“Tommy was clear that his father would keep us out of trouble, as long as we didn’t involve mages from the other faction, but his requests have been getting weirder over time.” The last mage he was interrogating muttered, with cloudy eyes and a mind filled with nothing but trust. “I told him that getting involved in this kind of thing was bound to bite us in the ass, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought it was his chance to prove to his father that he was worth acknowledging, and there’s nothing he wants more than that after he failed to stand out in class.”

“So you took up the job,” Nick clicked his tongue.

“Didn’t have much choice,” the mage shrugged, or at least moved his shoulders as much as he could in the state of complete relaxation he was in. “When an Archmage gives you orders, you comply. Especially if your whole livelihood depends on his goodwill.”

Finally releasing the now drooling form of his captive, Nick tried to piece together all the disparate information he had gathered into a single, coherent whole.

He’d expected this group of mages to have some skeletons in their closet, given how confident they were in their immunity. He had not foreseen the sheer extent of those wrongdoings.

“More like a whole damn cemetery in the closet,” he muttered as he stepped up the stairs, heading for the hidden terrace on the roof.

Guards were already converging on the townhouse, and the absence of the security guard to keep them away would only make them more suspicious.

No matter how clear Archmage Hone had made it that his illegitimate son’s business needed to be left alone, there was only so much the Duke’s men could ignore, and a magical battle in the middle of the city while it was essentially under lockdown was not one of those things.

“Why does everything have to be so damn complicated? I’d be so happy if these had just been simple smugglers, but no, they have to be part of one of the two hidden factions inside the Tower. And it all has to line up with this damn plot to attack the auction!” He grumbled, wrenching open the iron door and stepping into the cool night air.

The guards were already swarming, moving in unison from all directions to stop anyone from escaping, while several rangers kept watch on the sky to prevent anyone from flying away.

That made things harder for him, but slipping the [Ring of Unknowingness] on allowed him to vanish from their senses. While confusion rippled through the ranks, Nick shrouded himself in the shadows as best as he could, which admittedly wasn’t much, as this wasn’t an element he was familiar with beyond theory. He then slipped off the roof, disappearing into the balcony of the next building, only to repeat the same thing again and again until the echoes of the scrambling guards faded behind him.

This was a success. I got everything I wanted from them, including the location of several drop points for smugglers, the names of corrupt officials, and insights into the Tower’s inner politics. But the night is still young, and if I want to make full use of what I learned, I need to act now before word spreads and the rats disappear into the cracks.

The most important thing he’d learned today was that his enemy wasn’t just a ragtag group of gangs and failed mages under the control of a mysterious mastermind, but three separate organizations working together, competing for power, and all trying to spread chaos within Alluria for their own purposes.

The least concerning of the three was the mundane underworld. The gangs, petty criminals, the thieves' guild, and all the shady characters making a living in the shadows of the city's major powers. They were more involved in this mess than he had initially thought, especially considering that the mages he had just left behind had a formal contract signed with the local petty leaders to guarantee their cooperation and had been secretly coordinating to maximize their gains as soon as the inevitable retaliation subsided.

The second group was the one he’d initially believed was the only one involved: Changer, his agents, and his liege lord. Changer himself was apparently a well-known figure among the underworld leaders, as he had once controlled the thieves' guild with an iron fist before being ousted in an internal power struggle and forced to flee when the Duke turned against him.

Back then, he’d been a dangerous man, willing to go to any length to make a profit and expand his influence, but not usually threatening when directly confronted. It was clear to everyone involved that he had changed significantly, and the mages he’d interrogated believed he’d achieved Prestige in the past decade. This would explain his ability to possess someone from a distance, despite once being just a shadow-aspected thief.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

His return and his overt actions, including coercing and cajoling the gangs into a seemingly self-destructive plan, indicated that he had gained more than just personal power.

But even that wasn’t the biggest revelation of the night. No, the real breakthrough was discovering the existence of two separate political factions within the Tower, known as the isolationists and the interventionists.

Nick had known that politics were involved on some level. He’d personally felt it firsthand, as his mentor went from forbidding him from leaving the Tower to laying a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow.

But he hadn’t expected things to be so clearly defined. As of very recently, Tholm had stepped out of the shadows after years of independence, and along with Vice Tower Master Politod and most of the Tower’s masters, they formed the isolationists—a faction that supported separating the Tower from the city. They apparently wanted nothing to do with the nobles, petty power struggles, or involvement in large-scale operations, such as the one currently underway through the city to prevent the attack on the auction.

