Chapter 365: No One Can Escape

"I'll eat the biggest one. You lot can divide the rest."

"After we win, the power gets divided by contribution. I'll take the lion's share; you split what's left."

"And if we lose..."

He tilted his head.

"If we lose, a few new heads will go up in the darkness above us... even if they're our own."

Loki fell silent, waiting for everyone to digest his words.

Lillian sat in her chair, her fingertips cold.

In the quiet, she silently calculated the cost.

Winning three displacement battles, plus the fight against Baldr, had barely sustained her continuous depletion.

But the Path of the Abyss leaked as much as it took in; the barrel itself was cracked.

Team battles were another source of income. Winning meant a share of the power, and even a small portion was better than waiting around with nothing.

However, they had six people on their side, and the enemy had five. With so many involved, the situation would be chaotic. The risk of a team battle was far greater than that of a displacement battle.

Not to mention, someone who had "just touched the threshold of a Major Adept" was sitting at that Celtic table.

Loki claimed he could eat their strongest member, but what if he failed to finish the job?

What if the enemy dragged someone down with them as they died?

Lillian thought about the spoils she had recently accumulated.

Was all her current capital enough to gamble on a team battle?

She didn't answer Loki, and no one else at the table was eager to speak up first, either.

The False Flame danced in the hall, illuminating the obscured faces beneath their masks.

Loki took his legs off the armrests, sitting up straight in a rare display of seriousness.

"But then again."

"The Celtic table is, frankly speaking, just an appetizer."

Freyja glanced at him.

Loki ignored her and kept talking.

"The highest among those sitting at their table has barely touched the threshold of a Major Adept."

He continued in the tone of someone discussing a menu.

"Once we finish this dish, the real main course will be served."

"For the tables we'll be dealing with after that, the people sitting there won't be below the Major Adept rank."

Loki reached out, making a grasping motion in the empty air.

"I've roughly counted the tables within the Empire that are on our level."

"There is one table with more than one Major Adept."

As those words fell upon the table, everyone grew serious.

Two Major Adepts sitting at the same table meant the head of that table was at least stronger than an ordinary Major Adept.

One Major Adept, plus someone capable of subjugating both them and a group of Minor Adepts—just thinking about it made it clear they would be difficult to deal with.

"There are one or two other tables where, aside from the head Major Adept, the rest are all Minor Adepts. They aren't easy to handle, either."

Loki withdrew his hand.

"The Celtic table is just a warm-up."

"I've already drawn up the menu for the main course."

"We'll leave the table with two Major Adepts alone for now."

"After eating the Celts, we still won't be tough enough. Crashing into them right away would just turn us into an extra side dish for them."

Hela spoke up. "Which table exactly do you want to hit first?"

The corners of Loki's mouth twitched beneath his mask.

"There are three backup options. I've ranked them from easiest to hardest to chew."

He held up a finger.

"The first choice: the Greek Theogony."

Lillian's fingertips twitched against her knee.

She didn't even realize she had done it; by the time she noticed, her fingers had already returned to resting flat.

"The Greek table has an uneven level of strength," Loki assessed.

"Sitting at the head is Hecate, a Major Adept hidden one of the Web Weaving Tradition.

"Her methods are decent, but head-on collisions aren't her strong suit."

He raised a second finger.

"The rest of the chairs at the table are a mix of Practitioners and Minor Adepts, with one or two having only recently advanced to Minor Adept."

Hela pressed on, "And the second and third?"

"At the second table, aside from their leader, everyone is a Minor Adept. They hold the title of the Roman Pantheon.

"Their head, Minerva, is a Major Adept Scholar of the Star Map tradition. She'll be a bit harder to deal with than the Greek side."

"The third table belongs to the system from the Black Soil River Basin. Sitting there are one Major Adept and two Minor Adepts; the rest are all Practitioners.

"It sounds like they might be weaker than the Greek table, but their head, Apophis, is a Scholar maniac walking the Path of the Abyss. I really don't want to clash with him."

A Major Adept Scholar of the Abyss. Hearing this sent a chill through everyone present.

