The next five days did NOT go by quickly. They dragged on. And on. And on. My head was splitting from the constant information overload. Dantalion was rough over a long period of time, and the increased Focus didn’t really help so much as make it worse. More processing power meant more data, which meant more to sift through. Using my mask to offset the soul weight and stack multiple parallels was the easiest way to relieve some of the pain.
Along the way, I stockpiled my wishes as usual, forty of them in between bursts of Dantalion as I scanned the Skelgren manor. I had fifty six on hand with five separated out still for emergencies that my friends could use.
The place was shockingly different to the last target. The Skelgrens didn’t go in for the big bulky mansion look, their manor was spread out in more of a compounds style, lots of individual ranch houses connected by hallways and some underground corridors. I was increasingly grateful I’d included Song of the Soil in Dantalion, because without it, I’d have been screwed.
It was truly staggering how much underground there was to the place, and I wouldn’t have had a chance at finding that bee without all the information gathering, because the honeycomb of chambers under the compound was as extensive as it was labyrinthine.
Still, mapping each chamber and marking off the contents, purpose, patrol routes, entrances, and a dozen other things was boiling my brain. “I hate this,” I groaned, rubbing my temples. “Remind me to get some kind of…brain booster to help with Dantalion. Something like my crown was for Eye of Revelation.”
Callie, who was laying with her head in my lap, snorted. “Oh, I’m sorry, do you learn from pain now? Was the months of prolonged repeated god torture the straw that finally broke the camel’s back? Nice to know you can be taught with LITERAL divine intervention.”
“Says the girl who has made herself sick eating Devil’s Tongue Horseradish ELEVEN times,” I said dryly. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, right?”
“Pretty sure that’s called practice,” she said loftily. “And I was able to mostly keep that stuff down last time.”
I snickered at her. “Thus making my point for me, I win.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she sniffed. “You never win arguments with me. Even when you do win you still lose. Everyone knows I wear the pants in this relationship.”
Snorting, I reached down to tickle her, ignoring her squawk as she fell out of my lap. “You have literally NEVER worn pants since I’ve known you. Leotards, dresses, weirdly tall boots, but never pants.”
“What do you mean WEIRDLY tall?” she demanded. “You love my boots. And you’re the last person who gets to say shit about being weirdly tall.”
“I’m a perfectly normal height,” I said. “It’s not my fault you’re so tiny. Anyway, how’s the plan going? I can use Agares to get in but it’ll leave a trail behind. Your ability is tailor made for this kind of work, can you get us inside?”
She grimaced. “I can, but it’ll take me longer than I’d like. These people aren’t messing around. They DID something to the shadows down there. It’s like trying to swim through molasses. I’ll need to make a few jumps. Not to mention the shadows here are higher rank than I am, and don’t ask me to explain that, it’s complicated.”
I shrugged. “I’m hardly going to throw stones at you about not being able to quantify arcane power bullshit. Even I forget how some of my skills work sometimes.”
“It’s really not much to remember,” she said sweetly. “You mostly just hit people with a big stick in a bunch of increasingly complicated ways. Honestly, I don’t know why you don’t switch to a spear, the staff is way less dangerous.”
“Yeah, to me,” I joked. “I spend half my time delirious with pain. I’d probably cut my own toes off.”
She giggled at my nonsense, then stood, pecking me on the mask. “Anyway, I’ll sketch out my projections, and you can add them to your plan. You think you can get us in and out without notice?”
“Sure, the question is how long we STAY unnoticed,” I mused. “I need to hit them at the absolute earliest opportunity, to buy us as much time as possible. I want the bee at the dropoff before they notice it’s gone. That way I’m completely out of this. I learned my lesson from stealing that fucking necklace. Too many ways to track an item like that even through Stealth.”
Callie blew out a breath. “That’s fair. Probably want to calculate the delivery time into our window then.”
Nodding my agreement, I snagged a stack of papers and started mapping out our route. This particular heist was a bit more complicated than the last one. The compound was laid out with redundancy in mind. The tunnels frequently doubled back, had multiple passages between them, and were spread out enough despite that to have multiple overlapping patrol rotations.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I could get around them, but to maximize our lead I needed the best possible timing. Callie’s jump calculations made that easier, giving me the necessary lead time and travel delays. But despite that, I needed to find a route that matched up properly with her jumps, making sure each overlap with the patrols was managed in the most efficient way possible.
Unlike my last foray, I wasn’t dealing with a single group of guards. The Skelgren family had been active for generations, and had been tightening security for just as long. They had multiple barracks of trained guardians with overlapping areas of responsibilities who had spent their whole lives learning and perfecting their routes. The only reason I even had a chance at this was because Dantalion was incredibly broken against stable defensive emplacements at the same rank.
