Aurora was getting tired. She’d even missed Melmarc’s call at some point.

  Where are you David?

  Deoti had no idea, and she couldn’t disturb the woman too much since she was in tracking down her own lead in figuring out the drug that had made its way into the country. A drug that was linked to the Romanian cartel that was capable of increasing ranks and changing class was a big problem. And it wasn’t just about the country. It wasn’t safe for a drug like that to make its way out into the world.

  “Anything, Alfa?” she said, speaking into her phone.

  “My apologies, ma’am,” the detective’s voice answered. “I’ve got nothing. No reports.”

  Fuck. Aurora almost slammed her phone into the ground. Of all the members of David’s team, Fendor was the only one that she could not reach. Everyone else knew nothing about her husband’s whereabouts.

  The problem with that was that if Fendor was somehow helping David in whatever David was doing, then he could be anywhere right now.

  She turned and kicked a forklift. Her form was perfect even in her anger. Instead of the forklift to be sent flying, her leg ripped into it, tearing through metal and everything. Her anger didn’t subside even as she pulled her leg out.

  Now, she returned her attention to the warehouse she was in as she hung up on Alfa. Corpses littered the entire room. Only one person was left alive, and he hung from the ceiling, held up by the neck.

  He was still alive. He’d been looking at her since she’d entered the warehouse to the smell of blood and death. His eyes were bloodshot. How he had survived for so long was interesting.

  Aurora walked up to him. Her steps were slow, calculating.

  Messenger, she concluded. David had left him alive to relay a message… she hoped. She could never tell for sure with her husband. Her love for him had not come from her understanding of him. It had come from her acceptance of him. She’d had grown to know him and grown to love him even before his ascension to Oath-hood.

  After his rise to becoming an Oath, she had understood him less, but the core of the man she loved was still there. She saw it every day, even in his madness. He cared, and he listened. And he loved her.

  Standing beneath the man, she scratched the back of her head.

  “Were you given a message?” she called out.

  He groaned, choking on whatever words were stuck in his throat. The chain really was cutting off his airway.

  Aurora sighed. Without much strain, she leapt high. She scaled the distance between her and the man in a single step and caught the chain just above him. She checked what the chain was fastened to and found that it held their combined weight easily.

  With her other hand, she grabbed the chain around his neck, giving him enough space to breathe and talk but not releasing him.

  “Message,” she repeated. “Do you have one for me?”

  She saw his eyes dart around a few times, then he swallowed. If there was one thing she had learnt from being around her husband, it was how to tell when people were lying. It had been difficult, but everyone displays similar tells just before David declares them dissonant.

  The man in front of her was doing just that.

  She shook him unkindly. “Message.”

  “He said to let you know that I’m only alive because I’m innocent,” the man said quickly. “Not completely innocent but I don’t deserve what happened to the others.”

  Aurora nodded. “What else?”

  The man’s eyes darted about. “That he’s on to the next one.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Aurora studied him for a moment. She held back a tired sigh as they continued to dangle from the chain.

  “What’s your rank?” she asked.

  “A,” he answered.

  He didn’t have the confidence of an A rank Gifted. Aurora’s eyes narrowed on him as she spoke. “What’s your class?”

  “[Invoker].”

  She paused. “Why didn’t you conjure up something to save you?”

  The man hesitated before looking down in defeat. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he did something to me.”

  Aurora wasn’t sure if it was a sob she heard slip from the man’s lips. She shook him again.

  “What did he do to you?” she asked. He was silent for a while. He was silent for too long, so she shook him again. “What did he do?”

  “I DON’T KNOW!” the man roared in her face with tears in his eyes. “I can’t stop thinking. I can’t stop remembering. I’ve been doing math in my head for hours. My heart won’t stop beating.” He broke down now, tears streaming freely. “I hear my own voice in my head now. I hear… I hear my own voice. I hear… my own voice. I can’t focus on my skills… I can’t focus on my interface.”

  Aurora paused. She didn’t know of any skill David had that could do this to a person. It was as if he was running mad. But he was aware of what was happening, he was articulating his problem.

  He was… sane.

  The Pain of Sanity, she thought. It was the Oath skill that David had gained after he’d almost died from fighting Pain and Dorthna had saved his life.

