Chương 478: Limitless Path Chapter Five Hundred

"So, what's the plan?" Sera asked as they stood at the rear of a train car. The place had just such a thing because of just such people as Bjorn, who didn't fit very nicely in the rather small seats.

"It's mid-morning now, so we go over and scope out the place. Observe for an hour or two. Around lunch time, we'll head in and do an audit, which Gold Emblems have a right to do for corporations and guilds even if they don't suspect wrongdoing. The building faces east, so Bjorn and I will take that side, since we'll be using his Emblem for the audit. Blood, take the rear to the west, Sera the north, Kris the south. Once Bjorn and I enter, track anybody leaving, especially if they're in a hurry.

Don't pounce on them, but keep tabs on them; we might get something more valuable from them than we do from the office itself," Beth answered.

"Easy enough," Blood grunted. They got off the train a few minutes later, moving to surround the building, though they didn't make it obvious what was happening. Sometimes Beth forgot, for all their power and impressive equipment and so on, they could be very, very stealthy when they needed to be. Even Bjorn, half the size of a mountain and ten times as heavy, could just… disappear, when he wanted to.

He and Beth had picked separate spots to watch the company's headquarters, both out of the way, though Beth did a better job of blending in, as she sat at an outdoor table at a bakery and café, ordering some kind of tea and pulling out a screen to read on, appearing just like other regular customers who couldn't necessarily afford a fancy communicator to review things on.

Not a lot of people came in and out of the building over the next hour, and Beth ordered a second tea and a small sandwich to not be taking up space at the café without contributing to their business. Blood reported that a single person had gone in through the back door of the four-story building in the time they had watched, looking like it was a normal employee.

Kris and Sera said there were no regular exits, only a fire escape on one of the sides of the building, which the group made sure they factored into their plans. When nothing else unusual happened, with only a few people having used the front door of the building during the morning, Beth and Bjorn both appeared on the street in front of the place. Bjorn gestured with a hand the size of a snow shovel and Beth nodded, allowing him to partially take the lead on this.

They were, after all, using his Gold Emblem for this mission, so Beth didn't mind him leading this part of the investigation. She walked into the front doors of the business, throwing them wide, though she didn't slam them unnecessarily against the walls. She could easily destroy such things and her intent today wasn't to make too much of a scene, so she kept it within the bounds of reasonable taste.

The person working a small reception desk at the back of the lobby looked up at them angrily, though upon throwing out some form of Identify, and on registering just the mana radiating from the gear they wore, the anger was replaced by a cautious fear. The man stood up as Beth strode boldly up to his desk, casting a nervous glance between her and the massive man behind her.

"Miss, can I, uh, help you with anything…?" he asked as Beth stopped in front of him.

"CRA," she snapped out.

"We're here for an unscheduled audit."

"An audit! But, you can't just-ma'am! You can't do this!" he protested, becoming upset as she moved behind the desk, forcing him out and starting to go through his papers and terminal.

"We can and we will," Bjorn said authoritatively, showing his Gold Emblem.

"The CRA has the right of financial audit of any business operating on a world they have jurisdiction over. If you have a protest, you can file a complaint with your local Hall and with the planetary government. Until such time, you will remain here and remain quiet."

"I have to protest, in the strongest possible terms," he said, edging towards the hall leading further into the building.

"I have to protest this treatment! The CRA might think it's above the law, but it can't-""Do not run," Bjorn commanded quietly, which the man ignored as he hit the threshold of the hallway and turned and sprinted off. Well, he attempted to, but a flick of Bjorn's wrist had the man, lightly injured now, on the ground. Bjorn withdrew cuffs from his storage power and cuffed the man's hands, using a kind of enchanted restraint the CRA used when detaining Awoken or Empowered criminals.

Enlightened and Ascended needed much… stronger restraint, typically, than what could be done with a simple set of cuffs, even with Master or Grandmaster enchanters working on them.

"Sweep the building," Bjorn commanded her before contacting the others on comms.

"Anybody leaves the building, arrest them. You all have cuffs; use them on anybody that walks out, even the damn janitor."

"Yes," came back as confirmations from the other three outside.

"Lock the door," Beth said to Bjorn, who grunted in acknowledgement, moving over and locking the front door before grabbing their first prisoner and dragging him over to sit against the wall.

"How many employees are here today?" Bjorn questioned the slightly dazed man.

"There should be, ah, should be thirty people in the building today," he replied, a bit unfocused, though Bjorn had carefully modulated just how hard he had hit him. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Well, one down, twenty-nine to go," Beth grunted, finishing looking through the paperwork.

"Let's get this-" Bjorn started before a woman walked into the lobby. It was one of those comical scenes, all three of them becoming perfectly still as she looked at them questioningly before turning to run. Bjorn knocked her down, too, before continuing, "Let's get this done quick. Most of these people are barely Awoken. Move fast and try not to hurt them too much."

"Right," Beth replied, starting to move at high speed. She was so far beyond anybody else in the building, other than possibly one or two people in the owner's office, including the owner, that she wouldn't have even registered as a blur to them, and that was without using her skills. She was able to rather easily move between the rooms, cuffing people before they even realized what was happening. Bjorn moved along behind her, making sure she didn't miss anyone and taking people she cuffed down to the lobby.

Beth reached the fourth floor in just under two minutes, it not taking her long to clear the entire rest of the building. She moved through that floor rapidly, cuffing five people before getting to a room at the end of the hallway. Somehow, someway, the owner seemed to have figured out what the hell was happening, though likely just a few moments before. Beth slammed open the doors to his opulent office to find him actively in the middle of setting fire to some likely quite important documents.

