Chapter 69: Infiltration (1)
Since Azadine and his party had already left the premises, the search amounted to nothing.
“Baroness Nort, we apologize for our rudeness, but we had no choice but to follow the Count’s orders. We have committed a huge discourtesy.”
The knight in charge of the soldiers apologized to Baroness Nort.
“I see. I understand very well, but I wish you’d come when the cult worshippers kidnapped me.”
Baroness Nort could not help but be displeased at the knights and soldiers who turned her mansion over.
“Baroness, are you sure you haven’t let anyone suspicious in here?”
“A suspicious person?”
“I mean the person who rescued you and defeated Mezerry’s followers.”
“Hmm. How can you call the man who took down the Kurt cult worshippers a suspicious person? I would call him someone to be thankful for, or even a hero?”
“A cockroach eating other cockroaches doesn’t make it a heroic cockroach.”
As the knight said so,
“Huh!?”
“We-we’re in trouble!”
“What is it? What happened?”
“The castle is on fire!”
“What?!”
The soldiers, shocked, dashed out to the garden to witness the Count’s castle ablaze in flames.
Azadine did not go to the Baroness’ mansion to save her from trouble. Things would have gone according to Derek’s plan if he had gone there. Instead, he headed to the Count’s Castle.
“Are you going to sneak in?”
“Yeah.”
After receiving information on the castle’s layout, he used this new familiarity to sneak past the sentries patrolling the perimeter. He then lightly knocked out two soldiers in his path and climbed the castle walls. They would have spotted him as he climbed if he had not knocked them out.
“Alright. Let’s focus now, shall we?”
He breathed deeply through his hawk mask, focused his vision, and detected the flow of black magic in the castle.
“…There it is. It matches up with the information the Countess gave us.”
He gestured towards the greenhouses in the backyard. The rumors that the Count took a strange witch as his lover seemed true. He had also placed her in the Backyard Annex and kept everyone away.
“Don’t tell me. Are you going to approach them today? But we didn’t even get the advance payment yet!”
Mediam recalled Azadine’s negotiation with the Countess.
“Well, it would be nice to get paid, but our mission’s goal isn’t about money, is it?”
“You’re really putting your back into saving Baroness Nort, aren’t you?”
“That and, well, we always need to improvise when the situation calls for it. Mediam! Ismail!”
“Yes!”
“Yes.”
“Fire arrows. You know how to use Rose, right?”
Azadine could set arrows ablaze from a distance, but he didn’t have a high level of success with that trick. On the other hand, Mediam and Ismail were decent magic users. Igniting arrows would be easier for them.
“Of course we do.”
“Then set fires there and there.”
Azadine pointed to the roofs of a warehouse, stable, and armory. Ismail and Mediam released the Rose Arrows. As they whooshed through the air and started nosediving, the arrows began catching fire.
Embers dropped on the roof, like petals from a blooming flower, as the arrows hit their mark and sparked the flames. Perhaps due to the dry weather, the fire spread instantly, causing chaos inside the castle.
“Wonderful. So that’s the ‘Rose’ of Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon.”
Azadine marveled at the magic he couldn’t use.
“Alright, you guys lay low around the perimeter and wait. I’ll sneak in. Oh, also….”
“What?”
“Hurl an arrow at that wall over there.”
“Su-sure.”
Mediam and Ismail did as Azadine instructed and shot arrows in the direction of the wall of the building in the backyard, sinking them deep into the wall. A few struck true, while a few fell into the dirt.
“Let’s go, then. If you need to withdraw for your safety, that’s okay. If you’re confident, you can stay hidden, take cover and wait.”
As everyone scrambled to deal with the fire, Azadine took advantage of the chaos and began his infiltration.
Soldiers and servants rushed to extinguish the fire. Still, due to the roof burning up quickly and embers dropping to the ground, the removal of valuables to safety was more important.
Sneaking in was easy, with everyone frantically trying to carry things and stop the flames. Azadine advanced through the shadows made by the fire and torches and sneakily approached the backyard.
The Count had placed a mansion in the middle of the garden for his daily use. The garden was also filled with large ceramic pots and various garden trees around it.
“…….”
Azadine paused his advance. Mixed with the fragrance of orchids was the strong scent of blood, a strong odor that even the flowers and herbs could not mask. Lizards then appeared.
The lizards were munching on the carcasses of the Count’s guard hounds but then began moving. They were large beasts that looked similar to crocodiles, nearly two meters long.
-Hiss!
Azadine fired his arrows the moment he spotted the lizards.
“Tsss?!”
“Kieek!”
His arrows pierced through the lizards’ heads but also triggered the magic that was cast on them.
‘I’m busted.’
He clicked his tongue as he watched the warding spell activate. The sorcerer had planted a magical spell instead of simply placing lizards in place of guard dogs in that garden.
Azadine swiftly sprinted across the ground, stomped on a tree in the garden, and broke in through a second-story window. The resistance of a transparent barrier pricked Azadine’s skin as he entered the building.
