Chapter 377: Masks and Dominoes

That same night, in a sprawling, high-security office overlooking the capital, Mayor Vane of Al’satra City sat trembling in rage behind his mahogany desk.

He had just received the report.

"The salt... is gone?" Vane whispered, his face pale as ash. "But how?! We had three different decoys! The route was randomized by an AI! Who could have possibly known which truck it was in?"

"It seems

we

did, sir," a soft, feminine voice replied from the doorway.

The Mayor looked up abruptly. Standing there was his long-time secretary, a woman he had trusted for nearly a decade.

Her name was Maria Hart. She was an

A

-ranked Awakened — a total beauty with long black hair, matching eyes, and a cheerful attitude to match.

But beautiful women were a dime a dozen here in the Northern Safe-Zone. So that wasn’t why Vane had hired her, no matter what some uncouth rumors said about him.

He had given her this position because Maria was an extremely smart and hardworking assistant — always making an effort and volunteering for work that wasn’t her responsibility, always the first one to keep her calm under pressure and taking notes.

God knows how many times she had made his life easy.

...Right now, however, she wasn’t holding a notepad. Right now she didn’t even look like her usual self.

There was a grimly serious look on her face as she slowly closed the door behind her with a quiet

click

.

In the neon lights of the city spilling into the office from outside through tall roof-to-ceiling windows, her dark eyes caught a strange glint.

Vane couldn’t quite explain it right then, but he was suddenly getting very dangerous vibes from the woman.

"What?" he asked uneasily, shifting in his chair. "What does that mean, Maria?"

His secretary didn’t answer. She just sauntered deeper into the room.

All of a sudden, a cold shiver crawled down his spine. His pupils blew wide as he realized far too late that the "

we

" she referred to wasn’t his staff.

She... was talking about

them

.

Vane immediately lunged for the emergency alarm button hidden beneath the lip of his desk, but the woman moved with a speed that should’ve been physically impossible for a human.

Before his finger could even brush the button, she was already behind him.

She coiled around his neck like a serpent and lifted him from his chair, her arms locking the man twice her weight into an inescapable sleeper hold.

The Mayor struggled the best he could. He thrashed around and clawed at her arms, but nothing helped.

He may as well have been trying to scratch steel.

Soon, as the world began to gray at the edges of his vision, she leaned a bit closer and started whispering a haunting rhyme into his ear.

"One for the shadow, two for the door,

Three for the footsteps across the floor,

Four for the secret you thought you could keep."

It was only then that Vane realized the true identity of the woman who had been

acting

as his secretary all these years.

But it didn’t matter now.

Now he could only beg for his life. And beg he did.

"L-Lord... Hollowveil... I’m sorry..." Vane managed to choke out. His face was turning blue, his lungs burning and his teary vision rapidly failing. "Please... I’m sorry... G-Give me! Give me one more chance... plea— urghh..."

The woman only tightened the noose and continued the rhyme in her emotionless tone.

"Five for the eyes that watch you sleep,

Six for your silence, seven for his grin,

Eight for the moment I let myself in."

The Mayor slumped forward as his oxygen was fully cut off, slipping into unconsciousness.

The woman held him there for a moment longer, ensuring he wouldn’t wake anytime soon, before finally releasing him and smoothing the wrinkles from her skirt.

Slowly, right then and there, her features began to ripple and melt like wax near a flame.

Her height shifted and her shoulders broadened, her belly bloated outward and the structure of her face was reconstructed in real time until she became the splitting image of Mayor Vane.

The new

’Mayor Vane’

calmly sat down in the chair, adjusted his tie using the desk mirror, and smiled almost like he was practicing how to smile with that face for the first time.

Then he glanced down at the unconscious body of the real Mayor crumpled on the floor.

The man was now nothing more than a corpse waiting to happen — someone who had simply outlived his usefulness to the unseen hand.

With a voice that shifted from Maria’s soft lilt into Vane’s gravelly baritone, the shape-shifter finished the final verse of the rhyme:

"Nine for the life you’ve thrown away,

Ten for the debt you’ll be forced to pay.

Thank you for this face you’ve lent me,

May you rest in peace in the hell we’ll send thee."

The imposter reached out, his — or rather,

its

— fingers tracing the polished edge of the mahogany desk.

The transformation was absolute.

Even the pheromones and the faint tremor in the hands, even the embarrassing memories and the deepest buried thoughts that he had, had all been perfectly copied.

