"Based on the surveillance footage we pulled,"
Chaisi said, eyes on the road as he drove, "Ivan left the Westley Family Manor gates at 7:21 in the morning on November 16th and never looked back."
Not that the bodyguard had any reason to go back. The moment he had the Illusion in hand, he ditched the job without a word to anyone and made straight for Blackmoor City.
"What about his movements after he left the manor? How are you piecing that together?" The young woman in the passenger seat had long, thick dreadlocks dyed a deep purple — when they fell over her shoulders, they looked like a cascade of lavender.
"I have his GPS records. The route we're driving right now is the exact route he took on the 16th."
The young woman paused at that and shot him a look.
"I know," Chaisi said, his expression unchanged. "Just because a route shows up in his GPS doesn't mean that's actually the way he went."
"Right. I heard you have to pull the routing data directly from the manufacturer to know exactly where someone's been. Without police resources, that's not easy to manage."
Generally speaking, that was true.
But Chaisi had always had a knack for luck.
He quickly discovered that a small grocery store sat directly across from Ivan's apartment building. The owner lived on the second floor and had installed a smart security camera above the entrance, which caught everything coming and going on the street.
He posed as a police officer and had no trouble pulling the footage he needed — at 10:47 that morning, Ivan's car turned onto the street, circled for a bit, and nosed into a parking spot.
It was a Saturday, no rush-hour traffic. Ivan had made the trip from Upper State District to Blackmoor City in 3 hours and 26 minutes — only thirteen minutes over the GPS estimate. Given the overcast, rainy conditions that day, a difference of thirteen minutes was perfectly normal.
"If he'd taken a different route, the timing wouldn't line up this cleanly."
Every other GPS-suggested route would have added at least twenty minutes, and the numbers simply wouldn't add up. On top of that, Ivan was a man on the run with stolen goods — logic dictated he'd want to move as fast as possible, not take the scenic route.
That effectively ruled out the possibility that Ivan had made a detour somewhere along the way — his sister's place, a rented storage unit, dropping the Illusion off with someone else for safekeeping — because a difference of just thirteen minutes left no room for any of that.
But what if Ivan had called his sister in advance and arranged for her to meet him somewhere along the route?
He could have simply passed a package out the car window as he drove by. That kind of handoff would barely register on a travel record.
Chaisi dismissed that theory almost as quickly as he'd formed it.
He had access to everything Ivan owned, and pulling the call records from his carrier was straightforward — Ivan hadn't made a single outgoing call that morning. In the days before and after, there'd been no contact with his sister either. In fact, Ivan's entire call log for the 16th came down to two entries: one incoming call from the head of the security team demanding to know why he'd quit without notice, and one outgoing call that afternoon to a pizza place — a large pepperoni.
Nobody hands off a priceless Illusion to a random delivery driver.
If the two of them had known each other, that would be one thing — but according to the Hunter sent to look into it, the delivery guy had absolutely no connection to Ivan.
It was possible Ivan had used someone else's phone, though there was no evidence to support that — and Ivan didn't exactly strike anyone as the type to think several moves ahead.
Regardless, Chaisi still had to run down every possibility.
He had to bring back what Uncle Kai wanted. Nothing could stand in the way of that — nothing.
"Mr. Monroe, I have a question—"
"Chaisi is fine." He cut her off. "When other Hunters call me Mr. Monroe, it usually means they know they're in trouble."
Huangli hadn't been with the Family Faction long. Before this, she'd been a nobody — just another unremarkable Hunter. Then, not long ago, her reputation had spiked almost overnight, and suddenly everyone wanted her. Since she'd been brought into the Kai Family, today was the first time Chaisi had actually met her in person.
As far as Chaisi understood it, that kind of transformation wasn't unheard of among Hunters.
The Nest was a world unto itself — teeming with bizarre and inexplicable things. Beyond the Illusions that could be carried back into the world, Hunters might encounter creatures, rules, domains, or entities that defied every category imaginable. The intersections with those things produced consequences too varied and unpredictable to enumerate — and of course, not all of them were good.
Most of them weren't good at all.
But every so often, someone drew a winning hand — like Huangli. She came back from the Nest one day simply possessing abilities she hadn't had before.
"Chaisi," she corrected herself, and continued: "I ran a sweep of the Westley Family Manor. I can say for certain there isn't a single Illusion left in or around the grounds. And the whole drive here, I haven't sensed anything either. That supports the idea that the bodyguard took the Illusion straight to Blackmoor City after he grabbed it — that part all makes sense.
"What I can't figure out is: why, after getting home, did he just hole up and refuse to leave? If he stole an Illusion, he had to know what it meant and what it was worth. He had to know someone would eventually track him down. If it were me, I'd have gone home, grabbed the bare essentials, and bolted immediately — actually, no, I probably wouldn't have even gone home at all. I'd have left everything behind."
Before answering, Chaisi tilted his chin toward the window.
Outside, a heavy, grey sky hung low and sullen, perpetually threatening rain. Beneath it, dark green trees blurred past in muted streaks.
"Anything? Getting a reading?"
Huangli furrowed her brow, paused for a moment, then said, "The range is overlapping with my last sweep a fair bit… still nothing."
Chaisi checked the time and said nothing.
He had no idea how Huangli's ability actually worked.
Sensing Illusions was, for any Hunter, a fundamental and invaluable skill — but the problem was that Huangli's accuracy was appalling.
He'd been driving at fifty kilometers an hour for several minutes and still hadn't cleared the radius of her last sweep.