Obviously, they weren’t as dedicated to isolationism as the name made it seem, given that both Tholm and Politod had directed Nick to act in their stead, but generally, they preferred keeping a light touch.

The other faction, and this was the surprise, was the interventionists, which was apparently made up of Archmage Hone and a few of the more ambitious mages, mostly those with noble backgrounds. They were a smaller group, but influential enough that they couldn’t be suppressed, especially because, at least nominally, the Tower Master was one of them.

That fact was a source of great frustration for both groups because Horatio Bluetear never really intervened in the struggle, except for minor touches meant to maintain balance. The interventionists wanted him to take a stronger stand and were disappointed that he only seemed to act for his own benefit, while the isolationists wanted him to remain truly neutral and despised that their opponents could count him among their numbers.

It was, essentially, a balance that kept the Tower from becoming too involved in Alluria’s affairs, but also never completely detached from them, which had been the case for over a century.

That seemed to be changing recently, as Tholm’s choice to align with the isolationists and Hone’s actions to support his illegitimate son and the ragtag group of mages who followed him into real power in the criminal underworld were rapidly shifting the balance.

And even worse, they are doing so at a time when an external enemy is making a move.

None of the four mages knew who Changer’s backer was or why he was doing what he was doing, aside from wanting to acquire the fabulous wealth to be sold at the auction. However, they had received their orders to help him succeed and would follow them to the letter, lest even the petty kingdom they had carved up for themselves in the docks disappear.

I really hope this isn’t a situation where they are helping the enemy in hopes of exploiting the chaos to advance their cause as interventionists. That would be so dumb.

Unfortunately, the pieces seemed to be falling into place, and the picture that was forming was not far from that.

At least I got a lead on where Anthony might be. They weren’t directly involved in his disappearance, but they’d gotten deep enough into the muck to know where the bottom feeders lie.

And so Nick headed northeast, away from the docks and into the residential neighborhoods.

It wasn’t where he would have expected to find a smuggling ring, especially one dealing with people rather than goods, but maybe that was exactly why it was there.

The patrols thinned as he moved toward his destination, both because the soldiers were focused on controlling the overt gangs and because the commotion he’d caused was pulling people away in the opposite direction.

Eventually, he stopped in front of a typical five-story apartment building, inside of which he could sense several families sleeping.

If he hadn’t known there was something hidden beneath it, even he would have overlooked it. Instead, armed with that knowledge, Nick turned [Empyrean Intuition] to the task and peered into the dark.

“Oh damn, it is there.” There was nothing he could see under the building, but that was just another sign that something was wrong, since every other construction around it had a basement, and they had clearly been built at the same time and according to the same specifications.

Moreover, while he couldn’t see anything but rock, he could sense a few bursts of emotion leaking into the ether from beneath, something that shouldn’t have been possible if there had been nobody.

The actual presences were hidden, which told him whoever had crafted these defenses was a Prestige mage, but something told him they were old. There was a settled quality to the ether here, something he couldn’t say for most other magically active places in the city.

Nick took a moment to assess his situation. The battle against the four mages and their warriors hadn’t left him with a single scratch, but he had to use a lot of mana to win so overwhelmingly. Fortunately, he hadn’t needed to use his most powerful spells, which meant he finished the fight with about seventy percent of his mana remaining and recovered an additional ten percent during the downtime.

The thing was, he didn’t know what to expect from here. He’d been given a place and a way to get in, but after that, the mages didn’t know what he would find, as the most they’d seen of this base was the upper tunnel, where they had exchanged a few enchanted items for drugs. He could find a dozen Prestige warriors, just like he could find a few slaves.

That was not a good thing, especially for someone who relied on preparation like him, but he didn’t have the luxury of staking the area, especially since he was running short on time.

“Now then, let’s see if this works,” he muttered as he jumped into the side street next to the building and headed for the service exit.

Instead of knocking on it as would have been natural, he walked a few steps further, where ivy and moss covered the bricks, making it look like an archway of sorts. There, he tapped the center brick with his knuckles three times.

“Who is it?” called a gruff voice.

“The sunrise on the Valis River is as bright as the dusk,” he replied, and after a moment of silence, the bricks began moving, twisting upon themselves, until an opening in the wall was revealed.

A young man with hooded eyes and a nasty knife held at his hip looked him over as the last bricks slotted in place to the side. “Are they sending more brats? Damn, things must be really bad right now.”

Nick dipped his head, “Oh, you can’t even imagine.”