Loki chuckled. "But those walking the Abyss Tradition are all short-lived ghosts. He might just drop dead out of nowhere one day, saving us the trouble."

Freyja turned the three options over in her mind.

"The head of the Greek table uses the Web Weaving Tradition... the traps she sets definitely won't be few."

"No matter how many traps there are, they're just paper," Loki dismissed.

"What a web-weaver fears most is someone who refuses to walk into the web. If you flip the table and tear the net, she can't hold out on her own."

"What about the Roman table?" Freyja asked.

"You lot might not be able to handle six Minor Adepts." Loki shook his head.

"The gap in strength isn't large. Even if we win, we'll lose half our skin in the process."

"And the Black Soil River table goes without saying."

"Therefore, the safest first bite of our main course is the Greek table."

The candidates wrapped in the Curtain in the corner had no right to speak, but Lillian could feel their gazes shifting among the alternatives.

Tyr was the first to state his position, the one-armed man patting the table with his remaining hand.

"I agree with hitting Greece first."

"No matter how fancy the web-weaving head's tricks are, she can't withstand a head-on assault."

"This table has no shortage of people willing to fight head-on. Let Fenrir clear the path first, Freyja and I will flank from the wings, and Hela will provide continuous attrition."

"Simple, clean, and to the point."

Freyja didn't nod along immediately.

"Hecate might bring in other helpers when the time comes."

"How do you know?" Loki tilted his head.

Freyja didn't answer the question directly:

"What I mean is, hitting her is fine, but don't treat her like a soft target."

"The Web Weaving Tradition is best at making you think you've won."

Loki grinned.

"Freyja is right. We just need to pay extra attention."

He swept his gaze across the corner before finally letting it rest on Lillian.

"Skadi, what about you?"

Lillian felt the gaze of the entire table turn toward her in unison.

"I have no objections."

Loki stared at her for two seconds. "Alright, then we take the Celtic table first, and Greece second."

The serpent above his head dripped saliva, dropping right into the stitches of his mask.

"There's no rush for now. Go back and prepare well."

"Those people won't be able to escape anyway."

"No one can escape."

The False Flame, empty cups, and cold banquet in the hall seemed to grow a fraction colder after those words fell.

Lillian stood up, preparing to leave.

As she stepped out of her stone chair, she felt a gaze follow her from behind. It belonged to Freyja.

The candidates stood in the corner wrapped in the Curtain, the living and the dead crowding together in the same space.

On his high chair, Loki's aura was much thicker than the first time she had entered.

In every displacement battle, no matter who won or lost, he was always the one taking the biggest cut.

The winners sat in their chairs and continued to watch the door, fight, and feed him blood.

The losers turned into severed heads, hung in the darkness above him to accumulate power for his sake.

When she woke up, outside the window lay a winter night in the Imperial Capital.

Someone was singing on a distant street. The few intermittent syllables made it impossible to tell if it was playing from a phonograph or if someone was humming behind a window.

Lillian looked down at her hands.

Their color was a shade paler than last month, her capillaries visible through her fingernails.

The price of the Path of the Abyss gnawed from the outside in.

Ms. Holloway had told her that she would next start losing things she "used to think were very important but later realized weren't that necessary."

After her sense of taste went her perception of hot and cold; after her perception of hot and cold went her sense of pain; after her sense of pain...

"We'll talk about what happens after when it gets to that point."

Ms. Holloway had smiled as she explained all this, holding a cup of coffee.

The coffee had been steaming, looking scalding hot, yet she drank it all without batting an eye.

Lillian pulled her hand back beneath the covers, wrapping herself up like a caterpillar.

The blanket was cold, too, but she could no longer tell.

The girl rolled over, facing the wall.

A titmouse sat motionless on the windowsill.

...

On the other side, Richard opened his eyes as well.

A light rain was falling outside, and the Spirit Realm Messenger had yet to arrive.

The items wouldn't be delivered until Hecate finished her end of the process. The messenger used delivery channels behind the veil, so their schedule was rather irregular.

While waiting for the messenger, Richard ran through all the intelligence he had gathered from tonight's gathering in his mind.

