Southwest outskirts of Tivian, north of Shield Hill, Duke Barrett’s mansion.
In the quiet of the night, the mansion belonging to the Royal Duke Barrett was suddenly subjected to a brutal assault. Assassins from the Eight-Spired Nest launched a surprise attack on the mansion, slaughtering everyone inside in a short amount of time. Due to the success of the attack, the killers encountered little resistance and paid only a small price to completely take over the mansion.
After successfully seizing Duke Barrett’s mansion, the assassins from the Eight-Spired Nest immediately began a thorough search of the entire mansion, rummaging through every corner as if looking for something. However, their search had yielded no results so far, and the leader of the assassins couldn’t help but lose his temper.
"Didn’t you all swear earlier? That you’d summon his spirit immediately after Barrett’s death, and it wouldn’t take more than half an hour? Now, Barrett has been dead for hours! Where’s the spirit? Where’s the information?"
In the blood-soaked, empty foyer, a man in a black trench coat and a mask roared at the Face Spider in his hand, his voice filled with barely contained rage. After enduring the man’s tirade, the Face Spider fell silent for a moment before the human-like pattern on its surface twisted, and a slightly hoarse male voice emerged.
"Calm down, Kenk. Listen, our plan has definitely been exposed. Some other faction is interfering. Not just on my end, but Jeffrey and Berlit’s operations have also gone awry."
"I don’t care about Berlit and the others! All I know is that your task was to extract the information from Barrett’s spirit after his death and deliver it to me! Barrett is dead now! Where’s the information? Do you want us to keep searching here until dawn and run into the Hunters when they arrive? Didn’t you even bring a spirit summoner from the Nether Coffin Order? With extra help, you still couldn’t get this done?"
The man named Kenk continued to vent his anger at the Face Spider in his hand, his tone revealing his naturally volatile temper. Faced with his irate colleague, the leader on the other end of the Face Spider seemed to be suppressing his own anger as he responded through gritted teeth.
"Listen, Kenk... We’re being targeted! By some Chalice faction! Besides the Night Demon, whether it’s Berlit’s side... Jeffrey’s side... or my side, we’ve all been targeted! Our spirit summoning had no effect. Even the spirit summoner from Nether Coffin Order couldn’t pull Barrett’s spirit back. According to him, Barrett’s spirit was being pulled by some other force. He kept pulling until his spirituality was exhausted, but he couldn’t overpower it. It’s clear they were prepared! Blaming me now is completely pointless! Instead of complaining to me, you should spend more time searching the place!"
The Face Spider responded to Kenk, and after hearing its words, Kenk took a few deep breaths to calm himself before continuing through gritted teeth."I’ve already searched the entire mansion. I’ve used both Earth Listener and Scent-Tracking Sigil... but I haven’t found a single clue. Barrett’s research chamber has extremely robust anti-detection defenses. Unless I get the information directly from Barrett’s mouth, it’s going to be very hard to locate it.”
"The task of finding Barrett’s research chamber... was personally assigned to me by the Priest of Fangs. It’s of utmost importance. If we fail, both of us will be held accountable! Don’t think you can shirk responsibility!"
Kenk spoke sternly to the Face Spider. After hearing his response, the Face Spider fell silent for a moment before speaking again.
"Summoning Barrett’s spirit is impossible now. Here’s what we’ll do... You keep searching over there, and I’ll report the current situation to the Priest of Fangs. We’ll see how he decides to handle this."
"Fine... If that’s the case, I’ll keep looking. If I really can’t find it, I’ll just burn the mansion down and retreat. Even if I can’t destroy the research chamber, at least I can cause some trouble for those Black Hounds later."
After saying this, Kenk ended the conversation with the Face Spider, which then crawled back into his sleeve.
After putting away the Face Spider, Kenk frowned and quickly left the foyer, heading to other parts of the mansion to direct his subordinates in continuing the search. His departing figure was observed by the wide-eyed corpse of a maid lying on the floor, and by Dorothy as well.
…
"Who would have thought... These guys still haven’t found the hidden room? It seems my decision to perform a Soul Burial on Barrett’s ghost was the right call..."
Dorothy murmured to herself as she sat in a carriage on a wilderness road several kilometers away from the mansion. After confirming the situation inside the mansion through her marionettes, the anxiety and heaviness in her heart lightened considerably.