To the world outside that door, the Mayor of Al’satra was still very much alive, albeit perhaps a little more unpredictable in the decisions he would soon make.

The figure rose from the chair and dragged the real Vane toward a hidden compartment behind the bookshelf — a small space the Mayor himself had constructed for his own illicit dealings.

Now it was going to serve as his tomb.

"You shouldn’t have betrayed us, Vane," the imposter muttered, checking the man’s pulse one last time to make sure he was barely clinging to life. "And for what? Loyalty? Greed? Whatever the reason was, you shouldn’t have tried to trick us."

"Can you please stop talking to the soon-to-be dead? It’s honestly so creepy."

The new Mayor turned around at the sound of the annoying yet very familiar voice.

There, on the other side of the desk, now stood a tall woman in a black bodycon dress, her face all dolled up, auburn hair styled into a neat braided bun, and one hand casually clutching a designer purse.

"Ilina! How was the date?" the Mayor asked.

He should have been surprised that someone had managed to slip past the guards and enter this highly secured office so easily.

But he wasn’t.

Iliana was... beyond comprehension.

She had the power to trigger a butterfly effect — or several — at will. She could drop a penny into a fountain and cause a world leader to miss the meeting that would have prevented a war.

So, at this point, he had stopped questioning what she could do and began wondering if there was anything she couldn’t.

Iliana rolled her eyes and tossed herself onto a nearby sofa, swinging her legs up onto the center table.

"The date was a disaster, obviously. Thankfully the guy was hot," she groaned like she was physically exhausted. "But how many times do I have to remind you not to call me by my real name? We have aliases for a reason."

The imposter, still wearing Mayor Vane’s face, chuckled in a sound that carried a depth the real Vane had never possessed.

"But they’re all so edgy. Take mine, for example. Lord Hollowveil. Who even calls himself

’Lord’

? So you can go ahead and use my real name in return too."

"...I don’t

know

your real name."

"It’s Aemond."

Iliana scoffed. "Yeah, right."

Lord Hollowveil, the second-in-command of the Syndicate. He was a master of subterfuge and deception, possessing the gift of perfect identity-shifting.

Real name unknown.

No one knew how old he truly was either.

He had likely orchestrated countless betrayals and revolutions and political collapses throughout history.

There was even a legend claiming he had once killed an Angel.

Again, no one had any way of confirming it.

But Iliana didn’t doubt it.

She had only seen him fight once, and she could say with absolute certainty that there was no one stronger than him within the entire organization.

Not even Selene Valkyrn.

Not even Varion the Unbound.

Not even Iliana herself.

She didn’t believe anyone among them could challenge him fairly.

Except the Nameless King himself, of course.

...Or perhaps the Hollow Harbinger. But he was sealed, currently busy rotting beneath the

Golden Sanctuary

. Iliana had never met him personally, but he was something of a legend himself.

And the entire Syndicate had been tasked with unsealing him before the Nameless King returned to initiate the next phase of his grand plan.

Now, unsealing the Hollow Harbinger wouldn’t have been much of a problem...

If the

Golden Sanctuary

hadn’t been ruled by those monsters.

The Theosbane clan.

And especially him, the

Dawn’s Scourge

.

Arthur Kaizer Theosbane.

Iliana leaned back deeper into the sofa. "Did you get it? The Needle?"

Hollowveil came around to sit across from her, crossing one leg over the other.

"Yes. One of my puppets retrieved it recently," he replied. "I also found an interesting child. The one who has the Summoning Card of Asmodeus."

Iliana’s eyes all but bulged out of their sockets. "He survived? In

Noctveil Wilds

?"

The man nodded, inspecting his pot belly. "Yeah. Him and a few other Apex Cadets."

"What?!" She shot upright so fast the sofa creaked under her weight. For a quick moment, genuine disbelief flashed through her face. "

Noctveil Wilds

is supposed to be a slaughterhouse prison. That jungle chews up seasoned Awakened and spits out bones. And you’re telling me a bunch of Academy brats walked out alive?"

"Maybe they were just lucky?"

"I know what luck is," Iliana sputtered, "and this is

not

it. They can’t survive on luck alone!"

Hollowveil could only shrug lazily in reply, still wearing the late Mayor’s face like a perfectly fitted mask. "According to Asmodeus’ host, they had a seer with them. That girl you’ve been eyeing for quite some time now. The one from Luxara."

Iliana rubbed her face slowly.

Okay. That actually made a lot of sense.