  Was this how it worked? The man sounded as if hearing his voice in his own head was new to him. Aurora had heard that there were people who only thought in pictures never in voices or words—people who went around without voices in their heads.

  It seemed David had given the man a voice in his head. The question was for how long was the man going to be like this? What he was going through right now, was it the effect of the skill or a side effect, residue of a skill whose effect had already worn off?

  “Please,” he muttered, the word ruined by his sobs. “Please, help me.”

  Aurora wasn’t going to help him. She had no interest in helping him. After all, she had one last question to ask based on the things she’d seen in the warehouse besides the corpses. This was the fourth place and, for all David’s madness, it was evolving, there was a pattern.

  “Who do you work for?” she asked.

  She saw the answer in his eyes. He worked for people that he knew he was not supposed to work for. David had not spared him because he did not deserve to die, she knew that already. David had not left any message for her. He’d spared the man because he’d spared the man. It was as simple as that.

  “Let me guess,” she said very slowly. “You work for a Romanian company.”

  “No… please don’t—”

  Aurora was no longer listening. She released the chain around his neck, let go of the one she was holding onto, and dropped.

  She grabbed him by the ankle, halting her fall. She felt the chain tighten around the man’s neck. She heard him choke. She heard him try to plead. She heard him struggle to survive.

  His muscles began to relax, and she let go.

  She fell the rest of the distance and landed on the ground.

  Don’t kill him, she said. Madness left him alive, so he gets to live.

  What she had to deal with were the pills she’d seen in some of the boxes. Naymond needed to shut down the Romanian council faster than he was working. They were becoming a bigger problem than she had thought in the shadows.

  As for her husband, if the path he’d been treading had led to a place helping the Romanians smuggle drugs and she couldn’t reach Fendor, that could mean one possible thing: David was in Romania.

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  Had he decided to deal with the Romanian problem by himself?

  If the answer was yes, then it was going to be a problem.

  Was he going after the Romanian council?

  Or was he going after the Oath they knew was tied to the Romanian council?

  …

  What the actual hell?

  Those were the words that had been ringing in Melmarc’s head for the past hour. It had been ringing in his head while Ark had quickly slipped out of his room with the excuse that he needed something from his room. It had been on his mind when Pelumi had arrived at his room. It remained there when they took the necessary path that led them to the Grace Hall gym.

  How did Ark know that Oaths did not give as much [EP] as he would expect? Had Ark somehow killed an Oath? What exactly was Ark not telling him? And why?

  Since the arrival of Pelumi, he couldn’t really bring it up. Yes, she wouldn’t know what they would be talking about since she wouldn’t know what an Oath was, but it just seemed rude to be talking about what she didn’t know when he was the one that had invited her for the outing.

  The gym in Grace Hall was as wide as the building itself. It was as if they had dedicated an entire floor to the gym. While they went down to get to their rooms, they went up to get to the gym.

  The gym was a wide floor, filled with boxing rings and combat mats and punching bags and weights and machines of different types. It was also active. There were actually people present, using the equipments. All the boxing rings were occupied but the wrestling mats were not. There was a girl in the corner benching something Melmarc could only describe as too much as if it was lightweight.

  With no interspaced pillars to hold the floor above up, Melmarc would’ve wondered just how strong the walls were if he couldn’t see the mana particles in the gym. They clung to different parts of the ceiling and floor, letting him know that the room was only standing so easily due to magic.

  “What do you think?” Pelumi asked him, looking around. “Enchantments or spells.”

  “Enchantments,” he answered without having to think about it. “Spells don’t hold out so well without the [Mage].”

  Ark nodded, staring down a punching bag as if it had offended him somehow. “It’s always enchantments with these things.”

  Pelumi looked at him as if just seeing him, as if they hadn’t left the elevator and strolled onto this floor together.

  “Remind me why you weren’t bothered about leaving your phone in the room,” she said, curious.

  Before they’d left, she’d pointed out Ark’s phone on the bed, and Ark hadn’t been bothered. He’d told her that it would be fine. At their age, most of their peers couldn’t not be with their phones. Unlike Melmarc, Ark was one of such people. When he wasn’t talking with Melmarc, he was on his phone browsing one thing or the other, or listening to music.

  To answer her current question, Ark slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He shook it beside his head with a triumphant grin.

