Chapter 22: Closet meet

(In a secret room, Mayn castle: )

"Do they not deserve affection and pity just because they are born different? What of the nobles? They’re human, humans!"

Andrew was angry at what he had seen in the mage tower. He had seen the demonic cruelties.

He knew how those at the higher ends of the society operate, he knew the gorydamn things they do to their children.

The Mayn was still comparatively much better. The other kingdoms, the empire, the wilds beyond that... survival of the fittest, forced Darwinism, and experiments so damned even the world association had to sanction a ban on some things were still pretty common there.

The world was a cruel place, but he knew that.

He wasn’t emotional because such ugly things were happening with the people in that tower... he was angry about someone he had lost to cruelty like that.

Seeing these things reminded him of that time. It was something that happened a long time ago, and all three of his current partners knew about that past.

"It’s alright, it’s alright. Calm down, please calm down." Barn sat beside him, her disguised brown hair something that made her look like a normal servant.

Her hands weren’t soft. There were calluses hard enough to be bones.

She wasn’t a soft girl, far from it she was the spine of this team. And as Spot the mage continued hacking into the surveillance feed of the palace’s magic network, she consoled their husband.

The three of them had gathered in this room secretly. It was away from all eyes, all the places where the eyes of the crown, theocracy, and Elision could reach.

They were hiding right now. Hiding from the things that would take away all their freedom.

"Darling, come help me instead of being all gloomy again. Don’t you remember what happened when you were like this during the mission we did for those assassins? We might end up in a situation like that again."

If Barn was calming him down with her calming touch and words, Spot tried to distract him from his moment of misery.

It worked.

"...yeah. You’re right."

They were in a small closet deep inside a bigger closet just big enough to fit one person. The three of them were stuffed inside of it with Andrew pressed against the door while the other two ladies had one side of their bodies pressing him to that door.

Both were working right now.

Spot had a strange array of light dancing around her hands.

It was a strange thing.

Strings of light, different colors and different thickness, dancing in different patterns that almost seemed like frequencies.

The scene seemed strange. One of these strings were directly connecting to something that seemed a part of the wall she was facing, part of this place, part of this castle. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

Watching her strings move was like watching a hundred ’schools’ moving in a chaotic yet harmonizing manner.

It was beautiful.

And similarly, on the other side, watching Barn scan through the two dozen magical screens floating before her, all processing raw data against her analysis database was something else completely.

Her eyes weren’t her eyes. One could see a reflection of two separate pairs of eyes inside them.

At least, it was something close to a dot of light. These lights weren’t mere reflections of the lights on the screens.

They were moving on their own, as in, looking at different things, reading different things: a shivering cursor.

They were talking with him but their eyes were completely and utterly locked on what they were supposed to be doing at that moment.

It was a superhuman dedication...

And pressed against the two of them, understanding each element that was being understood by them, he was waiting for them to finish.

He could feel what they were feeling, but perhaps they were the only ones to pull something like this off.