Chapter 647

"Hahahaha!"

The Eredar twins were sprawled across the couch, laughing so hard they’d kicked off their high heels. Their bare feet waved through the air as they struggled to catch their breath.

Under normal circumstances, Evenson would have happily sat down and enjoyed the spectacle.

Right now, however, he had his face buried in the couch cushions.

He wasn’t coming out.

There was no dignity left to salvage.

"Heh... heh... what exactly were you thinking?" Saloras finally managed to choke out. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. "Do you really think we’re that desperate?"

"And even if we were..."

Oleses casually hooked a finger beneath her sister’s chin, teasingly lifting it while her red tail curled around and slapped against Saloras.

"We wouldn’t necessarily have to call you over for that."

"Hmph."

Evenson turned his head just enough to expose one eye.

"Can you blame me? You two called me in the middle of the damn night, picked the most suggestive wording possible, and told me the bathroom had exploded and that you needed a plumber."

He grimaced.

"What was I supposed to think?"

"Hey, we said the bathroom exploded because the bathroom exploded," Saloras said, slipping one stockinged foot into her recovered heel. "And you’re the one who came up with the plumber part. None of that was our fault."

She pointed at him.

"So the problem isn’t that we were being suggestive."

A smug smile spread across her face.

"It’s that your mind is filthy."

"I’m a Warlock," Evenson muttered, burying his face deeper into the cushions.

"What do you expect?"

"We’re Warlocks too," Oleses immediately shot back. "And not just any Warlocks. Eredar Warlocks."

She folded her arms.

"So why should our minds be any cleaner than yours?"

"Okay! Fine!"

Evenson gave up.

He yanked his head out of the couch and revealed a face bright red with embarrassment.

"Stop laughing at me and tell me what actually happened!"

To be fair, Evenson had brought this on himself.

The moment he’d ended the twins’ call, he’d practically sprinted to the bathroom to wash, dry himself off, and make himself presentable. Then he’d teleported straight to the company’s most classified location: the twins’ private domain, the Final Doctrine.

Except they weren’t there.

Someone had told him they were waiting for him in the executive office on the top floor.

His eyebrows had shot up.

Had he’d somehow triggered a special event?

Apparently not.

He’d taken the elevator to the top floor only to discover that reality was considerably less exciting.

The company’s public restroom on the first floor really had exploded.

Which raised another question.

Why?

The moment Evenson heard the word exploded, he thought of bearded terrorists.

But what kind of terrorist infiltrated the heart of America just to blow up a bathroom?

And if they’d come to rob the place...

What exactly was there to steal from a bathroom?

At most, they could haul away a toilet.

A ceramic, water-saving toilet.

"Take a look at this."

Oleses picked up a tablet, swiped across the screen, and turned it toward him.

Evenson looked at the photograph.

"Ugh."

His expression immediately soured.

The picture showed a toilet containing a severed human head.

Unlike someone who had simply drowned face-first in the bowl, however, the corpse was staring upward.

Its eyes were wide.

Its face was twisted in agony.

Blood had run from every opening.

"Someone’s head," Evenson muttered.

His expression became thoughtful.

"Someone was murdered in the building, and whoever did it tried to dispose of the body in the bathroom?"

He looked at the twins.

"Who is he? And where’s the rest of him?"

"We checked," Saloras said.

"He isn’t one of our employees."

She smiled coldly.

"As for the rest of him..."

Her smile widened.

"It’s all there."

Evenson blinked.

"What?"

Oleses took over.

"When our people investigated, they discovered that his head hadn’t been severed at all. It was still attached to the body."

She pointed toward the tablet.

"The problem is that everything below his neck had been forced into a drainage pipe only ten centimeters in diameter."

Evenson’s expression went blank.

"They..."

"Got crushed."

"Right."

Oleses continued.

"His body was compressed so thoroughly that it actually made him considerably shorter."

"I’m starting to understand the expression on his face."

Evenson shuddered.

A full-grown adult being forced into a curved drainage pipe barely four inches across was horrifying enough to imagine.

And if he’d still been alive when it happened...

No.

Evenson didn’t want to think about that.

"But this kind of thing..."

He rubbed his chin.

"Unless this company has been haunted by some kind of murderous ghost that dragged him into the toilet when he came in to use it..."

He paused.

"Or..."

"An error in a teleportation spell."

Saloras supplied the alternative.

And that explanation was considerably more plausible.

Most mages who used teleportation magic were painfully cautious about it.

But every profession had its idiots.

Take Millhouse Manastorm, for example. The gnome had somehow managed to teleport himself directly into a prison cell inside the Violet Hold.

Though, to be fair, he’d survived long enough to serve out his sentence.

