Amber, alert me if anyone comes near us, Tercius informed his familiar while observing the U-shaped mansion. The wings of the mansion were two stories tall, while the center part that joined them had three stories to it. Stone paved paths joined all three parts of the mansion, interspaced with carefully manicured shrubs, plants, and flowers.

He heard barking and… under the barking… was that whistling? And shouting?

Tercius used his Mana Sight and everything but the colors of mana delved into darkness eternal. As his eyes headed straight to the U-shaped mansion, he searched for a uniquely shaped mana outline. But something he saw abruptly stopped his search in its tracks.

Now that he had a closer perspective and a different angle, he saw that there was a bright horizontal mana outline on the mansion's top floor. Previously, while looking from afar, he thought it belonged to an overlap of two, maybe even three mana silhouettes, but now he saw it as a solitary outline. The brightness of the mana outline was nowhere near Master Lazarus' but it was more intense than Lux's.

The red outline was brighter than that mage in Spheros.

This could be a problem. He didn’t count on mages being present. Tercius took a breath. This would change his plans, something he didn’t like one bit, but…

If this person was a mage, then he or she was most definitely a mage hailing from one of the Empire’s Mage Academies, where most of those who come to become mages just get a skill manipulation version of their mana affinity. Fire Manipulation, Earth Manipulation, Stone Manipulation, and so on. These skills could get quite powerful, but they were also very situational in their application.

Mistress Helfira had told him that these kinds of skills can only manipulate materials and occurrences that are already present in some way, and therefore the Pyramid mages deemed them as a step below when compared to Mana Manipulation and Mana Metamorphosis combo— especially when the two skills were combined with the stored knowledge of the Repository.

Now that he thought about it, considering his wild magic escapade, Tercius guessed that most likely there was a skill similar to Mana Metamorphosis, but of a more focused kind, one that would turn a person’s mana into their correspondent affinities directly.

Maybe Fire Metamorphosis… no, that didn’t sound right… Fire Creation? Possibly. But these skills would require someone to learn to do what wild magic did and wild magic required Mana Metamorphosis to manifest, so…

Still, he should delve into that at a later date. Creating stones and crystals with just his mana was too overpowered to pass by.

He almost slapped himself for the retroactively seen stupidity. This would be especially useful for his family and even his familiar if he could manage to make these skills for them. Just thinking of Ciron with a skill like Stone Creation and Stone Shaping, which was most likely a lower strata skill derived from Stone Manipulation either on purpose or by accident, was… Well, that's guessing his affinity, which should be stone, but… Maybe Mistress Kalina has one or two of those mana affinity testing crystals on her? Why don't these ideas come to me in a better time? What if I hit my head and I forget it…

Immediately he turned to Quick Learning and started repeating to himself what he just thought of as well as taking a pen and paper from his amulet to write it down and store it to safety.

Hopefully, when Mistress Kalina saves my brain, she will remember to grab the amulet as well…

He made sure to remember to keep an occasional wandering eye on the sleeping mage in case he or she noticed him, as he restarted his search. His eyes moved over a green lawn and then through walls of the empty left wing, heading for the back of the mansion where the most mana signatures were congregated.

And lo and behold, there he was— the man he was looking for.

As he came closer, the red silhouettes separated into individual beings, and Tercius was sure that this man was him. Giant chest and arms, a very short neck that made him look as if his head grew straight from his shoulders. He was surrounded by fifteen silhouettes, two of which were currently moving in a way reminiscent of combat. The rest, including the gorilla, were clapping their arms and stomping their feet, others placed their hands or rather fingers into their mouths.

A fight at midnight?

Shaking his head, he continued his mana inspection.

There were seven mana silhouettes in the basement of the left wing, five of which were in horizontal positions and two whose arms kept doing repetitive actions which he deemed as cleaning the dishes. Those were servants, most likely of course. How could these people sleep with the commotion above? Were they used to it? Or was the stone that thick? How about the doors and windows?

On the ground floor of the center part of the mansion, he counted two horizontal mana outlines, close to each other and aligned, suggesting that they were at the very least sharing the same room with two sleeping cots close to each other or possibly a larger bed. Two more male outlines were standing positioned so that it seemed to him that they were observing the altercation in the backyard through windows. One person was near the door of the left wing, and one was close to the door of the right wing. One more stood at the main entrance.

One floor up and he found a person sitting, seemingly bent over the table, writing or drawing with his or her right hand, while a person stood nearby straight as a statue, hands behind his back. Chest shape suggested a he. If Tercius was a betting person, he would say that the person at the table was important. The Noble whose mansion this was, or maybe the leader of the il’Drusus contingent. One person was walking in a straight line a dozen meters from them.

