All the tension disappeared in an instant, like a pressed-down spring that was finally released. Silvia pulled back, staring at Yanna, startled and shaking.

  “Wh-Who w-w-was—” Silvia let out, but she wasn’t able to even finish her thought before Yanna wrapped her arms around her younger sister.

  “It’s alright, don’t worry. I told her to leave, okay? She’s gone.” Yanna held Silvia tightly, feeling her anxious shakes vibrating throughout the elf’s whole body. “I’ll call Dad, okay?”

  Silvia forced out a slow nod as she tightened her grip on the back of Yanna’s shirt, and the minotaur ground her teeth in pure fury.

  “Ouch, dude, come on!” Ryan flinched, pulling away his hand from Runar, who just stared back at his nephew and rolled his eyes.

  “Stop complaining, I’m just swapping out your bandages. If you stopped acting like you’re not hurt and were a bit more careful with your hand, this probably wouldn’t hurt as much,” Runar pointed out as he started wrapping up Ryan’s hand with clean bandages. The cuts on his palm that he got from grabbing Energizer right after it went berserk had closed well enough, and due to the healing salve, there wasn’t all too much swelling either. But that probably just made it easier for Ryan to use his hand for things while ignoring the fact that he was clearly injured.

  “The burns only just healed, what the hell are you doing? Wear some gloves, will you?”

  “I was wearing gloves in the dungeon, they didn’t help either,” Ryan defended himself. “And it’s not like I could’ve predicted what happened yesterday.”

  “… Still. Take better care of your hands, alright? You can’t help the spirits if your hands are completely messed up.”

  Ryan looked at his uncle and inwardly sighed, trying to ignore just how rough Runar was being as he wrapped up his hand. He slowly glanced over at the boy sitting on the living room couch, distractedly flipping through channels on the TV. They were on the other side of the room, and he tried to speak in a low voice, “So … you said he was raised by one of the elders?”

  Runar glanced up at Ryan and turned his head to Liam for a moment. “Officially, at least. In reality, I imagine it was more like he was raised in one of that elder’s hidden facilities. I’m sure you can count the amount of conversations they’ve held on both hands.”

  “… And that was enough for Liam to start acting like he’s a king in some grand story?”

  “He’s an Awakened above level 70, Ryan,” Runar explained. “There’s no sane high-level Awakened. All the facilities that guy runs are basically LARP camps.”

  Taken aback, Ryan stared at his uncle. “Level 70? Seriously?”

  “We have a lot of powerful people in our family.”

  Runar stood up after finishing the bandage, and a question that Ryan has been curious about almost since the beginning popped into his head. “So … what level are you?”

  The Rune Mage slowly turned around, a slight grin forming on his lips. “That’s a secret.”

  “Oh come on, seriously?”

  “There’s literally no person besides me that knows my level, so yes, seriously. There’s a reason why I’m not registered; you have to get your level measured regularly,” Runar pointed out. “Now come on, it’s almost three. Silvia and Modak said they’re on their way, right?”

  “Yeah, they should get here any minute now,” Ryan responded. “So what are we even doing today?”

  “Nothing much. Just meeting people, introducing yourself to everyone downstairs, learning a bit about the things that we have to do. I also called over an acquaintance from the Magic Tower to help us track down Gaia’s last fragment.”

  “Wait, seriously? You know someone from the Magic Tower?”

  “Yes, I know someone from the Magic Tower. I … briefly worked there after I awakened.” Runar hid his face as though he were embarrassed about it, and Ryan couldn’t help himself but let out a short laugh of disbelief.

  “Are you serious? You worked at the Magic Tower?”

  “It wasn’t really ‘working.’ I was like thirteen, it was more like an internship.”

  “You awakened at thirteen? As a mage?!”

  Ryan’s disbelief had turned into shock as Runar looked at his nephew with an annoyed look on his face. “I get that it’s not normal, but I feel like you’re being a bit insulting … The Aglecard bloodline is predisposed to magic users, and I happened to be a little talented. That’s all.”

