True to Barin’s word, Clive's villa was easy to spot from the road. As the rumormonger had described, the building had an abundance of vine-wrapped trellis, but it also had a courtyard with a large visible fountain, bracketed by a pair of smaller outbuildings. The combination of features gave the place a very cozy aesthetic despite the large size of the central main building.

While the estate had obviously been designed for appearances, no security vulnerabilities had been introduced for beauty’s sake. Just by looking at it, Hirrus could clearly see that there were clear sightlines all around the grounds. The climbing vines were kept neatly trimmed so as not to provide cover, and none of the trellises lead up to large windows on the upper floors.

Whoever had designed the place had both an eye for aesthetics and for defensive design.

As he left the main road to approach the estate, he encountered a new obstacle. While the villa sat atop a hillside, letting it set a beautiful profile against the horizon, at the base of the hill the grounds were encircled by a tall stone wall, barring him from entering. His first thought was to circle around to look for a gate, but he had to consider that Clive might be expecting him.

While Barin’s guards had let him by, due to his being a town guard, Clive was likely to have adventurers assembled in his defense like Juri.

And if they were as strong as those that had been sent to kill him, fighting them was not going to leave him in any condition to handle Clive himself afterwards. Even if Hirrus found him alone. His measly healing Arcana would be nearly useless in the face of such obstacles.

Instead, Hirrus had other tools.

He activated his High Jump Arcana. It let him clear the wall with ease and he came down on the other side as quietly as possible.

From the inside, he could tell immediately that he’d made the right choice. There were numerous adventurers patrolling the grounds, easily recognizable by their scrambled, mismatched outfits.

He could see five of them from where he landed.

Two were sitting on the side of the fountain in the courtyard, two more were walking together around the nearest of the two outbuildings, and one was posted at the main entrance to the larger building, absently cutting slices off of an apple. Hirrus didn’t doubt that there were more present, who were either better at hiding, or currently out of sight.

There was no telling how many more were inside any of the three buildings.

The adventurers he could see were all obviously distracted, but Hirrus couldn’t count on every adventurer on the grounds doing a similarly half-assed job. While the villa was lit up, the outer edge of the grounds was only dimly lit, and Hirrus was able to circle around to a low brush and crouch down, a little more confident in the cover it afforded to him.

Rather than rush in, Hirrus forced himself to slow down and wait. He knew Alric was potentially in terrible danger, but it wasn’t going to help the man if he bit off a bigger fight than he could handle. It was better to take a few minutes to assess Clive’s defenses than to take a few hours to recover from battle with a dozen of Clive’s zealous protectors.

And a dozen would have been a conservative guess.

When the pair he saw circling the nearer outbuilding vanished around the corner, another pair came around the corner of the far outbuilding. Shortly after, a third pair came around the corner of the main house of the villa.

As he watched, there were also more within the buildings, visible as shadows moving across the windows. He guessed there were at least twenty total adventurers patrolling the grounds. It was possible there were many more that he couldn’t - and wouldn’t - see, given the size of the estate and the buildings.

Whether or not Barin had gotten word out, Clive was expecting Hirrus' approach.

It was smart. Required forethought and planning.

Something Hirrus didn’t think adventurers were capable of.

He had to admit a sort of begrudging professional respect for this one.

Another minute passed before Hirrus had a window to approach. As soon as the pair circling the nearer outbuilding turned their back on him, he employed Juri’s Split Second ability to cover as much ground as possible. Hirrus rushed as quietly as he could until he was at the wall of the building. He crouched in the shadows there and listened. There was no alarm raised or warning cried, so he figured he had timed the run well enough to evade notice.

He crept along the back wall of the outbuilding, keeping himself as out of sight as possible from the courtyard. Staying low, he crawled under the windows to avoid casting a shadow to be seen by anyone inside. It meant that the pair patrolling ahead of him vanished around the corner well before he reached it.

It put him on the clock. If they circled all the way around behind him, he would be spotted.

His next move would have to be fast.

The pair circling the main building passed ahead of him. Hirrus couldn’t afford to wait for Split Second to be ready again, but he had other tools. Activating Pumped Kicks gave him a little bit more speed for more than long enough to cross the gap and duck down at the base of a vine-covered trellis.

He stopped there and waited, straining his ears to try to sense if anyone had seen him. When no outcry went up, nor was there the thundering of feet towards him to investigate, he began to plan his next move.

As he had previously noticed, the trellis didn’t provide an easy path up to a window. But Hirrus didn’t need something to climb to get up. High Jump was ready again.

Hirrus hurled himself up past the trellis and onto the building’s roof. The roof had very steep sides of brown curved tile, but above that, it was flat on top. Hirrus landed as gently as he could, grateful that he was wearing the leather armor rather than the chain and plate that he’d worn earlier.

