Chương 171: 4.38 Relative

The palace was an extravagant affair, though Irwyn had to admit it could no longer impress him. Inlays of gold in the high ceiling and sprawling halls were impressive at first, but it did not compare to what he had witnessed in City Black. How could something as meager as construction compare to the Voidways or to the throne made of a literal dragon's corpse which he had witnessed?

Levels of wealth he never could have imagined just a year or so prior sprawled before him, yet they seemed as impressive as gilded dust. Their group was welcomed into the inner chambers with surprising ease. Or perhaps not that surprising, given they had subtly disabled every bit of hidden security along the way and it seemed the locals had strong dislike for overt. Desir had stayed behind in the entrance hall to do 'whatever the moment required' as it had been put. Waylan was snooping somewhere unnoticed.

Alice followed them through the palace's sprawling luxury but remained outside the room they were being ushered into, in big part to better focus on disabling all the assassins they had captured along the way. If the plan hadn't changed, she would be teleporting them across empty cellars while also suspending them in staggered time. Not actually stopped, as that would make things much more difficult compared to merely one thousand times slower.

It still strained the Time mage a decent amount given it was a dozen people, and she still had to make sure none of them were found in the meantime. Irwyn put it out of his mind as he stared into the room they had entered. It was no throne hall but rather a somewhat humble office. The traces of opulence were still present all around - from gilded furniture to large paintings - but it was less ostentatious. It actually reminded Irwyn of Avys' office. The wealth and power on display tried to be more subtle.

And the main table's arrangement was also exactly the same, just that instead of a distant Temzda there was a window on the far wall behind it instead. Elizabeth clearly noticed the similarity as well, since a hint of instinctual annoyance passed through her eyes. Behind the table sat a shriveled old man, wearing what seemed to be mostly silken night robes, as if he hadn't had time to even change.

"So, am I dead?" the local man asked with great calm, pouring wine into jeweled goblets.

"Now, why would you think so?" Elizabeth inclined her head, smiling again. She clearly relished the tension at least.

"I can admit when I have been outplayed, even if it has been a while," he placed the bottle away, then pushed the chalices towards the duo.

"Is it really the time to lose all hope?" Elizabeth questioned as all three of them took their seats. Irwyn opted to remain silent for the moment.

"I am merely a realist," the old man shook his head, loosening control over his mana. Not that it changed anything. Irwyn had already been aware that the man was a mage, somewhere on the boundary between six and seven intentions - and not near good enough to hide that.

"Your third outside is already a match for me and that I can feel neither of your power tells me all that needs to be known. But given the intactness of my throat, I expect you have demands?"

"The calm sucks the fun out of it," Elizabeth sighed, picking up the goblet and sniffing the drink's aroma.

"I can cower in dread, if you prefer," the man jokingly offered.

"And I am sure you could fake it very convincingly," she shot back, just annoyed a bit further by that.

"Then perhaps honesty will be better. Such as introductions."

"Elizabeth von Blackburg," she finally introduced herself.

"And this is Irwyn, a trusted companion."

"Marr, patriarch of house Azalea, for now," the old patriarch inclined his head.

"We put the antidote in, and then it supposedly conveys a message, yes?" Elizabeth looked at the goblet again, summoning a visible tentacle of Void magic to retrieve said pill from her pocket. Irwyn did the same, merely with his actual arm instead. Calm had prepared them a good number of doses before they had ever even left the Federation. Though it was arguable if a mortal poison could even hurt them through their Concepts.

"That is the tradition," Marr confirmed.

"We will see," Elizabeth shrugged, dropping the antidote in with a splash, then drank her dose in one swig. Irwyn followed suit, a bit more hesitantly. His dislike for alcohol notwithstanding, knowingly digesting toxins went against his base instincts. Even if it was unlikely that they even could affect him. When it first entered his mouth, the wine had almost no taste at all. Irwyn felt the slightest hint of texture in his mouth yet no actual taste, even less than when drinking regular water.

But then when he swallowed, the wine ran down his throat startlingly fast. In his stomach afterward it caused a brief moment of revulsion before that too passed. Irwyn had no idea what it was actually supposed to mean.

"Is it… an ambush?" Elizabeth guessed.

"Unwelcome sudden visitors," Marr corrected.

"Ambush would sting more along the way down. You seems so very insistent on not being from Venen, yet I cannot figure out why you would find my doorstep like this."

"Guess," Elizabeth beamed, though there was fakeness to her joy.

"I would think that the mask on your face is no coincidence," the old patriarch inclined his head.