“It seems Barrett’s security measures were quite thorough. Even after an hour of searching, these guys still haven’t found the hidden room. This means I still have a chance to get into the hidden room and retrieve the holy symbol.”
Dorothy thought to herself with relief. Through her marionettes, she had gathered some very useful information, such as the existence of the Night Demon.
“The Night Demon... This is the Eight-Spired Nest’s trump card in this operation. It bypassed my warning and successfully assassinated Barrett. Who would have thought the infamous Tivian serial killer from the newspapers would be involved?”
Dorothy had certainly heard of the Night Demon from reading the newspapers. Since the middle of last year, news of his murders had been published periodically. Targeting mainly upper-class individuals, the Night Demon had been active for over half a year without being caught, and now he had even assassinated a duke.
“From what I can see, this Night Demon might be a powerful Beyonder assassin cultivated by the Eight-Spired Nest. But the question is, if he’s been active for so long and has killed so many people, he shouldn’t be hesitant to act. So why was he used as a trump card in this operation? If the Night Demon is so powerful, wouldn’t it have been easier to send him to kill the duke from the start? And were the people the Night Demon killed before also ordered by the Eight-Spired Nest?”
Dorothy pondered these questions about the Night Demon, but she didn’t dwell on them for too long. Instead, she shifted her focus to the more pressing matter at hand: how to infiltrate the hidden room under the noses of these assassins.
“The Night Demon can wait. The more critical issue now is how to sneak into the hidden room while these guys are still searching. I can’t afford to wait any longer. I need to act quickly…”
Dorothy continued to think. Given that the Eight-Spired Nest assassins hadn’t found the hidden room yet, her safest option would have been to wait. Since the Hunters would eventually arrive, the assassins would have to leave whether they found what they were looking for or not.
Once the Eight-Spired Nest left, Dorothy could use her marionettes to enter the hidden room during the gap before the Hunters arrived, taking both the documents and the holy symbol from the hidden room. This method would allow Dorothy to retrieve the holy symbol with minimal risk.
However, after hearing Kenk say that he would burn the mansion down if they couldn’t find anything, Dorothy abandoned this plan. Although Barrett’s hidden room was well-protected and wouldn’t be destroyed by the fire, the entrance to the hidden room might be damaged, making it difficult for Dorothy to enter.
Dorothy had observed that the mansion was filled with flammable materials, including a wine cellar stocked with numerous barrels of alcohol. With so much fuel, the entire mansion could be set ablaze in no time. In such a fire, Dorothy’s marionettes would struggle to move, the hidden room’s mechanisms might be damaged by the heat, and the entire building could collapse. If the mansion were reduced to rubble, Dorothy would find it nearly impossible to access the hidden room buried beneath the ruins.
On the other hand, engaging the assassins in direct combat was also unrealistic. Not only were they numerous, but their leader, Kenk, didn’t seem like an ordinary figure.
From the way Kenk spoke earlier, it seemed that he was on the same level as the people responsible for the spirit summoning and assassination in this operation. Both groups reported to someone called Priest of Fangs, making it highly likely that Kenk was a White Ash-rank Vampire.
Without any allies to assist her, Dorothy would find it extremely difficult to deal with a White Ash-rank Vampire using only her marionettes. Therefore, direct confrontation wasn’t a viable option either.
Thus, Dorothy’s main goal now was to find a way to sneak into the hidden room while the Eight-Spired Nest assassins were still searching the mansion. Fortunately, with so many corpses scattered throughout the mansion, this goal wasn’t too difficult to achieve.
Without further hesitation, Dorothy began her plan. She alternated control over the numerous corpses scattered throughout the mansion, using their senses to familiarize herself with the general layout of the mansion.
Next, Dorothy located the body of a masked Eight-Spired Nest assassin lying outside the mansion’s back door. Although the assassins’ surprise attack had been successful, the mansion’s guards hadn’t been completely useless. After all, this was a duke’s mansion. In exchange for being completely wiped out, the guards had managed to put up some resistance, taking down one or two of the Eight-Spired Nest’s lackeys.
The corpse Dorothy found was one of these. He had been shot in the chest and died outside the mansion’s back door. Due to the urgency of the situation, Kenk had ordered his subordinates to search the entire mansion immediately after clearing out the guards, leaving no time to collect the bodies. This lackey had been left here, unattended.
