Chapter 209: Teleportation
"What?!" The black mask suddenly snapped to attention, completely forgetting he was a prisoner. He lunged forward, grabbing Red by his cloak. "Hey! Is she telling the truth?! Did she just vanished?!"
Red gave a stiff, horrified nod.
"Fuck!" Black roared, stomping his boot so hard the floorboards groaned, clutching his helmeted head in distress. "Fuck, fuck, fuck! This is a total disaster!"
Meanwhile, Aria was violently slapping the silver clip at her ear, her manicured fingers trembling so hard she nearly dropped her weapon. "Hey? Idiot! Answer me! Darling, pick up right now or I swear I’ll dismantle this entire district! Darling!"
Nothing but dead silence.
Norelia sniffled, adjusting her glasses with a grim, pale face. "It’s no use... I calibrated the communication runes for a maximum radius of three miles of each other. If he was displaced beyond that boundary, the resonance field collapses entirely."
Aria’s golden eyes widened with mounting, suffocating dread. Her breathing turned shallow, the crackling lightning around her blade flickering out as she gripped her hilt tightly. "Beyond the boundary...? He could be anywhere. He could be dying in a ditch right now with that psycho assassin—"
"Hey, breathe," Seraphina commanded, though the her own jaw was clenched tight with barely contained fury.
"Hey," Emily spoke up calmly, extending a dagger, casually pointing the steel tip toward the far corner of the room. "Before we lose our heads... we still have a tour guide."
In the corner, slumped against the masonry, the slender guy in the brown hood let out a weak groan. He was clutching his fractured ribs where Eren’s elbow had rearranged his bones, his hooded face covered in dust as he weakly tried to crawl toward the shattered window.
The room went instantly dead silent.
The princess’ eyes dilated into terrifying slits.
She walked across the room, her heels clicking softly against the charred floorboards. Reaching down, she tangled her gloved fingers violently into the boy’s greasy brown hair, yanking his head backward until his neck popped with a sickening creak.
Before he could even let out a whimper, Seraphina drew her slender rapier with her free hand, thrusting deep into the wall right beside his ear.
The cold edge was pressed horizontally against his windpipe, the freezing vapor biting instantly into his skin and drawing a thin line of frozen red.
"Now then, little rat," Seraphina purred in a sweet, sub-zero whisper that made the entire room shiver. "Shall we have a nice, quiet talk about where you just sent that idiot?"
The thief’s eyes bulged in terror.
"I don’t know! I swear I know nothing!" the boy wailed, his voice cracking into squeak. "I’m just a third-tier mercenary mage! A rogue contractor! Three men in heavy cloaks cornered me in the lower slums few minutes ago—they paid me fifty silver coins just to slip into the Velvet Rose through the laundry chute, and teleport the fat noble with matrix from a parchment they handed me! That’s all! That’s all I was hired to do!"
"Who hired you?!" Emily snapped, stepping forward and leveling the tip of her trench dagger at his left eye. "Which syndicate? Give us an insignia, a drop location—anything!"
"They didn’t give names! They had distortion charms on their cloaks! I didn’t even know there was a war going on in this hallway!" the boy sobbed, snot and tears smeared across the grime on his cheeks. "The diagram was pre-etched into a scroll! I just traced the lines! I don’t know where the spatial rift leads! Please, lady, have mercy—"
"Mercy?" Aria’s voice echoed through the room.
The blue haired villainess strode forward with the terrifying madness of a noblewoman whose world had just been abruptly ripped away. As she passed the detained blue-masked operative, she casually grabbed a tactical hatchet straight from the his utility belt.
"Aria, wait—" Seraphina began, but the warning was already a second too late.
THUD!
Aria stepped in with pure, blinding savagery. Using the flat, blunt back of the heavy hatchet, she hammered it straight into the side of the mage’s skull, slamming his neck right into pinned rapier, slicing a deep, red gash across his throat. But Aria didn’t pause. She drove the heavy iron tool down again and again and again.
CRACK!
"Where is he?!" Aria screamed, her composure completely incinerated as she brought the blunt edge down a third time, fracturing the boy’s cheekbone against the masonry. "Where did you send him?! WHERE IS MY DARLING?!"
CRUNCH!
Plaster exploded behind the ruined face. The thief slumped, completely lifeless, pinned only by the bloody rapier still embedded in the stone.
Aria stood over the twitching corpse, her chest heaving violently, strands of her blue hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, the blood-splattered hatchet dripping onto her boots.
Norelia took half a step back, her eyes wide behind her round spectacles, clutching her staff like a shield. Even the battle-hardened Cinon gave a low, wary whistle from the doorway.
’I should never get on the future Duchess’s bad side,’ Emily’s expression seemed to silently convey.
Seraphina slowly pulled her rapier out of the stone wall, wiping the frosty crimson on a scrap of curtain. She then turned toward the white-hooded clowns in the room.
"Now then, let us address the remaining vermin. You four infiltrated this brothel with lethal intent. Were you sent here to assassinate Baron Kiliyan?"
The black mask leaned his head back against the wall.
"Assassinate him? Frankly, our mission is none of your damn business. But given that my lady just got hurled into an unmapped spatial void along with that brute... I’ll give you this much for free: we need that pig alive. At least until we extract the information locked inside his fat skull."
Seraphina’s eyes narrowed, sheathing her rapier.
"Then it seems our interests momentarily align," Seraphina declared coldly, crossing her arms. "A temporary truce. We pool our tracking resources, locate the unstable spatial coordinates, and recover both the Baron and Eren. The moment they are secured, however..."
"...we settle our debts later."
***
A skull-splitting ache pounded against the back of Eren’s head, followed immediately by the damp smell of room.
He was laying on the cold stone floor.
’What the fuck did just happened?’ Eren thought groggily, blinking against the shadows.
As he turned his head to map the place, his blue eyes locked onto a sight that instantly snapped his adrenaline from zero to five hundred.
Lying a mere two feet away from him was a slender figure draped in scorched white silk and gold mask.
Her breath hitched beneath the mask, her posture stiffening in realization.
"Fuck," Eren whispered.
"Fuck," a distinctly feminine rasp echoed right back from behind the gold plate.
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{Well, I got new way to acquire nsfw images for my book. So, I’m speeding up for my discord server. Everyone, in two days.❤️}