A rough estimate put her detection range at somewhere around five kilometers in every direction. As for where exactly within those five kilometers an Illusion might be — only God knew.
Was an ability this imprecise really worth poaching for a Hunter Family Faction?
Chaisi had never set foot in the Nest, so he had no answer to that question.
"Ivan was clever — in a small-time sort of way."
He pulled his attention back to the present, eyes fixed on the road ahead. "He knew someone would come looking for the Illusions that went missing from the study. So he decided to gamble — he bet he could fly under the radar."
"Fly under the radar?"
"If Westley's former bodyguard bolted the moment Westley turned up dead, everyone would immediately know something was off. And there's another thing — nobody knew yet whether Westley's death was even foul play. What if it was murder? The moment Ivan ran, he'd be tying himself to that as well.
"If Westley was killed, a fleeing Ivan would have drawn attention from three different directions.
"First, the police investigating the death. Second, whoever murdered Westley — the last thing they'd want is loose ends. Third, every Hunter Family Faction suspicious that he'd walked off with an Illusion."
Huangli nodded slowly. "That tracks… He was better off playing dumb. Even if he was going to run, he should at least lay low for the first few days and not draw any attention."
"Exactly. He couldn't stay in the manor — that would be the first place anyone searching for the Illusion would look. But Westley had fired him before he died, so Ivan had a perfectly clean excuse to leave. And since four Illusions had gone missing in total, and he'd only taken one, as long as he kept quiet about it, there was no reason for anyone to single him out."
"So how did you single him out?" Huangli asked, genuinely curious.
"…I got lucky."
"Lucky." Huangli kept her eyes on the road ahead, a smile playing on her lips. "I don't believe in luck. Everything I have, I earned myself."
What a young thing to say.
The Nest was no elementary school. The Nest did not reward sheer effort — but Chaisi kept that thought to himself.
"Is that right? Then I'm sure you won't care about what the other Hunters say about me."
"What do they say?"
"That the reason I'm so lucky is because I drain the luck from everyone around me."
Huangli seemed to take it as a joke and laughed — then glanced over at Chaisi. Like a cloud passing over the sun, the smile faded from her face, and she went quiet.
Anyone who became a Hunter had sharper instincts than most people. That came with the territory.
Following the GPS route, Chaisi came off the highway and crossed into Blackmoor City.
Forests of glass and steel towers, classical buildings that had stood through centuries and settled into permanence, neon advertisements layering light and shadow over one another, office workers striding briskly along the pavements, tourists perched on red double-decker sightseeing buses with their phones raised — it all assembled before him like pieces of a puzzle, gradually spreading out into the most vibrant, most vital, most varied metropolis in the world.
Chaisi had lived in Blackmoor City for thirty years, and the sum of everything he knew about it probably didn't scratch the surface. Running alongside its enormous, sprawling, wildly varied population was the unknowable — the certainty that no one could predict what the next moment might bring. Chaisi had never once thought about leaving Blackmoor City. Partly because of the Kai Family, yes — but also because he needed that uncertainty the way he needed air.
If every day of his life looked the same, he might as well already be dead and just waiting to be buried.
To cut down on distractions, Huangli closed her eyes and rolled down the window, as though listening for the pulse of the city.
"Nothing… nothing… Coming up on Brooklyn Fifth Street?… Nothing there either."
"You're sure?"
Huangli's eyes snapped open. "Wait!"
Chaisi lifted his foot off the accelerator. The moment the car slowed, a chorus of irritated horns erupted from the traffic behind them.
Blackmoor City residents were not known for their patience.
"There's something!" Huangli's eyes were wide, her head swiveling left and right — but a look of puzzlement hadn't left her face. "Hold on, let me just—"
"Where?"
Huangli didn't seem to hear him. She stuck her head out the window, held perfectly still for a few seconds, then dropped back into her seat with a thud.
"It's gone," she said quietly. "I thought there was an Illusion nearby… but it's strange, that feeling came and went in a flash. By the time I tried to focus in on it again, there was nothing. I'm telling you, my sense for these things is never wrong — I've never had this happen before…"
Came and went in a flash?
The car crept along. The honking and shouted curses from behind had been completely shut out of Chaisi's mind.
His attention swept outward like a searchlight, radiating in every direction — the road, the streets, the buildings, the pedestrians, the signage. Scenes he'd passed by countless times before pressed into his awareness with fresh, sharp clarity, each one registering as if for the first time.
An Illusion that "came and went in a flash" somewhere within a five-kilometer radius…
His eyes caught on something — a round sign in the distance bearing the letter D — and he felt a sudden flicker behind them.
A thought took shape.
He glanced over at the oncoming lane, timed a gap in the traffic, and wrenched the wheel hard without warning, cutting across half the road and swinging into the opposite lane.
Into the storm of screeching brakes, blaring horns, and shouted obscenities, he leaned on the center of the steering wheel and held it there — horn blaring in a continuous warning — as the car mounted the curb. Pedestrians scattered in both directions as though parted by a wave.
Huangli had a white-knuckle grip on the handle above her door. "What the hell are you doing? Where are you going? You're going to hit someone!"
The car rode half on the kerb and half on the road, tilted at an angle and pushing forward. They tore past a row of storefronts — close enough to send a customer who'd just stepped outside stumbling back, coffee spilling down his front.
The mayhem outside didn't register with Chaisi at all.
His eyes stayed locked on the road ahead. "I know where the Illusion is."