As the body of the last spy cooled on the pavement, Alexis turned her gaze towards the border between Darksol and… whatever was on the other side. Truth be told, she had no idea what exactly was opposite of the thin wall of mist that separated her nation from wherever those idiots had come from. As it turns out, being asleep for more than a thousand years as the world around you shifts and changes and then, after waking up, focusing all of your attention on a single foe tends to leave you rather unknowledgeable regarding practically everything else besides your initial focus.

With this being the second time that people from the ‘other side’ had come to potentially engage in potentially disreputable enterprises, Alexis was now quite interested in who and what was sending their men to die. She looked over the shredded lumps of meat and cloth and began to wonder what exactly the thought process behind sending such obvious spies was. Surely there had to be some reason to the decision to outfit their agents in such outdated and long since abandoned equipment. What did they think they were walking into, the Luminas Confederacy?

Alexis was about to turn to leave when she noticed something… off about the last person she had killed. His cadaver was somehow still wreathed in some kind of magic field, one that she identified as something designed to hide one’s true appearance. She traced the magic field to a single ring that was bound around the senior spy’s big toe and a quick usage of [Dispel] was enough to cause the object to cease functionality.

Alexis’ eyes widened slightly as the illusion that covered every part of the dead body, even the parts that had been brutally removed by her own claw, began to shimmer, and reveal something most certainly not human. What she saw was an azure-skinned humanoid with a thin, hairless, and almost rat-like tail and a pair of horns that came up from its forehead and coiled like a ram’s. The hair of the being had also changed, switching from a deep black to a brilliant neon blue. All of this gave Alexis reason to pause.

Alexis did not know what kind of creature this being was, but Kain and even Zero Noir could have guessed it in one try. Alexis had no such prior knowledge of fantasy races, and as a result could not come to much of a conclusion regarding what this represented. As such, she decided to raise the spy into a lesser kind of undead and take it along with her to find someone who knew what the ever-loving fuck she was looking at.

…

“That is… one of them.” Erwin Krueger said, his eyes showing his visible distain for the risen-dead humanoid that Alexis had brought to show him.

“’Them’?”

“Yes.”

Erwin shifted in his seat and sighed. He had expected that this day would come, but not so soon. It was almost as if fate itself was fucking with them all.

“Care to explain?” Alexis asked, her patience gradually wearing out.

“They call themselves ‘Tieflings’. They are one of many non-human races that call the neighbor of the former Confederacy their home. No one in the Confederacy knew where they came from, and so you cannot expect me to know either, but these buggers are generally easy to spot, if you catch them without a disguise, of course. The skin, the horns, the tail and the eyes tend to give them away, so they always wear a magic object that hides their true appearance. They are also rather skilled in charm-type magic and each skin color denotes what specific type of magic they are resistant to. That one looks to be resistant to Water Magic and possibly Ice Magic as well; you can tell by the color of their… everything.”

“Do they make up the ruling class of this other nation?”

Erwin shook his head.

“No, not at all. What little we knew about the Arbiana Sultanate was that all of the various races were all equal in the eyes of the law. It apparently did not matter if you were a Human, Elf, Dwarf, Beastman, Tiefling or what, so long as you followed the rules. The Tieflings do have more offices, or at least they did last time I heard anything, but that may have changed in the past three hundred years or so.”

Alexis blinked several times.

“Excuse me, but did you say, ‘three hundred years’?”

“Yes.” Erwin grumbled. “The Confederacy didn’t have the most up-to-date info on them, not that they had much interest in learning anything about the Sultanate aside from how to kill them.”

“As for this ‘Sultanate’… How long has it been there?”

Erwin leaned back in his chair as he tried to recall some obscure information.

“About a thousand years or so. The Confederacy only noticed them about a thousand years ago, and we both know how lackluster they were about affairs beyond their borders so they may have been around before then.”

Alexis sighed and reduced the undead puppet to dust. She had heard enough and now she needed to learn more than what Erwin Krueger could tell her. She needed to repay the ‘kindness’ of the Sultanate in her own way, but she was concerned about how Kain would react if he woke up and found that his wife had dragged the nation into another war without good reason.

“Well, Krueger, it has been… interesting learning all of this, but you don’t have nearly the amount of information that I need to make a decent decision.”

“Very well. Have fun with the spy games, I guess.”

Alexis looked over her shoulder and towards Erwin as she left. A smile graced her face as her eyes shone with a brilliant malevolence.

“Oh, don’t you worry, my little mortal man. I fully intend to have enough fun to last quite a while. If you have any more information regarding this new potential danger, then please do share it. I would hate to have to penalize you for hiding usable intelligence, so please try and think a bit harder.”

“Seriously?” Erwin retorted, practically standing up in shock.

Alexis chuckled and shook her head.

“No. But I did want to see how you would react to that. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a war to prevent. Hopefully.”