"That you think someone could recognize you. Yet the style of dress is off for any I know so that leads me nowhere." Coincidentally it ended up serving that purpose, even if that wasn't the intent behind it… though Irwyn would never mention anything about why Elizabeth actually had chosen to don the half-mask again. That was a topic even Waylan knew to steer clear of, while they all hoped a few more Concepts would resolve the issue - not that anyone would admit there was anything worth being called as such.

To distract from those thoughts, Irwyn tried to examine the old man more closely, trying to see if he could even spot any similarity between him, Avys, and Elizabeth. Quickly the conclusion reached was that he could not. Maybe it was the wrinkles, gray hair, and other clear signs of age or the gap between genders, but Irwyn didn't really find any particularly distinct features shared between the three.

"Close, though not quite there," Elizabeth continued to play coy.

"Think Marr, there are enough hints for a good guess."

"Three possibilities come to mind, one more bizarre than the…"" Caw," a bird shrieked by the room's window. Everyone turned towards it with various expressions. A crow, pecking at something on the other side of the sill. The patriarch immediately stood up, reaching next to it with a single stride.

"Damn bird," he loudly muttered, banging at the window. Said winged creature did not care to flee.

"Begone!"

"You seem agitated," Irwyn commented, noting the sudden tension going through the man.

"Of course I am!" the man nodded, continuing to knock on the window.

"Crows steal secrets, that's widely known. We could have let something important slip, had it stayed hidden."

"Hah," Elizabeth chuckled.

"Funnily enough, I have had that happen, though that was a different kind of 'Crow'."

"Get lost!" the patriarch exclaimed again, sending a small surge of magic towards the creature to shoo it away. At the same moment, Irwyn's chair exploded. It was rather startling, so much so he failed to react in any way. There had been no other source of magic until Irwyn found himself being shot towards the ceiling. A good full second of sheer surprise passed despite his inhumanely fast mind before it registered that it had been an attack.

Then he wrapped himself in layers of barriers awaiting the follow-up and giving himself a moment to access any wounds. Which Irwyn immediately found there were none of. His clothes had been cleanly cut through by shrapnel and then torn further by concussive force, but he was not bleeding. He had made a small dent in the ceiling with his skull yet felt not a hint of dizziness. He figured out the reason for all that in just a moment.

Indestructible Starflesh, an old spell Irwyn had gotten into the habit of always having active, even in his sleep. Besides making his eyes appear golden and somewhat shining, there was no reason not to. Even though he did not yet restructure the spell to accommodate Concepts, he could easily maintain it at nine intentions without any problems or strain. And whatever explosives might have been used, Irwyn doubted that there was anything non-magical that could get through nine intentions used for pure defense.

All those thoughts happened before he even landed back on the ground. As did assessing the room. Elizabeth had apparently dodged the sudden explosion, because she was already standing next to Marr, a black blade to the man's throat. Which had clearly not even registered for him since he was still in the middle of casting a spell of some kind. Six intentions, it felt like Time magic.

Irwyn therefore flooded the entire office with insurmountable amounts of mana, then empowered that raw mass with nine intentions that would disrupt Time magic - something he had gotten plenty of practice in thanks to Alice. The simplest way to counter magic that often cared neither for distance nor line of sight was to make the space itself so filled with power under his own control that it simply could not manifest.

The nullification would have been even stronger with Concepts, but Irwyn was not yet confident he would not accidentally kill their host given his previous testing with Flame. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"Seeds?" Elizabeth spoke, startling the patriarch, who immediately froze as he finally noticed the sharp edge to his throat.

"Come look at this, Irwyn." So he did. It took him a moment to notice, but when he looked out of the window, where the crow still sat, he realized that the bird was not pecking at nothing. It was gobbling up it's fill of seeds… On the edge of the window of someone's office.

"The nightrobe, the bird, the speech. Everything to make us think you were unprepared, when in fact everything was a distraction for the trap," Elizabeth summarized, sounding almost disgusted.

"Who are you?" Marr asked, the former calm finally crumbling.

"I said guess," Elizabeth dismissed her blade, shoving the man slightly as she went back to where she had been sitting. There was only scattered shrapnel left of their chairs, so she manifested a new one. Irwyn quickly followed suit, though with a bit of extra effort given to replace his clothes. He began to wonder whether it would be easier to just not even change them out next time and simply use magic - that was his second ruined set in as many days.

"Just a few days ago, there was an uproar in the Republic to the East," Marr spoke.

"I haven't gotten to all those reports but there was a group of four vaguely matching yours that caused some kind of uproar."