Other mages hadn’t been so lucky.

Some had teleported themselves directly into trees, only to materialize with a massive splinter through their hearts.

Others had appeared inside mountains and suffocated.

Some had teleported into volcanoes.

There were endless ways for a careless mage to die.

And this poor bastard might have managed to teleport directly into a toilet and its drainage system.

Under normal circumstances, he shouldn’t have died.

If a human body suddenly materialized inside a drainage pipe, the body should have forced the pipe apart.

The pipe should have ruptured.

The problem was that this wasn’t a normal building.

The Eredar twins had acquired it through their connections with Ross. Before that, it had been a legitimate military research facility hidden in the city.

For security purposes, the exterior had been made to resemble an ordinary office building.

The interior was another matter.

Large portions of the structure had been constructed to the standards of a military fortress.

The plumbing was no exception.

Bathrooms were considered prime targets during special operations and were therefore heavily reinforced.

The drainage pipes weren’t plastic.

They were reinforced concrete.

The kind that could apparently withstand a grenade being tossed down them when the plumbing got clogged.

Human flesh, unfortunately, was not as durable as reinforced concrete.

"Teleportation magic..."

Evenson stroked his chin.

"This is starting to sound suspicious."

His expression sharpened.

"Could he have been one of Ancient One’s people? If so, why teleport into our building? And how did he get in?"

If the man knew teleportation magic, there was a good chance he was connected to Kamar-Taj.

But the motive wasn’t even the biggest problem.

The fact that he’d managed to teleport inside the building at all was suspicious.

The twins had layered the entire structure with protective enchantments.

The dimensional anchors were locked down so tightly that even Evenson couldn’t simply open a demonic portal from outside and teleport himself in.

The only reason he could freely teleport around inside was because he’d been allowed to establish his own magical formations throughout the building.

"He... may indeed have been one of the Ancient One’s people."

Saloras slid the tablet toward him again.

"This is the security footage from the incident."

Evenson took the tablet.

The footage showed the hallway outside the bathroom.

Naturally, there were no cameras inside the restroom. Even a heavily secured building had standards.

Security cameras in the bathroom crossed the line from security into something considerably creepier.

It had been the middle of the night, and the hallway was deserted.

Then the bathroom door suddenly collapsed.

The entire doorframe came down with it.

People spilled out onto the floor.

Dozens of them.

A man who appeared to be their leader crawled out of the pile. He wore his hair in a long braid.

He climbed to his feet, looked around, and immediately waved the others forward.

Then he ran.

Straight out of the building.

Evenson’s eyebrows rose.

At least thirty people followed him.

No wonder the door had collapsed.

The bathroom had only five stalls.

Thirty people suddenly materializing inside a room that small would have packed them together like sardines.

Their clothing was equally revealing.

They all wore simple martial-arts uniforms, remarkably similar to the robes worn by the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj.

"Oh."

Evenson frowned.

"That bathroom."

He thought about it.

That particular restroom really was special.

It was the building’s weakest point when it came to spatial defenses.

Not because it had been left unprotected.

Because the twins had deliberately made it that way for him.

Evenson could teleport into the building.

That didn’t mean he could teleport out from anywhere inside it.

So the twins had intentionally weakened the spatial lockdown around the first-floor public restroom, giving him a designated point through which he could teleport back out.

That made the bathroom a weak point.

And these people had found it.

"The fact that it’s a weak point doesn’t mean it’s undefended."

Evenson shook his head.

"There are still powerful spatial interference fields in that area. The weakened frequencies were specifically calibrated for me."

He looked back at the footage.

"That’s why this idiot had such a spectacular failure. He tried to teleport directly into the toilet."

He shrugged.

"But still. Only one person died out of more than thirty. I’ll give them that."

"Ahem."

Oleses cleared her throat.

"Actually... the man who teleported into the toilet isn’t the only impressive one."

Evenson looked at her.

"They had about twenty others."

She scratched her head awkwardly.

"They teleported directly into the spatial labyrinth."

Evenson’s eyebrows climbed.

"Oh?"

"So there are survivors?"

He immediately straightened.

"Pull them out. We can question them and find out what they were trying to accomplish."

"Uh..."

Oleses looked away.

"I may have forgotten to mention something."

Saloras raised one hand.

"I might have as well."

Evenson slowly looked between them.

Oleses cleared her throat.

"I placed more than a hundred Flame Spirits inside the spatial maze."

Saloras raised her hand a little higher.

"And I put more than a hundred Shadow Wraiths in there."

Silence.

Evenson stared at them.

The twins stared back.

Apparently, the investigation was going to require a little more archaeology than expected.