“Ugh.”
A normal person would have fainted instantly on entering, but Azadine’s resistance to magic was exceptionally strong, so he was unaffected.
“What a powerful sorcerer! I can’t believe they cast this kind of magic all over the mansion. But….”
Arael’s letter came to his mind. The magic engulfing that mansion was nothing in comparison to that letter.
‘What the hell is Arael thinking? Does she plan to conquer the world?’
Azadine shook his head at those idle thoughts. Why was he getting distracted while trying to sneak through the enemy lines?
He nimbly made his way through the second floor. As he did so, he sensed movement on the first floor. A group of soldiers appeared out of the backyard, presumably to deal with Azadine, who had killed the lizards. Their stench was intense.
‘So, they’re mummies.’
Mummified soldiers that had been gutted and treated with a special herbal decoction wielded bardiches as they searched through the garden. Azadine glanced at them from the window before heading inside. The scent of blood served as his guide.
‘It gets thicker the lower I go.’
The smell of blood became more intense as he followed it to the basement, where there was a locked door.
‘The instant I open it and go in, I’ll probably get caught.’
He saw a vast operating room through the peephole where masked sorcerers were cutting up corpses with curved knives as they disemboweled and mummified them.
‘How can they be doing this when they’re the supposed descendants of the Yaegas God Clan?’
He frowned at the mummification going on inside.
‘I’ll have to end this quickly.’
Azadine readied his arrows as the operation inside was nearing its end.
-Plomp!
As he kicked the door in, he let loose a flurry of arrows.
-Hiss!
Two arrows pierced through the head of the sorcerer the furthest away. Shocked, the other two sorcerers turned around, wielding their hooked knives, but Azadine simply lunged forward with a bow in one hand and a sword in the other and slit one of their throats.
With his neckbone severed, only the skin and flesh at the back of his neck held his head up. After decapitating one sorcerer with a single blow, Azadine spun and stabbed the other through the chest.
-Push!
His blade pierced the sorcerer’s torso and came out through his back. Perhaps because Azadine had picked a sturdy sword for this occasion, the blade remained intact after the two slashes.
Azadine kicked the sorcerer’s corpse and retrieved his sword. He then swung it to shake off the blood and slid it back into its sheath.
“Grrrrr.”
“Kikikiki.”
The sorcerers who he had clearly killed slowly began to rise to their feet. Even with the arrows through his head, a half-chopped throat, and a pierced heart, they still stood back up.
“Psst!”
Azadine slung his bow back over his body, picked up the hooked knife that fell to the floor, and hurled it again at the furthest sorcerer.
-Grab!
The sorcerer’s body ripped open, and a scaly hand emerged from within, catching the knife Azadine flung.
“Impressive, I….”
Before the sorcerer could finish, Azadine used both his hands to grab the knife and sliced him from bottom to top, vertically splitting his head into two.
“Uck?!”
-Thud!
The knives were also stabbed through the other sorcerer’s chest.
“Wa-wait!”
Azadine leaped forward and chopped off their arms before they could fully transform.
-Crack!
“If you have an afterlife, too, take your time fixing your habit of mutating so slowly.”
Azadine cut up their bodies, then moved deeper into the operating room and looked around.
–-
The smell of blood thickened as he advanced, and now he stood in an area where it was hard to tell if he was inhaling air or blood.
Further away from the operating table was a large bath that held the spills from the operation. The bath was filled to a knee-high depth with oddly uncoagulated blood. Inside the pool of blood were a man and two women who were entangled with each other as their eyes glowed an uncanny yellow.
They must have heard the sound of Azadine’s brutal killing of the sorcerers outside, yet they simply slithered out of the bath like snakes.
-whoosh!
Azadine shot two arrows from his Two-Stringed Bow to eliminate the man. They were the last arrows he had left, but they were simply caught in a barrier of formless power that was around the man and…
-Bang!
The arrows exploded into pieces.
‘Tch. No wonder they stood up so blatantly. Did they already have a plan for the arrows? The magic’s colorless, so my vision can’t detect it. I should have brought the Shadowsteel Blade or something similar.“
He clicked his tongue as his Two-Stringed Bow was rendered useless.
“Kyaaaa!”
“Fwip!”
The women flinched in shock and opened their mouths, revealing sharp fangs and making them look similar to a viper baring its fangs to threaten. The Count held the women in his arms and glanced at the direction the arrows had come from. He paid no attention to Azadine but was rather caught in desire as he looked at the women.
“Excuse me.”
Sickened by the sight, Azadine chose to knock on the door he had entered through.
“Are you Count Casel, by any chance?”
“How insolent of you, man of the Messenger Clan. That’s right, I am Count Casel.”
The man lying in the bath of blood raised himself.
“How about you not expose the unsightly parts and stay lying down?”
Azadine snickered at Casel.
“Unsightly? And you, you think you’re fine?”
“Fine enough for your woman to propose to me.”
Though it sounded like a cheeky taunt, it was oddly true.
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