Two separate one-man patrols were circling the mansion with a canine mana outline following closely at their heels. Any time a dog approached the place where the combat was going on, the creature would stop to bark, seemingly forcing the patrolman to get it back in line.

So… Possibly a mage on the third floor, sixteen people in the garden behind the mansion, along with two dogs and two guards that circled the manor. One guard on the ground floor of each wing, and four guards on the ground floor of the center part of the mansion at the back with one guard at the door. Three people in a room on the second floor of the mansion. Seven servants in the basement.

The second floors of both the left wing and the right wing, the left wing being closest to him, were free of people, with a lot of space for him to move around. Now would be the best time to complete the objective Paper Trail. If there was one, of course. It could be a waste of time, but the most likely case was that these people had a written trail of their orders somewhere, unless specifically ordered to destroy them.

With a blink, he dismissed Mana Sight and returned to normal. He found himself recovering his bearings, disoriented from the strangeness that his eyes, the only visible thing behind the dark green mask and the black hood, experienced in a fraction of a second. It was one of the issues that came with using the wandering eyes function. He blinked repeatedly while focusing on looking at the geometric patterns of the wall, behind which he hid from direct sight.

One thing was sure. There were too many people there for his initial plan, as well as an unknown wildcard, so he stopped himself from moving to consider a few things.

Changing his mind about Mistress Kalina’s offer sounded tempting right about now. It wasn’t just tempting. It would be the smart move to make, plain and simple. The responsible move to make, both towards his family and towards himself.

And yet…

He felt that he had to try. No… he knew that he had to do it. He had to start developing this part of himself properly.

Since when am I a ‘has to’ person? A decades-old part of him asked.

But he found that he knew the answer to that question already. He wanted to be powerful of his right, not borrowed.

Learning that Mistress Kalina came to him because she needed to make sure that he wouldn’t become a part of some High Council of the Pyramid, or whatever they called it, made him immensely relieved. Now, by taking her offer, he would get three things. Her knowledge and protection from others like her, and the most important one being that he would stay out of any Pyramid politics.

Just for the last one, he would become her Disciple three times over.

If he had become a member of a Council that was the closest thing to any kind of organized leadership that the Pyramid mages had, just the shit-shows that came from the top of his head made Tercius shudder. It would have been cutting the line of the supreme order, in many eyes. Or maybe a better term would be meritocratic creation of a new line, but still…

And it wasn’t very meritocratic, in the first place. He didn’t do it on his own, not exactly.

The matter of the strange Energy he kept leeching off Flu, which had the potential to turn the current professions on their heads, was a matter for another time. If he had a say in it, he would keep the circle of people who knew about it tight. Not using Energy at the Pyramid, ever, was something he could do.

Five years of the Academy, possibly another few years of a still undecided Guild…

A decade? A decade and a half?

As he traced the various geometric decorations carved into the wall just ahead of him, Tercius knew that he could do it. He had kept things hidden for longer.

The decorative wall… the patterns kept capturing his attention. He found them vaguely familiar.

Tercius shook his head. Now was not the time for— Oh! It dawned on him that he knew whose property this mansion was— not by name, but by deed committed.

His eyes continued to blink as he jumped to the past.

After Tercius and his family moved to Nurium following the land grab, a certain Yagar bin'Ari was the first member of Empire’s peerage who had reached out to his grandfather in search of a skilled mason, through his butler of course.

Lord bin'Ari had wanted a countryside villa with a giant pool built just north of Nurium, along the banks of Hippotion. Three meters of stone walls and three meters deep ditches were planned to surround it, defenses that could keep out all manner of ferocious wildlife. Well, most wildlife.

Ciron, ten-year-old Neiran, and close to seven-year-old Tercius had been part of that endeavor, along with two other master stonemasons, both in their early forties, and nine apprentices, all in their mid-teens. There was also a crew of two dozen people who did all the heavy lifting required as well as digging and so on. There were also carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and many different craftspeople involved…

Tercius and Neiran had mostly just sat in the shade of a hastily made wooden shed and turned unprocessed yellow stone and white marble into appropriate shapes whenever they had mana for it, then studied whatever Ciron gave them to study, watched others do their work, or played around. Rona or Septimus would come to visit them almost every other day and sometimes they had even taken them back home for a day.

It was quite a carefree time, back then. One he missed very much.

