Chương 641: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Sixty

"What do we know and what do we do with it?" Beth asked the team after they had scanned every area that was even a little suspicious.

"First, we have someone that has both training and skills," Val replied, riffling through papers.

"Every single disappearance or suspected murder case has had almost no trace left."

"Almost no trace isn't the same thing as there being no trace," Sera pointed out.

"While that's true, it's worthless," Val shot her down.

"The traces we're talking about are fragments of mana, little bits of scent or disturbances in the ground and air that lingered for a few days. Things so small that most other teams wouldn't even have a way of finding it. I don't necessarily think they're errors, either, at least from my understanding. I think it's more like the amount of time it would take to cover every single track, even for such a skilled person, isn't worth it when they don't really need to.

We have these small traces left, and they mean practically nothing. There's not enough there to go on."

"Okay, not great so far," Beth said.

"Do we have anything useful?"

"Records," Val said, paging through the files she had in front of her.

"The one problem someone like this has, a problem that they can't always take care of, is that many organizations keep meticulous records. People that are this good at assassination and espionage are rare; a lot of people try this shit, and a lot of people fail spectacularly at it. Not many people can actually do these kinds of things, even regardless of skills and abilities."

"So, we can trace them through the paperwork?" Beth asked.

"Not that easy," Val denied.

"We can't just pull out a file and look through a convenient list of assassins and find our culprit. We can, however, look through lists of people with certain specific skill sets, and ones that have performed certain jobs, not CRA jobs, mind you, but other contracts we have records of. Cross-referencing will take some more time, but we can create a list of possibilities; the best thing we have going for us is that the person has been here a while.

Whether they're a local or just have been here a long time, this has been going on for months now. There's bound to be at least a small trail, something they've overlooked, even if just from the aggregate data."

"I think we can just sniff them out," said Blood, her only contribution so far.

"Then you can work on that," Beth said with a sigh.

"Bjorn, make sure she doesn't get in trouble and try to find out what you can from the locals."

"Easy," the titan grunted, lumbering out behind the wolf.

"Let's get to work," Beth said, sitting down next to Val and pulling up documents on her communicator. The records that Val had pulled up for them to review were pretty copious; if there was one thing one could say about the CRA, it was that they really did keep a thorough track of as much as they possibly could. Beth knew her own file was close to as thick as the width of her palm at this point, and she'd only been a member for a little under two decades.

Then again, she was a mini-Exalted with crazy connections that had done some crazy things and was already well on the path to Platinum Emblem, so it shouldn't be a surprise that her file was rather voluminous. The files she was working through were decidedly less so, but even many Copper Emblems had a few dozen pages on them, depending on their length of membership and activity history.

They had more than just CRA records, as well, considering how closely the Association worked with many different governments and authorities. That really just meant way more records for them to cross-reference, which was good for them to catch something, but bad for the amount of reading and researching they had to undergo. Beth pulled out about two thousand pages of records to search to start and paged through them rather quickly; thank heaven she had already been a quick reader even before the Path showed up.

Now, with her enhanced stats, she could scan as much as two pages a second and retain all the information. That still meant a few dozen minutes just to go through the first section of paperwork, but she found a few very interesting things just on that first reading. There was no official assassin's guild that was widely recognized, but that didn't mean there were no assassin guilds anywhere. There were almost too many, in fact, as killing people for money was, sadly, quite a big business.

Too many people had too much wealth and too little to do with it, at least in Beth's opinion, and eliminating even tangentially threatening targets was what a lot of spending went to. The CRA took a dim view on such things, but it was an industry that was hard to quash, and there was a sort of tacit understanding that if the assassins didn't target certain individuals or behave too much in the open, the CRA wouldn't work too hard to pursue those that covered their tracks.

That didn't mean they were left off without any consequence, just that assassins weren't put at a number one priority if the jobs were kept within certain boundaries. The whole reason Beth's team was there right now, however, was that jobs were not being kept within a certain boundary. The local frozen hellhole didn't have an assassin's guild, officially or not, which also meant this was an individual acting on their own.

Bad, in that they were pursing some singular rogue agent without any larger organization to lean on. Good, in that it looked like the person was alone, meaning no backers, no cover stories, no alibis, no friends or guild members assisting, etc. They had to contend against just one person, though that person was clearly very skilled, based on the fact they had left almost no trace at all. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The records that Beth went through first didn't really help in identifying the individual, so she kept searching. Val, meanwhile, was reviewing all the details they had of every incident that had happened. The suspected killer was so thorough that it was hard to tell what was actually an incident; as terrible as it was to say, people did sometimes just go missing. The universe was a tough, cruel place, and while the the Path was not actively hostile, it left people up to their own fates.

Even the inside of a town was not necessarily safe; beasts and monsters occasionally got in, or other sapient beings attacked, or someone got drunk or high and wandered past the walls, or any number of rare, bizarre, or disturbing things could happen. The only part that was easy was eliminating incidents that had a very clear lack of relation to their supposed killer, and even that was tricky.

Someone this skilled could throw in a random act that messed with the pattern just for that very reason, to mess up their history of movements and attacks and make themselves harder to trace. Sera, on the other other hand, was working through files on the victims. The really unfortunate things was that it seemed like the killer wasn't necessarily doing contracts or eliminating specific targets.

