On the mundane side of things, the place they arrived at was perfectly inconspicuous. Just another street in northern Manhattan, filled with apartment buildings and corner stores. There was some minor filth flying around thanks to a couple of crows that were picking apart a garbage bag that had been left out for collection.

They flew off when John and Marie walked by them. Once they had passed, the crows landed on the floor again. Circling their previous scavenging site, they returned to it once they knew they were safe. John only spotted some half-spoiled avocado remains being slung down their greedy beaks before he focused his eyes on what was in front of him.

Once they were at the correct address, both he and Marie raised their arms and entered the Illusion Barrier.

‘That answers one question, at least,’ John thought and checked his phone. While it was still functioning, the signal was jammed. Scarlett couldn’t have located this place no matter how hard she tried. That made it easier for those people to slip under the radar. ‘I’m still going to have an investigation into corruption.’ “You ready?” the Gamer asked his company.

Marie reached into her pocket dimension and retrieved a book. Once fully in her hand, it flew open. The pages scattered into the air, forming a whirling cocoon of white and dark blue around her, the handwritten words blurring in the motion. After about three seconds, the pages flew back towards her hand.

Folding and sticking together through magic, they attached themselves to the transformed leather. What had been a hard cover was now the grip of a sword, with the pages soon finalizing into the shape of a blade. It looked quite elegant, a gently curving, broad blade, as thin as one layer of paper. The individual sheets that made it up disappeared, their borders melding away, words spreading out equally over the length of the weapon.

John found that quite fascinating. He had no idea about the powers nor level of Marie, he just assumed both to be potent. As far as he knew, the Damocles family succession was dictated by who was acknowledged as strongest by the current house head among all members of a generation. Marie herself had two siblings and doubtlessly a few cousins that John didn’t know about. Still, she was the successor, that had to count for something.

“A Papersword,” Marie said and lowered the finished weapon. “As uncreative as zhat is, I believe that’s what you call me.” She must have read the question right from John’s mind. John saw several words on the blade flare up and the ink simmer away, like water through a filter. Just as they had vanished, Marie began to turn invisible. “I’m ready, yes.”

‘Does she get to store spells in the ink of her sword or how does that work?’ John wondered about the implications and possibilities of that. ‘I would assume the stronger the spell, the more ink is necessary and she only has so much room? Is it a per character thing or could she have a massively powerful spell that is just written as ‘fire’? I have so many questions.’ Regardless of any of that, he trusted that the French woman had his back and approached the door.

Contrary to his initial belief, supported by other places of this nature that he had raided before, this place was clean. Cleaner than the street they had come from, visibly, and very clean in general. Everything inside the barrier was clearly being checked on regularly, the walkway had not a single stain on it and the building that replaced the apartment building that stood there on the mundane side of things was a mixture of mansion and fortress.

Marble walls rose three stories high in their white and black glory, interrupted by large windows. The frames were reinforced metal and all blinds were drawn shut. The five gold-trimmed steps at the front led to a solid steel door, likely several inches thick. The flat roof was separated into two levels, a high middle and two lower side arms. On top of the middle one stood a person, looking down at John as he approached.

No alarm had been rung yet, although John could distantly hear the nervous chattering. He had been spotted and they weren’t happy about the fact that Marie had disappeared. ‘Wonder how they are communicating. Low range walkie-talkies? Those would be safe from Scarlett and Technomancers in general, unless she got into the barrier.’

He approached the door and saw someone slide open a piece of metal, allowing them to look outside. Normally, in those situations, one would be asked name and intent, but John only heard the words, “Shit, shit, SHIT, SHIT!” as the visor was violent slammed shut again.

“Appropriate,” John drily stated as he equipped Purgatory, along with the rest of his battle gear, and used Active Aura for the first time in forever. Mana surrounded him as a fiery aura, bundled into Ki within his body and gathered in the joints of his left arm. The Impact Punch collided with the steel door and slammed a fist-sized dent right into it before ripping it out of the wall at the hinges.

