Chapter 502: Ripples upon Ripples continued
Normally it’s very easy for an international organization to find someone, anyone really.
Grease the right palms, talk to the right people and have an accurate descriptor of the guy, and that guy is fucked.
Of course, if one also had access to an Anima Wielder, one could leverage their mental capabilities to just outright read someone’s memories.
However, in the case of one mysterious young puppet manipulator and the two children he had “stolen” from the organization, they couldn’t find jackshit.
“The Purple Shadows are doing the best they can, milady. They just need a little more time,” an attendant of Madam Venus tried to say in comfort.
“A little more time?” Madam Venus asked in disbelief.
“A little more time? I’ve seen them locate a prince that had been missing for twenty years in a matter of three days. They managed to find the one bastard child of the celibate Queen of Amagi, despite her efforts to kill anyone who could’ve known.
We wouldn’t know the location of the Amazon warrior tribes of Dozing Salamander, if they hadn’t find a pattern in their exiles,” Madam Venus ranted while her aether began to act more and more agitated, “so do you think you can understand why I am a little frustrated that they can’t seem to find two fucking children and one motherfucking Roaring Tider?! Do they not have my memories recorded on a crystal? Do they need more fucking pictures?!”
“Ma’am, you know why the Purple Shadows can’t use your memories right now. At least not until Master Bulga returns.”
“Tsk!”
Evidently, part of the reason why the Purple Shadows were having so much trouble locating this “hateful puppet master” was due to…the unusual qualities of the memories regarding this moment in time.
For reasons beyond any of the Purple Shadows understanding, while the overall memory was readable, the main subjects they wanted to review, the puppet master and his demonic puppets, were unusually blurry.
Technically it was a bit more than just a blur, but that was the best description they could come up with at the moment.
Regardless of how they manipulated the copied memories, no matter how much they tried to increase the visual acuity and details, for reasons beyond the Purple Shadows’ memory department’s understanding, they couldn’t get a clear image of this guy no matter what.
The only thing they could use was a sketch that Madam Venus had provided from memory, but even that was barely accurate.
There were a lot of Roaring Tider immigrants on Stampeding Bison alone, and trying to find a specific person was tricky.
Even if there was the filtering factor of the person of interest being an aether puppet master, there weren’t that many puppet masters that could control multiple aether puppets at once.
Except for ultra powerful experts and old monsters that have not only perfected the art of puppet control but could also, supposedly, use their abilities on people, and usually, those types of people had massive organizations behind them that could and would crush organizations like theirs into the ground with nothing more than a twist of their fingers..
If the young man they were looking for happened to have such an identity, then the best any of them could hope for is to not anger this guy any further and forget about the whole ordeal.
Unless of course, that person was Madam Venus.
“Ugh…forget it for now,” Madam Venus said in defeat as she let out a deep sigh.
“Leave me for the time being, Sarah. I need some solitude.”
“Of course, mistress.”
Madam Venus watched as her attendant left the area, waiting until she was absolutely certain no one else was in the area or within earshot.
‘Alright…they’re gone.’
Once she was certain she was alone, Madam Venus proceeded to summon forth a familiar trunk from her storage treasure with a simple snap of her fingers.
With another snap of her fingers, Madam Venus opened the trunk to gaze at its contents.
A feeling of anger and disgust filled her soul as she stared at the empty slot where the mask that had belonged to a young prodigy from Umbral Spider once laid.
‘When I find that bastard, I am going to steal his entire existence, gender preferences be damned and that stupid little twinkly dancer!,’ Madam Venus cursed, ‘where the hell am I going to find a Caligos aether user that was as vicious as her?!’
Out of everyone injured during this whole affair, while Madam Venus was the least hurt physically, but emotionally and mentally…she was rather traumatized.
‘All those years having spent perfecting using her, all that time and money spent on isolating her, just…gone! Down the fucking drain because of some otherlander with an ability that literally counters mine? What kind of bullshit is this!’
Frustrated, Madam Venus proceeded to dismiss the trunk of masks and was just about to go and take a bath or get a snack, something to get her mind off of all of this bullshit.
