bookpub Chapter 148 : Chapter 148
Chapter 148 : Chapter 148
Chapter 148. Ironclad Evidence
“How do you want to handle this? Kill them?” Sylvia frowned.
“Do I look that heartless? These people will all be witnesses to testify against the Tarassa family’s crimes later.” Logaris raised his right hand, still clad in the jeweled glove, and one pale violet gem gave off a faint gleam. “Let’s give them a little ‘benefit package’ instead.”
“Spellcraft · Mass Sleep.”
With a snap of his fingers, an invisible wave of magic carrying hypnotic ripples swept through the enormous workshop like a breeze.
The workers who had still been stirring vats and hauling goods froze in place. Then, as if every bone in their bodies had been pulled out, they collapsed to the floor in a clattering wave.
Several hundred people dropped at once and slept like the dead, snores rising and falling one after another. At the very least, it would ensure that no news leaked out from this place before everything was over, and no one would die from overwork in the meantime.
“Sleep. By the time you wake up, the world above you will already have changed.” After giving the sea of “sleeping beauties” one last glance, Logaris finally turned and headed for the door.
“To keep them from panicking and destroying the evidence, we should infiltrate the place first. We’ll come back to deal with these people after we’ve finished with Cassido.”
The two of them quickly left that revolting factory.
Outside, the night had fully deepened.
A damp sea wind rushed toward them, carrying a salty, fishy tang that at least managed to blow away some of the reek of alchemical drugs clinging to them.
Logaris made a gesture, and two spells silently settled over them.
“High-Tier Mass Invisibility.”
“High-Tier Presence Concealment.”
For many mages, these were spells that drained the mind terribly. For Logaris, they were as effortless as breathing.
Their outlines blurred for an instant, then vanished completely into the tangled shadows of Whiteport.
Compared to the filthy, decaying Lower City, the Upper City halfway up the mountainside was like an entirely different world.
The roads here were broad and level. Streetlamps stood along both sides of the avenues. They were nowhere near as bright as the magitech lamps of Winter City, but they were more than sufficient to light the way for the nobles’ costly carriages.
Tarassa Manor.
It was a classic Astrelian-style estate sprawling over a vast area, its outer walls built from expensive white marble and its sharp spires thrusting into the sky.
Even at this late hour, the manor was still brilliantly lit, and cheerful music drifted out through the thick windows, echoing beneath the silent night sky.
Set against the corpses that could be seen by the roadside in the Lower City at any moment, the contrast was almost absurdly ironic.
“What are they celebrating?”
Standing in the shadow of the outer wall, Sylvia watched the nobles inside the grand hall dancing in splendid dress.
“Perhaps they’re celebrating the arrival of their new masters,” Logaris said with a cold snort.
He led Sylvia around the heavily guarded front gate.
To Logaris, those magical alarms were riddled with flaws. He merely plucked lightly at the aetheric threads in the air, and the entire detection array skipped right over their location as if it had been infected by some kind of virus.
The two of them reached the third floor as though they were walking through an empty house.
According to Baron’s memories, behind the heavy nanmu door at the far eastern end of the third floor was Count Cassido’s study.
They stopped before that very door.
A faint violet glow flowed across the handle, and a ring of extremely well-hidden alarm runes had been set into the frame around it. The moment anyone touched it illegally, the entire floor’s alarm would start shrieking like a kettle boiling over.
“A fourth-tier linked alarm array, plus a bloodline verification lock.”
Logaris pushed up the sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. Looking at what was supposed to be an “absolutely secure” magical lock, he wore the thoroughly bored expression of someone staring at a kindergarten arithmetic problem.
He did not even bother using any kind of lock-breaking tool. He simply reached out with his gloved right hand and flicked twice along the complicated rune circuits with his index finger, like a master musician adjusting a single out-of-tune string.
Bzz.
The ring of violet light flickered once, then obediently dimmed.
Click.
The sound of the lock springing open was crisp and pleasant.
Sylvia arched a brow. She had seen this many times before, but every single time she watched this man toy with something that could trap a fourth-tier thief, as if it were a child’s puzzle, it still felt absurd.
The two of them slipped inside. Logaris closed the door behind them with his backhand and even thoughtfully reset the alarm in place.
He was the very picture of a courteous guest.
The study was enormous, and its decorating style was true to the taste of a nouveau riche parvenu: if it was expensive, it went inside. An entire wall of bookshelves was crammed with gilt-edged tomes, most of them still wrapped in their original sealing film. They looked less like books and more like decorative ornaments called I Am Cultured.
Logaris did not spare those books even a glance. He walked straight to the giant oil painting hanging in the center of the wall behind the desk.
The painting depicted a middle-aged man in armor, with a face full of righteous dignity. Supposedly, he was the first ancestor of the Tarassa family line.
“A relic of the old age, nothing more,” Logaris commented casually.
Then, following the sequence from Baron’s memory, he pressed three times on the spot where the visor of the painted helmet sat, then turned the painted sword hilt half a circle to the left.
Rattle-rattle-rattle—
A faint sound of gears meshing together came from within.
The giant oil painting slowly popped outward, revealing a black iron safe embedded in the wall behind it.
Now that was where the real goods were hidden.
This time, Logaris did not even bother looking. He stepped aside and gave the position to Sylvia. For a purely mechanical combination lock like this, a fifth-tier knight’s monstrous hearing and sense of touch made opening it easier than using a key.
Sylvia pressed her ear against the safe door and pinched the dial between her fingers, turning it lightly.
Click. Click. Click.
Three seconds.
She had not even finished entering the full combination before the safe door swung open.
Inside, there were no heaps of gold coins or jewels. There were only two thin document pouches and a black account book whose cover was already badly worn.
Sylvia quickly pulled out the pouches and opened one.
Several letters written on parchment slid out, and at the bottom of each, the scarlet wax seal was especially glaring—a twin-headed serpent coiled upon the waves.
The exclusive insignia of the Tyrenian Royal Intelligence Bureau.
“All right. The evidence is conclusive.”
Sylvia let out a cold laugh and quickly flipped through the account book. It was densely filled with records of every shipment’s destination, as well as the flow of funds between the shell company called Deep Blue Fisheries and the Tyrenian navy.
It was appalling.
In the past six months alone, three different versions of the Northern Territory’s Whiteport defense maps had been smuggled out, and in exchange they had received a full five hundred crates of that damned hallucinogen.
With a flick of her wrist, everything vanished into her Spatial Ring.
Just as she finished, Logaris’s ear twitched.
“Someone’s coming.”
Logaris made a quick hand signal.
The two of them moved like weightless feathers, drifting instantly into the shadowed angle beside the bookshelf. As the light around them twisted under the invisibility spell, they once again “disappeared” from the room.