Every breath I drew in this medical bed felt like rubbing coarse sandpaper against the walls of my lungs. The "glass cup" inside my body was still cracked, stubbornly refusing to heal quickly.
Without a Sanguine Core that I could pump, I was nothing more than a crippled teenager hiding behind a white blanket.
The ward door creaked open. Finn, my roommate from the Outcast Dormitory who was always trembling in fear, poked his head inside. He carried a tray containing oat porridge and a glass of water.
"K-Kael?" called Finn nervously, his eyes darting wildly down the hallway before he entered and shut the door tight. "Here is your dinner."
I shifted my gaze from the chessboard beside the bed. "How did the message go, Finn?"
Finn swallowed hard, setting the tray down with trembling hands. "I-I delivered it to the tattooed man at the end of the lower district street, exactly as you ordered. B-but Kael, please, do not send me there again. That place is terrifying! Someone was stabbed in the alley right as I walked past!"
"Good work, Finn," I said calmly, ignoring his whining. I tossed him a silver coin, which he caught clumsily. "Take that. Keep your mouth shut, and you will survive both the instructor council and those thugs."
Finn nodded quickly and hurried out of the room.
I looked back at my chessboard. This feeling of vulnerability was truly infuriating. If tonight's reconnaissance plan went awry and my subordinates were caught, I would not be able to come to their rescue.
Tonight, I was hanging my life entirely on the street smarts of a bear and the magical precision of a bookworm.
Deep underground, far from the grandeur of the academic towers, the Lower District Black Market pulsed with its filthy nightlife.
The air inside the 'Broken Fang' Tavern felt incredibly thick. The smoke of cheap rolled cigars mingled with the sour sweat of mercenaries and the pungent perfume of cheap prostitutes. The clinking of silver and copper coins clashed with the sound of rough laughter and fists pounding on tables.
Ragnar Holt kicked the tavern door until it swung wide open.
"Hey, Barkeep!" roared Ragnar with a booming voice that silenced the entire room for two full seconds. He staggered in like a half-drunk man, then slammed a pouch of silver coins onto the sticky wooden bar counter.
"One keg of your cheapest black ale for me, and distribute the rest to the tables of those bastards over there! Tonight, Young Master Holt is treating!"
Raucous cheers immediately erupted from the thugs and lowly mercenaries. Ragnar grinned widely, throwing an arm around a drunken mercenary beside him.
From the outside, he looked like a foolish thug who had just won a massive gamble. Yet behind his drunken laughter, Ragnar's eyes were as sharp as an eagle's.
He observed the corners of the room. Three cold-faced men were collecting a pouch of coins from an illegal artifact merchant in the corner; those had to be Silas's men collecting their "security tax."
Ragnar carried his massive mug of ale toward a table near the dark hallway leading to the VIP Room, the place where Silas's safe was located. While laughing uproariously at his companion's vulgar joke, Ragnar pretended to stumble.
Splash. A little black ale spilled onto the stone floor right in the patrol path of that hallway.
"Hey, watch yourself, Giant!" cursed a guard knight who had just emerged from the hallway, glaring in disgust at the spilled ale before stepping over it and continuing his patrol toward the bar.
Ragnar merely laughed apologetically. However, inside his head, he began to count.
One... two... three...
Two minutes and thirteen seconds later, another pair of knight boots stepped into the exact same puddle of ale.
The patrol interval is only two minutes. Too tight, Ragnar thought. His watchful eyes then scrutinized the posture and equipment of the two guards standing rigidly in front of the steel door of the VIP Room.
Ragnar narrowed his eyes. Those guards were not street thugs. They wore dull black chest plate armor that did not reflect the tavern's lamplight.
There were no engravings, no emblems. Just pitch black.
Pitch-black steel with no reflection... military-grade anti-magic armor. Ragnar swallowed hard, hiding his surprise by gulping his ale ravenously.
Damn it! A frontal magic attack will not work on them. Kael was right, this Silas is a pet dog of the upper-class faction.
Exactly twenty meters below the soles of Ragnar's boots, the atmosphere changed drastically to become silent, freezing, and incredibly damp.
Virelith pulled her increasingly wet gray cloak tighter. These ancient Aethelgard sewers smelled of stale waste and rotting moss. Water droplets fell echoing from the arched stone ceiling, creating a terrifying rhythm amidst the darkness.
She held a moldy blueprint in her left hand, while the tip of the wooden staff in her right hand emitted a dim magical glow just enough to see two meters ahead.
A sewer rat the size of a cat hissed angrily at her before scurrying away into the filthy water.
"Combat engineer, he said," grumbled Virelith softly, almost a whisper. "More like a treasure-hunting sewer rat. If my dress smells like crap forever, I am going to throw a brick at Draven's face."
Despite her complaining mouth, Virelith's brain and magical instincts worked with deadly surgical precision. She knew the elite guards above possessed acute hearing. Earth magic did not always have to create earthquakes; in the right hands, it was the perfect infiltration tool.
Virelith channeled mana into the sewer floor. Instantly, an incredibly fine and dense layer of dust formed covering the soles of her boots. That dust layer acted as an absolute sound-dampening cushion.