He crouched there, perfectly still, waiting to hear if someone called out in alarm about his landing.

Again, nothing happened. This was beginning to feel a bit too easy.

He shrugged to himself and crept across the roof, seeking an entrance into the building.

In the far corner of the roof, there was a thick wooden hatch. There was no latch or lock, and Hirrus carefully took a hold of the ring that served as a handle, and inched it open a careful crack. The hinge was well-kept, and didn’t creak as he peered down into the room below.

The interior of the room he had found appeared to be a storage room. It was full of matching furniture, but mostly chairs and tables, stacked on top of each other. There were also a few wooden crates and a stack of paintings in one corner.

There was an adventurer inside, presumably to guard this entrance. But they were instead sorting through the paintings, examining a few of them that they’d leaned up against the wall.

Hirrus carefully opened the hatch the rest of the way, gently settling it open and lowering himself down.

The adventurer seemed entranced by the paintings he had set out, paying no attention to him.

Hirrus dangled from the opening for a moment, gauging his landing. He swung himself forward towards a table, and brought his feet down on top of it with a soft tap instead of the loud thump if he’d dropped to the floor.

The adventurer didn’t even look at that. They were too busy digging through the stacked paintings, pulling out a fourth one and leaning it up against the wall as well.

After climbing down off of the table as quietly as possible, Hirrus crept towards the adventurer’s back, the icy greataxe ready. The door to the room was behind him, and he could have left, but it was too big a risk to leave this adventurer at his back.

If it was to be a fight, it couldn’t just be ended quickly.

It had to be ended instantly.

Stepping up behind the man, Hirrus activated his Iron Typhoon Arcana and swept his axe down as hard as he could. The blow struck solidly right at the base of the spine, dealing six thousand three hundred and ninety-three damage, and proccing a double strike for an additional four thousand seven hundred and ninety-four. With the additional attack speed from Iron Typhoon, the huge weapon whirled around in a flash to catch the man in the ribs before he could cry out in pain at the first attack, and another six thousand damage sent him crumpling to the ground in a heap. Dead.

Hirrus looked down at the corpse with a small smile. It seemed the adventurer with all his points focused in BUR had had the right idea.

The destructive potential of this strategy was undeniable.

Now that he was alone in the room, he spared a glance at the paintings lined up on the wall. They were beautiful in their own way, but had a very stylized, sketchy quality to them. If it wasn’t for the expertly-applied splashes of pastel colors giving each painting an ethereal look almost like watercolor, he would have thought them the work of an amateur. They had clearly been picked out of the pile as the work of the same artist, as the rest of the pile didn’t match that particular style.

Hirrus hoped that the time this adventurer had spent appreciating them had been worth the untimely demise.

Moving across the storage room, Hirrus arrived at the door, carefully cracking it open to peek out into the hall. Like Barin’s home, the place was lavishly decorated, but the floor was bare varnished wood, stained a deep wine-red color. The walls were practically lined with paintings with barely a foot of space between each one. They covered a wide variety of styles and subjects. From his vantage point at this door, he could see clearly a painting of a vase of flowers in shades of yellow and orange, and then farther down a portrait of a young woman in purple robes with a bashful smile, and beyond that, another of that sketchy style from the paintings against the wall behind him, depicting a knight mounted on a six-legged horse.

Hirrus stayed in the storage room for a minute longer, waiting to see if the halls were being patrolled. There was no sign of anyone approaching or passing by. If a patrol was going through here, it was on a longer circuit.

He was either about to walk face-first into it, or he would not encounter it at all.

It didn’t take long to figure out where to go. His first priority - above even bringing Clive to violent justice - was to rescue Alric. He suspected they would both be in the same place, with the officer of Last of the Strong lording his power over the prisoner. Likely in a room surrounded by more of these ostentatious decorations.

Eventually, Hirrus came to an enormous entry room. The hallway opened up onto a balcony, giving him a vantage point where he could see the entire room. Huge stone pillars sprouted from the wine-colored wood of the floor far below. An enormous stairway stretched from the floor up to the height of the second floor, where there was a massive wooden double-door, flanked by a pair of staircases that ascended perpendicular to the first, up to the balcony he was on presently.

The room was currently occupied. Beneath him, Hirrus saw a quartet of adventurers at the bottom of the giant staircase, lounging on the stairs and chatting quietly. Their voices were only an echoing murmur to Hirrus' position.

Those enormous double doors drew Hirrus’ eye. The lines of the construction, and the arrangement of the decoration made it the center attention here.

That was where Clive was.

There could be no doubt.

Hirrus had to get through that door quietly. Considering how lazy the adventurers acting as guards had proven thus far, it wasn’t impossible.

All he needed was an opportunity.

And he believed he had all the tools he needed to generate one for himself.