NOVEL NEXT Chapter 60: Infiltration
Mila
From her brief observations of the Gale Clan while running through their base, Mila noticed a few things. One, the clan was very hierarchal. Those with greenish blond hair and yellow eyes were like nobles among the masses, likely true descendants of the clan, but they only made up around an eighth of the force. Two, the Pink Ursa was truly an outlier, looking Caucasian while pretty much everyone else had features common in South Asia on Earth. Finally, three, they weren’t very well disciplined.
Everyone was wearing artifacts, but they weren’t uniform, a sign Nana Xara had taught her meant the clan likely didn’t have many of their own craftsmen, instead buying things from outside. There hadn’t been enough guards, allowing her to easily sneak in as only one had a detection skill and she’d killed him. And, probably the biggest sign, almost no one had a weapon near them while they were eating, which had allowed her to kill twenty soldiers with relative ease.
Using Trickster’s Guise, Mila changed the illusion around herself to show her as a greenish blond haired Gale Clan woman of around 40. Then she dropped the effects of Blur, put the Twin Dragons in the Left Hand of the Runescribe’s subspace, and just started casually walking around the camp, moving away from the site of the commotion.
There was a lot to be learned just from listening in on conversations, and an effective Perception of 643 made doing so easy. Using all five of her minds to listen and moving to the more central area of the camp, she started to learn quite a bit.
First, the inheritance on Hira was left by a C rank power called the Shadow Thief, or at least that is what the name translated to. She’d died several hundred years ago, killed by someone called the War Dragon King, but all the treasures she’d stolen had never been found.
One of the things she’d taken was the collected class paths of the Gale Clan, blocking the leadership of the Gale Clan from knowing how to advance to C rank, and that was the main thing the Gale Clan was after, though Mila expected there was something else which wasn’t common knowledge.
Second, the Gale Clan wasn’t doing very well. They had been a C rank force in the Night Kingdom, third in power after the Imperial family and another clan, but their C rank elder had died around the time their class paths had been stolen, and many clans in the Night Kingdom had been suppressing them ever since, especially the Flare Clan.
From looking beyond the obviously biased words she heard, it very much sounded like the Gale Clan had abused their position when in power and were now getting their just desserts, but Mila was more interested in how no one seemed to know how their elder had died.
Third, and probably the most immediately important, she learned more about the Pink Ursa. His mother had been the most powerful cultivator to come out from a planet which had undergone an apocalypse style integration and actually beaten off the invaders. She’d then fallen in love with the first son of the Gale Clan’s previous clan master and married him, giving him one son, the current next in line for the clan master position. Then, a little more than a decade after her first son’s birth, she’d had another son, but his hair and eye color made it obvious he wasn’t the child of the clan leader, and she’d killed herself in embarrassment.
The people speaking were blaming the Pink Ursa, whose name was Isaiah, for not being properly thankful to the clan for raising him despite his mother’s infidelity, but Mila was leaning toward there being nothing for him to actually be thankful for. First, she very much doubted Isaiah’s mother had married the current clan leader by choice given the obvious power difference at the time, Isaiah’s mother only an F rank when her planet had lost its protection while the Gale Clan’s C rank elder’s death hadn’t been widely known. It was, however, possible she was unfaithful, but Isaiah had such obvious characteristics with his salmon hair and fuchsia eyes—characteristics which hearing about his older half brother obviously didn’t come from his mother—so it was suspect none of the people talking seemed to know who his father was.
His father’s identity had been suppressed and that didn’t fit with what she could gather about the personality of the Gale Clan leader unless Isaiah’s father had quite a bit of power, as otherwise he would have been hunted down and killed. If Isaiah’s father had power, though, and had actually been in a relationship with Isaiah’s mother, the poor circumstances of Isaiah’s upbringing didn’t make much sense, so Mila thought it more likely Isaiah’s mother had been raped and the Gale Clan leader was too scared of Isaiah’s father to kill him as a child.
Finally, Mila highly doubted Isaiah’s mother had actually killed herself. From what she’d heard, there had been tension between the Gale Clan leader and his eldest son for over a decade, and Mila was already guessing there had been no love between the Gale Clan leader and his first wife, given how fast he’d remarried. So, there was a pretty good chance Isaiah’s mother had been killed by her husband.
