Chapter 616: Trouble in the Assassin Family |
“Master Luke!”
It was Charlie, still wearing her full black armor. She pulled off the helmet.
“I missed you so much, Master Luke. I caught your scent from far away.”
It was Charlie. Really Charlie. And she was safe.
Luke’s system went wild, flooded with accumulated notifications from Charlie’s system as everything finally caught up.
“Charlie, I missed you too,” he said.
She was hugging him tightly. Very tightly.
“Hello, Lord Luke,” said a familiar voice. A maid doll.
“Hello, Anne. It’s good to see you again.”
“Master Luke, are you alright?” she asked. “So much happened. I disappeared and woke up on an island. Have you been eating properly while I was gone?”
Artemis stayed silent. She never liked talking when Erza was nearby, but Luke could feel her practically vibrating with the urge to make one of her usual ridiculous comments to Charlie.
“I’m sensing major structural changes in this region,” Cadmus said as he appeared. “A great deal that was blocked for safety reasons is now being released.”
Erza had one floating beside her too, though hers had just come out of invisibility mode.
“Oh? What is this? Some kind of autonomous being as well?” Cadmus asked, looking at Anne.
“You’d be wise not to offend her with a phrase like that,” Erza said.
Erza’s Cadmus remained silent, probably under direct orders from her. Serena was approaching. Luke could see it through [Soul Infiltration]. He had left the soul-cat on her.
“I should keep talking later,” he said. “There’s something I need to deal with first.”
“But we only just found each other again, Master Luke...” Charlie said.
She clearly wanted to stay close to him. Their bond magnified that feeling until it almost overflowed.
“I’ll explain later,” he said, stepping away.
Charlie was a vampire. Serena was heading straight for her. And this place was full of vampire hunters.
“You really don’t know how to wait, do you?” Luke asked when he reached her.
“I’m sorry, but etiquette and privacy matter a little less when it comes to some of my responsibilities. Besides, Eleanor is not just a friend. She’s someone very important to our government.”
The two of them walked off together. By the time they reached the place where Evangeline and the others were staying, they did not even need to go inside. Eleanor was already outside the building, talking to a few people.
“Luke, it looks like we’re going to...” Eleanor stopped. “Serena? You grew your hair out.”
“There weren’t exactly any salons on the island where I was staying,” Serena said with a laugh, then stepped in and hugged her. “I was worried about you.”
"Is she gay?" Artemis asked.
They’re just two women hugging as friends.
"I’m not judging if she is. I’d hug Eleanor like that too."
Serena’s expression shifted.
“Your father...” she began.
“I know. He’s not in our region of the event.”
Serena glanced toward Luke and the others. “Would you come with me for a moment?”
Eleanor looked at Luke.
“It’s fine,” he said.
The two women walked off.
"Great, gossip time. Are you using your spy skill?" Artemis asked.
I am, and no, I have zero interest in Serena’s sexuality.
He listened as they spoke.
“I managed to track down some people of interest in this region,” Serena said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come for you. I found out I could only clear five Beacons. Of the five people I was able to track, three are dead.”
“Dead?”
“Reaper Court is using the event to hunt important government figures. If their leader is Rank C, then maybe they had advance knowledge of what was going to happen, just like members of the World Government did.”
“My father...”
“The director of the SIA may be one of their targets,” Serena said. “I can’t cross into another area of Sunken Realms, but there is at least one Reaper Court member in this region. At least one we know for sure is here. I need to find him and get information out of him.”
It’s just work talk. I’m tuning out the second this turns into something more personal, Luke thought.
"And miss the truth about Serena’s sexuality? Absolutely not" Artemis complained.
“There’s something else...” Serena said. “I need you to come with me.”
“Why?” Eleanor asked. “No one knows I’m here. That Reaper can’t track me. And I’m not even someone that important.”
“It’s not just that. I need you to stay away from...” Serena stopped and glanced at the hilt of Eleanor’s sword. “Just trust me.”
Hmm?
“Assassin,” Erza said as she approached.
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“Erza...”
Luke’s attention split between the conversation and her.
“I need that favor I mentioned before,” she said. “I need you to look after my sister until the end of the event.”
***
“And that’s it?” Luke asked.
The conversation with Erza was happening somewhere more private, inside the ruins of an old structure, far even from Anne and Charlie.
“I just need to keep Anne under my protection while you chase after a dangerous individual. It doesn’t seem that complicated.”
“That’s all,” Erza repeated. “She can help you clear Beacon phases, and she’s a servant, so she can clean, cook, and she’s also a healer. She’ll be very useful to your group.”
“Which raises a question. Why not take her with you on this little assassination mission of yours?” Luke asked.
It was obvious Erza was hiding a lot.
“I’m not sending Anne to spy on you or anything like that, and I’m not collecting on the favor I owe you for taking care of your precious Charlie all these months by her side,” Erza said. “I’m simply asking you for a favor... as a friend.”
“As a friend?”
Erza Grimhart was serious. And desperate. What she was doing now was probably the closest Luke had ever seen her come to begging.
“Fine. I’ll look after your sister for the next few months. But there are two things I’m curious about. Why me instead of one of your servants or someone else, and who exactly is this person?”
“I’ll be direct. I don’t trust other people. People can be bought. Manipulated. But you and I share a certain connection, since both Charlie and Anne can live inside our souls. Our secrets are similar,” she said. “And the one I have to kill... is my brother.”
“Brother?”
“Brother?” Even Artemis sounded shocked.
“That’s all I can tell you. He’s dangerous. And insane.”
“Aren’t you already dangerous and insane?”
“He’s worse than I am...”
“I didn’t know you had a brother. I thought your family only produced women.”