"Resonance Stage. The mask's shadow radiating."

Messaging, crossing realms, Ferrying... he had his shadow run through every single path governed by the Mask of Hermes dozens of times.

If he still couldn't achieve resonance after all that, the mask was probably broken.

The images of tonight resurfaced in his mind; just looking at those two Divinely Crafted Armaments made him envious.

What did Hermes possess in mythology?

Winged sandals (Talaria), allowing him to tread upon the wind;

The Kerykeion, bringing peace to all things, resolving disputes, and Ferrying the dead;

The Helm of Invisibility (borrowed from Hades), allowing him to pass through the Underworld undetected;

The Seven-Stringed Lyre: invented on the day of his birth using a tortoise shell and ox gut, later gifted to Apollo in exchange for forgiveness (for stealing Apollo's sacred cattle);

The Reed Pipe (Syrinx): made of reeds, once used to hypnotize the hundred-eyed giant Argus to relieve Zeus's siege.

What Richard could obtain depended on how far his resonance reached.

Moreover, Hermes himself possessed immense untapped potential.

In addition, he was nearly at the requirements for Shadow Inversion.

He had considered many possibilities for what he might get from inverting the mask.

While his thoughts were churning, the Spirit Realm Messenger arrived.

A gray moth landed on the windowsill; after folding its wings, it melted into a small Cloth Bag right where it sat.

Richard untied the bag and tallied the contents one by one:

The two items Heracles had entrusted him to appraise (the cornflower bronze clasp and the small lead cylinder), as well as the no-man's-land identity tag gifted to him, were each wrapped separately in cotton cloth.

As for the handful of dirt from the no-man's-land, it was only for show; it was a cursed object that needed disposing of.

Demeter's Name-Recording Tassel, wrapped in oil paper.

The Frost Branch and three pods, stored in their own thin Cloth Bag.

And there were various loose pieces of Ether Condensate, the batches meant as payment for his appraisal services.

As usual, Richard performed divination first, running a safety check over every single item.

The Tarot Cards and Runestones danced across his desk for over ten minutes without showing any anomalies.

What needed storing was stored, what needed sealing was sealed. With the tally complete, it was time to sleep.

Rain was still falling outside. The fine rustling pressed against the glass sounded like someone gently scratching it with their fingernails.

Tide-Shifting Breathing engaged automatically, and Wild Sleep swept him into a clean, seamless slumber.

At seven-thirty the next morning, he washed his face, threw on his coat, and headed downstairs.

People were already walking along the main road of the Academy District, most of them students rushing to early classes.

A newsboy clutched a stack of papers to his chest, his voice scraped sharp and hoarse by the freezing wind.

"Morning post! The East Coast has been shelled!"

Richard handed over a penny and pulled a copy from the stack.

A massive headline stretched across the front page:

"Enemy Ships Shell East Coast Civilians! Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby Suffer Indiscriminate Bombardment!"

A photograph accompanied the text, showing a hotel in Scarborough with half its wall sheared off.

Rubble and shattered brick lay strewn across the pavement. Curtains hung limply from a second-floor window frame set into the ruined wall, caked in plaster dust.

The caption beneath the photo read: "Royal Hotel, Scarborough, 8:00 AM, December 16."

Richard flipped to the second page.

"The Whitby Abbey Ruins suffered direct hits from two artillery shells, causing further collapse to the remains of the main tower.

"Residents along the Yorkshire coast have expressed outrage over this unprovoked attack..."

He folded the paper, tucked it under his arm, and continued his walk toward Imperial Capital University.

What he had heard at the table last night perfectly aligned with the freshly inked newspaper in his hand, echoing through the newsboy's cries.

By the afternoon, the recruitment posters on the noticeboards around the Academy District had been swapped for a new design.

"Remember Scarborough!"

The illustration depicted a mother clutching her child amidst ruins. The child's face was painted crimson; the artist had used bright red to portray sheer terror and outrage.

The mother's face stared out at the viewer, with a single line of text running beneath:

"Your country needs you! Avenge the innocent!"

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