"Correct, but not who we are," Elizabeth shrugged.

"That was mostly a distraction along the way."

"It sounded like you have done far more than be 'distracted'."

"The hunting of undead is a duty that cannot be avoided without reason, and thus sightseeing turned into that," Elizabeth nodded with a roll of her eyes.

"That someone from your nation was a source of that scourge is a major demerit against it. Your god should be wary because if something like this incident repeats too many times, the Inquisition's diviners will pick up on the pattern and send a punitive force."

"I do not know this 'Inquisition'."

"Their idea of punitive is earth so scorched not even the dead can survive the sheer desolation," Elizabeth explained.

"A brutal measure, but undead cannot be allowed any footholds on this Realm. If a place becomes too deeply infested, it is usually far better to burn it down to the bedrock rather than let them uncover new buried horrors every few years forevermore."

"I… see," the old man paled at that, perhaps more than when a weapon had been at his neck.

"You still don't know who we are," Elizabeth sighed.

"Guess."

"Try thinking further back," Irwyn decided to add a hint.

"Far in the past, you say. Then perhaps… 40 years?" Marr frowned, then his eyes widened.

"Could it be? It fits. Avys. You are my granddaughter." And to his credit, it was enough for the patriarch to figure the connection from that. 40 years was, from Irwyn's understanding, roughly how long ago the Duchess had left her home. Long enough to have an adult daughter. Much more than one child, actually, but there was no reason to complicate things by brining that up.

"The whole setup with the explosives, it made me think of her immediately," Elizabeth frowned, not hiding her dislike.

"Is she doing well?" Marr asked, perhaps too distracted to notice.

"Do you actually care?" she snapped back immediately.

"Avys robbed me blind on the day that she left, somehow taking with her two of my most valuable assets, then never looked back," the man said slowly.

"I was both infuriated and proud, so call it curiosity. After two decades of no word, I assumed she was dead or had truly severed herself from our family."

"The latter," Elizabeth nodded.

"She is doing quite fine as a Duchess. And has neither the time nor the inclination to care for this place."

"And yet, here you are."

"To sate my curiosity, as you said. For one, I never learned why she had left."

"Hah, no wonder," Marr chuckled, growing distracted with old memories. Or, given his earlier actions, acting distracted and fond in order to de-escalate.

"I wouldn't have shared either. She was defeated by such sheer unmitigated idiocy, I couldn't believe it myself in the aftermath." Irwyn also leaned forward in honest curiosity. That seemed like a story long buried.

"To set the scene, all seven of my children were alive then, but split in three faction. The twins together, Angela and Travis on their own. Meanwhile, the youngest two were still barely more than toddlers and thus not taking part while Avys did everything to appear as a completely harmless pretty face without a speck of wit or ambition - keeping few followers and at five arms' length. Her mother had taught her that well. House Sammer, vipers to the last, which is probably why they ended up wiped out to the same.

So unlike her siblings, Avys had no support of a different noble family and had to adapt to the lacking resources by pretending to drop out convincingly enough no one would bother killing her."

"She was still aiming to become the chosen heir, just more subtly. Small moves which provoked her siblings to act more recklessly. Made them too busy to bother with her. And the one that got her caught was honestly inspired. Travis, her eldest brother, was supposed to hold an honor watch for the passing of his mother. An important and sacred vigil of her side of the family, it was unthinkable anyone would skip out on the tradition. So Avys left a corpse of a certain overconfident triple agent right by the site.

By the next day, Travis would be framed for despoiling an important event - thus losing much support from his maternal family - while the twins and Angela would both think it was a provocation meant directly for them and thus demanding retaliation."

"Except Travis, as dumb as he always was, ended up actually skipping the damn watch and got caught plowing someone's wife instead that very same night. There was even a whole fight, a different corpse, and plenty of witnesses. A massive blunder that would have cut into his credibility, but instead ended up salvaging a much worse situation. His handlers even managed to frame it as an ingenious move to some. Besides that, it obviously ended up exposing something else was at play.

And with all three sides either quickly pointing at her or soon to be, the woman with no support had to flee."

"I was away from home at the time, so I do not know how Avys managed to steal Azalea's best assassin in generations. Nor do I understand how she convinced our chief geneticist that a fleeing nobody was somehow a more lucrative partner than me and my father before. For those details, you would have to speak with her. Which I still feel a sting of bitterness about, now that it has been brought back to memory."

"Johnson?" Irwyn guessed. Yes, the ancient mage supposedly worked with the Duchess for a long time and conducting research outside the Federation was clearly something he had a habit off. It was obvious when in front of him like that.

