[Chapter Size: 1900 Words.]
Third Person POV
Northern kingdoms.
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An explosive sound occurred at the vault door as Mousesack and Eist entered the place, their men having already taken control, capturing all the nobles and subduing the guards.
"What the hell happened here?" Eist asked, looking around in surprise.
Mousesack saw the place completely empty, but there was a trace of chaos energy... "Some magic was activated here..." Mousesack murmured while touching the ground.
"There's no way out... where did the boy go?" Eist asked, looking at the mage.
"It's teleportation magic... He was sent somewhere else..." Mousesack concluded, frowning at this revelation.
"What? What are we going to do?"
"I will try to track him... Because Madara was sent somewhere else..." Mousesack murmured, but his thought quickly collided with the latest reports, that the mage was after him. "I have to be quick... before the boy falls into the trap." He murmured, moving his staff, trying to find the boy as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away, Madara was looking at the arena where the only sound was steam starting to emit from a robot as it lay on the ground for a while.
"I'm almost out of chakra... using shadow clones is quite exhausting..." He admitted, feeling very weak, although he had defeated his enemies and could breathe a little.
He had no idea where he was or how to get out of there, but he didn't immediately explore the place. Instead, he sat on the ground and crossed his arms with his fists together, a technique he had learned when he needed chakra, focusing on energy replenishment, which was at least four or five times faster in this position with his eyes closed.
He remained like this for an hour, while the robot no longer had any smoke to emit. He finally opened his eyes, his eyes without the sharingan... "Let's see what we can find here..." Madara murmured.
There were three exits from the arena, so he crossed his arms and created two clones of himself.
PUFF!
PUFF!
"You know what to do..." He murmured as the clones nodded and started moving towards the exits, he chose the third and began to enter while entering the corridor, he would make a clone to look around the place first there, but his chakra was still very low.
He followed the corridor until he found a staircase and went down, there were no traps, so it seemed calm, until he finally found the mage's laboratory. There were many large cylindrical glasses.
"That damn..." Madara regretted having made the mage suffer so little, even though he had plucked out an eye, left him lame, broken several ribs with the fall, and stuck a knife in his rib before he was cut and killed.
In front of him, there were children's bodies inside the cylinders like a macabre scene, while they seemed to supply a core in the middle of the room, placing it on a panel.
"That damn really used the children to use as energy for that robot..." Madara murmured and ignored it for the time being, he activated his sharingan and looked at the children, realizing they were already dead.
He continued to search the place, finding a pile of books, potions, and even monster parts, all meticulously organized in that place. There were researches about that robot, from what he could understand in one of the scrolls and books, since the mage had written in his diary in the Nordic language, which Madara already knew a bit from his lessons, although he couldn't understand much of the details written there.
In that laboratory there were two entrances, an extra one besides the stairs that Madara had descended, and one of his clones arrived through this other entrance, looking confused. "The path led here, but I passed through a prison full of dead bodies, mainly children who had disappeared from Cintra. Including, one of those old acquaintances from our orphanage was there," the clone warned.
It seemed that the mage had stopped taking children since his last fight, to avoid drawing attention while he was the only target. "I understand, I already imagined we would arrive too late here. There's nothing to do about it anymore... I want you to help me look for any proof that incriminates those nobles and their schemes," Madara asked, and the clone nodded.
They began to search, and despite Madara's difficulty in fully understanding the language, he was still able to interpret the meaning of those papers. Soon, he began to find the exact evidence about the supply of drugs through children by the northern gangs and gold provided to other gangs in the city, two of which he had destroyed.
But what really mattered was the ability to incriminate the nobles from the northern region. Madara also needed to find evidence against a lord who had died, as his family was powerful and could cause problems for the royalty. Meanwhile, a clone approached him, coming up the stairs from where his original had traveled to get here.
"Found anything?" Madara asked his clone.
"Yes, I went to the exit of this dungeon... We are in a place I have no idea where it is, but it's in the north," he said after observing the constellation. "Somewhere in the middle of a forest and full of monsters by the sounds I heard outside..." The clone concluded and continued.
"But I found something else," the clone showed a box he had brought, opening it to reveal gold inside. "I found the safe where they kept that powder used as a drug and the mage's gold, there were about 2,000 gold coins and a lot of that drug..." he explained, and Madara merely nodded, but didn't care much about the other now, since it was no longer important to him, after all, the mission was just about amassing gold coins and now that he had done that, the gold was good for nothing but the possibility of replenishing his weapons.
