After reports about what had happened at the back gates of the city circled around and sightings of the blurred black beast had been confirmed, it took an overall three hours for a small company of thirty guards with well trained magic auras equal to or greater than my own to makes its way down the highway passed where I had once been.
Currently, I was sitting in a treetop with three naked and busted up dudes tied to the undersides of random branches further down watching the company of guards. These were all officers at the very least with plated armor and a few of them were definitely high in the ranks with particularly potent magical weapons or gear.
Aside from the fact that a giant mass of death energy had shown up and eaten three people while they were beating a civilian, this was far to strong of a response. Anyone with any knowledge of magical beasts would have recognized the insanely rare elemental wisp for what it was despite its insane size and would have known they could only get that big with a master's help. I believed the people in charge believed the people who were 'eaten' were still alive.
This was not a beast subjugation or else these would be Guild mercenaries, this was a silencing of information. I already knew from a long time spent listening to the men below beg and cry and spill their guts out that the city was hardly even imperial anymore. They no longer had a landowning noble, or 'lord', but a bureaucratic city governor.
After using over thirty candies to dehydrate and desensitize the lackeys, I learned that these three in particular worked for a person known in the city as the 'silver lord' who was one of several leaders of the different mining and merchant groups who had been controlling the city for the better part of the last forty years.
These different powers were divided into two factions, the mine lords and the merchant princes. These mine lords were the founding families of the city who still maintained full rights and ownership to their vast lands outside the city. The princes, though, were all 'recent' inheritors of the various high-profile businesses that worked the goods of the mine lords and dispersed them through the country.
From what I could gather, the mine lords converted the previous merchant leaders to usurp authority in the town and control the governor with money. The current princes were the worst kind of spoiled debauchees, some of which had used lethal means to acquire their current positions in the last ten years.
While the mine lords were bad enough in their own right by manipulating taxes and paychecks as well as work shifts, the princes were the main problem. The first merchant princes simply exploded prices on everything to slowly ruin the economy and force people to work more in the mines while the mine lords began manipulating things like education behind the scenes.
After the first twenty years and replacing their previous generations of workers with a newer generation of younger and better groomed individuals, the city went to shit.
Now, though, the current merchant princes who are stuck under the thumbs of the mine lords have been trying to cut themselves bigger pieces of the pie. The mine lords have always had rights to small private militias for the sake of protecting their lands outside the city, such as the naked guys below, but the new princes have begun gathering thugs of their own.
Those guys all worked in the city, though, because the mine lords did not approve at all of the growing threat to their power. One of the reasons these three were at the gate were to check for people sneaking into the mines among work details. Apparently, the problems between the leading powers of this city's underworld were just that serious.
After learning everything I needed, such as where I find this or that person, I wrote a very angry and strongly worded letter to Old Man asking if he already knew all this and demanding to know why AN EIGHT YEAR OLD was sent to deal with it. Although my pilgrimage site is outside the city among the mining lands, this was still shit I had to step in to get there.
I had then further vented my frustrations by beating my captives once again.
The city guards were already over a hundred yards away and were unaware of our positions thanks to largely visible wards I had placed another mile down the highway. With all of our auras minimized and such an obvious presence in the distance, there was no reason for the guards to look anywhere else. Even if they did, I was quite proficient in magic stealth.
With no information left that was worth sharing, I decided to simply leave the men tied to the tree asleep and led my wolves hiding behind the hill toward the city from around the highway. After another couple hundred yards of distance I got back on the road approaching the city gates. My wisps were safely inside of me and I was followed by a pack of giant wolves, I doubted anyone would suspect me of anything after I identified myself.
I was stopped at the gate and asked for identification such as a Guild card I did not possess as well as a few questions about my familiars. I provided the usual scroll from Old Man and told them quite honestly that I picked a fight with the wolves and won just the other day. After being identified as a religious figure of sorts, I was allowed entry to the city and given a special pass for the exorbitant number of familiars I traveled with.
Apparently, more than two or three small or one powerful familiar would be tolled at the gates to most cities. I had never had any problems with this since my wisps were usually a vehicle and the only other familiar was Sili, but overall I was grateful for the benefits that came with being the Adjutant.
It was not as if I did not have the money to pay five silver for every extra familiar but I was glad just to not have to pay it to this particular city. My money would just end up in all the wrong places. However, I liked this young guardsman and his two lady coworkers manning the gate.
"The closest entrance to the city sewers or the catacombs as people call it, where can I find one?" I ask frankly after being cleared to enter the city. The expressions that flashed across one of their faces told me that one of the ladies behind the young man was not happy with my question.
The young man, though, seemed hesitant for different reasons and said, "Brother Chuck, as a fellow follower of the gods I feel the need to warn you… the sewers have become a very dangerous place over the last few years. At first, it was disappearances and reports of beasts but recently there have been reports of troublesome people using the sewers."
Reaching up to place a hand on the taller man's shoulder, I give him a grateful smile before looking past him at the female superior officer in nicer armor and saying, "I know, that's why I'm here. It would also be good for you guys if you did not report anything but the fact that I am in the city. Otherwise, there may be repercussions that are out of my hands," I add while going back to smiling at the young man before leading the wolves into the city.
With a compromised guard in the area, whatever entrance they gave me would have been the one I was followed through. At least I got to know not all of the law enforcement was compromised. Just enough of it to make it matter.
I sent Shadow into the ground through my feet and had them monitor the compromised guard as I walked away, winding back and forth from one street to the next while staying within range of my familiar. As expected, only twenty minutes later, the superior officer left after finding a patrolling unit to replace them. Shade also followed close after them from twenty feet underground.
Using my wisp to keep track of their position, I started following as well when they had passed me by an intersection. From this distance I could almost flippantly follow them after having changed out my leather traveler's suit for a simple suit of a single layered leather jerkin woven about the torso with leather for padding waxed for hardness and durability.
The reversed scheme of armor that the mine lord lackeys were wearing.
It was a common enough sight that the guard I was following would certainly disregard if they glanced upon it but also different enough to keep any of the merchants' men from mistaking me. I had already asked around from bystanders and shopkeepers for a number of entrances to the underground aqueducts that took care of the city's plumbing. I honestly did not want anything to do with that place
The reason I collected numerous locations was not only in case the wrong people heard my questions but also to make a mental map of the city using entrances as checkpoints. I had even bought a cheap cloth map from a traveling vendor to use as a reference. I already had nine viable methods of entering the sewers within five hundred yards of the front gates.
After having spent enough time learning about them it was not hard to actually spot them as I followed the reporting guard using both streets and alleyways between business properties. Within half an hour of following the guard to a three-story hardwood building around which many guards could be spotted in surrounding streets. It was their barracks or headquarters.
I decided that I had followed them for long enough and retracted Shade from the mission. It was simply too dangerous even using the hoverboard body underground. Returning to the wolves that I had left resting in an empty lot a few streets back, I use the nearby maintenance entrance for the sewers to leave the area.
With more businesses and storage buildings in this area than residential homes, the sewers were visibly clean for the most part but the smell was still god awful. Stagnant water, old and young waste alike, and even something like old dead animals of different types. The wolves at first struggled to adjust but a simple wind spell was all it took to divide clean oxygenated air from particulates and gases around their faces.
*