Arte and Mael eventually arrived at their destination, a knightly-guarded basilica on the outskirts of the inner walls of the holy city, between the noble and common districts.

"Are you sure this is the place?"

"This is the place," Arte confirmed with assurance.

"I see… What should we do about the guards? Do we take a detour to avoi–"

"Restrain, deal with them, do whatever you see fit, so long as they don’t stand in the way."

"Hein?"

While Arte was expecting much more precision than just that from him, Mael simply strode toward the basilica as though it were the most natural thing of all.

Obviously, at the sight of Mael approaching, the guard immediately greeted him with the welcome expected of a stranger walking onto a guarded domain.

"Halt! Who are you?" Several guards yelled at Mael, but before they could say anything else, Arte summoned blood to restrain them, binding their arms and hands while trapping their heads inside floating bubbles of blood, preventing them from uttering nothing else but a drowning cry as they shriveled to their knees.

"What are you do–"

"This might look uncomfortable, but it won’t kill them."

"Still–"

"Those were merely guards. Certainly, a tougher opponent is going to be on our path inside. Clerics,... and, of course, those abductors. You fought them. You got a glimpse of what they were worth. So, I'm sure you agree with me that we don't have time to waste on small fries like them. Do whatever you feel like you must do, but don’t waste too much time on it. Getting the girls out is our main priority. And for that to be done, this place is to be subdued, and since that is something that won’t be achieved through diplomacy, it must be done by force. If you have complaints about my methods, do all the work yourself. It’s all fine by me."

Fairly enough, just as Mael finished speaking, the last of the knights, who were at their knees, fainted and found themselves automatically freed of Mael's drowning embrace.

"Now, let’s get moving."

With a last glance at all the now unconscious guards, Arte and Mael made their way into the basilica.

***

Despite sieging the place all by themselves, it took Arte and Mael no time to subdue the place.

A rotund, balding clergyman with a beer belly stumbled and fell face-first onto the stairs leading to the altar, trying to flee from Mael.

"There’s nothing here, Mael," Arte announced, having inspected every room of the place and subdued all ten of the present clerics of the place. "Could it be that you got the place wrong?"

He merely shrugged at his cousin’s question: "You're the bishop in charge of this basilica, aren’t you?" Mael questioned the bishop.

"You… I know you… You’re Mael Edouard.

"So you do know about me." Mael, noticing the glance the man also threw at Arte, remarked, "And you do seem to know who my friend here is."

"You two. I’m a bishop of the church. This is the holy city. You don’t know what yo–"

"Spare me your nonsense. I don’t care what you are to the church. Do you believe I would’ve stormed this place without having thought about these?"

Ten of the eleven clerics present, including the bishop, offered little to no resistance, making it easy for Arte and Mael to take control of the basilica.

"All I need to hear from you is where the girls are, because they don't appear to be held captive, he—Or, else,..." Noticing the man's apparent nervousness at the yet unfinished question he was supposed to ask, Mael reached for the bishop's neck, lifting him up so that he could get a circular view of the place.

"What are you doing to me?! Put me down?!"

"They are here? Aren’t they? Where?"

Using the man as some sort of human compass, Mael lifted him up by the neck clockwise to sweep the room. Feeling a reaction from the man, he came to a halt, his gaze fixed on the altar.

"The altar, huh?… Arte."

Arte went to the altar and, using earth magic and swinging his spear downward, shattered it, revealing beneath it a sort of stairway leading to an entrance made of metallic material laid horizontally on the ground.

As he looked at the bishop, who was still held by the neck like a rooster to be slaughtered, Mael hesitated for a moment between questioning him for more information and simply proceeding. He eventually voted for the latter, rendering the bishop unconscious the same way he did for the guards.

Arte summoned a drill-like earth magic and unleashed it at the door, but the blow’s might was ineffective in breaching a hole for them. The door vibrated with a strange radiance, suggesting that some sort of magic was involved with it.

"What do you think this door leads to?" Arte asked, summoning yet another earth magic, but one more powerful.

"I don’t know… but we’ll see."

Unleashing his spell, Arte, this time around, successfully breached a hole through the metallic door. Ahead of Arte and Mael were now yet another set of stairs, which seemed to lead to some sort of much larger underground structure.

Wasting no time, the cousins proceeded down the stairs, but the moment Mael took a few steps down, he froze in place, something that didn’t take Arte long to realize.

"Mael? A problem?"

"Don’t you feel it?"

"Feel what?"

"You don’t sense it?" The mood. Whatever this place is, there is, with this place, something off. Different."

Confused, Arte glanced around, trying to sense what Mael was talking about. "I can’t sense it," he admitted resignedly. "You sense something?"

"I do. The very moment we walked down those stairs, I felt as if I had walked into the closed interior of a massive bottle. Noticing the expression on Arte’s face, Mael briefly explained, "Think of it as some sort of fifth sense. One that has yet failed me, so, though I suppose we're left with no other choice but to proceed, keep in mind to be cautious. I don’t know what this place is, but there is undoubtedly something off about it."

