Chapter 385
Matt stood amongst the flames of another burned out thieves guild and pondered just what exactly he had been finding.
This was his tenth raid on those who had hit the cargo ships, but so far, each of them had only been fed details on one of the aura potion shipments, with no information about the supplier or that multiple shipments’ information had been sold. Any thief with a brain would naturally think twice before stealing something that could be considered the property of an Ascender, but even those fools willing to take the risk for a one-off shipment wouldn’t risk being part of a larger organization that would surely incite their retaliation.
The thieves were fools baited into action. Matt was considering cutting his losses and not wasting his time chasing down the last few groups, but he felt obligated to do exactly that.
First, one of the remaining groups might know something the others didn’t. Unlikely at this point, but none of the thieves guilds as a whole liked being used in such power games. They knew they would be the ones to get squashed first, so they often took precautions when getting such juicy information. Tidbits about the sellers might not save them but it could turn a thrashing into a slightly less awful beating.
Second, Matt was hesitant to let anyone get the impression they could hit his and Liz’s duchy’s goods without swift and thorough retaliation. Being seen as easy targets was a quick way to make sure no shipping corporations wanted to move their goods in the future. That shouldn’t have been a problem given their status, but considering the strings that were being pulled on his guild and their business partners, it wasn’t unlikely that people would put pressure on the duchy’s partners. If too many of them left, he and Liz would be in serious trouble.
Duchies isolated like that were easy pickings for every malcontent in the Empire, and he liked his peace and quiet.
Third, Matt just didn’t like these organizations and didn’t mind cleaning them up.
On the other hand, he felt like he was wasting one of his most precious resources: time.
He may be immortal, but he had a thousand and one things to do at any given moment and this was interrupting all of them, leaving Liz, Cato, and a dozen others to pick up the slack as they could. Sure, he did what he could while traveling around and pushing data dumps through the EmpireNet when he stopped at planets, but that was only a fraction of his typical work speed, as his need for concentration hadn’t changed. It wasn’t fair to them, and that weighed on his conscience.