Family drama aside, however, Mila was now convinced Isaiah wasn’t a C or B rank talent, but an A rank one. Sure, at 30, he was quite a bit older than she or Aalam, and he’d been born in a world where learning Laws had been possible from his early childhood. But Laws were much, much easier to access in System generated soulspaces and worlds undergoing integrations. That was one of the main reasons forces risked the lives of their young on invasions even when the chance of death was quite high. And, given how weak his Aura stat was, Isaiah’s Attunement stat was likely less than 32.
It wasn’t easy to qualify for a Legendary grade class at F rank even with a good environment, and Isaiah had only received his first skill orb a year before the Gale Clan’s invasion of Hira, before that receiving pretty much no help whatsoever.
Mila entered into one of the nicest smaller tents near the center of the base, likely the personal tent of someone higher up in the Gale Clan force’s hierarchy, and sat down cross-legged on the mattress placed on the floor. She spent about fifteen minutes just allowing her resources to recover, Aalam’s recovery overflow greatly speeding up the process, and then she started practicing with Second Self.
She’d completely mastered Illusion Steps as she ran away from Isaiah, and both Second Self and Blur had advanced a few percentage points as well even though they’d been useless, the discovery of their limitations improving them quite considerably.
Nana Xara had confirmed for her that skills were specialized metaphysical runic arrays carved into a cultivator’s soul, either allowing the cultivator to pour in resources to create an effect or taking in energy from the universe to create an effect automatically, so skill mastery was then the process of the soul adapting to the skill, and there were multiple ways to go about it. External energy of certain types could make the process easier, just using the skill slowly improved the adaptation process, but the best way was for a cultivator to increase their comprehension of how to use the skill. Given the metaphysical nature of skills, the better a cultivator understood their own skill, the more their souls naturally adapted to it.
For Mila, this process was made even easier due to the Void Sage class’s effect of increasing the speed of mastering skills by 100%, which she could make use of through her Essence Chamberlain class. The effect helped her soul adapt and it made a huge difference in her growth.
Legendary grade skills were harder to master, being made of far more complicated and powerful arrays, so her mastery of them was slower, but she was very close with her last two Epic grade skills and the enlightenment she’d received when they proved completely useless against Isaiah would hopefully help her fully master them within the next few days.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my—” The woman who entered was in her late thirties, with the greenish blond hair of a true Gale Clan member, but she was nowhere near as strong as Isaiah and she wasn’t actually prepared for a fight, so Mila was able to grab her head with Telekinesis and break her neck.
Mila hadn’t fully understood before the fight with Isaiah, Nana Xara seemingly deliberately not explaining anything to her so she could learn on her own, but Telekinesis was an extremely powerful and versatile skill. Mila’s effective Spirit was nowhere close to Aalam in his Id state, but it was her second highest stat after Soul and the skill itself was Heroic grade even if it barely had any mastery, so it could produce quite a bit of force. Then, as long as Mila’s effective Aura was more than 12 times her opponent, she could initiate Telekinesis close enough to their bodies to physically touch them.
The technique was relatively easy to defend against with qi, mana, or psyforce, like Isaiah had, and it wouldn’t do much against someone with Isaiah’s level of Toughness, but it was a very useful assassination technique and it didn’t make much of a mess as she was able to kill without bloodshed.
She’d chosen the tent she was in because it seemed to be the highest grade of the tents not in the very center, and it had met her expectations. With excellent privacy features, it didn’t allow anyone’s F rank detection skills to enter from the outside, but allowed the occupant’s senses to easily pass through, so no one in the camp noticed as she committed murder.
Mila then quickly looked through the items on the woman’s body, stripping her bare. Then she put the body in the subspace of the Left Hand of the Runescribe along with the blue dress she’d been wearing since she’d taken it from one of the native cultivators during her first few days in Eshna.
The Left Hand of the Runescribe was an artifact designed by Aalam to be usable by her, so it could shrink to the size of her left hand, but that wasn’t a very common function, especially as it required a subspace built into the artifact to put the extra mass. And she hadn’t found any artifacts better than the dress which could comfortably allow for her increased bust size as a succubus, so she hadn’t replaced it.
Isaiah had seen the dress, however, along with the Left Hand of the Runescribe, so it was dangerous to keep wearing them around the Gale Clan camp. Mila thus bound her chest with cloth and put on the dead woman’s light armor, hiding the Left Hand of the Runescribe under a glove she’d found for that purpose while handling the rebels in the Voranin region.
Then she continued practicing with Second Self and Blur inside the safety of the tent and waited for nightfall.
