Despite having a tentative lead in the mutual understanding that it was incredibly strange for someone in the Bureau to know, for fact, that Walkers were going missing here in Heaven's Shore, the first week of the investigation was unexpectedly uneventful.
Initial inquiries among the businesses were shot down and it became clear they were going to have to spread their search radius pretty far.
The fact that there didn't appear to be any kind of meaningful pattern to track among the disappearances wasn't much help either. Chris did consider that maybe the lack of a pattern was a pattern itself, but 'look for what we're looking for' didn't get much traction in their brainstorming sessions.
It wasn't until they found a group of ten kids that the duo got a clue, and even then it wasn't as helpful as one might think.
Chris was leaning against a brick wall while Leon fought the gang, who all appeared to be between ten and twelve.
Years old.
Not levels.
Despite being partially sealed, the man was still impressively strong compared to most Walkers, and fighting off an entire group of Walkers with an average level of thirty five demonstrated that pretty effectively.
Just after knocking his seventh child unconscious, Leon said it.
"Seriously, who could kidnap someone like this?"
He was panting from exertion, quite possibly for the first time in his life since awakening, but that wasn't what caught Chris's attention.
"Kidnapping."
The word, spoken aloud, triggered something in Leon's mind too, enough to make him pause and take a hammer to the head.
These kids were out for blood, and Leon wasn't exactly scrambling to kill kids, so he put his foot down and flickered right next to Chris, moving so fast the kid who was flying at him didn't have time to react and slammed into the wall he'd been standing in front of.
The two of them leapt into the air, kicking off buildings until they were several blocks away and stopped to take a breath and figure things out.
After waiting several minutes to make sure they weren't being followed, the two of them pulled out chairs from their inventories to sit down and look over the city.
Despite the shocking class disparity that was evident even with the mundane citizenry gone, the megacity was still gorgeous in an over the top kind of way.
The shine and glitter of the wealthy districts spilled over into the poor parts of town, lending the entire city a dim glow that accentuated an architecture built around down south comfort and wet weather.
Even in the modern day, when construction materials were commonly enhanced with mana just by the very fact of being suffused with the stuff, the old style of buildings was maintained. This was a trend that extended to the people and culture, giving the feeling of stepping backward to a different time, where the people you spent your time with were more important than the problems to come.
It made the mission all the more confusing.
These people who went missing were strong and everyone in Heaven's Shore knew someone, but it was like the taken were just…forgotten.
No, worse.
Written off.
The people who had been taken, who would be taken, were treated almost like a sacrifice to pay some price either nobody knew or was willing to discuss.
Chris flipped through some information about the city prior to the disappearances and found that the populace, despite the heightened poverty problems, were actually treated exceptionally well.
There didn't appear to be any of the common mundane discrimination that much of the rest of the world experienced, and you were in more danger due to crime or starvation rather than Walker conflicts or Gate crashes.
It was impossible to get an accurate number on how much of the population were actually mundane in Heaven's Shore, but Chris put a guess that something like forty percent of the citizenry was gone, which still left millions of people going about their daily lives.
Daily lives that were almost completely normal and included little to no Walker activity, for the most part, since most of the people here had leveled up prior to the current state of security.
All of this is to say that the mission they were on felt impossibly convoluted in a way that Uplifter training simply hadn't provided Chris with the tools to deal with easily.
Leon seemed to be having the time of his life, but being faced with a situation that wasn't 'Gates are a major threat to daily life' left Chris in the dark. There wasn't an ocean of monsters to fight or Walkers to subdue, and the moral grayness of the people here left him lost for answers.
He'd sent a message to Jet about updating the training so Uplifters could be better prepared and received a message that was ambiguous, at best.
Now at an impasse, he turned to Leon and said, "So…kidnappings?"
He nodded in response and gestured out at the city, "Someone's taking them somewhere, and I'm pretty sure its not in the city."
Despite agreeing on the disappearances being done by someone's work, Chris wasn't as positive about it being out of the city.
"Why do you think they're not in the city?"
Leon sat on the question for a few minutes and finally responded, "They're not dead."
"And how do you know that," Chris asked incredulously.
His friend shrugged and made a vague gesture with his hands as he said, "I don't know…I just know."
The duo had been working together for a while now and while Chris knew Leon's ideas were often correct, he still had misgivings about them being out of the city.
"Where would they possibly go? All that's out there for miles and miles is the…"
Chris trailed off as he realized exactly where they might be taken.
"The lake."