"Alright, let's keep this stored here," Madara said, and continued his research while asking a clone to help him, and the three clones stayed researching in the laboratory.
It was then that Madara felt something emerging in the environment, with a portal reappearing in the middle of the arena. He activated the Sharingan to see through the walls and prepare to face anything that appeared there. "You stay here, I'll check who it is..." He said and went up the stairs to the arena, but not entering while staying at the entrance in the shadows and analyzing who was arriving at that moment.
Mousesack had some difficulty in finding Madara, so much so that he had to return to his laboratory in the castle with a portal and pick up an artifact, an essential thing that defined his success was Madara's own blood that he had collected, allowing him to find him through spiritual tracking.
From the portal in the arena, Mousesack finally emerged, surprised by the environment in front of him, completely silent, but with marks of the chaos that had happened here.
Eist appeared shortly after with his hand on his head due to the dizziness of the journey, "That was horrible..." He murmured and prepared his axe for battle, but soon was as surprised as Mousesack, seeing the signs of a fight that had taken place there.
"What the hell happened here? And what the hell is that?" Eist said, pointing to the robot lying on the ground while looking surprised at what seemed like a man made of tin, larger than any man he had ever seen.
"I would also like to know," admitted Mousesack, looking at the creature curiously.
Madara finally decided to come out of the shadows, seeing that it was just his acquaintances. "You finally arrived." Madara said, landing in front of them with a neutral face.
"Hey, kid... what happened here? Looks like you had fun while we were just dealing with boring soldiers and arrogant nobles," commented Eist with an arrogant smile, looking at some bodies on the ground and at the robot.
"How are you, kid? Where is the mage? He brought you here, didn't he?" asked Mousesack.
"Yes, he's right there," said Madara, pointing to the body cut by the robot's huge blade. "He was killed by his own creation," he added, and Mousesack approached the body to examine it.
"What the hell is that?" asked Mousesack, after seeing the body and analyzing the machine from a distance.
"That is a construct made by the mage himself. A folly that needed to use children as energy, you will know better when you see the documents in the laboratory below us." said Madara spitting on the ground.
"Did you kill the Lord?" suddenly asked Eist, standing next to them, examining the body of young Lord Rushford burnt with an attack.
"No, it was the mage himself. The fool thought he would be safe here, but he was stabbed in the back," Madara mocked.
"Anyway, you're okay, right?" asked Mousesack.
Madara nodded as he began to undo his clones in the laboratory, not wanting to explain these things right now, meanwhile, he received all the memories from the clones.
"Where are we?" Eist asked Mousesack, who also didn't know how to answer.
"This is the mage's hideout. There's a laboratory here below. I was looking for some evidence and found something, but I believe you will have more success than me," Madara told Mousesack, who nodded. Then, they began to enter the place.
"What was this lunatic doing?" exclaimed Eist, spitting on the ground with disdain, as he looked at the glass cylinders with children bathing in waters, their energy being drained.
"This is certainly a horrible thing," Mousesack spoke calmly, Druids were naturally more concerned with life than mages, and seeing children in that state was quite despicable to his morals.
"We can't do anything for them, they're all dead. Anyway, let's look for everything we need," Mousesack said in the end, and began to search things with Eist, who also helped him. It didn't take long for them to gather many proofs in those documents.
"I believe this is enough..." Mousesack said, picking up a stack of books and scrolls with Eist. "Well, let's go. We should take the bodies as proof of what happened, since we'll spend the next few days full of hearings with nobles explaining why we arrested so many of their relatives," the druid spoke, and both nodded.
"Before we go," Madara suddenly said, exiting with them via the staircase, "let me end this." He began to make a series of seals and launched flames directly into the laboratory. He didn't want that knowledge to be passed on, as he wasn't sure if there was anyone else who knew this place besides the mage. Mousesack and Eist didn't complain about this, while keeping only the proofs and the gold that Madara carried in his hands.
Whistle... "Remind me never to ask this kid to spit fire during training..." Eist said, seeing Madara using his jutsu for the first time.
They returned, collected the bodies, and opened a portal, going back to the castle of Cintra. It was time to deal with all that mess.