"And the assassin… could it be Calm?" Elizabeth also wondered out loud.

"It seems they are both doing well," Marr confirmed.

"What exactly did Johnson research?" Elizabeth immediately latched onto that thought, growing much more animated by the topic.

"If he had worked for you for years, you must have some idea."

"He left no notes behind and was overall rather secretive."

"You must have guesses or at least seen some results," Irwyn frowned at the blatant deflection.

"This family would not have supported him unless there were worthwhile returns."

"Perhaps something to do with a certain 'Hydra'," Elizabeth smiled, referencing the research notes they had found in the Republic.

"He used that same word, 'Hydra method'," the patriarch reluctantly admitted.

"But never told anyone how he achieved it. Even promised that if I ever tried to force him, that would be the last time we saw each other. Only that it was supposedly far too difficult for anyone else to perform the magic needed. I searched for clues for years both before and after his departure, but all I found about the many headed monster it seemed to be named after made no sense in relation to what I was seeing."

"What did it achieve," Elizabeth pressed.

"I thought you would know since you must have benefitted from it… as has my family," Marr seemed surprised about their lacking awareness. Then answered.

"Johnson was able to determine whether a conceived child had potential for honing or mage craft, then improve said talent. Greatly."

"Impossible," Elizabeth frowned.

"I have never… no, it makes sense. And my mother is keeping it to herself. Damn it."

"Is that difficult?" Irwyn asked, unsure on the topic. But it sounded exactly like the thing Elizabeth would be in the know for.

"It's considered unfeasible by anything short of two specific edicts by anyone who has ever tried - and there were many incredible people who had," she explained, her heartbeat audibly accelerating. That was no exaggeration, it was thumping so strongly, all of a sudden Irwyn could literally see her chest shaking beneath the dress.

"No wonder. So many things make sense in retrospect. It's no coincidence all my siblings are talented, even when statistically there should have been at least a few dregs. The sheer potential… combined with the bloodline of Wrath, Johnson has undoubtedly made more breakthroughs since. I am one, aren't I? Damn it a thousand times - all of that kept secret to maintain an advantage. I can't believe my father even allows it. How many more exceptional mages could have been made with this, ready to face the Rot?"

Marr also chuckled bitterly after her outbursts, reminding them of his presence.

"It only makes me all the more remorseful to hear what I had lost was even more valuable than thought."

"Realistically, Johnson would not have stuck around forever. He might have been on his way out of the door already," Elizabeth guessed.

"Make no mistake, this place never could have held any sway over him that he did not allow."

"This place, built upon the generations of ancestral blood," the patriarch shook his head, changing topic instead of arguing.

"And soon more to be spilled. Of the seven, I only have three children left, squabbling so impotently I worry that by the time I get murdered they will still not have decided on the chosen heir. Over 50 years old each, yet Johnson had perhaps neglected to mention that the prolonged youth he had granted them could lead to them still acting like children. Well, or perhaps that will not be a worry after today."

"You still cannot picture me having no motives besides curiosity," Elizabeth sighed, standing up. She seemed so very… annoyed was the best word Irwyn could find.

"I will admit, the hint you have provided about Johnson was an unexpected gain, I was mostly hoping to learn something I could use to irritate my mother."

"She always disliked seafood - as rare as it is here," Marr carefully offered. Meanwhile, Elizabeth walked to the window, where the crow was still pecking away at the last of those seeds.

"We will stay the night, then most likely leave tomorrow. Come here and tell me what you see," she commanded, and the patriarch followed her gaze out through the glass.

"The city of Azalea."

"Describe it," she demanded further. Irwyn also joined them looking into the city.

"A prosperous town, my family's domain," Marr elaborated doubtfully, then continued when Elizabeth nodded.

"The ancestral grounds we have built unto providence, generation by generation. Even as every rival in week's travel time did all they could to uproot us, House Azalea always persevered. Always thrived and surpassed." Elizabeth chuckled at that, then spoke darkly.

"I witness a hollow backwater openly insistent on cutting its best apart for no greater purpose than the act itself, to the point it shames me by association. A self-important, egocentric middle of nowhere with a singular achievement worth mention being that it produced Avys von Blackburg - and that I can already behold all the hints of how that had happened sickens me. When the annals of immortal Names are written for the millennia to come, none will bother even searching for what this place was called.

Certainly not mine." Then she turned on her heel and left, ignoring the stunned patriarch still standing by the window. The speech was only slightly undermined by someone throwing a knife at them the moment the door was open.