  Pelumi’s jaw dropped. “How?”

  “Magic,” he answered with a dazzle. “It’s an amazing thing.”

  Melmarc rolled his eyes. “The phone has so many enchantments I’m not sure there’s anything that it can’t do.”

  Pelumi looked from Ark to Melmarc, then back. “You both know that that’s not normal, right?”

  Ark shrugged. “What’s normal with us?”

  “I’m serious,” Pelumi pointed out, still very confused. “I’ve never heard of an enchantment that teleports your phone from where it is to your pocket.”

  Melmarc was also very certain that there was no known enchantment that protected your phone from being burnt by flames from an S-rank [Pyromancer] or falling from over thirty thousand feet in the air, but he wasn’t going to talk about that.

  “Custom made,” Ark said. “I know a guy.”

  Pelumi’s brows furrowed in suspicion. She looked at Melmarc. “Can you phone do it, too?”

  “Yep,” Melmarc nodded. It was an interesting feature Uncle Dorthna had added. It was to make sure they never lost their phones.

  More importantly, it was to make sure they never entered a portal without their phones. When he’d given them this little bit of information, he had been looking at Melmarc.

  “I have a request,” Pelumi said.

  Ark was quick to answer. “No.”

  “But I haven’t even said anything,” she complained.

  “Alright, alright,” Ark said, smiling. “I’ll wait.”

  Pelumi very slowly and intentionally turned to face Melmarc. “I have a request.”

  “I’m listening.” Melmarc couldn’t hold back his smile.

  “Can I get my phone enchanted in the same way?”

  Melmarc felt a little bad for what he was about to do, but just a little. “Is that it?” he asked.

  Pelumi nodded.

  Melmarc looked past her to Ark. It wasn’t a difficult task since she was small between the both of them.

  “That’s the request?” he asked, talking to Pelumi while looking at the excited smile on Ark’s face.

  “Yes,” Pelumi said.

  Ark placed a very gentle hand on Pelumi’s shoulder. Pelumi dropped her head with a groan, not turning to look back at him. The look Melmarc caught on her face let him know that she knew what was coming next.

  Ark grinned. “No.”

  “Ugh,” Pelumi snorted, tossing her arms up in exasperation. She rounded on Ark, laughing. “I hate you. You know that, right?”

  Ark placed a hand on his chest in mock hurt. “You don’t even know me.”

  “I know you enough to hate you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m allowed to hate you.”

  Ark started laughing.

  Pelumi watched him for a moment with a smile on her face. Then she turned to Melmarc. “I hate your brother.”

  Ark clapped very loudly. “Alright. Shall we get started?”

  All eyes turned to them. Ark could not be bothered. He had his eyes on Melmarc only. He was already walking towards one of the unoccupied wrestling mats.

  “What exactly are we doing, again?” Pelumi asked as she and Melmarc followed.

  Ark gestured to Melmarc as he came to a stop on top of the mat. “My beautiful brother over here just got a new skill.”

  “Already?” Pelumi asked, clearly surprised. “I’m still stuck with the two I got that gave me my class.”

  “That’s slow growth,” Ark commented absently. “Anyway, we’re here to see how exactly the skill works.”

  Pelumi paused. She looked at Melmarc. “You sure? I remember your skill can give people some kinds of feelings. Mr. Hitchcock definitely didn’t like it.”

  “Pshaw.” Ark waved it aside. “They’ll be fine. Nothing wrong with a little chaos.”

  Pelumi didn’t take her eyes off Melmarc. “And you’re fine with this?” she asked carefully.

  In truth, Melmarc hadn’t thought about it. However, he had some level of control over the range of [Knowledge Is Power]. He just didn’t know just how powerful his control over its range was.

  “I don’t think I have a problem with it,” he answered in the end.

  Ark waited throughout, very patient.

  Pelumi was quiet for a moment, as if thinking about Melmarc’s words. It wasn’t long before she nodded. “Alright then.”

  “Do we have your permission now?” Ark asked, smiling.

  Pelumi rolled her eyes at him. It seemed they were getting along well enough. Melmarc was happy for that.

  “It’s like waiting for Ninra’s permission to do a dastardly deed,” Ark chuckled, taking off his shoes. “Alright, Mel. Let’s get this on the road.”

