you resist.” The assassin got extremely frightened by his words, the pain he is experiencing couldn’t be described by speech, and he would already do anything to make it stop, so without further ado he spoke.”

“Please no more, it was the duke of Hevorin family he is the one who sent us here.” His speech was disorganized due to the pain, but Ariel managed to understand the most important parts, making his hidden anger reach the boiling point.

Before he didn’t know his enemy so he was holding back, but now that he knew who the enemy was, and considering he just found out before of his ties with an underworld organization, he couldn’t hold it back anymore.

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The air around Ariel started dropping and the area started to freeze over, while silent, but piercing killing intent started emitting from his body. His friends have never seen him like this and didn’t know what to do. Unknown to them, not having many people he could consider being close to, made Ariel think of them as more important than even his own life. Now that someone actually dared to kidnap one of is friends, and what’s more his fiancé, for the first time in his life he was unable to control his emotions.

Thankfully his emotions soon started to recede as he managed to recall that he first had to go save Erna since there was not much time. He turned to look at his dumbfounded friends as he spoke. “Latter send someone to get this guy and interrogate him.” He said while pointing at now already frozen, body.

Brendon while still being lost, just nodded absentmindedly as Ariel continued speaking. “It is that worthless Hevorin family again. Do you know anything about where they could have taken Erna?” His words snapped the siblings out of their shock and Brendon quickly replied. “Of course I know. They have a mansion in this city that is used when Hevorin family members are staying here, but we should hurry out.”

The other two nodded and all of them left the café while continuing to talk. Ariel who was leading in the front spoke to Sarah. “Sarah, can you tell us how it all happened? It would be best to know all the details.” Agreeing to his words Sarah spoke.

“Just as you probably know, we were spending some of our casual time in the café. It was nothing special, just a calm evening. Suddenly however, we were sneaked attacked out of nowhere, fortunately Erna managed to react just in time and we dodged their first strike.” It appeared that the assassins had some inside help since without it, it would be hard to get into the school grounds like that Ariel and Brendon thought this while continuing to listen.

“There were in all, about fifty of them and Erna was able to hold them back by herself for a good while, but I was just in the way and couldn’t cast any spells at all, due to that she got hurt several times.” After saying these words, Sarah once more seemed to about to burst into tears.

However Ariel put his hand on her head while responding. “Calm down. For someone who never experienced something like this it is natural to be caught off guard and become unable to fight. This is something to be expected of a mage so you shouldn’t blame yourself and continue the story so we could go help Erna.” It is unknown if Ariel’s words helped, but Sarah smiled again as she continued.

“Now that I think about it, from the start their attacks didn’t seem to be aiming for the kill, so they probably wanted to kidnap us, as the best as scenario. The battle dragged out for a while, unfortunately they realized that I was Erna’s liability and started concentrating on me. At that time Erna suddenly told me to run away and get some help. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but she grabbed me and threw me towards the exit while carrying on with fighting against the assassins.”

Ariel and Brendon saw that Sarah was still feeling guilty for not being of any use to Erna, maybe if she had been more collected they could have fully fought off their attackers. However they let her push those thoughts out on her own, and waited her continuation, which came quite quickly.

“At that time I had already got back some of my rationality and soon understood that I would be useless by continuing to stay there, so I ran as fast as my legs could carry me to find any other people around. Strangely there was not one person near here except for you two, almost as if this area was deserted at the time.”

Putting facts in their place inside his head, Ariel agreed as he spoke. “There must have been some strings pulled to make the kidnapping more successful.” Later on he would need to look into the staff here, but now he didn’t have the time as he asked. “Brendon, tell me the directions to the Hevorin mansion and I will go on first. In the meant time you should go bring Henrik while you, Sarah, go inform any teachers you can find. The more people know the better.”

Understanding what Ariel meant and realizing they were running out of time, both of them started doing their part. Sarah immediately left to search for anyone while Brendon started giving detailed directions. When they reached the gate, they finally said their farewells and separated to do their own tasks.

While speeding towards the place Brendon informed him about, Ariel felt the rage and killing intent boiling inside of him, ready to explode at any time. He will never let off anyone who hurts his friends, not until he is still alive.

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If you want to read further, visit https://verathragna.wordpress.com/ I will always have an extra chapter there