Chapter 230: Almost got caught
Eren sat completely petrified, his heart doing frantic backflips.
’Fuck me sideways,’ he shouted internally, cold sweat instantly beading across the back of his neck. ’I survived a twelve-foot mutated flesh titan just to get executed by a chain-smoking Saintess who’s obsessive about her friend. I am officially dead.’
Alice didn’t blink. The cigarette remained poised between her slender fingers. Her swollen amber eyes had narrowed.
"I’m going to ask you one more time, Volsver," Alice whispered. "What, precisely, were you doing inside our private dorms... alone... with Violet?"
"Treating her curse!" Eren blurted out, hands flying up in a display of frantic, desperate surrender while the Shadow Cat cub chirped in annoyance at his sudden twitch. "Purely clinical! You know how unstable her mana curse got and how I was cured for her!"
Alice’s brow arched sky-high, dripping with absolute skepticism. "Clinical? In my dorm?"
"Yes! Exactly! Violet suggested that!" Eren babbled, nodding vigorously like a man standing before a firing squad. "I was helping her stabilize her mana peak! And—and while I was there, I specifically warned her! I lectured her about never accepting suspicious vials or black-market tonics from strangers promising a miraculous cure for her curse! I was doing my service!"
Alice leaned in, her gaze boring into his soul, searching for the slightest microscopic twitch of deceit. "Did you lay a single inappropriate finger on her?"
"I swear, I didn’t do anything that day!" Eren declared, crossing his heart with theatrical piety.
He wasn’t technically lying.
Alice studied his innocent facade for a few seconds. Finally, she let out a slow, heavy exhale, blowing a thin plume of grey smoke toward the ceiling, her shoulders drooping in relief.
"Thank the heavens," Alice muttered, tapping the ash onto a stone shard. "If you had tried anything funny with that sweet, fragile girl, I would have castrated you with a butter knife and fed the remains to the gutter drakes."
Eren swallowed, forcing a stiff, agreeable nod.
’Sweet? Fragile?!’
Eren screamed silently, his eye twitching with her irony.
’Innocent girl, my ass,’ Eren thought, shuddering as a phantom memory of Violet’s grazing his collarbone flashed through his head. ’She’s a wolf pretending to be a harmless kitten. But you keep living in your wholesome little fairy tale, Saintess. For the love of all that is holy, please keep living in it.’
Alice reached into her tattered satchel, pulling out a stale piece of hardtack bread and chewing on it with mechanical exhaustion. She glanced across towards Baron Kiliyan who was still snoring peacefully.
"So," Alice murmured around a mouthful of dry crust, "how much longer are we supposed to play sewer rats in this pit? Every hour we waste here is another hour the Rujgard tightens the exit."
"Not long, if we value our lives," Eren replied, his playful tone receding as reality caught up with them. He scratched the purring cub under its chin. "The moment Branagh’s auction house turned into a crater and that five-hundred-thousand bounty went live, Rujgard officially hit critical mass. My team isn’t stupid. With this chaos in this territory, they’ve definitely deduced that I’m stuck here."
Alice paused, chewing slowly. "Is Lady Aria also in your team?"
"Yeah," Eren sighed, rubbing his face with both hands, a genuine knot of anxiety tightening in his chest. "And that’s what terrifies me. Her impulse control when it comes to my well-being is practically non-existent. The last thing I need is Aria marching into Rujgard. This place is a hellhole."
Alice pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them, staring silently at the cub.
"I know the feeling," Alice whispered, resting her chin on her knees. "I’m worried sick about Theo."
A faint, tired smile touched her lips, fond yet laced with familiar dread.
"Which is precisely why we need to accelerate the schedule," Eren said, letting out a breath as he gently set the Shadow Cat cub down on the stone slab. "If we want the full information on the syndicate. Why don’t we pay a visit to the Lord of Information?"
Alice’s amber eyes flickered with instant comprehension. "The Whisper. If anyone holds the ledgers on The Substance and who contracted Rujgard, it’s him."
"Spot on," Eren said, pushing himself off the floor.
Eren stopped.
His pupils contracted into tiny pinpricks. Alice froze in the same millisecond.
The perimeter tripwire. It’s an invisible mana dome they had created across the safehouse to check mana signatures if anyone approached. It had just snapped.
Without exchanging a word. Alice snatched the cracked, half-shattered skull mask and snapped the leather straps behind her ears. Eren adjusted his silver earring. Both stood motionless in the darkness.
Five seconds.
Ten seconds.
Thirty seconds.
Nothing moved in the corridor. No footsteps. No rustling cloth. No heavy breaths of a vanguard brute.
"That’s not human," Alice whispered under her breath, her hand resting on the pommel of her side blade. "But there’s a distinct, dense mana signature."
"Must be familiar to spot us," Eren muttered, his blue eyes darting across the shadows above, hairs prickling along the back of his neck. "It feels like—"
Every survival instinct in Eren’s nervous system screamed at once.
"LOOK OUT!"
Eren lunged sideways, his forearm wrapping around Alice’s waist as he tackled her violently to the stone floor.
Four massive, foot-long needles whistled through the exact pocket of air their heads had occupied a millisecond prior, piercing into the wall. The stone fractured on impact, thick, pale-purple paralytic venom hissing as it ate through the rock.
Alice’s looked up.
Perched upside down among the crumbling vault ribs was a cloaked slender silhouette, clinging to the stone like an oversized mantis.
"You look out!" Alice barked.
She planted both palms against Eren’s chest and shoved him backward with all her strength, throwing herself into a desperate, outward roll across the floor.
BOOM!
The cloaked assailant plummeted straight down from the ceiling like a falling anvil. Two slender, blackened iron daggers pierced clean through the flagstones where Eren and Alice had been together a fraction of a second ago.
Eren gritted his teeth, not waiting for the intruder to regain posture. Rolling onto his shoulder, he swept his right leg in a low kick at his legs.
The force buckled the figure’s base, dropping him hard onto one knee.
Alice was already in mid-flight. She vaulted into the air, her boot igniting with a sharp burst of mana as she unleashed a savage, airborne roundhouse kick aimed dead-center at the intruder’s jaw.
A sound of splintering bone echoed through the damp chamber. The impact whipped the figure’s head around; the face was twisted at an unnatural, horrifying ninety-degree angle over their left shoulder.
Alice landed in a crouch.
For a moment, the intruder remained completely still, kneeling on the ground with a broken neck facing sideways.
Then the intruder grabbed their own jaw, and casually wrenched their head back into place.
Alice backed away half a step, her amber eyes widening as she recognised the frame.
"The Whisper..." Alice whispered, her voice tightening with dread. "The Lord of Information."