"Also," Hollowveil went on, "someone from her party killed the Sleeping God there."

And that made absolutely none!

"What?!" Iliana practically shrieked again. "Who?"

"Arthur’s youngest child."

At that point, she was starting to believe Hollowveil was simply spouting nonsense for the sake of it.

How could a boy who hadn’t even awakened his Spiritual Pressure manage to kill a fallen god?!

But Hollowveil wasn’t finished yet.

"Now," he said with mild amusement, "would you like to hear something even more interesting?"

Oh god.

"What now?" Iliana asked warily.

"Remember Ishtara? It turns out more than half of these surviving kids were on a mission there. They were already suspected of interfering with our plans. At first, I also failed to see how a bunch of children could possibly have done that. But now... I’m very inclined to believe it."

Iliana was so shocked by the revelation that she momentarily went numb.

How...?

How could that even be possible?

"It can’t be," she muttered. "I thought someone of at least Selene’s caliber had been involved. I personally calculated all the probabilities. I accounted for every possible variable. It took me months. Months! And you’re telling me... a kid undid all that work?"

Hollowveil stayed quiet.

He knew the failure of Ishtara was already a sensitive topic for the Wardeness of Luck. She was young, still only in her early twenties and only recently graduated from Dawn Academy — the North’s most prestigious institute for the Awakened.

She just didn’t have the experience needed to deal with failures yet. Especially not one of this scale.

So he let the silence linger.

Iliana’s knuckles dug into the armrest, her nails leaving faint crescent-shaped marks in the leather.

"No," she shook her head. "No matter how much I think about it, no one could have figured out what was happening there. We had everything covered."

To be fair, that was something that had been bothering all the Syndicate’s higher-ups. Their organization prided itself on being impossible to breach.

But if that was true... then how had someone managed to dismantle their operation so thoroughly?

"It really wasn’t possible unless someone knew the future—" Iliana stopped mid-sentence, blinking as if startled by her own words.

"Exactly," Lord Hollowveil affirmed. "That’s exactly what I believe."

Iliana swallowed, waiting for a few seconds before daring the question, "Who’s your suspect?"

"The Theosbane brat would be my guess," the Mayor replied evenly. "He has already accomplished one impossibility. Who’s to say he wasn’t responsible for the other?"

...Yeah. It made sense.

What didn’t make sense, however, was

how

.

How

did he know the future?

Was he a seer?

But no. That wasn’t possible. His Origin Card had something to do with matter manipulation, if Iliana remembered correctly.

Even setting that aside, if he truly knew the future, then

how

much

did he know?

And more importantly...

How much

did he know about their plans?

...Wait a second.

"Hey," Iliana snapped her head up suddenly, glaring at the new Mayor. "How do you even know this? That

they

were the ones on the mission? Our informants couldn’t verify any names."

Lord Hollowveil smirked. "When Ishtara fell under the authority of second-years, I planted some of my puppets between them. So by the time they returned..."

"You infiltrated the Apex Academy?!" Iliana nearly gasped.

They had attempted to infiltrate Apex

many

times before. But the Grandmasters who conducted the Cadets’ interviews there somehow always managed to identify Hollowveil’s puppets.

Always.

That was precisely why they had been forced to rely on living spies instead.

But the problem with spies was that the Ascent Isles — and by extension Apex Academy — existed within the domain of the Central Monarch.

And a Monarch could almost always perceive what was happening inside their ruling territory. They were, in all senses of the word,

omniscient

within their own domain.

No one could hide from them without using some very special artifacts. And those artifacts would immediately be detected by the Grandmasters.

In short, transferring information in or out of Apex Academy had always been a challenge for the Syndicate.

Especially after Rexerd — the one guy who was in possession of the Dimensional Chambers where the Central Monarch could not peer through in the Academy — had

mysteriously

died.

So the news that Hollowveil had finally infiltrated Apex Academy was monumental.

It meant—

"We can at last move forward with the next major event that we’ve been preparing for nearly a year," Mayor Vane said, the smirk spreading across his face wider until it turned into a sinister smile as he rose from the chair. "We’ll kill the Royal Twins... and then we’ll drop the Ascent Isles from the sky."

Iliana returned a similar smile of her own.

She could finally see it now...

The possibility of

Golden Sanctuary

’s fall.

The possibility of Arthur Kaizer Theosbane’s death.

For the first time in forever...

She could see that it was all finally within reach.

"Alright then, I’ll gather everyone..." she said, standing up as well. "And let the first domino fall."