The gate groaned as Kael pulled it open. It didn't take long before an old man with a crooked back shuffled around the corner, leaning heavily on a cane.
He walked up to Kael and squinted up at him, as though his vision had gone soft.
"This is not a good time to visit, young man."
Kael shook his head.
"It will be quick. Go back and rest, old man."
The man struggled to turn fast enough to follow Kael's movement as he walked past. He sighed and shuffled back to sit down.
'What is Valthorne thinking, putting an old mortal on the gate?'
He was sure there were parts of the history he was missing, but keeping someone whose mind was deteriorating as a guard carried obvious risks. Then again, who in their right mind would walk onto Valthorne grounds with ill intent.
His gaze drifted to the treeline.
Syleena and Sophie were somewhere in there, hidden. He had agreed to enter first as a decoy so Syleena could slip in, and for a little extra on top of the original payment. That put him at a comfortable seven hundred mindstones.
"Hmm…"
His attention moved to the mansion ahead. It looked almost abandoned. Pristine, but abandoned.
'There can't be more than one or two rank threes left in all of Valthorne.'
And while that seemed like little, but the truth was rank threes were genuinely rare, at least in smaller cities like Velthoria or Farkath. The fact that Syleena had advanced to rank three technically placed Farkath above hundreds of noble families in terms of raw strength. That was simply how scarce they were. But in the end it always came down to the rank fives. Remove one of the family heads and the scales nearly tipped on their own.
Kael's gaze moved to the empty coat sleeve hanging loosely beside him.
A scoff escaped his lips.
He had managed to take out one of Valthorne's rank threes, but the price had been steep enough to be genuinely annoying.
He could manage, but the problems that came with losing an arm were not negligible. Things that would normally take a blink now took twice as long. Refinement itself had become harder. Tossing ingredients into the same refinement orb he was already straining his mind to maintain was difficult enough with two hands. With one, he had been forced to line the ingredients up in front of himself and move the orb to each one in order, making the whole process look like some strange ritual. The unnatural movement demanded even more focus, which drove the Thought consumption higher still.
Then there was offense and defense.
Point Blank only worked through fingertips, so he was already working with less firepower than before. And while Point Aegis was still out of reach, the missing arm left a glaring weak spot he couldn't fully cover. So far he had been forced to pick his fights even more carefully than usual, only engaging those beneath him in rank. But that luxury wouldn't last much longer.
Hair clung to the blindfold as he pulled it away.
When the weeping eye had first replaced his own, the information had been almost overwhelming, so he had kept the blindfold on to focus on it exclusively.
Now he had grown used to it. Uncomfortably so.
It worked almost like a superior sensory mote. He gained omnidirectional vision, but it lacked detail and colour, and if something wasn't moving he risked missing it entirely. What he wanted now was to use both eyes at once, to stop choosing between them.
And while the weeping eye could be called the stronger of the two, it lacked the precision a human eye carried naturally. That gap became obvious the moment he tried anything fine, like writing. With only the weeping eye he had been forced to follow intuition more than the actual pen on the page.
Both eyes together. The best of both worlds, if it worked.
He squinted briefly before adjusting to the light, his glacier blue eye locking onto the mansion. His left eye was still sewn shut, the stitches almost ingrown after so long.
Kael's jaw tightened against the discomfort. He shoved it aside and pulled open the door.
A maid with a towel folded neatly over her arm turned toward the sound of the creaking door and dipped into a courtesy bow.
"Welcome to Valthorne," she said, straightening up.
When her eyes met Kael's she stiffened. She stumbled backward, scrambling a few steps before finding her feet and breaking into a sprint.
"It's him—"
She didn't manage another step before Kael had her by the neck, Point Blank activating in the same instant.
The mortal's neck gave way immediately, bone fragments scattering through the air like splinters from a grenade and embedding deep into the wooden interior. Unable to support her weight, the remaining tissue tore and she collapsed to the floor.
Kael shook the remnants from his hand and looked around.
A chandelier hung at the entrance, large enough to pass for a small house. Dark wood lined white marble, lending everything a cold, pristine quality. Two lions locked in fierce combat, tangled in thorned vines, had been carved into every surface large enough to hold them.
"Awfully quiet," he murmured.
Kael stepped over the body and up a short flight of stairs, letting his hand trail along the railing.
It was a little worrying, how easily he had walked in. But it made sense, even if he didn't like it. At times like these, when anyone could be an enemy, the circle of people you trusted shrank to almost nothing, especially in a noble family like this one.