The door flew three metres into the room, and John stepped inside. It wasn’t often that he used one of the two martial arts he knew, but in this situation, it had felt like the simultaneously cheapest and most impressive way to make his way inside.

“IT’S THE GAMER!” the person manning the door, a sickly smooth looking woman with a nose that looked like it belonged on a bird, shouted into her walkie-talkie. They had wisely retreated from the door in a hurry and were now trying to get away as fast as they could. John paid little attention to the luxuriously designed entrance and extinguished his Active Aura. His Mana Regeneration kicked back into action.

While pulling the Mandala Sphere out of his inventory, he prepared an Arc Lance. Waiting until his target was on a natural chokepoint, namely a doorframe, he then unleashed the spell. The good old trick that basically every videogame ever had taught him worked like a charm here as well. To be fair, he was probably over-calculating this affair, his target wasn’t even level 30.

The Arc Lance blew away a large chunk of the woman’s left thigh and caused her to fall over. She tried to crawl away, the Mandala Sphere flying past her, but John caught up to her with a couple of quick steps and picked her up with his clawless right. He threw her into one of the fantastically designed chairs. Promptly blood began to soak into the seat, flowing from her leg at a massive speed. His attack must have hit an artery or something.

Whimpering in pain and confusion, the woman tried to escape the Illusion Barrier. John could feel the weak pulses from her raised hand whenever she tried. They bounced off uselessly against his grip on the Protected Space. ‘Well, this is a problem.’ John looked at the wound he had caused. At the current rate, she would bleed out before he was finished here. ‘Should have aimed for the foot…’

He had three ways to fix this. Letting her leave the barrier, calling Undine (for which he would have needed to leave this barrier, the distance between them was now too great for a mental connection) or the third, very painful option. Painful for her, that was. It was a necessary cruelty, but he needed her incapacitated anyway.

Activating the Cleansing Fire of Purgatory, he pressed his fire engulfed palm against the wound until it was cauterized. It was a temporary solution, but it kept her from bleeding out before John was done there. “Please… please don’t kill me,” she whimpered when her body stopped trashing from the pain.

“I won’t,” John assured her to keep her pacified for the moment. By the laws he himself had put in place, the woman before him would either be locked up for a very, very long time or get the death penalty. Truth of the matter was that he needed the witnesses, so keeping her alive for the moment was a purely pragmatic decision. Regardless of that, John didn’t like seeing someone in pain. He just accepted it as part of the dirty business. “You just keep sitting there.”

With those words said, John picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the button at the side. “Wherever you currently are, whoever you are, I am willing to accept your surrender. I’ll be waiting in the entrance area.” He then turned to Marie, who was still hanging around. While she was invisible to him on the Mundane Layer of his vision, he had no trouble spotting her on the Abyssal Layer. “Do you want to just wait here with me?”

If Marie was surprised that he could see her so easily, she hid it well. “Are you seriously going to wait for zhem here?” she asked. “A spotted fox that waits for his prey at the entrance of their burrow will go hungry.”

John didn’t answer immediately, as he had to track the movements of his Extensions and the relative position between the two of them. “Well,” he said slowly, position calculations taking most of his mental computing power. “I am not one fox, is the thing,” he said while taking measured steps through the giant entrance room.

He climbed behind a desk, likely meant to take coats, and then stood firmly where he was. Then he raised his foot and slammed the heel down as strongly as he could. The marble floor cracked, but didn’t break. Once more, twice more, changing the angles to spread the destruction equally. After the sixth stomp, something gave. He quickly jumped on the table, the ground caving where he had just stood. Shards of rock fell into an underlying hallway, and John looked down on a person that was half buried under the rubble.

Marie looked over with interest and witnessed as Jack approached from elsewhere in that tunnel. Having found two people at the same time, John’s double had chased them down until they split at a juncture. A plan that might have worked had it not been for what John just did.

“Even if you can’t get away, you still try to hide and hope that I somehow won’t find you, do you?” the Gamer asked and sighed. Coordinating efforts with himself, the person Jack was holding was thrown up the hole simply and caught by John, like an item on a construction site. Adding the humiliation, John let the man dangle above the hole by the collar of his well-tailored suit. “You will tell me everything,” he just stated.

