Chương 640: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Fifty-Nine

"Anything else of interest?" Selene asked as they entered the nearest CRA Hall. Even 'walking' to people of their level of power wasn't a slow process.

"Not from the fight," Beth said, a slightly sly look on her face.

"Is Alex free?" Sera piled on.

"I'm sure something can be arranged," Selene said, the group of three detouring from their next destination. Fortunately, the Platinum missions could wait; many of them were fairly fresh, and none of them had the kind of critical priority that meant five or six hours would make that much difference, though it was even less than that, considering Beth had her Gate.

The entire team could take advantage of the time dilation, though the suite Beth had constructed for her and Sera had four rather happy people in it for the two days of rest they took. Selene and Alex couldn't stick around forever, and Alex was literally upon the cusp of her transcendence; having so many Exalted as friends, beyond having an Exalted wife, did wonders for the already talented angel. Selene and Alex couldn't stick around forever; Alex had to become an Exalted and Selene had to do…

Exalted things, whatever those were. The team, then, had to move on, heading for their next mission, which was another, slightly less difficult monster mission. That wasn't any trouble for them, and was in an earlier stage than the lich, which is why a whole two hour delay in getting there didn't matter at all. An easy mission was fine, but the team knew that they certainly weren't all going to be like that, and they had several on the docket that held a promise of more difficulty.

Platinum Emblems had to deal with a lot, which the five of them going for the emblem had already experienced to a certain degree. There was work they would have to do that they hadn't done much of yet, and Beth wasn't exactly looking forward to having to watch over a Hall for a few years, even if they might be able to finagle it so that they could do it as a group. Before they got to that point, the point where they were full Platinums, they had to get through a bunch of tedious and, perhaps, difficult missions.

Beth knew that some of what they were going to do was going to be challenging and time-consuming; her biggest issue was with the mysterious missions. Much like they had to investigate what was suspected to be a murderer before, sometimes missions at Platinum level just didn't have enough details or were left to the team's discretion to discover and perform. They had three missions like that out of nine, which wasn't a great start, and they would have to be very careful in the investigations.

They were onto those missions next, having taken care of three of the initial nine assignments, and also the three that were likely the most pressing, depending on what exactly they found on these next three. Thanks to the wide array of skills, powers, abilities, enchantments, and random items it was possible to possess under the Path, disguising oneself and one's actions was rather easy; it was always a tough time to catch up to someone who wanted to be truly nefarious.

Beth's team was also pretty representative of what the CRA had to work with a lot of the time; they were an incredibly powerful and skillful team, but their skill set had gaps. Sleuthing and investigation were not their strong suit, but sometimes needs must, and so they had to handle these missions. First was a world of ice and snow, a frozen hell that only had a moderate population because of the rare resources that were abundant there.

Unfortunately for the locals, and the few wandering Wayfarers, such a place was a great hunting ground for a beast of a different sort. People had been disappearing, and more than one or two a week, for several months, and they were not disappearing outside the walls of the cities in the wilderness.

Someone would go to a bar to drink, leave the bar rather toasty, and never show up again; it was highly unlikely that person, even drunk, had decided it was a great time to wander out into the wilderness and fight a few beasts for a couple extra coins. The signs were pretty ominous and pointed towards something quite nefarious going on, something that Beth's team was here to sort out, hopefully before any other half-drunk fighters vanished in a puff of snow.

"What's the situation?" Beth asked.

"Same as the initial report," T'von, the leader of the planetary CRA Halls replied. The first thing they had done was meet with her to get a picture of what was happening.

"Nothing new? No new developments?" Sera asked as Beth gave the Hall Master a dubious eye.

"If you count two more disappearances in the last two weeks, which have been added to the report," T'von said. The group exchanged looks before asking a few more questions, but it was clear that the situation wasn't a priority for T'von. That wasn't necessarily unusual, but the same way that they would report on their actions, and others would monitor what the team did, they would also include the activities and attitudes of others in their reports.

It might not do much more than raise an eyebrow or two, but T'von's lack of interest in pursuing the deaths as she focused on her other work would be noted, and somebody on Arbitus would at least add that to her file. Then again, there was a reason the investigation was a mission and had been assigned to their team; it was expected an outside unit would be assigned and quickly resolve the problem. Their first stop was to start at the end and work back towards the beginning.

After meeting with the planetary coordinator, they moved to where the last suspicious disappearance had happened and found… exactly nothing. It wasn't surprising that anybody that could get away, at least for a time, with murder would be able to cover their tracks, nor was it a surprise that there weren't any traces from a week old crime scene, but that was also considering it from a normal perspective.

Beth's team was far outside the normal or standard, and the fact that they couldn't see or sense anything, with all their skills and abilities, was a bit confounding. They headed over to the second crime scene, or rather, the second place with an odd disappearance, combing the area just as thoroughly, and finding just as much, which was absolutely nothing. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"We might be out of our depth," Val offered after they left the area.

"Too soon to make that call. We need to spend a lot more time investigating," Beth replied.

"The person could have a skill, or an entire build, that we don't have anybody that can counter," Val responded.

"How likely is that?" Beth asked.

"In this case? A lot more likely than you think," Val said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Val explained, "that in terms of combat, having a build that's very hard to counter is more of a myth than anything, especially since you can always just get matched against someone or something way stronger than you. However, for something like stealth, spying, and assassination, it's possible to have a set of skills and abilities, all working together and honed over years of training and practical application, that is very hard for anyone to detect, let alone counter.

This person could, and I'm just suggesting the possibility, they could be something like an assassin or specialist that might have cracked or just developed a sick side business."

