‘At least she got that right. You do eat for two.’ Lith inwardly chuckled.
‘Ha ha! Very funny. Why don’t you try spending years trapped inside a stone form without any of your five senses? Then when you get out, we’ll see if you won’t indulge in a bit of food after a long day’s work.’ Solus said.
‘Please, stay calm, Solus. Too much stress could hurt the baby.’ Lith said while pretending to caress her womb while he actually pinched it.
‘Tell this story to anyone and I’m going to kill you!’
The carriage quickly reached the inner rim of the city where a couple of guards attempted to stop them to search the vehicle and identify the passengers.
“Move away, dimwits! There’s no time for this crap. This woman might lose her baby!” The umpteenth groan and Solus’s genuine distress at those words made the guards move out of the way.
“Bring them straight to the hospital. Our colleagues will identify the man while the woman receives the necessary treatment.” The senior officer said.
They couldn’t leave their station nor communicate with others due to the dimensional sealing arrays. They just followed the carriage with their eyes, making sure it wasn’t just a ruse.
“Thank you very much. I can do the rest on my own.” Lith jumped out of the carriage while looking through the windows on the second floor of the nearby city hall with Life Vision, searching for an empty room.
“We couldn’t come with you anyway.” The woman sighed. “The food rations for the day won’t deliver themselves and with all the soldiers on the walls, everyone must do their part to protect our city.”
Lith gently took Solus between his arms, opening the door of the hospital with a kick while screaming:
“My wife needs a healer!” Loud enough for everyone to hear.
Yet he also opened a Warp Steps on the floor and placed a Hush spell in the corridor in front of him. The guards inside heard the yell muffled and thought it came from one of the hospital rooms.
Also, when Lith walked inside, he fell straight into the Steps. The door opening and closing on itself baffled the guards only for a second.
“I can’t believe that people can’t even close a door properly! We are soldiers, not butlers.” The man looked outside, making sure there wasn’t anyone who needed help, and gestured to his colleagues that were staring his way that everything was okay.
Meanwhile, Lith found himself in a storage room filled with stationery.
‘How are you doing?’ He asked while making sure with Life Vision that no one would disturb them.
‘I’ve never felt so embarrassed my whole life but I’ll get over it. Thank you for asking.’ Solus checked her own flabby, soft belly and Lith’s flat, well-toned abdomen.
The comparison only made her feel worse.
‘I meant your energy reserves. You can only spend so much time in human form and I might need your help later.’ Lith replied. ‘Also, hands off the merchandise.’
‘Right. I’ll get back inside my ring.’
Lith used Hush on the door so that neither the lock nor the hinges would creak when opened and stepped outside. The corridor was lit by two lines of torches hung to the walls while the magical stones had been turned off to redirect the energy into the city arrays.
Lith spotted several energy signatures and moved away from them.
‘If I kill people randomly, their disappearance might be noticed and my mission would become even more complicated. First, I need to find a clue about what’s happening here.
‘Then I can search for one of the local nobles and ask them why they decided to follow Quaron in his madness.’ He thought.
‘Agreed. It’s best to have answers before asking questions. I found a few heavily enchanted doors that look promising.’ Solus said while sharing with him the findings of her mana sense and array detecting spell.
Lith followed her directions, using a Hush spell to not make any noise and sticking to the high ceiling with Spirit Magic whenever someone walked their way. The City Hall was a three-story building tastelessly furnished.
The rooms and corridors on each floor were identical if not for the tags that identified them by number.
‘Either the people who built the City Hall were confident in the arrays that surround the building or they made the corridors confusing on purpose. There is no other way to explain why the locks and the arrays are not connected.’ Lith thought.
‘Without Life Vision, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish the door of a broom closet from that of the treasury. On the other hand, someone like me only needs a good old Clean Slate spell to open a door without triggering any pesky alarm array.’
The tier four Forgemastering spell used a pulse of light and darkness magic to temporarily reset any enchantment the caster touched, making them lose their imprint.
The lock clicked and Lith stepped inside, making sure to leave no visible trace of his passage.
‘Oh, fuck me sideways!’ The rectangular room was five meters (16.4 feet) wide and ten meters (33 feet) long, with three desks each one lined against a different wall.
They had two cabinets each on either side and were covered by orderly piles of documents as long as Lith’s arm. It would have taken a regular person hours to read the files on a single desk and that without even opening the cabinets.
‘The bad news is that everything here is magically locked. The good news is that I made a lot of room in Soluspedia before leaving the tower exactly in case something like this happened.’ Solus said.
‘Thanks, Solus. This will still put some strain on my life force but it’s better than nothing. As soon as we’re done with this mission, I’ll prepare your favorite dishes.’ He thought.
‘Yeah, right. I don’t want people to ask me if I’ve already chosen the name for my twins so hard pass on that.’ Yet if she had a mouth, it would have been watering at the thought of his cooking.
Lith needed to consume a spark of life force to make the pocket dimension overcome the seal of the arrays and to make matters worse, the amount wasn’t fixed. The more things he stored the more energy conjuring the emerald flames required.
Lith opened the drawers of the desks and the cabinets, putting everything inside Soluspedia at the same time. He felt so tired that he needed to sit down and eat, but at least it took him less than a minute to browse through all the files.
Thanks to Soluspedia, he needed but a thought to study the contents of every single document. He took notes of his findings so that once he was done, he could put everything back in the same place where he had found it.
‘Either the Commander of the city guards lied to us or he underestimated how much money Quaron took from Zeska.’ Lith thought. ‘Even if he really bought supplies on the black market, there’s no way Quaron spent so much in just three months.
‘The taxes have already been collected and yet the treasury is almost empty.’