That is until…
“Madam Venus!”
“Huh? I thought said not to disturb me.”
“Apologies ma’am, but it is great news! Master Bulga is to return by tomorrow morning!”
A brilliant smile appeared on Madam Venus’s face as soon as those words registered in her mind.
“Really?”
“Yes ma’am! And apparently, when he heard about this conundrum, he said he would make it his top priority!”
“Excellent!”
As the smile on her face grew wider, the thoughts in her head turned more sinister.
‘You know…I usually make it a habit not to do anything to the people related to the masks I make..but I think I can make an exception this time around…a very, very good exception.’
_____________________________________________
The Witch’s Encore.
That was the name given to the battle that had occurred between House Dunkelkrieg and the combined forces of House Moyuda and Blitzblut.
Although, calling it a battle would be a disservice to Alice Dunkelkreig’s performance during that aforementioned affair..
At the initial start of the skirmish, it looked as if the Moyudas and Blitzbluts were about to wipe out the Dunkelkriegs, sending them into being nothing more than a footnote in a history book.
However, absolutely none of them could predict that the infamous War Witch, the Scoruge of the Dunkelkriegs, a woman that had been assumed dead for fifty years, would suddenly come back out of nowhere looking as if she hadn’t aged a day.
Not only that, but she came back as an Aether King.
Once Alice had entered the battlefield, both the Moyudas and the Blitzblut households were wiped out in an instant, with many of their core and pillar members falling one after the other to her vicious armament, becoming nothing more than bloodstains on her armor and marks on her emblem.
And now, after dealing with this most heinous of crises, Alice had to deal with just one more pressing issue.
Catching up to the modern world.
And just how was she going to do this?
Going back to school under a false identity.
“Bullshit! Bullshit!,” Alice yelled at her younger, yet older than her, brother, ” I am a hundred and ten percent too old to attend such a facility, are you out of your mind?!”
Patriarch Duran had a defeated yet nostalgic smile on his face as his older sister yelled at him.
He had missed her these last few decades…he didn’t miss her swearing though.
“Come on now, big…dear…sister,’ Duran tried to assuage her, “much of the world has changed since you were last…last…”
“Alive?”
“I was going to say ‘active’, but that works too…either way, that also means things like etiquette and politics are different too. Besides, most of the world thinks you were already dead and I don’t think we have the reputation to say we brought you back from the dead…not anymore anyways.”
“Tsk! Right…”
After the battle with the Blitzbluts and Moyudas ended, Alice had spent that time learning about everything that had occurred to the Dunkelkrieg household while she was gone.
It wasn’t…good to say the least.
The kingdom at large went to war as usual over the years, with the Dunkelkriegs as one of the main forces to be reckoned with.
However, due to some internal malcontents that didn’t like the Dunkelkrieg household, their forces were more or less sent on the most dangerous of assignments that would be tantamount to suicide otherwise.
They had earned prestige and success, but also suffered rather terrible losses.
At some point, there was a plague that had wiped out half of the population over the course of fifteen years, until an alchemist managed to figure out a cure and gather all of the ingredients necessary.
The Dunkelkriegs could’ve gotten their hands on that cure sooner, if not for, again, the meddling of third person households that wanted to see the Dunkelkriegs burn.
In essence, the Dunkelkriegs were subjected to a lot of bullshit, but they managed to get out on the other side time and time again.
Battered and bruised, but still kicking.
“But it’s not all bad,” Duran assured his sister who looked a bit more like his daughter if anything, “now that you’re back, our family has a chance to recover from its fallings and then some! But to do that, we need to establish who you are in society again.”
“Man, but that’s a massive pain in the-!”
“Sister, please if not for the family’s sake, can you do it for me?,” Duran asked with a pleading look.
A bit jarring given his advanced age in comparison to whom he was giving this look to.
Alice looked at her pleading brother before letting out a sigh.
“Alright, fine…where do you have in mind?”
Duran perked up once he heard his sister’s acceptance.
“Well, thanks to our connection and your talents, I can think of this one international academy that can suit our needs.”
“International? Really?”
“Indeed!”