  Melmarc shook out his arms, not that he needed to. Taking his shoes off, he stepped on the mat then hopped on the balls of his feet like a kickboxer. He cocked his head from side to side then rolled his shoulders.

  Ark gave him a raised brow. “Dude, we’re not sparring.”

  “Just loosening up,” Melmarc replied.

  Pelumi stood on one side of the map like a referee, arms folded over her chest. “You guys are sure that this is safe?” she asked.

  “Safe as safe can be,” Ark answered. “I heard this gym has people that aren’t even new intakes. It’s also designed to handle skills. Obviously they should know that being here means having to deal with skills, too.”

  “But not every skill,” Pelumi pointed out. “We can be civilized.”

  Ark sighed. “You should be more fun.”

  Pelumi stuck her tongue out at her with a smile on her face.

  “Mel,” Ark said. “Hit it.”

  Melmarc obeyed.

  [You have used skill Knowledge Is Power]

  He kept an active attention on the mana as it burst out of him. He could feel it move, clearer than the first time he had gotten the skill. Since gaining the trait [Pure Blooded], his awareness of his skills had grown stronger.

  When it was ten feet out, reaching the closest person to them in the gym, he tried to hold it back. It didn’t budge. A small frown touched his face as he pulled. It reached out farther, going beyond the person. The boy was curling dumbbells in one hand. He faltered when the skill went through him and paused with a confused look. He turned the weight and checked it.

  Melmarc held the skill back at fifteen feet out. When it came to a stop, he knew that the skill still had a long way to go. Its reach was growing wider even without the skill evolving. It expanded with every growing day.

  When the burst of mana came back, running through the boy once more, he dropped the weight suddenly.

  “What the fuck!” he hissed, staring down at his arms.

  Melmarc said nothing. Pelumi had a worried look on her face. It turned into a calming smile when the mana went through her. Ark gave her a curious expression.

  “Now I want to know what she feels,” Ark said, intrigued.

  Pelumi chuckled. “It’s nothing out of the world. It’s just like a warm hug.”

  “Feels like a fist bump to me,” Ark mused. “I wonder how it will feel to dad.”

  Melmarc realized that he’d might have actually not used the skill on their parents as [Knowledge Is Power] came to a conclusion.

  [Skill Knowledge Is Power is concluded.]

  [All stats are increased by +1.5.]

  [Life forms detected: 3.]

  [You have received 3 Potential buffs.]

  [Will of Hades](Mastery -18.00%)

  The Gifted possesses a slight resistance to fire.

  [Where Strength Lies](Mastery 13.00%)

  The Gifted draws on strength unused to reveal a strength unknown.

  [My Faith In You(Mastery(18.00%)]

  The Gifted summons and aid to help in their time of need.

  …

  [Buff mastery is scaled based on mastery of skill Bless Your Kindness. Mastery of buff will begin reduction after eight minutes.]

  [Would you like to select a Buff?]

  [Yes/No.]

  Melmarc was confused. [My Faith In You] was eighteen percent. He’d never had a mastery that high before. And he doubted it had been a double digit mastery when he used the skill long ago during his mentorship program.

  He looked at Pelumi for a brief moment. Was it because they were closer now than they were then? But the mastery on Ark’s skill hadn’t shot up exponentially.

  “So?” Ark pressed, pulling him from his thoughts. “How did the new one work?”

  Melmarc shook his head. “It hasn’t.” He looked at his interface, curious. “Maybe I have to finalize before I can use it?”

  “Alright then,” Ark said, “go for it.”

  Melmarc returned his attention to his interface.

  [Would you like to use Will of Hades? You will not be able to renege on this decision?]

  [Yes/No.]

  “Yes.”

  [You have selected Will of Hades.]

  [Will of Hades](Mastery -18.00%)

  The Gifted possesses a slight resistance to fire.

  The moment it was done, a new notification popped up in front of him.

  [Skill Extended Kindness is in effect]

  [New buff detected.]

  [You have gained random buff.]

  …

  [You have gained skill Wrath of Amadioha]

  [Wrath of Amadioha (Mastery 80.99%)

  The Gifted is blessed by the god amadioha, calling upon the storm.

  Melmarc’s jaw dropped at the sight of the new skill.

  Those gods are real?