Chương 647: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Sixty-Six

"Whew. Now that that's done, the fun part starts," Val said, sorting through folders.

"The paperwork."

"Also, remember that coin won't work everywhere," Sera said.

"What do you mean?" Beth asked.

"Stuff we get from, say, Mortaine, we don't have to worry about," Sera started to explain.

"His stuff just works. Then again, he's a many millennia old Exalted who specialized in research and understanding the esoteric. Most organizations don't have people like him making their tokens. The Hushed Hand wouldn't be any different. I would bet money that their tokens rely on the standard comms network."

"So, anywhere that works, the coin would work. Anywhere it our communicators would be out of service, the coin won't work either," Beth cut in.

"Exactly right," Sera said, sighing before sorting through some of the papers. Getting everything organized took them another twenty minutes, and then they finally returned to a CRA Hall for the first time in a couple days. They sent a quick report on what had been happening all the way up the chain to Arbitus, and Beth gave the local planetary coordinator the five minute rundown on what they had found.

Needless to say, they weren't happy with having a Hushed Hand member slinking around the planet they were currently overseeing, but sometimes everyone just had to bite the bullet and deal with shit they'd rather not handle. Beth wasn't exactly thrilled with it either, not having to work with an assassin nor having to explain that to other CRA members, but it was what it was. They had everything they needed, however, so they were on to the next job, which was unfortunately not quite as interesting.

It did give them a chance to do some looting again, as they were up against another monster incursion. These things didn't happen all that often, not compared to other events, but monster outbreaks also weren't something that most others could solve. It took a certain level of strength and skill to handle any monster, let alone a powerful one that had many rebirths under its belt, so a lot of that kind of work fell into the area of Gold and Platinum missions at the CRA.

Not just that, but comparing across galaxies or different areas would get different results; the Milky Way, as Beth had been hearing for a while, was a pretty poor and underdeveloped galaxy overall, despite the wonders she had seen. Part of the knock-on effects of that lacking development meant more space for crazy beasts and for monsters to form, develop, exert influence, and expand.

Essentially, the Milky Way kinda sucked, and Beth's team had more monster hunting missions than they would otherwise have because of that lack of development. The job wasn't all that interesting, not compared to what they had been up to, but it did give them another completed Platinum mission and a chance for Beth to work her looting powers by using it on a strong monster.

The results were much less interesting than the lich, unfortunately, and they didn't need to call in Selene to look everything over, also unfortunately. They were getting through the missions pretty quickly, but Platinum missions were important, and they needed to pick up the pace to make sure the ones that were more time sensitive didn't sit too long.

The second monster job was mission number four, and the ease with which they could wipe out a monster and its beast waves let them finish in two objective days and move on, heading for mission number five, which was more hunting, though of a different nature. This mission was similar to one of the first batch they had taken, where people were disappearing and even their bodies weren't showing up.

It wasn't the same as the assassination cases they had just cracked, as all evidence pointed to someone snatching people off the street. That might sound like it was a little far-fetched in a society with so much magic and technology, but not every single street corner was watched twenty-four/seven, nor were people constantly being monitored.

The sad truth was, a lot of places, people generally felt safe because there were a lot more good actors than bad actors; they just had a lower chance overall of somebody with nefarious intentions coming after them specifically. That and places like the CRA existed; one could always count on the CRA's justice to be swift and impartial, and that gave an awful lot of people a sense of security. It was exactly why Beth and her team were here; to track down one of those handful of nefarious actors and deal with them.

The disappearances weren't happening in a scenic area around a beautiful lake this time, but instead were happening in a poor district of a small working city. A lot of places like this existed, places to process lower level or lower value materials, things even a lot of Master craftsmen wouldn't typically waste time on, but someone with a handful of levels and a Journeyman profession could easily handle.

Such places were great hunting places for the kinds of people like the psycho they had stopped at the lake; lots of lower-leveled individuals crowded together, though still with their own individual apartments, and not a lot of strong police or CRA presence. Not until a lot of those people started going missing in strange ways, and then there was suddenly both a local law enforcement presence and a CRA presence, but neither necessarily brought out the big guns right away.

That's one of the ways the guy from the lake, Beth was pretty sure his first name had been Dean, was getting away with things for so long. The heat didn't get turned up all the way right away, so he could monitor for increased police or CRA activity and bail before anyone powerful enough to track him down showed up.

"Classic killer on the loose vibes," Beth muttered as the team reviewed the files.

"Sometimes, people use that as a cover," Val warned.

"We could be looking at a cult, or a really powerful Ascended that's grabbing people to use as lab rats, or a handful of other scenarios that would be a lot bigger problem than just one lone killer." A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Good to keep in mind, but are there any indications of that?" Beth asked, looking over the last of the admittedly sparse documents on the case.

"Can be hard to tell," Val replied.

"Either the person here is extremely thorough, moreso than that last guy we nabbed at that lake resort, or they're more powerful than the initial assessment."

"What makes you say that?" Sera asked, though she was just trying to probe Val's thoughts rather than not understanding her point at all.

"It really is a matter of speed and detection," Val explained her thought process.

"This case got elevated because so many people had disappeared. The time period is still stretched out over a few months, which makes it a little less crazy at first glance, but that's about thirty people a month. They're grabbing one person a day, or close to it, off the streets or out of their own homes, just scattered around the city, and they're not leaving any evidence.

There's no sign of a struggle or evidence of some kind of powerful mana traces still present at the scene, at least not that law enforcement has found."