“We’re all our parents’ experiments. Dolls. It’s in our nature to be test subjects. And my brother is the only male ever born. So now you know one more secret about my family, the kind that could get you hanged if it ever got out.” Her mouth curved faintly. “This is almost nostalgic. Feels like our old conversations.”
“And you’re going to kill your own brother... That’s pretty messed up.”
“He’s become too much of a problem for our family, and he knows secrets he should not know. He committed crimes, not against human society, but against sacred laws P would never forgive being broken. My brother was imprisoned as punishment, but during this event...” She exhaled. “Well. He got loose. And now he’s out there.”
“A male version of you, but more dangerous and more insane, running around loose really does sound bad. And there are two of him, right? A human version and a doll version?”
“No. Only the human one. He never went through the process of separating the two souls to avoid the madness of half-human dolls. That’s why he’s... broken.”
“And why the hell would your family do something like that?”
“Experimentation,” she said.
“Your family is...”
“Normal to me. Abnormal to you.”
“Oh, it’s way past abnormal.”
“He’s running right now. I have the locator active. I cleared two Beacons. I can’t lose him, and I don’t have time to stop and clear more Beacons. Neither does he, because the moment he stops, I’ll find him. But taking Anne with me is complicated...”
“She’s too soft to help you kill your brother?”
“No. It’s because he’s an exceptional Puppeteer.”
***
Two days passed. Erza had already left the Citadel. More people kept arriving there. Everyone had received the notification that Phase 2 had resumed, but no one knew whether the Beacons were already active again. For now, Luke was preparing to leave.
“Would you like... another serving, Lord... Luke?” Anne asked as she cleared things away.
“No, thank you, Anne. The food was really good.”
“Thank you, Lord Luke...”
Erza’s brother had no interest in clearing Beacons to reach Stage 3 of the event. For him, it was better to return to Earth at the end of Stage 2, when many of the strongest people would still be trapped in Stage 3. All he had to do was survive the next few months while staying out of Erza’s reach.
“I’ll make dinner next time,” Charlie said.
She was still trying to make up for the time she had been separated from Luke.
“This is ridiculous!” Layla said. “That bastard doesn’t just have one maid. He has two!”
“Three,” Luke said, pointing at Katarina.
The jar had been painted black and white to look like a maid uniform.
“It looks awful! You damn fetishist!”
“I... was the one... who painted it,” Anne said. “I... thought it looked cute.”
“I mean, it looks great!” Layla corrected herself in a hurry.
She was still afraid of the Grimhart family.
“We need to finish getting things ready,” Evangeline said. “We already have one boat for each of us, but I want us to get at least one really big one too. Like some kind of Viking boat.”
“But that wouldn’t fit inside a storage item,” Eleanor pointed out.
“Well, look who decided to show up. Are you coming with us, or staying here with that hero girl of yours?” Evangeline asked.
“I’m going with you, obviously.”
They were still sorting out what to bring.
“No sign of Angie,” Charlie said while Luke stared outside.
“Yeah. She still hasn’t reached the Citadel.”
The worry was there. But that did not automatically mean something bad had happened. A lot of people still had not made it to the Citadel. Many were simply too far away, still stuck out in the ocean. Angie could be in the same situation.
“If we stay here any longer, we’re just going to miss each other,” Luke said.
***
As he walked through the Citadel with Eleanor, Luke took the chance to ask a few things he had been meaning to.
His friend was always around Serena and the government people.
“What exactly counts as a global-threat criminal?” he asked. “They mentioned it in the meeting, and yeah, I know what it means in theory. I want the government version.”
“When a criminal reaches Rank D, they’re treated as a global threat,” Eleanor said. “Not because they can literally destroy the planet, but... you get it.”
“Yeah. There aren’t many Rank D individuals on our planet compared to the total number of people with the system.”
“Climbing to Rank D takes a hundred levels, and getting out of it takes another hundred. That’s an absurd amount of power to accumulate, not to mention the number of enemies someone has to kill along the way. If a Rank D individual turns criminal, things get dangerous fast. That’s why, once people like that are identified, their names and faces are circulated among governments, especially in cases involving the Reaper Court. Though honestly, we only know the names of a few of its members.”
“Reaper Court. That’s the second time I’ve heard about them. Sounds like they’ve got their hands in a lot of places.”
There had been the incident in the Rift involving the kingdom of Lagras, and now this hunt for high-value government targets during the event. And in the Rift, that had only been one of the things they were responsible for. They had also been financing a ducal faction trying to seize control of Lagras.
Damn. I never got to collect my debt from Cassandra...
He remembered.
At least maybe I can get rich again.
“This Tobias is a powerful necromancer, Luke. The Reaper Court has twelve leadership seats. Every single one of them is classified as a global threat.”
They kept walking.
“You’re really coming with us?”
“I am.”
“And Serena?”
“She wants me to stay. Thinks it’s dangerous for me to go wandering around. But it’s not like this planet is suddenly lacking in things that want to kill us.”
A day passed. The system had notified everyone that, in one hour, it would reveal information about the Beacon.
“You sure you don’t want me to call in more people from the Church of Kindness to come with us?” Jack asked.
“No. One lunatic is already enough,” Evangeline said.
They all watched the countdown.
Then the notification appeared.
Phase 2 Challenge:
Reaching a Beacon may now be a challenge in itself. In this phase, the Beacons are no longer on the surface, but at the bottom of the ocean. To the west of the Main Island, in the beach zone, deep beneath the waters of the Giant Reef, there are multiple entrances leading into a cave biome where an ancient lost city lies. Scattered throughout that city are the Beacons. But be warned. The path there will not be easy. The darkness of those treacherous waters hides beasts and other dangers. The labyrinthine cave network is also filled with threats, and the lost city itself has been overrun by Stalkers.