*BANG* *BANG* *BANG*
A new thief immediately shot down the man walking carelessly down the street, bringing Loki out of his worried thoughts.
The thief stayed alert and pointed his gun at all the other thieves hidden in the street and slowly bent over the body of the dead man to pick up both, the loot and the gun that the man was holding onto, even in his death.
After looting the body, he began moving toward the shack at the centre of the Black Market.
One part of Loki immediately wanted to leave, while another part wanted him to stay and enjoy the maddening blood work that was being spread around the street.
'What's going on? Why am I feeling like this?'
Eventually, he spent the rest of the day studying the various thieves who fought each other, all trying to be the ones who stole the most.
But if given the opportunity to describe what he'd seen today, Loki had only a single word in his vocabulary, "Madness.".
The streets that were usually wet with puddles that formed as a result of London's neverending rain, were today filled with quagmires formed from blood instead.
Loki had puked twice throughout the day watching the madness that had ensued but it still hadn't quelled the queasiness he felt in his stomach.
In spite of watching everything that happened carefully, Loki realised all he understood today was that the value of human lives to these people amounted to nothing.
The thieves were cold, calculative and highly efficient.
'Do I have to become like that?'
'Do I have to give up my humanity to become a thief?'
'God damn this is stupid!'
'Why did I pick such a stupid pathway!'
'I should've just taken the darkness pathway and be done with it!'
'Bloody Hell!'
Loki got down from the roof and stepped into the streets, walking through the puddles of blood since there was no way to walk around them, his eyes constantly moving along his blood-red reflections in each puddle as he navigated through them.
As he was leaving, Loki sent one last glance the shack's way.
'How could they have done something like this?'
'And why did they do something like this in the first place?'
'Doesn't doing this reduce the amount of money they will get in the future?'
'And that stupid nagging feeling at the back of my mind that wants me to drown myself in these pools of blood. Are they using a Beyonder item to make me think like this?'
The smell of iron that Loki had come to recognise as the smell of blood suffocated him as he breathed in the turbid air.
But just as Loki was about to leave, he spotted a man hooded in a dark black robe who stepped out of the shack and onto the street.
The man seemed to be shivering but Loki felt something was off about it, the man's shoulders were squared and he didn't seem afraid of all the blood and signs of violence on the streets.
'His posture is too relaxed for him to be scared. He is not afraid.'
'Is he enjoying it?' Loki thought confused as he stepped behind a building and began to observe the situation.
The man knelt on the ground, brought his face close to the puddle of blood and began to take deep breaths as if he wanted to breathe in the entire thing.
'Eww…what is he doing?'
Loki's sight then fell on the ruby ring around the man's finger on his left hand and his mind immediately exploded with the value of the ring.
'If I'm not wrong that ring is valuable enough to belong in the Black family's artifact collection.'
But suddenly the gears in Loki's mind turned, 'Wait he's wearing a robe and he came out from inside the shack, is he Mr. A?'
Loki suddenly felt fear and went stiff, and to his misfortune as if he had a radar in his head, Mr. A raised his head to look straight at him.
Red eyes glimmered from inside the robe petrifying Loki with fear but then, *BANG* another gunshot sounded in the distance dragging Mr. A's attention away, allowing Loki to for the first time in his life use his ability as a Thief to find the closest exit around himself to run away from the Black Market.
Loki ran and ran and did his best not to look behind himself and raise a death flag as he dove into the shadows, ducking into unknown streets, people's backyards and main streets that had heavy foot traffic as he took the most roundabout way he could to lose any tails before he reached home.
Arriving home, Loki immediately ran towards the door, used magic to unlock it and stepped inside without waiting for Kreacher to help him in.
He shut the door behind himself with force enough to rattle the windows.
He was afraid.
*POP*
"Master Loki?" Kreacher asked with worry as he looked up at Loki.
"Give me some space Kreacher. I want to relax. A cupcake would be good too." Loki spoke in short sentences, taking deep breaths to calm his raging lungs that had become overworked due to the long run.
Loki collapsed with his back on the door, sliding down until he reached the wooden floor, his heart beating a hundred miles an hour and tremors running through his fingers like they were suffering an earthquake.
Loki clenched his hands and thought back to the situation that he had just escaped from.
'That had to have been Mr. A.'
'No one else would be mad enough to sniff blood with such religious fanaticism.'
'But then why did he orchestrate such an event?'
'Is it a ritual to advance his sequence?'
'I remember seeing a ruby ring on his hand, but my intuition screamed that it was much more valuable than a ruby.'
'Could it have been an item made from the Beyonder characteristic of the next sequence?'
'Is Mr. A still not a Sheperd?'
'If that's the case then that means he's still a sequence six, Rose Bishop.'
'Perhaps the ritual for becoming a Sheperd requires a lot of blood to be spilt.'
'Damn, I can't confirm my reasoning through divination since I'm not a seer or a Mystery Pryer or even a Monster.'
'Would using the Sefirah Castle help me?' Loki wondered but before he could perform the ritual to enter the Sefirah castle Kreacher arrived.
"Here's the cupcake master requested.", Kreacher said with a polite bow while a plate with a cupcake on it floated beside him.
"Thank's Kreacher." Loki nodded and Kreacher left with a polite bow after Loki picked up the cupcake from the plate.
Peeling the cover of the cupcake Loki began to munch on the sweet desert bringing him a bit of solace as well as energy that he seriously lacked.
'I will confirm the reason for the fight in the Sefirah castle.'
'And I need to ask Kreacher what he did with the gun that the guy Walburga killed had.'
'Although I don't want to go back to that place, having a gun on me is a necessity because I eventually have to steal from them if I want to digest my potion.'
'And I don't think I can ever step into that place without a weapon protecting me after what happened today.'
'Damn thieves! I don't want to be like them! They're just pawns in someone else's games! Bloody hell!'
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A/N : Just wanted to know, how many chapters extra would get you to invest ~$3 on my Patreon? Each arc will be about ~50 chapters, and the book should have ~400 chapters.