Nesha wrinkled her nose in disgust as she kicked the rotten banana peel away, trying to make out the faded text on the soggy flyer by her feet.
Initially, she hadn’t been thrilled at the idea of operating in the 121st district – the place was downright filthy. Sadly, it wasn’t like they’d had too many choices. They knew they couldn’t return to the places they’d been to before, and this was among the best for information gathering.
Sighing, she read the details on Percy’s new wanted poster, along with the others still plastered over the wall. The dim light of the nearby establishment barely illuminated the otherwise dark alley, but it would have to do.
___
WANTED BY THE DIVINE ROOT
Name: Percival Avalon, the Spectral Reaper
Status: Noble (Former)
Affiliations: House Avalon (Disowned)
Grade: Yellow / Yellow (Two Cores)
Affinity: Soul / Unknown
Bloodline: Clone (Mutated)
Age: Late Thirties (Estimated, Red-born)
Last Seen: North Pole
Other features: Glowing teal eyes, Invisible equipment, Accompanied by Green crow, Suspected to not require sleep
Crimes:
- Murder of two Holy Children
- Murder of over twenty members of the Divine Root
- Murder of over twenty nobles
- Unauthorized infiltration of the Thirsty Valley
- Unauthorized stay within the Thirsty Valley
- Unauthorized escape from the Fungal Spire
- Withholding of Strategic-Class resources from the Divine Order
- Fugitive from justice
Caution: Extremely dangerous. Engagement not advised unless accompanied by a minimum of four Blue-cored mages.
Bounty: 75,000,000 CP (Confirmed Kill) / 150,000,000 CP (Captured Alive)
___
___
WANTED BY THE DIVINE ROOT
Name: Unnamed Crow
Status: Mutated Beast
Affiliations: Percival Avalon
Grade: Green / Yellow (Two Cores)
Affinity: Beast / Ice
Age: Unknown
Last Seen: North Pole
Other features: Body partially made of ice, Tamed, Suspected demi-human-level intellect, Capable of conventional spellcasting, Always accompanies its master, Suspected to not require sleep
Crimes:
- Murder of two Holy Children
- Murder of over twenty members of the Divine Root
- Murder of over twenty nobles
- Strategic-Class resource
- Fugitive from justice
Caution: Extremely dangerous. Engagement not advised unless accompanied by a minimum of four Blue-cored mages.
Bounty: 75,000,000 CP (Confirmed Kill) / 150,000,000 CP (Captured Alive)
___
___
WANTED BY THE DIVINE ROOT
Name: Nesha Veritas
Status: Noble (Former)
Affiliations: House Veritas (Destroyed) / House Avalon (Suspected)
Grade: Yellow
Age: Mid-Twenties (Orange-born)
Last Seen: Camelot Province
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Other features: Spectacled
Crimes:
- Unauthorized escape from the Fungal Spire
- Withholding of Strategic-Class resources from the Divine Order
- Fugitive from justice
Notes: Bounty on kill retracted. Only wanted alive.
Bounty: 80,000,000 CP (Captured Alive)
___
Nesha clicked her tongue in annoyance, realizing the numbers had gone up again. Even her own – albeit not as much as the others’.
‘You two are dragging me down with you…’
She hadn’t been seen with Percy and Micky since before the Thirsty Valley, yet the Root had kept increasing her bounty all the same – doing so whenever her friends committed another crime. Worse still, their pursuers seemed to have finally realized that they wouldn’t be catching Percy or Micky anytime soon, so they’d clearly decided that their best hope at learning the recipe would be to capture her alive.
Nobody knew that she could hold her own in a fight, but they did know that she wasn’t travelling with the others at the moment, so she was viewed as an easy target by the bounty hunters. This had forced her to be even more cautious than she otherwise would have been.
‘Well, excuse me for not handing myself over to the Root,’ Percy replied, his voice oozing with sarcasm.
Shaking her head, Nesha walked away calmly – but quickly. With her shorter hair, the lack of eyeglasses, and her higher grade, people would be hard-pressed to connect her to the girl in the picture. That said, the last thing she needed was to be seen reading her own wanted poster.
Tonight had been another waste of time.
Thanks to Percy’s Insomnia trait, she didn’t need to sleep – for now at least, though she wasn’t looking forward to bidding the clone farewell. The extra hours had served her well thus far, allowing her to spend her days practicing runecrafting with him, and her nights investigating the destruction of her House.
Sadly, the latter task wasn’t going as well as the former.