IT really seemed like they were hunting just for the thrill of it, or for the practice, or for some other, even more obscure reason. On the surface, not a single victim had any relation to one another; not one of them was a co-worker, friend, family member, lover, or even distant acquaintance. That in itself was slightly suspicious; not that the killer couldn't have arranged it like that or some such, but that they managed to pick out so many victims without a single thing linking them.

Sure, it was a whole planet they were talking about, a half dozen cities where the crimes had taken place and over a period of at least several months (even the timetable was difficult to determine and in question), but for none of the more than thirty people that were part of the case to even know each other at all? It was more than possible, of course, but then what was the point?

It was giving off vibes of the lakeside killer they had stopped, but this person was far too meticulous to be just another psycho, at least, from the evidence they were seeing at the start. Sera just wished there were some key features that linked in a few of the victims. Sure, several of them were CRA Copper Emblems, which was another reason that this case had been elevated, but it wasn't anything different than a sampling of the population would get one.

Take forty random people that were at least trying part of the time to be Wayfarers and quite a few of them would have Copper Emblems, and even just taking a general sample of the population would get a decent number. With things like stat-limited matches and restricted matches using only certain skills or abilities, even the office worker down the street that had given up on leveling after hitting level fifty the first time could still participate in fights.

Not to mention the CRA was generous even with Copper Emblems; for just a couple gold coins, which wasn't a ruinous fee in the grand scheme of things, one got a certain level of access and discounts that was hard to pass up. Having priority in not just watching fights, but participating in events, also went a long way to encouraging people to get a basic emblem whenever they could scrape together the coins.

None of that helped Sera in the search, and none of the victims even had a Silver Emblem, so it was pretty easy to dismiss them as general members that were just interested in the basic benefits and access to the general ladders. Nobody was a more serious or senior member, whether by coincidence or that the assassin was avoiding higher-ups in the Association, that remained to be seen, but looking at their CRA status didn't give any hints.

Nor were any of the victims co-workers, which wasn't a crazy stretch, but not a single one had worked for the same company or business, even in the past. They also didn't know each other socially, though that was a bit harder to track down. Interviews with known friends, associates, and lovers would be needed, though some had already been done by local law enforcement. It painted a picture, at first glance, of random violence, but that was easy to see through.

Random violence would have seen some of these people have some association; the killer was more methodical than that. Whether they were obtaining access to records, or stalking the victims, or both, there was a certain pattern in the lack of association. Even with that, it still wasn't hardly anything to go on. So what, on a world of a couple million people, that a murderer had managed to find a few dozen that didn't know each other?

It wasn't all that surprising, other than the absolute and total lack of links between them. That was the only part that stood out; it was at the point that Sera wasn't sure any of the victims had ever been in the same room or the same building as any other. The complete and total lack of connection between them was so all-encompassing that it raised a few suspicions itself, but Sera would have to sort through far more data to try to find a link in the lack of any link.

Blood and Bjorn had less luck in finding anything that could be traced back to the person, but they did provide useful information. People were often intimidated by Bjorn, which could keep them from saying much, but his presence had a way of eventually overwhelming others. Or, at times, attracting those that wanted to act big to make a big impression, but either way, he could pull a surprising amount of information out of people, consider his lack of enthusiasm in saying more than ten words in a week.

He was the one, in fact, that got the first original piece of important information by way of drinking in a bar that one of the victims had frequented; a pair of men, getting rather hammered in the titan descendant's presence, had said something about the victim owing money. It was a very interesting tidbit because it didn't show up in any official file.

According to financial records, the victim had a bank account with a small local bank where he had a few coins stored and was otherwise rather unremarkable financially. Owing some kind of debt to some unknown third party was something both new and highly valuable that the team could pour a lot of time into tracking down. Blood, on the other hand, was not that social, but was their best scout and tracker.

That wasn't saying a whole lot, but she did have some skill, and senses that were so enhanced that they practically operated in a different way than others. That was also on top of her having a very, very strong eye power that she was very good with; the ability of her eye power to see through illusions and understand hidden truths was great, but not that useful here.

Her ability to see through even faint traces of mana and use all her senses in coordination to track that mana was much more useful, though the assassin was too good for her to catch out. She wasn't sure how they did it, but they had wiped their track out without making it obvious. Blood had hoped that her incredibly keen senses could detect a little error, or, better yet, a case where the assassin had removed too much from their trail and left an indicator.

Sort of like if they had erased a small piece of a drawing and not redrawn something in its place. Blood would be frustrated on that count, however, as they assassin clearly knew that if they just erased their scent, mana signature, and more, they could leave such a blank patch or a suspicious trail. Blood just wasn't good enough at unraveling the threads of mana, coupled with the fact that the trail on a lot of these suspected murders was rather cold, to find anywhere the assassin had left any kind of blank space.

The fact they all also happened within cities and the mana, smells, and movement of others through the area had greatly muddled everything didn't make the job any easier. Blood was able to filter out a few clues from the latest scene, a suspected murder of only three days before, but even that had been expertly covered up and the traces muddled.