Hundreds of miles away, a thin layer of faintly glowing crystal slowly grew over the surface of what used to be Lake Pontchartrain, forming the lid to a massive bowl shaped structure that extended deep into the water.
Ever since the call had been put out, she had begun her work alone and suspected it would be completed in the same way. These people, Walkers as they called themselves, were some of the worst samples of humanity she'd found thus far.
To the outside observer, she was certain they seemed like normal people who were just living their lives, but by her standards they were objectively filth.
Their crimes were too innumerable to count, and committed daily with no sign of stopping or changing their ways.
Restriel was positive that the Elders back home would see the importance of her task and send assistance eventually, but as the months dragged on and she arduously worked herself to the bone taking these fools one at a time, she was losing hope.
Her crystal threads wrapped themselves tighter around her prisoners, forcing their bodies to dig deeper into the lake while simultaneously caressing her cheek in an effort to comfort herself.
How long had it been since she'd left home to observe humanity?
A decade at most, a drop in the bucket for her kind, but as her master used to say, "Even a feather fallen must be collected."
Every moment counted when the Dawn was so close at hand, and she'd already realized that something had to change.
The intensity of the mana within the lake was so strong that the corpses of the people who'd lost their lives protecting the city hadn't even begun to decay in all this time, and that alone was evidence of how much needed doing.
How could places like this exist, but humanity remains so disgustingly pathetic?
She muttered a prayer to the Creator as the crystal structure pulsed with energy, absorbing the mana within the water and solidifying further.
It was something she'd designed herself, using some of the technology of the First Empire as the basis for her ideas. They had created the System after all, so obviously they had good ideas, even if almost all traces of them had been wiped clean from history.
An intergalactic society being destroyed was, sadly, not all that unheard of nowadays, but the First Empire wasn't the same. The System itself had scrubbed all mention of them from the universe wherever possible, even going so far as to mark any words related to their race or empire as taboo.
Needless to say, her research into their history and advancements was forbidden to the highest degree and she had a sneaking suspicion that if she'd stayed at home much longer, the Council of Elders would have sent an eradication squad after her.
Shaking the concerning thoughts from her mind, she looked down on her creation and reveled in the knowledge that soon everyone in Heaven's Shore would be allowed to benefit from her work…or at the very least be a proof of concept that it wouldn't turn everyone it affected to dust and remove their souls from the cycle of reincarnation.
Anymore.
The first few tests had been rough, but she considered herself lucky that her first designs, the obfuscation arrays, were effective enough to shield her from even her own people.
It was the first of its kind, on Earth at least, as most people used spells or skills to accomplish something similar. The problem with those was they created easy to track mana signatures that could send you directly to whoever was generating them.
Anger flared in her chest as she remembered their hypocrisy, willing to accept that technology to shield themselves but unwilling to pursue the grand work of accelerating humanity's growth.
"Oh, Restriel you can't force a soul to grow that fast, you'll destroy it," she spat mockingly.
Who cares if a few souls are destroyed if it means everyone else's are elevated to new heights?
She snorted as she remembered the looks on the investigator's face when he discovered her research on the limits of a soul. It was impossible to quantify a soul's limits, of course, since that seemed to be purely determined by some amount of fate. If you were lucky, you could become infinitely powerful, and if you were unlucky no amount of reincarnation would result in a strengthening of your soul.
Obviously people with such weak and impermanent souls deserved a chance to contribute, so using them as a resource to improve the strength of more deserving souls was the best option for them. They would be honored to be part of someone's foundation, and it was beyond her that someone would feel otherwise.
The Council put her on observation after that and she could already start to feel the noose tightening when they started nosing around some of her other labs. Of course they'd never find her research into the First, but she'd left before she could put that belief to the test.
Why test her own fate when she had so much work left to do?
Restriel continued making notes and muttering to herself as, far below her at the bottom of the lake and outside of her realm of perception, a crab wearing a human skull as a shell skittered away.
The water of Lake Pontchartrain seemed to practically glow with a teal light in the evening light as Chris looked out. There didn't seem to be anything strange, but the world had changed in enough ways to know that the appearance of normality was usually a sign of something being hidden more than anything else.
A message from Jet confirming that their idea to check the lake was a good starting place led the duo to where they were now, looking over yet another gorgeous view with little to no idea where to start.
The sound of a mournful cry rang out over the water and Chris felt a minor headache coming on at the thought of having to scour hundreds of miles worth of lake surface, not to mention what might be hiding beneath the waves.
Leon flashed him a smile and shot him a thumbs up and Chris gave him a small smile in response.
At least he wasn't alone.