A growl was followed by the quick drawing of a pistol from a concealed holster under the armpit. John didn’t even attempt to stop the motion. The gun was aimed at his stomach and the trigger pulled three times in quick succession. Each bullet bounced of Particle Skin without causing any harm to him. He barely even felt the impact. It was like someone was lightly slapping his stomach with their flat hand.

“That’s just rude,” John sighed and tossed the man into the entrance room. Once the second man, who had been knocked unconscious by the rubble, had also been brought up, Jack resumed his scouting of the remaining building. For the moment, John had his double run around aimlessly, basically in search and destroy mode.

“I see,” Marie finally continued her earlier statement and then jumped down the hole. “I will search the building as well. Should I find someone, I will bring zhem here.”

“I would be much happier if you stuck around Jack,” John confessed.

Shaking her head, Marie brushed some stone dust off her dress. “I’m not a damsel that needs your protection.”

“No doubt about that… well, I won’t force you to do anything,” the Gamer said and stepped away from the hole. This wasn’t really the time for unnecessary small talk. There were people in chains somewhere in this building and the quicker they got those opened, the quicker he would be able to alleviate the pressure on his mind. Then he could make all the jokes he wanted again.

That aside, he had long since learned that there were women one couldn’t reason with and that they were sexier for it. Although the submissive types were also wonderful. John just loved them all, really.

John jumped off the table and turned to the man with the gun. Three more bullets came his way, all to no effect. A fourth one struck him in the eye, however. While that didn’t cause any more harm than the previous ones, it was a thoroughly unpleasant feeling. Irritated, John grabbed the gun’s barrel with his left and turned it into a sliced and squished clump of scrap.

“You will tell me everything,” John repeated, while forcing the man to look into his eyes. Hypnotic Gaze activated. “Be calm.” The man relaxed slightly. “Be – Calm,” John repeated, putting all of his authority and Charisma into those words. It had the desired effect and the man dropped the ruined pistol. “You will tell me everything,” the Gamer said for the third time. No reaction. The hypnotic suggestion must have been too broad. Everyone had things they would never say. “You will tell me what I want to know about this place.”

“I will tell you what you want to know about this place,” the man repeated in a trance, confirming that this angle worked. With the difference in John’s Charisma and the Wisdom of his current target, the hypnosis became basically mind control. Not completely, otherwise this whole thing would have been even easier.

John skipped the things he already knew, who he was, what rank he had in the organization and other things Gaia’s intel and his own Observe already told him. “Where do you keep the slaves?”

“The merchandise has rooms in either the third story or the second underground layer, depending on obedience and value.”

John kept his urge to punch the guy for using the word merchandise in check. Barely, when he remembered that this meant most of the people kept here were stuck in some sunless room underground. Punishment had to wait. Violence would rip the guy out of the trance and make further questions difficult.

Adjusting Jack’s search priorities, he had his double save those slaves underground first. “How do you acquire slaves?”

“We run a shop in the red-light district and use it to scout out potential targets with little social connections. Once we get their trust, we lure them here and sell them. We also got some merchandise from the Lake Alliance in the past, but that stopped when the war started.”

John tensed up. “Which shop?”

“Reilo’s Mark.”

He relaxed slightly. That something like this was going on in the Bay Circle was still quite bad, but if it had been the Little Whirl, John would have felt conceivably more guilty. Especially after the talks he had with the girls there. ‘I guess the place is a bit too libertarian at the moment…’ John thought. He had resigned himself to some things he found creepy going on there. That an abduction plot could run there, undetected, spoke for the police there being too lax.

“Do you have any connections to officials?” John asked, hoping that rooting out corruption would fix this problem without additional legislature.

“Yes.”

“Who?” John asked and received a short list of names, most of which he didn’t know. Those he did recognize, he only did distantly. The apparatus of Fusion had grown beyond his complete control months ago and, in moments like this, it showed in a fashion that the Gamer thoroughly hated. ‘No wonder some people become control-freak dictators.’