  “No, but like …” Ryan looked away as he tried to gather his thoughts. “How the hell do you always keep forgetting the pin to your phone? It’s like four digits. I was legitimately worried about you at some point, but you’re the type of genius that can awaken at thirteen and start working in the Magic Tower?”

  Runar just shrugged, as though he had already accepted it. “I’m bad with tech, that’s all.”

  “That—That has nothing to do with being bad with tech; your pin is your birthday!”

  “Hmm … Nah, I think it’s just the tech,” Runar pointed out, but Ryan still wasn’t convinced.

  “Didn’t you say you linked up your phone so you can use it from downstairs or something? That doesn’t sound like you’re bad with tech to me.”

  “Well, that wasn’t about tech. I just adapted the Message spell into a semipermanent link between two points.”

  Ryan narrowed his eyes, glaring at his uncle. “I have no reference point for how insane that is, but it sounds insane.”

  “Oh, shut up already.” Runar walked up behind the couch, knocking on the young vampire’s head. “Liam, you too, come on.”

  “Huh? Why would I do something like that?” the boy huffed, clearly not feeling like joining, but Runar already prepared the perfect answer and replied smugly.

  “Don’t you want to meet all your potential subjects downstairs?”

  Liam immediately perked up curiously, “That … does sound like the duty of a king, I assume. Very well! I shall accompany you two!”

  Clearly excited now, Liam jumped up from the couch and ran into the hallway to put his shoes on, a broad smile plastered on his face. Rolling his eyes, Ryan picked up the remote and turned off the TV. “Dude, do you want him to get bullied at school or something?”

  Runar shook his head with a slight yawn. “Oh, calm down, it’s not that bad. He’s got a big personality, people gravitate toward people like that. And it’s not like he’s a bad kid; there’s a reason why we picked him out for the test run.”

  “… Alright, that’s fair. Just make sure he doesn’t yell at me to show him my neck again.”

  Runar laughed quietly and nodded his head. “I’ll try my best.”

  “Excuse me? What do you mean, it’s not happening?” Christopher stared at the man in front of him, who pulled back nervously. The lizardman was scratching his neck nervously, making his scales almost pop off. Being faced with the fury of a boa lamia was more than just nerve-racking.

  “The … the event of New Riverside University’s robotics club showing off their latest project has been pushed back. There was an incident yesterday where one of the … where one of the robots went out of control and broke a bunch of private and university property,” the man slowly explained as Christopher’s unblinking glare only got more intense.

  “No, it was supposed to go out of control today, during the showcase, not yesterday. I specifically made sure that it wouldn’t go off during the last tests yesterday.” The lamia ground his teeth together, pushing down at the desk in front of him. Moving around erratically, his tail was bumping into nearby furniture. “What happened to Vanda?”

  “… The girl was questioned by the police and the university immediately chose to press charges,” the man started, hesitating to finish what he was saying. “How—However, early this morning, the university has dropped those charges.”

  “Hah? Why would they do that? Vanda’s got no contacts, no power, nothing. That’s why I picked her for this.”

  “… Looking at the records, the university has just received a large donation from the Honeydew Fund, one of the Aglecard Foundation’s—”

  “I know what the bloody Honeydew Fund is!” With an almost deranged hiss, Christopher hit the desk. A nearby couch was pushed across the room into a bookshelf from the force of the lamia’s tail violently swinging around. The lizardman flinched as books from the shelf dropped onto the ground and the couch. “Fine, whatever. You recovered the fragment, though, right? We can just try again with something else.”

  The lizardman’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t answer that question. There was no way he could. Christopher would have his head, and it wasn’t even his fault! However, with the lamia’s deep glare laying on his scales, he had no other choice but to finally respond, “We … we sent someone in to retrieve the fragment, but we were unable to find it.”