As soon as she stepped into the room, she pulled all the fire around herself, the flames coating her arms and back and dancing merrily through her hair without burning it up. The owner, a tall and slightly fat man with a swarthy complexion and a bit of a red face, charged her, swinging a punch at her head while he tried to throw more flames into the building. Beth caught his fist in front of herself, not even having to activate her buffs beyond their passive level to stop his swing.

The man was an Enlightened, but not all Wayfarers were created equal, and he was somebody that proved it. It was pretty clear he had rather recently advanced, as his level was pretty low and Beth was reading ten rebirths on him. That, and it seemed as if he really had no idea how to properly utilize his Mana Physique to aid him in combat, which pointed towards him having just acquired it and not trained with it.

On reviewing his likely stats and skills, including his skill levels, Beth was guessing this was a man that didn't really train that much to begin with. He had reached Enlightened, which did suggest he had some skill and strength, but Beth could see half a dozen openings in his form that she could drive a bus through. Not only that, but she had been able to block his punch laughably easily, catching his fist and partially crushing it in her gauntlet without exerting too much pressure.

As he reeled from the pain and tried to attack her again, Beth slapped his punch, and the burst of electricity that came with it, to the side with ludicrous ease, snapping out several punches of her own that had the man staggering around the still very much intact room. He tried to throw a filing cabinet, the only one in the room, at her and set it alight, but Beth once again stole the flames from his skill or spell and caught the cabinet with ease, setting it down behind her.

"Done?" asked Bjorn, walking in to see the man still fighting.

"Almost," Beth said, having glanced at the titan when he walked in. The owner of the stupidly named scheduling company was equally as stupid, going for Beth in that moment, as if Bjorn wasn't staring right at him, and as if Beth wouldn't be ready for such an attack. Beth, however, was ready for such an attack, lazily turning and intercepting another lightning-based strike, scoffing at the attempt before thumping the man again.

This time, her combination drove him, quite literally, to his knees, forcing him to catch himself just short of falling flat on his face. Beth took that opportunity to teleport behind him, giving him a heavy blow to the head while cuffing him. The cuffs might or might not hold him, but with the bit of damage she had already done him, perhaps they could keep him docile for a while.

"Now I'm done," she said, picking the owner up and moving him to the side.

"Alright, building's clear," Bjorn said on the comms.

"The three of you come in and help with this cleanup." The other three entered the building and the whole team set to work, reviewing files and figuring out what was what. It was a big damn mess, and Beth was glad she had stopped the owner from burning the place down with his fire spells, as there was a trove of valuable information there. Bad for the other employees, too, as many of them had been involved to at least some extent in the fraud and petty smuggling the business got up to.

Fewer of them, though still more than just the owner, knew about the warehouse thefts, but that number was still non-zero. Beth finagled out some records from the place's computer system that detailed several mysterious payments the company received for seemingly bogus services, which she at first thought tied in with the little bit of fraud they did on the side, but she quickly realized that she was looking at something else.

The payments she had found linked, though several hops, to an account connected to a known thief, a thief that had vanished a year ago. Beth was suspecting either the thief herself, or somebody that knew her or something similar, was using old accounts linked to her to funnel money to the company. That money, very likely, was coming from the warehouse thefts and depot raids, though they would have to do a lot more digging to piece everything together.

It was pretty important they did a lot of this investigation first, as it would provide the legal justification for their coming actions, some of which might rise to the level of lethal. Also, a small band of elite bandits hiding out somewhere, possibly even in one of the cities, was going to be trickier to track and confront than a company with an office on Water Street. Sera and Kris had handled interviewing the rest of the employees, apart from the owner, who Bjorn had handled personally.

That led to them needing to grab a few more people from the CRA and two people from the local law enforcement office, which turned into a big hassle, just in getting everyone there and up to speed. Basically every single person, except for one, that worked at the office was guilty of some kind of crime, and the CRA would back up local law enforcement and prosecutors in handling those cases.

What the CRA would take exclusive control over, however, was the bandit investigation, which they politely told the local police to refrain from sticking their nose into, as it had already passed outside their jurisdiction. Beth had found all kinds of goodies in the files that the owner was trying to burn, including several names and addresses that she was sure were related to criminal activity.

Figuring out which of them had something to do with the owner's embezzlement, and which of them had something to do with the bandit gang was another matter. They would have to hit the streets and go to several of those places, as some of them weren't clearly detailed. Two she was able to cross off their list because they were essentially labeled as the product of illicit company activities; she passed those details to the local prosecutor's office before sending her team the information with their real targets.

The other goodies that came out of the files was data that she was pretty sure had been stripped of attribution but was related to the sale of stolen goods from the warehouses. The scheduling company, it seems, hadn't just leaked times and numbers to the bandits, they had likely helped offload at least some of the stolen property, likely also some of the money in the process.

The local law enforcement people were going to have a great time digging into that whole web of fraud and illicit purchases, likely with quite a few more arrests before everything was sorted out. Beth and her team, however, had their own fish to fry, those mainly being checking the addresses in that first city before trying to use the data they had snagged to trace back to the bandits' lair or lairs, as the case may be.

Their first stop would be an old building on the north side of town, though Beth had them pause first before going any further. They needed to act on the data quickly, before the bandits could get a handle on what had happened, but Beth's team needed to do a quick strategy session first.

They made their plans on where to hit, what order they would go in, how to hit the places, and how to start tracing the data back to the bandits themselves before they set out, double-time, towards the first location on their new list.