"Understood."

As the duo proceeded, the earlier tight alley to which the door led slowly broadened into a large, pillared room, already manyfold the size of the humble basilica it was built beneath.

The entire underground space was illuminated by yellow and red glowing stones struck into small caves on the walls. Across the room, crawling across the two hemispherical walls and even on the ceiling, were countless zapping and whistling pipes, from which from time to time gas and sparks leaked.

As they continued down the corridor, they reached a section of the wall with dozens of metallic doors spaced about ten meters apart on either side.

The peculiar arrangement of the doors led one to easily imagine that the rooms behind them could be either storage rooms or, quite possibly, cells.

As nobles, both Arte and Mael were in a certain sense familiar with underground structures, as both were born into a noble house that possessed a sanctuary of its own in which their forefathers rested. But the moment they set foot in this place, they were certain this was not a sanctuary but rather a sort of facility of not yet understood purpose.

"Do you think Ana and the others might be inside one of these rooms?"

"That’s possible." Mael said, agreeing to inspect the first door on their right.

Seeing the door made of the same material as the one from earlier, Arte immediately summoned his earth magic, which he almost immediately dispelled when Mael reached onto the door and noted, "It’s not closed."

Mael simply reached for the hatch and began to unlock it. As soon as he managed to fully unlock the door, a cold, curiously-scented breeze escaped from the slightly-ajar door, greeting Mael and Arte.

Mael's face went pale, and his immediate course of action was to close the door, slightly backing off.

"What is that strange smell?" Arte inquired, as the smell was vaguely familiar but strangely unrecognizable to him.

Though his cousin didn't seem to recognize the smell, Mael had spent enough time around open wounds and corpses to immediately identify it as belonging to the latter two. The distinct smell emanating from the cold breeze was unmistakably that of decay, or more precisely, the smell of an attempt to stop decay.

Seeing Mael's reluctance, Arte, in his curiosity, strode forward and proceeded to open the door wide. Almost immediately, the duo were bathed once again in the cold, odd-smelling breeze.

As Arte took a step inside, the lights, formerly off, automatically lit on, and as Arte strode further in, Mael followed the bold and, mostly, oblivious Arte into the room, only to bump shoulders with Arte, racing toward the exit to puke his guts out.

Mael kept walking, the smell growing more and more potent.

Having seen his cousin’s reaction and glancing at what lay around him, Mael was certain that his senses didn’t betray him and that the smell this place was engulfed in was that of death.

In dozens. Corpses—human corpses were neatly dispersed throughout the room, preserved inside a cylindrical reinforced glass in a jade-colored, occasionally bubbling solution. Each of the cylindrical glasses was individually tagged with a serial number, as if they were products.

Though, uh, it had to be said that it would be a stretch to call these corpses, as some of the said corpses preserved in the glass were just organs, some just limbs, and others merely the head. Each of these ravaged cadavers shared their torn-apart appearance. While a glance at these corpses, especially in the state they were in, could hardly tell whether or not those were noble or commoner corpses, Mael was certain that those belonged to the former.

It took Mael some time to gather himself, but once he did, he headed out, reaching onto the shoulder of the still heavily shaken, kneeling Arte.

"You’re okay?"

"What—what was that?!"

"Corpses that are, fortunately for us today, in this particular instance, noble corpses."

"You… look unfazed by what you’ve seen," Arte asked Mael, noticing a complicated expression on his face.

"Maybe. But truth be told, as much as that sight disgusted me, I’ve seen worse." Mael ventured a glance at the many other doors, which one could assume hid within similar rooms with a similar display, then announced, tapping on his shoulder, "Come on, stand up, we’ll check each of these rooms, "Hopefully, we won’t find them here, but it is to be checked nonetheless."

Arte stood up and went with him to check one of the chambers to find out, with the greatest relief to see none of the girls amidst the gory display. That being so, the duo decided to proceed.

"They weren’t there, right?" Arte ventured.

"No. None of these corpses were commoners."

"Where did they get so many... of these?" Arte asked, indignantly, "There is no way anyone would allow its family remains to be desecrated this way."

"In the state they were. I saw something similar two years ago. My guess is that these corpses, broken, ripped apart, and burned...belonged to nobles who met unfortunate ends during the calamities. As for how they were acquired, you’re right; no one would allow their family’s remnants to be dessacrated the way we saw them. Being so, it is without a doubt that they were acquired the same way they acquired the girls: taken away without permission."

Despite having many questions, Arte satisfied himself with Mael's brief explanation. However, shortly after, he voiced the question that had been bothering him the most.

"These corpses? What could those keeping them be doing with them?"

"I'm not sure. For nobles like us, a remnant is an important inheritance, but I can't think of any reason someone would want cadavers in such poor condition, unless they were planning to use them for research or experimentation of some sort."

