NOVEL NEXT Chapter Three Hundred Sixty Three
I hadn't visited the location where my cousin and her guards were living. With the tournament ongoing and my team's deal not to seek outside help, it seemed smart to minimize contact, but I had at least gotten an address from her in one of our conversations, so I was able to direct Jessie to the location. Lucky the expanded space came with a possible expanded entrance, or we'd never have fit Randall in the car.
When we arrived at the rented house (Natalie had been in a hotel for a while but had moved into semi-permanent lodging a while after confirming my team's strength in the first round, since between us we had a decent chance to make it all the way.
I grimaced as I looked up at the house. It was dark and silent, but looking close I could see a few issues. The lock on the door was snapped and it hung slightly ajar, some of the windows were cracked. I tried calling again. No response. Shit. I turned to Callie, who was standing close, offering support silently with her presence and through our bond. "Someone's been here. But it seems weird there wouldn't be more mess. Nat is a candidate. She's not going to go down easy."
There was a loud crack behind us, and we all spun to stare at Jessie, or rather, Randall, whose back she was on, who had stepped on a curbside bench and smashed it to kindling by accident. We all glared, and she just shrugged, saying in a soft tone. "Well, he's a bear. They aren't made to be stealthy."
Rolling my eyes, I turned back to the house, my tension pretty much shattered. I was still worried, but it's hard to feel stifled by the gravitas of a situation when you're walking around with a big clumsy teddy bear on your team. I looked at Callie. "Do The Four have a higher Perception than you? I know of the G-rankers present you're our best stealth agent, but I don't really know what they can do."
She glanced at them questioningly and when one of them nodded she pointed to him. "That one does, apparently." At my snicker, she just shrugged. "What? It's not like I lunch with them. When would I even have the time, we're together almost any time I'm not working or training. They're acquaintances through my uncle." She turned to the indistinguishable-from-their-sibling hooded figure. "Check the house, report back if you run into anything we need to know about, and be careful in there."
The only real upside to this was that we knew there was no one over F-rank inside. With Rime and the rest of our crew along there was very little chance they'd be able to overpower us. I hoped. No matter how many times I repeated that to myself a part of me was pretty terrified we were kicking an anthill and about to be ass deep in F-rankers we couldn't beat. Speaking of which, I looked at Rime. "Is Frostbite coming to meet us here?"
I'd asked her to tell our ally we needed her on hand after we found Celine, since the other team had a decent chunk of people on hand. The blue haired ice user nodded. "She's on her way. This isn't exactly a central location, which I imagine is the point."
That was the best we could ask for. Callie, hearing the confirmation, dispatched whichever of the The Four had been pointed out, and one of the figures vanished. I'd seen them use that trick in the fight with the mercenaries, but I wasn't sure how much of that was taking advantage of lapsed attention. This time they just blinked out of existence right in front of me, and I recognized that they'd used Perception to erase all traces of themselves from my sight.
The door to the inside shook slightly as it creaked a smidgen more open, but it didn't make any sound or anything, and if I hadn't been looking right at it I'd have missed the motion. Callie put a hand on my arm. "She's fine, Shane." She said softly, her voice being run through Stealth to prevent it from carrying. "Your family is tough, and if her guardian is anything like yours, in the very unlikely circumstance that something happened to her, they'd have burned down half the planet in retribution."
I snickered at that, but it actually did make me feel better. If there was anyone I trusted to have my back it was Zeke, and remembering that Natalie had someone like that really helped. Not to mention her two guards, whose names I'd forgotten if I ever heard them. She had plenty of backup even without my team coming to help.
After two minutes the hooded form reappeared in front of us among the other three. The weirdest part was that somehow even knowing where there hadn't been one of them before, I somehow couldn't figure out WHICH of the figures had just appeared and which had been there for the entire time we'd been waiting. "The house is empty." Reported the F-ranker. "Signs of a struggle. The inside is bigger than the out, and the fighting was mainly in the middle of the top floor, so none of it spilled over onto the exterior."
I cursed, stalking through the door, letting it bang open as I strode into the house. Near the exterior it looked like a nice normal house, but the further in I got, the more signs I saw of combat. Acid burns, fire, purple crystal and some strange blue glowing slime that had stuck at least two literal lightning bolts to the wall, suspending them harmlessly inside the gel in an extremely disturbing way.
I saw splatters of blood in a few places, none of them too big, so I was pretty sure no one bled out here, but in and of itself the fact that Nat and her people hadn't managed to kill any of their attackers was jarring. I also wasn't sure how they'd attacked this place. Was Nat's guardian not living with her like Zeke was with me? The whole loophole of protecting their own residence should have applied. Though maybe that was a liberty Zeke took with his contract to help as best he could.