The only thing she’d managed to gather so far, was that the leader of House Asclepius – Machaon – had acted somewhat suspiciously in the years leading to the disaster. The old White core had developed a sudden interest in alchemy, seemingly overnight, spending a brief tenure in the Guild. It hadn’t lasted long – he’d only stayed there for a few months, learning the basics of the art and hunting a few Blue wasps atop the fifth level of the Spire at his leisure, before returning home.
People hadn’t thought much of it. Older nobles – especially the ones hailing from the Great Houses who didn’t really have any enemies or rivals to worry about – often picked up new hobbies to break the monotony that came with their extremely long lives. It wasn’t every day that somebody at the very top of the ladder did that, of course, but similar things had happened in the past.
Nesha hadn’t been as quick to dismiss this seemingly unimportant detail, however.
On one hand, she knew that nobody would have dared to mess with a family associated with the Great House without Machaon’s explicit approval. On the other, she found the timing too odd to have been a coincidence. Unfortunately, she lacked the connections to learn more.
Her enemy was the very person in charge of Remior’s entire information network, after all. The whole point of destroying her House had probably been to keep some incriminating truth buried, and this had all happened several years ago.
But she wasn’t one to give up this easily.
If she didn’t have the means to pry any deeper, she just had to expand her influence. If that wasn’t enough, then she’d grow strong enough to knock on that bastard’s door one day and interrogate him herself. Percy had given her all the tools that she needed to break past her limits. Compared to his ambitious goals of becoming a god, what did a lowly White amount to?
‘Maybe I should ask my handsome boyfriend to take care of this for me,’ she joked.
‘Five minutes ago, you were complaining that we got your bounty raised. Now you’re asking me to assassinate the leader of House Asclepius,’ Percy scoffed.
She shrugged.
‘By the time you’re strong enough to do that, people will have forgotten about me anyway…’
It was still dark out when they reached the 108th district where their inn was located. The quality there was piss-poor – literally, in fact – she’d spotted the same drunkard emptying his bladder in the corridor multiple times this month alone, and he wasn’t even the only one. At least, her room was liveable. It sure helped that she didn’t need to use the bed.
Kicking the door shut behind her, she tussled the sheets a little to give any potential snoopers the impression that she’d spent the morning sleeping. Next, she grabbed a half-stale loaf of bread from her nightstand, munching on it as she undressed. A quick shower and a more comfortable change of clothes later, she sat on her prized chair – the cleanest one she’d found in the room. Not that she’d eat off it, but it was the only one that lacked the questionable stains the others had.
They were about to begin their runecrafting practice – they’d been working even harder lately, since they knew Percy’s main body would be needing the injection of knowledge pretty soon – when she spoke.
‘I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.’
‘You know you’re free to visit, right?’ he asked with a chuckle.
‘Got an address by any chance?’
‘What do you take me for? An amateur? Sail to the northern seas and look for the tree-shaped cloud, then follow the waves to the fifty-third uninhabited island to your right. We’ll be there for another hour or so.’
She laughed, shaking her head.
‘Seriously though, I’ll miss you too,’ Percy continued with a sigh. ‘I suppose we’ll have to stick with the long distance for a while.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s my fault – I should have stayed with you and Micky… It sounds like you two could have used the hel–’
‘Don’t,’ he cut her off. ‘We both have our own things to focus on. Besides, you’re helping us plenty as it is. I wouldn’t have wanted to see you getting chased by Blues all over Remior anyway.’
Clenching her fists, she nodded, a silent understanding settling between them. The best way for her to help Percy and Micky was to assist the clone with his current task. His main body would have to replicate their success on his own later, but it would hopefully be easier the second time around. Especially if they managed to register the spell upgrade before the clone left.
Gathering mana from both of her cores, she allowed them to blend between her hands, merging into something new. Nesha hadn’t found time to work on the Dance – drawing so much ambient mana inside the inn wasn’t very practical anyway. However, she had made a lot of progress with affinity fusion.
Motes of black clung to the earth mana, the brown substance turning darker and folding rapidly onto itself, before eventually settling into something denser. As soon as the mana calmed down, Nesha willed it to manifest into a construct, a pitch-black orb seemingly cast out of obsidian forming between her hands.
She didn’t stop there. Preparing more of the substance, she added to the sphere, slowly moulding it into something larger and shaped differently. An hour later, a glossy statue stood in the middle of her room, as tall as she was. It was humanoid, though its features weren’t very defined. According to Percy, it somewhat resembled the golems he had faced in the Vault’s Yellow combat challenges, though its purpose was very different.
This was the object they’d be carving their enchantments onto.