Aki and Serenity watched the four men in black until they left the dungeon. The only notable surprise was that one of them seemed to disappear for a few seconds; since he reappeared with damaged clothing and a sword strapped to his belt, it wasn’t hard to guess that he’d been taken into the Tutorial.

It was almost surprising that the others hadn’t; most Tutorials seemed to pick up everyone who hadn’t been through the Tutorial yet who was within a certain area, but no one else inside the dungeon was inducted.

He even spent some time in the Crafting Area, looking around to see what he could find. He didn’t take the time to make anything; from what he said, he didn’t seem to think that the area was anything other than an oddly-situated public facility, even though he couldn’t find the nearby parking lot he expected. He eventually headed out, but was delayed enough that he arrived at the actual parking lot after the furor died down.

Aki and Serenity couldn’t see what happened at the actual parking lot, since it wasn’t within the dungeon’s area, but they heard about it later. The three men who walked out together were met by several police who “happened” to have stopped at the parking lot to chat. One of the policemen noticed a pistol, which resulted in a tense scene.

None of them had a concealed carry permit for the state. They tried showing their Department of Homeland Security IDs, but the NYC police weren’t exactly happy about finding three out-of-state Feds wandering around armed in a public park without any coordination with the city. They were even less happy after they found the sniper rifle.

At the end of the day, there weren’t any arrests. Lancaster’s explanation for that was simple: despite their irritation at the DHS officers, the police knew they wouldn’t be able to get charges to stick, even without coordination or a warrant. Not for carrying weapons in public, even the concealed rifle; they were federal officers, after all. There was no point in making things even harder than they already were on “joint” cases.

In the end, the overall effect was twofold: Aki started planning better protections for the “homes” area and Serenity was late to his meeting with Rube. The strangers were only inconvenienced and no one realized there was a tracer on Janice’s rental.

Serenity was bothered by the report that one of the men was carrying a sniper rifle; until he heard that, he’d assumed the men were just looking around, possibly investigating the high magic zone in case it was a threat. The rifle changed that; it meant they were planning to be a threat themselves. Serenity was worried for Raz; trying to bag an elusive dragon seemed like the most likely reason to bring a larger distance weapon. The other option was that they were after the boreal moose, but that seemed unlikely.

It didn’t occur to Serenity that he was worried about the wrong dragon.

Rube’s arms were bandaged again, which made it difficult to tell how much damage remained, but it made it clear he wasn’t fully recovered. At least he wasn’t still unconscious.

“This is where I found it. This tree.” Rube pointed at a tree that leaned out over a riverbank; it was slightly undercut. “Here where the roots go out over the water. I thought it was washed here in a big storm, but there’s no water damage.”

Rissa leaned out over the side of the tree. Serenity started to try to catch her, then realized she had it under control. She touched the roots where Rube indicated and shivered. “Glee. A dark anticipation. A flash of a face, and hands … whoever put this here appeared human, but the emotions aren’t human.”

Rissa carefully lifted herself off the roots, backing up onto solid ground. “That’s ugly, but we ought to be able to trace it backwards. Thanks, Rube; this is what we needed.”

Rube frowned; he looked puzzled. “What did you just do?”

“Psychometry,” Serenity answered. He’d already decided how to answer that question. “Object-reading. She touched somewhere the person who left the box touched and was able to get a glimpse of them at the moment they touched it. It generally only works when there are strong emotions.”

He held a hand out for Rissa to grab and carefully lifted her to her feet. His attention was on Rissa, now. “Do you think a tracing spell would work, or would we be better off with something else? The box did a good job of hiding the vase.”

Rissa shook her head. “Not unless you can track the box. He was planning to open it when he had it in place.”

That was unfortunate, but still more or less the answer Serenity expected. He focused his magical sight on the roots of the tree, even though he didn’t expect to see anything. The box didn’t appear openly magical; more than that, it seemed to absorb magic, which would make it hard to trace and would also mean that it was unlikely to leave a magical signature behind.

There was a splotch of magic exactly where Rissa had put her hand before having the vision. It wasn’t Time magic, which meant that it was probably what she’d read rather than the effect of her vision. That was a surprise; it clearly meant the person who left the box wasn’t human. Even at high Tiers, humans would rarely be sufficiently magical to leave a visible magical trace behind them.

Whatever it was, it was more magic than man; the magic was the key part of its existence.

The Final Reaper was that magical, from the day he became a lich, but before that he wasn’t. Even as an undead, he was simply too tied to his physical form to have a magical presence that outdid his physicality. Of course, somewhere around that Tier, almost all of the magical types did. Eventually, they all started losing their physical bodies and becoming embodiments of their magic. The Final Reaper was later than most.

Serenity knew he wasn’t leaving that sort of trace yet either, and he was far more innately magical than any true human should be yet. He wasn’t actually certain why he wasn’t; he’d have expected his Sovereign form to leave some behind, but it didn’t. Perhaps it was more physical than he realized, or perhaps he was simply a little more able to contain his magic?

Either way, the thing to focus on was the fact that there might be something to trace after all. “Did he look like a human to you?”

Rissa nodded. “What little I saw. Didn’t feel human, though.” She’d already said that, hadn’t she?