  The lamia’s fingers dug into the surface of the desk. “Excuse me? You’re telling me that we not only lost a prime opportunity, but we lost both the fragment and a seed of corruption?”

  “There … there’s more to it,” the lizardman explained. Christopher would find out sooner or later anyway, and it was better to just say it here now instead of being punished for hiding it later. “… They called an ambulance as someone was injured during yesterday’s events. According to the reports, they treated a student named ‘Ryan Aglecard’ due to the injuries he received while subduing the rampant robot.”

  Christopher stared at the lizardman. “Excuse me? Why was he there? Why was he at the robotics club, of all places?!”

  “I … It looks like they were trying to have test duels between the robots and the spirit that he cont—”

  “Get out.” Christopher turned his head away, placing his hand in front of his eyes. The lizardman wasn’t sure if he had heard right, and was about to ask for confirmation, when Christopher turned back around and swung his arms across the desk. The monitor, keyboard, notes, and small trinkets were all thrown onto the ground. “I told you to get out!”

  Once the man was out of the room, Christopher ground his teeth together, pulling out his phone. He dialed a number. It rang a few times, but nobody responded. “This little …”

  So, instead, Christopher dialed another number, and someone picked up before the first ring even finished, “Mr. Blanchard! What a pleasure to hear from you! How can I help?”

  “Put me through to Simon Grand immediately.”

  The man on the other side of the phone was silent for a few moments, before responding with a tone of voice that showed that bad news were about to follow. “… Simon Grand is currently being treated at a hospital. He will be unable to work for the time being. We were actually about to call you and introduce you to a new employee that could take over his—”

  “Was he injured? I thought you have world-class healers at your company for situations like this.”

  A nervous laugh came from the other side of the phone, “Mr. Blanchard, while I have no idea what ‘situations’ you are speaking of, Simon’s issues do not seem to be injury-based.”

  Christopher frowned, “Then what’s the issue? I need to talk to him, I have to ask him some questions about my request.”

  “… That is exactly the issue, Mr. Blanchard. Simon has no memories of the past two months, believing us to be in the month of Notis instead of Konter. He will be unable to continue to work with you on this request. I truly apologize for this inconvenience, but we promise to make it up to you as well as we can. We …”

  Even though the man on the other side of the phone was hurriedly trying to explain the future plan of actions, Christopher wasn’t paying attention. His tail was moving around him, tightening around the legs of a chair, crushing it under the pressure of a boa lamia’s muscles. Staring at the shadow that he was casting onto the ground due to the sunlight pouring into the room behind him, Christopher almost shivered in anger.

  “So the Aglecards are involved, and have the fragment now. And Ryan has probably been pulled into the main family now. That’s fine. I still have a few more tricks up my sleeve.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Factions

  Alright, guys, this is Liam. He’s the vampire kid that’ll be staying with Runar and me from now on.” Ryan stood next to the boy and introduced him to his friends.

  Modak smiled as though he were looking at his siblings. Zigg and Mogh were a bit younger than him, but they were around the same height as Liam. He figured that maybe these three could become friends. “Nice to meet you, Liam. I’m—”

  “A sturdy orc and a beautiful elf, I see. They will do.” Liam nodded his head approvingly, before getting a light slap to the back of the head. It was really just enough to get his attention and not hurt him, though.

  “Don’t be rude. And don’t call people older than you ‘beautiful’—that’s just weird,” Ryan scoffed lightly. Rather than finding Liam annoying, he was starting to understand the humor in the boy’s actions. The fact he was being so serious about it all just made it funnier. Obviously that was only the case as long as he didn’t start actively insulting others.

  “Ow! Don’t hit me, I’m just speaking the truth!” Liam complained, clearly overacting how much that light tap hurt. Ryan rolled his eyes and looked at his friends.

  “That’s Modak and Silvia, they’re my best friends. Treat them well, please, and don’t treat them like servants. That’s not what they are.”