Upon hearing Mael’s words, Arte swallowed nervously as he hastened his steps along Mael's. The thought of the girl's fate filled him with dread more than ever.

After a while, the pair exited the large hemispherical room and found themselves in a large corridor that appeared to lead to a room similar to the previous one.

"Just how big is this place?!" Arte complained.

"Indeed, just how big this place is... Yet, don’t you think it’s strange? With how big it is, we have yet to encounter anyone."

"Now that you mention it, it was true that—"

It was then that the boy, as though reacting to their conversation, teleported a few dozen meters away from them, alone.

Noticing the boy's suspicious presence, both Arte and Mael’s reactions were immediate. They both summoned magic, but before they could proceed any further, the boy reached both arms to the ground, which immediately reacted in a strange glowing way before acting as though it were warping beneath Mael and Arte’s feet.

"What the—"

Though both were unable to tell exactly what went on, both understood that it had something to do with the boy’s teleportation magic.

They didn't know how, but they knew they'd been teleported away; less than a few breaths later, looking around at the ground that was no longer glowing, they noticed that they were no longer standing in the earlier large corridor, but instead somewhere else.

Being the first to recover from the mysterious maneuver, Mael leapt into action, summoning chakrams of blood and flying toward the teleportation-magic user boy, but his reaction was faster than Mael could have imagined. His teleportation, like before, took effect almost instantly. The boy teleported somewhere across the room. Relentless, Mael unleashed yet another of his blood-chakrams onto the boy, only to have him simply teleport away with little to no casting time. The same thing once, twice, and then thrice, each meeting with the same failure over and over.

"Tsk… Talk about conveniently annoying magic," Mael grumbled.

Arte launched a series of fireballs towards the boy, hoping to overwhelm him with the sheer number of attacks. However, as they neared their target, they were intercepted by a series of firework-like bursts of light.

Gazing at where the shaft of light had been fired from, Arte saw across the room the teleportation-user teleport beside the man, whom both Mael and Arte recognized from last time. He was wearing the same armor and mask, but this time around he was carrying a golden cudgel.

"It’s the bastard from that time!" swore Arte.

A glance was exchanged between the two cousins. Both Arte and Mael summoned their magic, ready to dive straight into a battle, but before they started their charge, the man called out their names.

"Arte Barbosse, son of the late Lord Vicar Barbosse, and Mael of the Edouard Family of the Duchy of Beaumont."

Having their names called had the effect of calming Mael and Arte's offensive compulsions, or at least had the effect of stopping them in their tracks.

"You know our name, so... what of it? Nothing. Where have you taken the girls you’ve abducted?"

"This is a warning, you are trespassing on a church-owned facility. This is not a place for people like you to walk. Surrender, and no harm will be done to you."

"Surrender?! You’re kidding me, rig–" his shoulder reached by Mael, Arte calmed himself down.

"What’s with this all of a sudden? Why this sudden politeness and courteousness when you attacked my cousin not even yesterday with the clear intent of harming him."

"It happened merely because he stood in the way of our business."

"A business that consists of abducting people? No matter how politely you put it, I still see it as obvious who was in the wrong in that very situation."

"It is not about who is in the wrong, Lord Mael. It's about your cousin interfering with our business, and now you two, two nobles, are storming a church's respectable basilica and injuring fellow nobles and church members."

Mael sneered at the man's words, "Humph, let's just drop this act already. It doesn't suit you, especially when I know that what you do is abduct helpless girls for your own purposes, calling it 'business.'

"If that's what you want, Lord Mael, but understand that you may come to regret it."

"I might, but that would be none of your business."

"Is that so?"

After exchanging a nod with the man, the teleportation boy suddenly teleported away, appearing nowhere within sight.

"Where did he go?!" Arte shouted.

"That would be none of your business, Lord Arte," the man said, swinging his battle-cudgel around suggesting that chit-chat was over.

Mael proceeded to ready his blood orbs, but just as he did, Arte announced to him, "Mael, go ahead. Leave this bastard to me."

"What?"

"I don't know where that other teleporting bastard went, but I doubt it meant anywhere good. This one over here. He’s alone. I can deal with him on my own; besides, I have a tab to settle with him. Go ahead. I’ll catch you up later on."

Arte was somewhat expecting Mael to voice further objection, yet he simply responded with a question: "You think you can win?"

"I’m confident."

"I see… I'll leave him to you then. Don’t hold anything back, you might come to regret it. If you’re given the opportunity, don’t hesitate to... Just do what you think you've got to do, so he won’t come back to you carrying more trouble than you can handle."

With these words, Mael strode toward the door that stood behind the man; surprisingly, the man simply let Mael through without making any attempt or comment.

After a while, Arte and the man were left on their own.

"Why did you let him go?"

"We've got him guarding the next room; I have no reason to get in your cousin's way. After all, the two of you may be too much for me to handle alone; you alone, on the other hand, is a completely different matter."

"Heedlessly arrogant, I’ll make sure to make you eat your own words."