"You know our opinions on the local cops and their competence," Bjorn grunted out, sitting by the window of the room they were in in the center of the city.

"I know, I know," Val said, holding up a hand in a placating gesture.

"They're not great at the best of times, but even they can identify common signs and mana typings. The fact that nobody has found anything is more than a little troubling and it means we don't have as many leads to work off of as we should."

"Lot's of casing work here," Beth sighed.

"Least we'll be moving around again," Blood commented.

"Let's split up and take the city in quarters. Bjorn, you can just plant up someone; little too hard to miss you poking around," Sera said.

"Sounds like a plan," Beth seconded her wife, the others just nodding or grunting, in Bjorn's case, in confirmation. It didn't take all that long for them to split up the city, which had about five hundred thousand people living in it in total, and start to case the area. Despite their dislike of it, or Blood's dislike of it, Sera and Blood made themselves look entirely human, though they didn't go so far as displaying their runes.

Funnily enough, Val was the most obvious one at that point, out of the group out searching, and it constantly amused Beth that her 'disguise' involved a big hat and sunglasses. At least she wasn't always recognized right away, her legend having faded just a bit after having been mostly out of the spotlight for a couple years.

Just as the Young Scions had worked very hard on their PR campaign, without that campaign being active anymore, they were very quickly fading from people's memories, which was just fine with Beth; having a massive celebrity on the team could get pretty annoying at some points.

The thing about what they were doing is that they could investigate so much without any fresh leads to go on, so it mainly came down to combing through places that had already been gone through and working on trying to find anything the beat cops and local investigators had missed. The CRA hadn't deployed anyone before them, so all the information they had was from local law enforcement and Bjorn's disgusted grunt was about what the team thought of their skills most of the time.

It was kind of a little bit of an attitude the CRA senior members worked to not have spread through the Association, but a lot of people had a view that local law enforcement were those not good enough, skilled enough, motivated enough, or talented enough to really pursue work with the CRA. That or they were people who were more than happy with settling for something considered to be a lesser job or assignment.

Not that there weren't local law enforcement that did good work or helped their communities, but there was a kind of parochial attitude that some in the CRA had, one which Beth's team was also a little biased towards. They had not had very good experiences with local law enforcement teams so far themselves.

Searching the places where everyone had either supposedly disappeared from (some people were just gone and it was hard tracking where they had disappeared), as well as all the missing persons' homes was an effort that took a couple days, even splitting the work. During the searching, Bjorn was mostly drinking, but that was right where the team needed him; he was so big he always drew a lot of attention, and it was pretty interesting the kinds of things people would reveal at the local bars, especially to him.

There was just always this culture of oneupmanship where ever they went that had people trying to impress what they saw as the biggest and strongest person around, and Bjorn's ability to put away liquor only helped encourage that. While their walking battleship was busy sussing out interesting tidbits from the drunken screeds in the bars, the other four had gone through every home and disappearance location and come up with surprisingly little.

One point back to local law enforcement, even if it was begrudgingly, as Beth's team still not picking up on anything showed that there was more going on here than they had first thought. Beth had thought they could at least pick up on some strange mana perturbations or something, but everything was quiet and calm. Too quiet, in fact, as Blood noticed that the places were too clean. Leave it to the wolf on the team to get a lead for them by smelling something, or not smelling something, in this case.

It was like the places they were investigating had been stripped of smell, and that was really the way to phrase it, as they hadn't been cleaned. It wasn't like they were super tidy, or they had a smell of disinfectant or cleaner of some kind; they just didn't have any smell at all, which was a very weird thing, but led to them postulating that somebody involved might have a smell.

Either somebody involved in this whole thing had a very strong smell, or a unique smell that was far different than anything else around. In either case, it gave Blood something to do. Not that the others couldn't help; Sera, for example, did have a pretty good nose and sense of smell based on her dragon lineage, but she wasn't going to go sniffing around a whole city when they had other stuff they could look into.

They cut Blood loose, however, let her roam where ever she wanted and follow her nose, looking for anything particularly strong in terms of scent, or something that was highly unusual. Beth was betting it was somebody that had an extremely distinctive scent, probably someone like her wife but even more so. Sera had a fairly distinct smell, something that wasn't common to dragons or even certain individuals, and if it was something like that, it would make sense why the person would cover that up.

Though, that was also a bit sloppy on their part, as Sera pointed out if they were concerned about something like that they should have either misdirected with another scent or tried to cover more things up, like destroying some homes and not others. The fact they had done everything so quietly did work in their favor a little, but it was strange that they only covered up scent, to the point where they were worried that might be a bit of a false lead itself.

They would just have to wait for Blood to either get tired of the search or to find something that was really smelly, in one way or another. The other three, as Bjorn was still drinking, had gone through every house and disappearance site they knew of before reconvening and deciding to try something more than just passive investigation. They broke the city into quadrants and decided to use a bit of their power and privilege to do quick but thorough scans of everything in a quadrant.

It would be a bit invasive, but they were CRA Gold emblems that were in their Platinum approval process; they had a lot of leeway in what they could do. They also weren't just busting into people's private homes and tearing them up; not in most cases, anyway. They were entering buildings or areas where they might not otherwise have permission, but they didn't break into anywhere that was someone's personal space, though they move close to those kinds of places and scan them thoroughly.

Funny, how they could do a thorough scan, which was more invasive than them breaking in in many ways, and people were far less upset at that than if one of Beth's group had snuck into their house.