Five months of work later, the walls, the ditches, and the three-story-tall, two-story-deep mansion were complete— finished a month ahead of planned schedule in large part thanks to Ciron’s broad expertise which circumvented a lot of pitfalls, one quite literal. The Lord was pleased with the work done and paid generously for their time and work. After that many a butler or servant had visited Ciron in search of his expertise, probably a result of some Noble network at work.

Jobs followed, sometimes with barely a day of rest in between. Minor repairs lasting a day or two, or major work that took months and a crew of different craftspeople. Those major ones were paid in weekly installments, as was agreed on Ciron's insistence, a few even overpaid at the end by the satisfied customer. But for half a dozen jobs there had been a few… problems.

One of those half a dozen problematic jobs had concerned a decorative wall that surrounded a mansion inside the Inner Wall. Judging by the work he could see and touch, this was that wall. It had taken him, Neiran, and Ciron close to a week of work to rework the old stone, add new stone where needed and then rebuild everything from the ground up.

Tercius peeked over the wall at the flickering shadows of the torch-lit mansion. The more he looked at it, the more he remembered.

After they finished their work and the time to part and pay came, the butler had claimed that the work was barely satisfactory and then paid them a paltry sum, barely a third of what had been arranged. Reasonably upset, his grandfather had complained of the offered sum and the fact that no one had said a single word of dissatisfaction before that moment. The butler had gone red-faced and immediately threatened to call the Peacekeepers to throw them out if they caused a scene inside a ‘respectable Household’.

Ciron had taken the offered money and the three of them left, angry but resigned. By then, even Tercius and Neiran had known that stirring Nobles up was never a good idea. If they paid you for your work, which the Noble technically did, then you had no case to present to the Peacekeepers. It was Noble's prerogative to say that the wall was 'barely satisfactory'.

It all came surging back as he touched the stone wall. He remembered how he toiled for five hours in the early morning and then four more hours in the afternoon, for five days.

Now the same person housed the people for whom he came.

Suddenly he had this desire to ruin the wall to pebbles, but he stopped himself. That would amount to nothing. It would be an unnecessary action, one which would only bring him a little satisfaction and a potential clue to his opponents.

Money and reputation. It was always about one or both with these people. The two were their life and their chains. Chains which he made sure never to inherit for himself from his old parents. Being practical about it, he didn’t mind earning them but he also made sure to occasionally remind himself what they truly were.

Paper Trail does encompass this Noble. And if I can find his property books and ledgers as well as money… Tercius thought. For the money, I need a new objective name… since the search closely aligns with Paper Trail and won't disrupt the timeline too much… Coin Snatch? Gold Rush? Safe Pillaging? I like them all…

Amber, go hide in that tree there. Climb as high as you can and stay there no matter what, Tercius sent along with Familiar Bond. Don’t come down until I come to get you. That’s an Order.

Brushing against his black pants in goodbye, Amber scampered off running across the street and climbing up the indicated tree with barely a hitch in her speed. Good girl. She knew the importance of Orders.

Light mode of Mana Sight covered his eyes, giving his regular vision the ability to see vague mana outlines. Glancing left and right he found a clear coast and he immediately jumped over the wall, dashing across the green grass to the nearest bush.

From cover to cover, he ran like the wind making no sounds in his passing. As soon as he met the wall of the mansion, a dozen seconds later, he hugged it for a moment to let his breath go calm once more. But he didn’t have a lot of time to catch a breath. One guard and one dog would be at his position within the next thirty seconds.

Looking up, he saw no ledge within arms reach to grab onto. But he had expected that. The walls of the ground floor were built smooth, in the classical style that hailed from Augusta Belia, to which the majority of the Nobles of the Empire religiously adhered. Ciron always pointed out that the style came with the unnecessary pitched roofs since no part of lowland Sogea had seen snow for as long as his grandfather's grandfather remembered. Flat roofs were the traditional Sogean style.

But the windows had thick diagonal bars on them. Both the inner and outer wooden shutters were open, and no one was in the room. If he wanted to climb up he would have used them.

But his plans for this night were already messed up. His self-imposed limitations had no more sense. He had telekinesis. He would fly.

Flying up two floors, he laid his body completely against the still warm roof tiles while the guard and his dog passed by, his wandering eyes observing the events below him in red mana silhouettes. The smell of the Purple Pitcher had caught the dog's nose, but the animal didn't start barking. It was a strange smell from a foreign land. An unknown. Hopefully, it completely hid his smell. The creature just kept sniffing around and occasionally growling. The other guard and his dog caught up with the first one, and the two lingered for a while but moved on soon.