"Or are just lacking in morals and practicing," Sera commented. At Val's look, she shrugged, saying, "What? Sometimes, people who dance around with things like assassination have very loose or entirely lacking morals. It's not unheard of that training programs for such people, or just regular, everyday practice involve picking random targets or people with only small flaws and hunting them."

"So, long story short, we could have someone that's specialized in assassination and hiding their tracks either having gone psycho, or they've always been psycho, being an assassin, and now they're grabbing random people," Beth said.

"Basically the gist of it," Sera said.

"Though, we should do some groundwork to investigate all the people that went missing. It's not crazy to think that the assassin could be picking people based on something in common, whether that's a similar trait, or whether it's that they've all done some kind of crime or similar act or something."

"Sounds like a needle in a haystack," Blood grunted.

"Just sounds like doing our due diligence," Beth replied.

"Let's comb through all the scenes of disappearances first, then we'll start looking into all these people's stories and backgrounds. Val, start working on that; see if any of them have anything in CRA records beyond just a Copper Emblem. Blood, run and scout all the locations quickly as we start moving; see if you can see or smell anything unusual, but don't do a full investigation. Just do a quick scout. Bjorn, Sera, with me; we'll go place by place and check thoroughly."

The team all nodded or grunted acknowledgment before staring on their assigned tasks. Val started pulling whatever records she could, which was quite a lot; being a Gold Emblem already gave a lot of access to the CRA, and just as much to many government systems, upon request, and she could get even more from the CRA by waving around the Platinum mission, if she needed to. That proved mostly unnecessary as, unfortunately for them, there weren't any easy answers in the CRA database.

The sad thing was, even just getting a Copper Emblem was too pricey or too involved for a lot of people; sure, there were an awful lot of Coppers running around, far more than Silvers and many, many times as many as Gold Emblems, but certainly not everyone got a Copper Emblem in their lifetime. Of those that did, many would only use it a little bit just to do some spars or a few fights, often never even fighting on the floor or in a big show or tournament.

Many people simply used it for access to the CRA Halls to train and do a few mock battles. All of that meant that even most Copper Emblems had little to nothing in their CRA files, not unless they did something criminal, and even then, it had to be pretty hefty for the CRA to get involved. Enforcers and Senior Enforcers weren't going around rounding people up for public drunkenness or petty squabbles, so most CRA records were, essentially, blank.

That didn't mean Val found absolutely nothing, even beyond that a record of making frequent use of CRA facilities or fighting often could convey quite a bit of information itself. At least one of the alleged victims had more notes in their file than just that they had an emblem and had done a little training, though doing two Silver missions wasn't really an indication of all that much.

It was a couple hours later, as the others were still moving around and scanning disappearance locations, that Val actually stumbled into something valuable, and that was only because she was being thorough. In a set of supplementary records, she found that two of the people they had on their list, people who had just suddenly disappeared one day and never returned, had gotten into quite intense altercations with local authorities.

Altercations, as they were rather colloquially referred to in the files, that were bad enough an Enforcer, someone at Gold Emblem, had to go over and sort the whole thing out. While all of that might have just been a bit of fluff or noise, that sent her down a rabbit hole of checking secondary reports, finding quite a few interesting things along the way. It wasn't directly useful, not yet, but she was gathering a lot more information from records than they team had first hoped.

The other four, meanwhile, where scouting locations, though they were having much less luck. Blood was moving quickly, a specialty of hers, and scanning around each place there had been a disappearance, though she couldn't detect anything, even with all her senses and skills tuned to the max. In one respect, it had simply been too long since anything had happened, and any traces would have likely faded away.

In another sense, if the person doing this was any kind of stealth specialist or assassin, then there would have been precious few traces to begin with, and weeks of time passing would ensure that any tiny hint that might have still been there was long gone. The rest of the team was going slower, hitting each location and checking with all their senses and skills.

It didn't add on all that much, as they weren't investigators nor did they have anything that could do any kind of in-depth scanning, but they did have a few aces up their sleeve. While none of them were miraculous sleuths or Sherlock Holmes types, the Empyreans were getting a bit stir crazy and were more than happy to pop out and help. Just being at the level they were at, with Diamond and even Mithril skills, let them observe and draw conclusions that most others would miss or simply be unable to calculate.

The first of those, coming from Erosh, of all people, was that this was definitely a murder. He had enough power and strength that, given his use of a Mithril detection skill, he could pull very faint traces of a violent altercation from two of the locations. It wasn't a bolt out of the blue, but the Empyreans basically confirmed that there was funny business afoot, the kind of funny business that involved secretive murders. Tracing more than that, however, was not a fast or easy process.

Despite a whole group of people at rebirth forty-nine aiding them, hunting down a dedicated stealth specialist, one Beth was now convinced was a trained assassin, was extremely difficult. Not only would such a person have a multitude of skills that would aid them in both disappearing and hiding any evidence, they would likely have years of training and practice to fall back on.

It also really didn't help that they were so far behind; old crime scenes were always tricky, but they were next to useless in this case, having so little that even the Empyreans failed to do more than identify that some kind of violence had taken place there. That meant that they were left largely scratching their heads, though they had some other avenues to pursue in the meantime, including sorting through more records with Val.

Beth was just hoping they could get a better handle on it without having to wait for someone else to get jumped and, presumably, killed to give them a fresh crime scene to scan, though that would also help. It was also a case where they couldn't use many of the tricks they had for the last murder; the person they were hunting, even if they had snapped, wasn't likely nearly as crazy. Dangling some obvious bait was highly unlikely to work, as was scanning one specific area.

Sticking to that one area by the lake had really cost the last killer, while this one was roaming an entire planet to find their victims.