Every step Virelith took was now as light as a shadow, completely inaudible even as she stepped on rough rocks.
After traversing the winding corridors for fifteen minutes, Virelith stopped at a dead-end intersection. She looked at the blueprint in her hand, then stared at the stone ceiling above her.
The blind spot. Right beneath the foundation of Silas's vault room, Virelith thought.
She folded the blueprint, stowing it inside her cloak. Virelith took a deep breath, relaxing her muscles. She had to feel the density of the stone above her using earth mana to determine how thick the foundation was, so she could dig a hole without triggering massive vibrations on the floor above.
Virelith raised her right hand, pressing her pale, bare palm against the cold stone ceiling surface. She closed her eyes, letting her earth mana slowly seep into the pores of the rock.
Just a little more... the stone is thick, but there is an empty space behind it...
Suddenly, her mana struck something unnatural. Not the density of stone, nor metal. It was something alive, pulsating, and incredibly evil.
ZZZZZT!
A dark red sting of magical energy exploded from within the stone, striking her palm instantly.
"ARGH!"
Virelith was thrown backward, falling into a sitting position in the filthy sewer water. She bit her lower lip hard to hold back a scream so it would not be heard above. Her breathing raced rapidly.
The girl stared at her own palm, which was now smoking. Her skin was blistered red, and there were traces of black lines resembling veins spreading around the wound, delivering a burning pain straight to the bone.
"Crazy..." whispered Virelith with eyes widened in horror, recognizing the pattern of that evil energy. "This is not physical security. This is curse magic..."
Without wasting time, Virelith scrambled to her feet. She covered her blistered hand with her cloak fabric, turned around, and ran through the darkness of the sewers as fast as she could, leaving her sound-dampening layer slowly fading behind her.
Reconnaissance mission complete. And the result was deadly bad news.
The ancient clock hands on the medical ward wall pointed to two in the morning.
My window was opened from the outside. Ragnar slipped in with an agility surprising for his massive body size.
A few seconds later, the ward door opened and Virelith sneaked in. Both looked incredibly exhausted, and their stench truly contaminated the smell of antiseptic potions in my room. The smell of sour ale and the stench of sewer waste.
I looked at them alternately. "Report?"
Ragnar leaned his body against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. His thuggish face no longer bore a drunken smile.
"Your plan to storm straight from the front will fail completely, Kael," reported Ragnar with a heavy tone. "The guards in front of Silas's vault are not street thugs. There are a dozen mercenary knights in the VIP room, and their patrol shift only has a two-minute gap."
"That can be handled with a distraction," I replied calmly.
"That is not the main problem," interrupted Ragnar. "They wear dull black armor. Military-grade anti-magic armor. Our Engineer's mud magic will not be able to penetrate their skin, and my ordinary sword needs time to crack it."
I tapped my index finger on the nightstand table. "Anti-magic armor. Silas is very heavily guarded by the Nightbane faction. Then, what about the underground route, Virelith?"
Virelith stepped forward approaching the lamplight on the nightstand. Her face was deathly pale. Wordlessly, she pulled up her robe sleeve and revealed her right palm.
Her skin was severely blistered, with traces of black lines looking like rotting veins around it. Ragnar, seeing it, even pulled his face back slightly.
"Did you touch an acid trap?" guessed Ragnar.
"Worse than that," answered Virelith with a voice trembling slightly holding back the sting. "I managed to find the blind spot. But the foundation floor of that vault is not only guarded by stone and thick steel. Someone planted an Explosive Rune inside the stone structure."
Virelith looked straight at me, her eyes implying pragmatic despair. "It is not an ordinary elemental rune, Kael. It is based on a Blood Curse, a legacy of the Black Tower's forbidden magic. If I force my earth magic to destroy the stone from below, or if there is a wrong vibration, that rune will respond to the mana change. The entire black market building will explode to ashes with us inside it."
Silence instantly blanketed the medical ward. Ragnar cursed roughly in his heart, realizing they had hit an impenetrable steel wall both from the front and from below.
"This operation is a failure, Kael," sighed Ragnar, massaging the bridge of his nose. "We have to find another target in Orvelis's veins. Silas is guarded too crazily."
Instead of panicking, getting angry, or aborting the mission, I merely fell silent, staring at the small chessboard before me.
One second passed. Two seconds.
Slowly, the pain in my chest that had been torturing me earlier seemed to evaporate just like that. My Sanguine Core, which for the past two days had throbbed weakly like a dying person, suddenly vibrated joyfully within my chest cavity, responding to one specific word just uttered by Virelith.
A cold, dark, and terrifying grin formed on my pale face. I lifted my head, looking at my two elite subordinates who were confused seeing my smile.
"An explosive rune based on a Blood Curse?" I whispered, repeating those words as if they were the chant of a beautiful poem.
I chuckled softly, a laugh that made the temperature in the medical ward seem to drop a few degrees.
"Silas the Snake just made the most fatal mistake in his entire pathetic lifespan," I said quietly, staring sharply out the window at the brightly shining moon. "By the Gods... he installed a security system using the only weapon in this world that actually makes me its master."