'I wouldn't be surprised if only blood-related Luminaires remained in this house, along with a handful of handpicked staff.'
Door after door lined the hallway.
He walked to the first and opened it. A guest room as large as the apartment he had stayed in back in Velthoria.
Kael closed the door and moved to the next. Another guest room. He sighed and closed that one too.
'Anything of value wouldn't be this close to the entrance.'
Kael made his way down the lifeless corridors.
He had originally come here to gather refinement ingredients to advance Point Aegis, but when news reached him that an all out clash had begun to brew, he had hesitated. Once he started a refinement he would enter something close to a vulnerable state, the bulk of his focus consumed by the process itself.
After some thought he had decided to go through with it anyway. It was a gamble, and a significant one. If the refinement failed, his soul would take enough damage that it might not recover before the war had even ended.
But that wasn't the only thing that had given him pause.
Thinking back, it was genuinely disturbing.
When the arrow had damaged Point Aegis, it hadn't only damaged the mote. It had damaged Kael's soul directly. The golden rod had done something similar when the weeping eye destroyed it, but that was a different matter entirely.
Golden rod was a soulbound mote. A fundamentally different thing from Point Aegis. Soulbound motes grew alongside their user, strengthening as the soul did. So why had a pierced Point Aegis dealt more damage to his soul than the outright destruction of his soulbound mote?
He had first suspected it was because his soul was already damaged at the time, but that didn't hold up. A soul didn't work that way. A damaged soul would generate Thoughts at a slower rate, yes, but it didn't behave like a cracked glass sphere. Showing cracks didn't mean the next blow would shatter it.
Kael walked into the kitchen looking for something quick to take.
'I'd never assume it normal, coming from a Paragon. But I've never seen a mote behave that way.'
He grabbed a piece of bread and walked back out into the hall.
'Now… where are the ingredients?'
—
Two men stood outside a dark wooden door, one resting in a chair, the other leaning against the wall.
"I never thought I'd see the day Vael traveled to the mortal district," the sitting man said.
"That's just how things are. War brings changes whether you like it or not. Anyway… how long until we rotate?"
The leaning man waited for an answer. Then waited some more.
"Hello?" He opened his eyes.
The sitting man was slumped forward, fingers clawing at his throat as blood poured down onto the floor at an alarming rate.
"What the—"
Before his mind could catch up he found himself doing the same, clamping his own throat with both hands, desperately trying to hold the blood in.
Syleena watched the man collapse to his knees, then onto his stomach, a dark pool spreading slowly beneath him. She slid the stiletto back into her coat sleeve and stepped through the blood toward the door, leaving a trail of red footprints behind her.
She glanced back at the two men before pushing the door open.
Motes... soulbound motes… She had always thought it was too broad a name. Hundreds of millions existed with entirely different effects. How could it possibly be fair to place a mote like Kael's Point Aegis and her own soulbound mote, Aether, in the same category as everything else?
It wasn't.
There should be a grading system beyond rank alone. That had always been her thinking.
Aether, for example. Its effect alone outweighed countless other motes she had come across. Take the last two men. Both rank two, but like so many others they had no answer for her mote, leaving them almost entirely helpless against her when the conditions were right.
Syleena let her hand rest on the railing as she descended the stairs.
"There you are…" she murmured.
Before her, shelves upon shelves of ingredients stretched across a space large enough to be a dining hall. She picked one at random and walked up to it.
Thin strands of pale white dried grass rested on a sheet of paper. She picked it up and read.
Spring Jade Grass.
She set it back down and moved on.
It might have looked almost too easy, how simply she had walked in. And in a sense it was, but the circumstances had made it possible. It wasn't just Vael that kept people from attempting something like this. It was the full weight of the family's resources. That might sound counterintuitive at first. Why wouldn't someone looking to steal go for a place guaranteed to have plenty of it?
The answer was obvious if you thought about it. With the resources came motes. Who was to say Valthorne didn't have one that could track down anyone who entered uninvited? There was no proof they had it, but the possibility alone was enough to make people think twice. Even now, with everything unfolding around her, she fully expected to be hunted down by Valthorne after this was over. That was part of why she had decided to cut down as many of them as she could. For her own safety as much as anything else.
She took her time moving through the shelves before settling on a few.
Even though she had already taken a handful of ingredients from her own family's stores, there were still some here she hadn't seen before. She wanted to take all of them, but she refused to use the Stone Coffin until she knew it was safe to do so.
She gathered the rarest ones, tucked them into her coat, and left the storage.