The Path of Ruin

After all the training he had received, all the practice he had done, Kael had thought that infiltrating a place would be at least a little bit easier.

Not much, just a little bit...

Oh, how wrong he was...

'Why the hell is there so much security in this place?!'

The mansion was surrounded by guards, trained dogs, controlled checkpoints, and much more.

He had to think about every step he took, calculate every point he wanted to make.

It took him forty minutes of analysis and calculation to get into the garden, let alone inside the mansion, without getting caught!

Well, in the end... he succeeded. And as long as he got what he wanted, it didn't really matter how much time he spent.

Still, it was frustrating!

He calmed himself, took a deep breath.

'Now...'

He had managed to sneak in by disrupting the dogs' sense of smell.

And yes, he could ruin animals' senses too.

But his next problem was to get inside the mansion. Though, this... was easier than he thought.

Moving step by step through the garden without anyone noticing, he spotted the baron's office, and keeping his ability active, he climbed to the roof.

Then... he could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Thanks to the structure of the building, the roof had ledges for the rooms and recesses above the corridors. This gave him a few spaces where he could deactivate his ability without worrying for the first time.

And in this space... he waited for quite a long time.

He was hiding behind the bulge just above the baron's office. No one could see him, and the dogs in the garden couldn't smell him from here.

Basically, he was quite comfortable here.

And comfortable meant there was plenty of time to formulate the perfect plan.

Kael lay down, closed his eyes, and used his eon to enhance his senses. The Baron's office was just below him, after all... even if there was a wall in between.

So he thought that if he developed his senses to a certain degree, he would be able to hear his movements, his voices.

And he did.

Although he could have used more eon, to avoid the few Bearers or, in the unlikely event, Followers in the mansion, he was limiting himself. So what he could hear was not extremely clear, some things were even difficult to make out...

But it was enough.

He could hear the baron humming a melody. He could also make out the sounds of the papers on his desk, which he was constantly moving around and scribbling on, though it was difficult if he focused on them.

That's how he knew where the baron was in the room.

He calculated how far away he was from the window, and even made tiny calculations to figure out where his face was looking.

Ten minutes into his analysis, though... there was a knock on the baron's door.

"Come in."

Kael focused all his attention on his ears. He turned off all his other senses and pushed his hearing to its maximum.

"Ah, Sirbas. I've been waiting for you."

'Sirbas...?'

It was... a name he did not know.

The person who entered, Sirbas, closed the door and approached the baron's desk.

"Any news?"

"Yes, sir."

It was a... man. His voice sounded very strange, quite... thin. But he could still tell it was a man.

"Nice! What is the news?"

Kael couldn't help frowning. What could make a baron so... excited?

Sirbas didn't answer, on the contrary, he moved closer to the baron's desk and then silence fell over the room.

'Did he give him something? I couldn't hear a sound...'

The silence continued for a few more seconds. But finally...

"Great! That's excellent news."

Kael tried hard not to click his tongue. Sirbas had given him something, probably a piece of paper, and the baron had read it completely inward.

'Maybe he'll comment on something?'

But... he couldn't hear anything from the baron. Absolute silence reigned in the room. The only problem was that he knew Sirbas had not left the room, that he was still standing there.

'Why are they so quiet?'

Kael waited a while longer. But there was no sound from inside...

And with that, suddenly, his eyes widened, a possibility entered his mind.

'Did they... notice me?'

Fear gripped his whole body. He opened his eyes and looked around, waiting for someone who was about to pounce on him...

But no one came.

He was alone...

And that's when a faint voice entered his ear, the voice of the baron. A low, incomprehensible sentence of some sort...

He quickly closed his eyes and focused on his ears again.

But the baron had already finished talking.

"Understood, sir."

With those words, Sirbas left the room. And Kael... made the mistake of not hearing what the baron was saying and stayed where he was.

If he hadn't had to hide, he would have scolded himself out loud, but he didn't. What had happened had happened. Now, he just had to keep doing what he had to do.