Searching for a premade entrance would take time, especially since he could make one for himself. Messing with the structural integrity of a house was risky. Exhaling his taut nerves, Tercius thought about where to enter and a moment later he knew a way in.

Using his telekinesis he made the wisps float him one floor down and then he halted them in mid-air. Like water, a part of the wall just below the metal bars of the windows moved into the empty room and he crawled inside. Crouching near the hole, he used Stone Shaping to close the entrance behind him, and then he made sure that the stone patterns looked like their neighbors.

Standing up and turning around, Tercius coated his eyes with dark mode Mana Sight and checked on the mage. Still there, still horizontal. More checks followed and only then did he switch to the light mode of Mana Sight.

The room in which he ended up was a sleeping room with two cots and a wooden chest at the end. He opened the chest but found it empty.

Now to check all the rest in the wing… Maybe I can see what the fuss on the other side is about?

***

***

***

As Caeso's feet guided him back and to the left, his spear tip moved from its 'resting' position, and with a loud strike the metal of the spear collided with the shield's wooden surface.

"That's better." he said, as his spear returned to its resting position or 'defense position' based on whom you spoke with. His left hand held the lower part of the spear shaft near his hip, while the right hand held the shaft around the center of his torso, while the spear tip came at eye level.

A few quick thrusts later, some aimed at the stomach, upper leg, or groin, some directly into the chest or arms, and some for the neck and face, all the while denying his opponent the opportunity to get closer to him with a well-timed swipe and some impeccable footwork, Caeso smoothly educated the man of the advantages of a spear.

With half a dozen bleeding nicks on his arms and one on his face, the bearded sword and shield-wielding mercenary was a wild sight to behold under the quivering torchlight. Blood was running down his arms and half the face was dark from the superficial wound on the forehead.

After close to an hour of non-stop sparring Caeso was a bit short of breath, but the exercise kept his spirit high.

"Sixteen times. That's the number of times you would have died if this wasn't a spar." Caeso said, running a hand over his sweaty forehead. "And you didn't even get close enough to me once. So do you want to explain to me how exactly the spear is inferior to a sword?"

The observers of the spar laughed, while the mercenary stared back at Caeso with flaming eyes but a still tongue.

"I thought so," Caeso said with a smirk and waved for a cloth to clean the sweat of battle.

People mocking spears had always been a point that Caeso took too personally, especially from when coming sword wielders. The spear was the weapon of army grunts, guards, and peasants, people said. All were valid points, he knew, but what bothered him was not that they said it but the way they said it with a… contempt of some kind.

So any time he had an opportunity to teach someone, he took it.

There was a reason why spears were the prevalent weapon everywhere. They worked. They were easy to make and maintain and most importantly very easy to learn quickly. To kill with it, all it took was a good thrust.

Thrust was the first spear move that Caeso learned, back at the il'Drusus training grounds, at age of seven. Since then he had repeated the same move an immeasurable number of times, becoming one with it. He had learned how to breathe with a spear, how to prime his body for attack or defense while stationary or on the move. His Spear Mastery had been used three times as a sacrifice for other skill barriers. This time around, however, it would be the turn of Spear Mastery to finally move past its first barrier and get a sacrifice. Caeso had chosen Shield Mastery for that honor.

But he had to admit that this spar had not been that much about the spear as his need to make sure that these mercenaries knew their place.

Drinking deeply from a large water pitcher and then emptying the leftovers on his head, Caeso felt refreshed. Blinking the water out of his eyes, he looked up at the second floor where he saw that his host was still up, burning the candle. Caeso couldn’t really blame him. The commotion his men made was likely heard down the street. Just when he turned to order his men to quiet down, the corner of his eye caught something. Or at least he thought he did. Looking at it now, he could have sworn that something had been in the corner of that end window on the second floor, then it was gone the next moment.

Looking at the barred windows of the ground floor he noticed that he and his men had had an audience there too. To these provincial guards, he and his men probably looked like harbingers of death itself.

"Everyone, go to sleep," he ordered. "If I find even one of you smelling of the bottom of a bottle in the morning, I will reduce everyone's payment. You have been warned."

He walked away from them, ignoring the protests, and stripped all of his clothes before he jumped bare in the pool. The water cleansed his body from the sweat and he headed for his room to sleep as well. Tomorrow would be a day of action and a good rest would be welcome for it.

Half an hour later, Caeso was still staring at the ceiling, every part of him telling him that something was not right.