“I think he might be traceable.” Serenity stared at the patch of magic. It was colorless, yet seemed almost slippery. It was related to Death; he could feel that much about it even though it wasn’t Death and he didn’t have an Affinity for it. In fact, he didn’t even have an Affinity that was close. Death was the closest, but what he knew was that it was both related to and opposed to Death at the same time.

He also knew that whatever it was, it tried to hide. Colorless mana was relatively rare; most mana had a color. Only mana that had some element or relationship to hiding was truly colorless; even Air mana had a color, pale though it was.

There wasn’t enough information to identify the primary Affinity. That might be important when they caught up with whatever it was; for now, it was simply interesting.

Serenity started building the same spell he’d used to track down the magical items that were stolen from Rissa’s house. The spell went together easily; Serenity noticed that it was heavily mana-based, with only a few places where the mana was converted to essence. He really needed to go through his spellform library and see which ones could be improved by directly using essence, but this wasn’t one of them.

When he reached out to capture some of the mystery mana, it slipped through the tiny bit of mana he used to scoop it up. The artifact’s mana hadn’t done that, but the artifact was frozen in place; this obviously wasn’t.

It took half a dozen tries before Serenity was able to capture enough mana to actually trace anything, and his efforts had all but dissipated the patch of mana. There were no other obvious splotches, but it was possible he was missing them; the mana was colorless, after all.

As they left the park, there was another blow to Serenity’s hopes of simply following the mana trail to find the person responsible for the vase: the trail simply stopped. Serenity dug into the inner workings and analyzed its results. What he found was annoying but not entirely a deal-breaker: he could follow the trail backwards but not forwards in time once it left the park.

The reason was obvious once he paid attention to the magic around him instead of simply to his own spellform: someone had triggered a fairly large anti-divination spell at the edge of the park. Since it seemed to be centered directly ahead of the spot where Serenity stood, it was natural to assume that it was triggered to prevent tracing the person who left the box. It was a mistake that he hadn’t covered his trail in as well, but Serenity was quite willing to take advantage of the mistake.

The mana trail was faint, either damaged by the anti-divination spell or simply because of the type of mana; some mana left a weaker trail than others, and while Void mana (Possibility mana?) left a strong, distinct trail, this trail was far more difficult. Worse than that, the mana Serenity had captured seemed to be either degrading or perhaps escaping as he followed the trail. It was slow, but it meant they had limited time to follow the trail.

It wasn’t a surprise that it was dissipating; mana did that. The only surprise was how quickly it was disappearing. It was likely related to the fact that it was colorless mana, mana designed (or at least Affined) to hiding in some way. How that related to and opposed Death, Serenity wasn’t certain.

The poor mana quality meant that they had to travel slower than before; trying to boost the spell would be far too likely to disperse the small amount of colorless mana he still had. Driving a car simply wouldn’t work; they had to go slower than traffic, and there was definitely traffic.

Serenity could easily run faster than the spell could move; it was a light jog to move at its top speed. Unfortunately, moving even that quickly meant he was far more likely to trip or run into someone, because he had to keep most of his attention on the spell. They fairly quickly fell into a pattern where he would jog behind Rissa while she watched where they were going.

It worked well until Rissa ran out of steam. She’d never been particularly enthusiastic about running of any sort; she loved getting out in nature, but that was nature walks or hikes, not running. She could walk all day, but after an hour of running, she was beat. She slowed to a walk and Serenity kept pace with her.

They already knew that the trail wiggled and wandered. It was clear that whoever it was had traveled by car and visited a number of different places on the day leading up to leaving the vase-in-a-box in a park. Not long after she slowed to rest, Rissa stopped. “Why don’t we take a scooter?”

“A scooter?” Serenity looked around. What did she mean? It took him a moment to focus enough on the real world to notice the pair of electric scooters lying in the grass. “It’s been years since I rode one of those. Could be fun.”

Even if it wasn’t fun, Rissa needed a rest and they couldn’t afford to stop. A scooter seemed like a reasonable thing to try.

Rissa gave him a single-arm hug, then pulled out her phone and activated one of the scooters. It was clear she used them far more often than he did; Serenity had to download the app and set it up before he could activate the scooter.

He could see a screen with Aide’s commentary pop up in his vision. Aide did not like the scooter app. Of course, Serenity had to read between the lines to know that.

Establishing remote access.

…

Complete

App isolated.

Scooter enabled.

App will be removed once scooter is disabled.

Not that it was hard to read between the lines. Serenity smiled without commenting to Aide.

The scooters worked well. They were slow enough to follow the trail, but far faster than the long-distance walking that Rissa could maintain indefinitely. While Serenity still had to follow Rissa to avoid having his distraction make him run into things, it was easy enough.

Serenity had expected that they would eventually reach the being’s home or place of work, probably fairly quickly; most people didn’t put too many trips together, after all. A few stops was all that could be managed in a day. That wasn’t what they saw.

It took hours. They actually ran the charge out on two pairs of scooters before they reached anywhere interesting.

When they finally did get somewhere interesting, it was very interesting.

They’d arrived at Frank’s warehouse.