  “I mean … technically we’re your ‘aides’ now, right?” Silvia pointed out with a slight laugh. She was looking pretty rough despite trying to act as she usually did. Modak seemed to have noticed it earlier as well, but right now wasn’t the time to talk about it. Not in front of everyone else. And she said she would be fine, so Ryan and Modak had to trust that.

  Ryan shrugged lightly. “Just officially, though. Anyway, Liam, don’t be a dick to my friends.”

  “Don’t call him a dick. He’s ten,” Runar yelled out from across the café, holding a wooden crate in his hands that he brought from upstairs.

  “Yeah, but he’s also being a dick.” Ryan shrugged, and Runar simply sighed loudly.

  “Whatever, just come, we’re heading downstairs.”

  Runar shifted the crate’s weight onto just one of his hands as he unlocked the basement door. The wooden boards cried out under every one of Runar’s steps, as though he had suddenly tripled in weight. The boards were old, but even the towering Modak was able to walk over them with only some minor squeaking.

  “What’s in the box?” the orc curiously asked. The top was slightly open so he was trying to take a peek, but there was nothing but darkness in there.

  Runar turned back with a slight grin, clearly excited to show it off. But even so, he was trying to stay patient. “You’ll see. It’s pretty cool, don’t worry.”

  “Hm … alright,” Modak muttered. “Oh, and by the way, I met with Vanda earlier. You really took care of everything overnight, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Thanks the gods for all the nocturnal species in this city, huh? This kind of thing takes so much longer in other parts of the country,” Runar explained, pressing his palm onto the runic patterns on the floor. He turned back around as the ground opened up, revealing the stairway down below. “I was a bit surprised that we managed to get it all done on the weekend, though, but I guess we got a bit lucky.”

  Lucky? As if, Ryan thought to himself. There was no way that luck solved all of this. He stayed up pretty late, just scrolling through article after article describing Aglecard Foundation’s work. It was a massively influential organization.

  While they were largely a philanthropic group, they had their hands in many industries to some degree. Construction, agriculture, journalism, clean energy; all the companies that were directly supported by the foundation were leading actors in their specific industries.

  The Aglecard family was not only extremely wealthy, but vastly powerful and influential. It was almost to a scary degree; the more Ryan dug around, the larger and more shrouded the scale of this all seemed to become. There was no “luck” involved in the fact that Vanda’s situation could be figured out overnight while they were headed into a weekend; it just showed the ridiculous and vast power of the Aglecard family.

  “So you were checking up on Vanda?” Silvia asked as the group started walking down the stairway, and Modak slowly nodded his head.

  “Yeah, I wanted to talk to her about something. Her Energizer imitated the powers of an Enhancer, right? But the way those powers work is by alternating, high-frequency energy patterns, and she was struggling to figure out a way to do it at the low-power output that she needed, so she had to use some weird tricks,” Modak explained, turning back toward the elf walking behind him. “I showed you the mana tapes a bit ago, right? I figured maybe the mana-inscribing method that I used would work to solve Vanda’s problem.”

  Ryan looked at his friend with raised brows. “Oh damn, so what does that mean? She can rebuild Energizer without having to use a spirit core?”

  “Hopefully. And really, she didn’t know. She was given the fragment by someone else, right?” Modak pointed out, and Ryan let out a slight sigh.

  “I know, I know … I just … feel really weird about the whole thing. Like, what was the plan there? Why did some rich kid give her one of Gaia’s fragments?” Ryan pointed out, inwardly glancing at the two fragments in his mind. “Runar, do you know anything about that?”

  “Sadly not,” he replied, “I’ve got some guesses, but none of them are substantiated enough to really be worth adding onto your pile just yet. You’ve got plenty of other things to learn and know. And whichever the plan was supposed to be, you foiled that.”

  “I … guess?” Ryan let out, unsatisfied, but he figured it was a good point. However, he looked back at Modak with some curiosity. “Also, what’s this about mana tapes?”