Dorothy took control of the dead Eight-Spired Nest lackey, making him slowly rise to his feet unnoticed. After straightening his clothes, the lackey turned and re-entered the mansion.
The assassins were all dressed in black and masked, making it impossible to recognize each other’s faces. Although Dorothy’s lackey had a large bloodstain on his chest, this wasn’t unusual among the assassins. As a Shadow-aligned faction, the Eight-Spired Nest favored close combat, and many of the assassins were covered in blood from cutting down their enemies with blades. The strong smell of blood was pervasive, and a large bloodstain didn’t stand out.
In this way, Dorothy’s marionette infiltrated the mansion. Like the other assassins, the lackey began searching the mansion, making his way toward the western corridor of the first-floor drawing room.
Once he reached his destination, Dorothy had the marionette linger in the corridor, pretending to focus on searching that area. Seeing that someone was already searching the corridor, the other assassins chose not to waste manpower there, as the mansion was large, and having multiple people search the same area was unnecessary.
Thus, when other assassins saw Dorothy’s marionette in the corridor, they chose to continue their search elsewhere.
After securing the corridor as her search area, Dorothy had the marionette use the search as cover to make some preparations. He knocked over cabinets in the corridor and opened doors to rooms along the corridor, blocking the view of the corridor’s end.
Once everything was ready, Dorothy took control of a male servant’s corpse lying in a room next to the western corridor. Under the cover of the open door and the lackey marionette, the servant’s corpse walked to the grandfather clock at the end of the corridor. He reached out, opened the clock’s face, and began adjusting the hands. He set the hour hand to 12 and the minute hand to 3, leaving the second hand untouched for now.
Next, Dorothy took control of a guard’s corpse on the third-floor corridor near a window. The guard’s body wasn’t too badly mutilated, and she had him shakily stand up, reload his pistol, and fire several shots out the window unnoticed. After emptying the magazine, he threw the gun out the window and collapsed back to the ground.
The sound of gunfire from the third floor immediately drew the attention of all the assassins in the mansion, with many rushing toward the source of the noise.
At the same moment the gunfire rang out, Dorothy’s servant marionette in the western corridor adjusted the second hand to 6. Immediately, a rumbling sound of machinery echoed through the area.
The sound of the machinery wasn’t particularly loud, and under normal circumstances, it might have been heard by nearby assassins. However, the continuous gunfire masked the noise, making it impossible to detect.
While the other assassins were distracted by the gunfire, the heavy floor in front of the servant marionette began to open, revealing a staircase leading downward. Dorothy controlled the servant marionette to step onto the staircase without hesitation, and the floor closed behind him. The clock’s hands returned to their correct positions.
Using the gunfire as cover, Dorothy followed Barrett’s instructions to open the entrance to the hidden room. The servant marionette descended the staircase, carrying a gas lamp he had taken from the mansion.
Under the light of the gas lamp, the servant marionette quickly reached the bottom of the stairs, entering a relatively spacious underground area. Dorothy used the gas lamp to light the other lamps in the room, illuminating the darkness and revealing the hidden room’s contents.
What appeared before Dorothy was the scene of an underground research chamber. On one side of the spacious room were tall bookshelves filled with densely packed books. On the other side were long tables cluttered with books, manuscripts, and various strange gadgets and incomprehensible instruments.
In another corner of the room stood a large, telescope-like instrument with a long barrel and numerous mechanical components. Dorothy recognized this device—it was a Mystical Text Observator, used to examine mystical texts through layered enchanted lenses and protect against cognitive poison. She had seen similar devices in the church’s Historical Scripture Department, though this one was larger.
However, the most striking feature of the hidden room wasn’t the massive Mystical Text Observator. Instead, it was an ancient, cracked statue placed in one corner of the room.
The statue wasn’t of the Mirror Moon Goddess, but of a male warrior. The warrior wore armor, a cape draped over his shoulders, and held a sword upright in front of him with both hands. His bearded face was filled with determination, and his flowing hair was uncovered by a helmet.
On the base of the statue was an inscription in Imperial script, and below it was a plaque with the following words written in Pritt Common:
"Arthur Despenser, one of the Four Knights of Moonlight, the Wind Knight."