To keep waiting, to keep analyzing.

And so... a day passed.

He kept analyzing.

Then two days.

Three days...

Kael hid on the roof the whole time. He had problems with food or things like that, of course... but with little things like a piece of bread he had taken with him before entering the mansion, they weren't too big a problem.

In the end... he had achieved his goal.

He had learned the baron's daily routines. He figured out where certain things were, what time the servants came in at night.

He also learned a few useless things.

The baron was cheating on his wife, for example.

And that the reason he didn't have a child was because he was infertile, even though he was hiding it from everyone.

And he didn't know why, but the baron had a habit of muttering meaningless things over and over. Kael wondered if he was crazy more than once.

Still, it didn't matter.

He could finally take action and that was what mattered.

With that, he waited for nightfall.

The Baron usually worked late into the night, only then sleeping, waking up at noon, and getting back to work. So Kael had to wait under the cover of darkness for quite a long time.

And the baron rose from his desk only three hours before sunrise. He stretched, yawned sleepily. Then he did a few things, like organizing the files in his room, and finally went to sleep.

Kael moved rather quickly. He stepped perfectly down from the roof, avoiding any eyes that might see him, and stood in front of the office window.

The Baron left the window slightly open to allow the room to ventilate. In this way, he had no trouble sneaking in.

Since the Baron's sleeping hours often varied, the servants never entered the office at night, and when they woke with the rising of the sun, they started to clean up. In short... he had three whole hours.

The design of the room and the positioning of the furniture were as he had imagined it when he was on the roof. Only... it was fancier than he had imagined.

Still, he didn't waste time on that and quickly approached the baron's desk.

When the baron worked, he often heard the sound of drawers opening and closing, so he would check them first.

So he began to rummage through one drawer after another, examining the files.

There were many things in the files. Things that concerned the town, a few files about the renovation of the mansion, a list of women he had cheated on his wife with, and many other things...

'Why don't they put these things in more secret places...?'

He put aside the list of women with whom the baron had cheated on his wife. When he was sure there was nothing useful in this drawer, he put it back the way it was before and moved on to the next.

He found many things. Yet the vast majority of what he found had to do with things that the baron already had to do, and the rest was unnecessary.

But when he realized that he had finished searching every drawer in the desk, he frowned. He stood up and started rummaging through the cabinets fixed to the wall just behind the desk.

There were quite thick files and books in the cabinets.

But not all of them, again, were useful.

'How surprising... The Baron was actually a decent, dedicated man...'

Kael could not help but praise the man. What he was doing was really about growing his town, his business, and his future. Likewise, he didn't persecute his people. In fact, they liked him very much.

'Leaving aside the cheating on his wife, of course...'

Which, as far as he could tell, very few people knew.

'Whatever.'

He looked through the books in the cabinet, searching for something hidden, but he couldn't find it. Finally, realizing that nothing worthwhile was going to come out of here either, he put everything back the way it was and closed the cabinet door.

The same thing happened in another one.

And then in another...

Finally, with a sigh, he walked across the center of the room, slowly turning around, looking carefully at every corner of the room.

He couldn't see anything that caught his attention.

His face twitching, he narrowed his eyes and began to search every corner of the room more carefully.

But the man had nothing illegal to do or anything to indicate his connection to Feria Lockhend.

"Tch."

He clicked his tongue, closed his eyes, and began to scan his memory, and then paused as a thought occurred to him.

'Now that I think about it... who was that Sirbas?'

Since the first time he had heard of the man, he had never seen him enter the baron's office again. It was as if... he had disappeared.

'Where could he have gone?'

He hadn't found any files related to him inside. So his existence had slipped his mind a little.

Now, though... he had no other suspects but the person called Sirbas.

~creak!

He suddenly paused.

'Is that... the door?'

His eyes widened as he realized what the sound was. He quickly turned to the door of the office.

'The fucking door!'