Finally, after about an hour, I finished my draft. “What do you think of this route?” I asked my wife, passing her the stack of papers.
She flipped through them. “It should be fine. I’d probably budget an extra half second on the fifth jump though. I was being optimistic there, the shadows are especially dense, and I might need a slight breather when I come out.”
“Won’t work at all then,” I admitted. “How about this? Northwest through the secondary tunnels on the third sublevel, then drop down into the fifth through the access shaft into the honey chamber. Speaking of which…”
Rolling her eyes, she shook her head. “No. It’s a pointless risk.”
“But it’s MAGIC HONEY!” I whined. “It sounds so delicious. What kind of lunatic passes up a stockpile of magic honey?”
“The kind trying not to get noticed,” she said bluntly. “It’s too close. Trust me I want to try it as bad as you do. But it’s an unnecessary detour and a big risk for almost no profit. It gives us more time to get noticed, more points of failure, and it screws with our jump timeline.”
Grumbling, I nodded, knowing all that but also knowing she was worried about this. Being allowed to shut down a dumb idea from me would distract her from what we were about to risk, and that seemed like a good deal to me. She knew it too, if the little smile she was trying to hide told me anything, but she knew it would make me happy and went with it anyway.
Once we finished everything up, we prepared for our raid. It took us about an hour and a half to get the right mix of patrols to start. “Alright,” I told her when the time came. My hand closed over hers, and I triggered Bael. “Let’s go.”
Pulling me forward, she stepped into the shadows, dragging me along with her into the dark. Our bond made it easier for her to bring me along, but in shadows this deep and thick it was much more difficult than I expected. I could feel the resistance as I was dragged after her into the depths of the abyss.
I felt the flicker of dark wings behind us, and I realized she was using a technique, a variation of her “Dance of the Abyssal Fairy”. When we emerged from the dark, we both landed silently, and I let her catch her breath before we bolted across the chamber we’d found ourselves in, dropping into a different shadow.
A crystal veined cavern, an underground spring, a shrine, a lab, we passed through so many different places on our way down, blinking in and out. It took minutes for some of the trips, and we had to stop and dodge several guards that were out of position, but Bael covered the minute gaps.
When we emerged into the last room, it took me a second to recognize where we were. The whole place was…light. A million strands of woven light in a panoply of colors, strung with a thousand petals from a thousand flowers. Some made of gemstone and glittering metallic dust, some made of fire or wind.
A tapestry of supernature, the world as seen by the clouds at sunrise over an ocean of diamond. It was staggeringly beautiful. I’d mapped this chamber, and even sketched it out, but it hadn’t done it justice. Nothing could have prepared me for THIS.
It really brought home that Dantalion, as amazing and useful as it was, couldn’t do everything. It wasn’t perfect.
“This part is on you,” Callie said grimly. “Not a shadow to be found in here.”
I nodded, then activated Dantalion again. It might not show me the depth of the beauty, but the actual path was something else. I Waltzed forward, slipping effortlessly between strands and dipping under petals. As I got deeper, the light condensed into combs like a bee hive, and I slipped through all that, using Double Trouble on some of the bees I could see, but who couldn’t see me.
It took me about ten minutes to get to the center. When i got there, I found a tiny, mostly unassuming bee. It was made of what looked like wrought metal with topaz splashed of yellow. I reached out and scooped it into the prepared box that I’d been given, closing it and making sure not to put it in my ring.
Making my way out, I met back up with Callie, holding the box up as I grabbed her hand, Bael covering her again. “Alright, we’re good to go. Get us out of here, as fast as you can.”
She pulled, dragging me into the shadows, and as we fell into the dark, the flutter of wings increased. We burst from the abyss even faster this time, racing back the way we’d come, jumping between banks of shadow as we made our way out.
When we hit the lawn, I scooped her up in a princess carry and triggered my Waltz, bursting forward out of the grounds as I headed for the rendezvous point.
When I arrived, I passed off the box to Aloysius with relief, and Callie and I headed back to the heart. The heist was just as smooth as the first, but it felt…unfinished. Like it was just step one of the last trial, where I would have faced Jacob.
He might have been gone, but there were still plenty of candidates to go up against, and only two days until it was time do it. I still didn’t know what the last trial would be. I would be undergoing rebirth after I finished, so as not to weight the last trial, but I was less worried about that than the final test. Something about it just screamed danger.
Callie, seeming to have noticed my reticence, smirked and shoved me over as we entered the room, flopping into bed lazily. “So…you want to watch a bad horror movie?”
I laughed as I joined her. My wife knew me better than anyone. Trust her to know when I needed someone to help me relax before a big test. I just hoped relaxing was going to be enough to help me come out ahead this time.