Looking around, I shouted. "Hey, if Natalie's guardian is here I'd like to talk. It's not interference, I just want to confirm a few things. Even if you aren't living here you should be keeping an eye out right?" My voice carried into the depths of the empty house, but I got no response.
Callie shook her head. "They probably followed Natalie. We need to figure out where she went. What about your tracking skill? You have a starting point here, so you can follow her trail right?"
That...was a good idea. I should have thought of that. I was off my game. My stomach roiled and my chest was tight. I had exactly one biological family member who I was aware of in this entire damn star cluster, and she was on the run from insane cultists who had tried to kill me multiple times. Nat and I weren't close, we barely knew each other, but what she represented...a member of my family I could talk to. Could learn about.
"Shane." Snapped Callie, and my head came up, I'd been standing still for a minute, lost in my panic. Callie knew about my tendency to drift off, but she usually left me to my thoughts. This time she was looking at me sternly. "I know. Ok? I know how scary this is. How confused you are. I can FEEL it, and it breaks my heart. But if you spiral and let her die it's going to break YOUR heart, and that will hurt me a million times more. I need you to focus up. Ok?"
I took a long, deep breath. "Yeah. Yeah I'm good. Thanks Cal. I'm ok." I turned to the destroyed room and triggered Eye of Revelation. There was...a lot. Footprints, all over, some of the attacks were glowing, showing me they'd been Nat's, and I had to stop for a second, not because I didn't have a trail, but because I had like seventeen of them. Nat had lived here, there were traces of her everywhere.
It took me a few minutes to sift through the traces, figuring out how the passage of time effected them, and using that to date the most recent trail. Once I got it, I set off down the hall, following several passages back further into the house. We stopped in the kitchen, and everyone looked at me quizically, until I reached up and put a hand on the refrigerator and shoved to one side.
The large metal machine slid aside easily, smashing into the wall because I was way too strong to do something like that without paying attention. Behind it was a small closet full of cleaning supplies, and I stomped down on the floor of that closet, crumpling a well hidden trapped door that led down into a cement passageway.
It was a huge relief that they'd managed to rehide this place behind them, but the blood smeared across the cement as we climbed down the metal ladder into the tunnel was...less encouraging. It wasn't enough that I was sure someone was dead, but it wasn't a little bit either. Handprints on the wall showed where someone had tried to hold themselves up, and the prints were lower to the ground and smaller than they would be from a man or even a reasonably tall woman. Natalie was small like that.
Callie stepped up next to me as she came down the ladder. "This keeps going. And it's not a huge amount." She squeezed my arm. "I know it doesn't feel like it, but this is a good sign. I sent Jessie with Rime to take Randall around the back of the house to look around. Mel went back to let them know which direction the tunnel is going, so they know which way to head."
I nodded silently, not trusting myself to speak right now. I was...angry. Irrationally pissed off at everything. This was taking too long, my cousin was hurt, possibly dying and I couldn't help and everything was getting in my way and I just wanted to punch something and throw up and possibly strangle a cult member. The cocktail of unpleasant emotions and feeling was not helping myself control at all.
Callie just smiled at me reassuringly and then set off down the tunnel. She could feel what I was, and she knew I needed a minute to clear my head. But I also needed to keep moving, so once they pulled ahead I followed after. The tunnel went on for an unusually long time, the blood smears getting more and more fresh as well as having less blood on them, which I took as a good sign.
About three quarters of the way down we started hearing noises and feeling shaking. We reached the end of the tunnel and opened up a hatch at the top of a ladder, pushing aside a bunch of leaves to reveal our place at the edge of a massive clearing. In the center of that clearing, glaring at a series of hooded figures, was Nat and her two guards.
One of them was cracking whips made of blue gelatinous material like the stuff from the house. There were dozens of types of energy caught along the whips, and the taller hooded figure, whose face had been revealed as a red bearded giant of a man with a shaved head, was bringing them down to ward off the other forms.
The smaller hooded figure, who turned out to be a strong looking blonde girl with her hair in a pair of braids, had a huge axe coated in green smoke that she was lashing out with in short, sharp chops.
Surrounding them was a huge construct made of some kind of red energy in the shape of a wall of briars, and I could see that while it was F-rank, some of the cultists were hard at work tearing through it. Off in the distance, I could see Jessie on Randall's back with Rime bringing up the rear. Without even waiting, I dropped to my knees to condense my poison lava fists. I needed to help.