novelraw Chapter 363: Fruits of Labour
Chapter 363: Fruits of Labour
"I got her to the location. I don’t know what you want from me."
The young man with the black spectacles stood in the middle of the office and shrugged, the smile on his face easy and completely unbothered. He spread his hands slightly, like the answer was self-evident and the conversation could end here if everyone agreed to be reasonable about it.
The mission had been to kidnap Ember and deliver her to the safe house. He had done exactly that. He had also shaken a transcendent being who was actively hunting him mid-air while carrying dead weight across his back, and then disappeared into a city of over a million residences without being found. By any standard worth applying, the mission was a success. What happened after he completed his objective was not something that fell under his responsibility.
He had done his part.
"Sigh."
Viper sat across from him, one elbow on the desk, her expression carrying the specific weight of someone working through an outcome they find personally inconvenient but cannot argue against.
The situation was straightforward in an annoying way. Linda Firestone had contracted the Black Dogs Underworld to have the girl delivered to the Firestone manor. That was the full scope of the agreement. Badur’s role was the extraction and the initial handoff to the safe house, after which the delivery chain was supposed to continue. But Leon had found the safe house before the next step could happen, tore through the bunker walls like they were made of something soft, and walked out with Ember before anyone on their end could respond.
Linda’s end of the mission was incomplete.
Which meant the full payment from Linda wasn’t coming.
But Badur had completed his portion of the job without fault.
She had to pay him out of her organization’s own pocket.
"We’ll have to pay you out of pocket," she said.
Badur’s smile didn’t shift.
"You guys really have nerve though." He tilted his head, the smile taking on a slightly distant quality, like he was replaying something in his head that he found genuinely entertaining in retrospect. "That Leon is something else. Incredibly powerful on his own, and then his movements during the chase pulled in a magic king on top of everything. I doubt anyone is going to want to touch this mission again after what happened that day."
He said it without any particular judgment. Just laying out facts as he saw them.
And the facts were significant.
Setting aside Linda entirely, who was a mid stage transcendent and not someone to wave off casually, what Leon had done to the city during that chase was not normal behavior for someone at the early stage of transcendence. The destruction across the market district. The way he had tracked the safe house through a city of over a million homes using nothing but his own ability and drive. The bunker had been built to withstand transcendent level assault. That was not a loose claim, it had been constructed specifically with that rating in mind.
Leon had collapsed it.
That person was a monster, plain and simple. The category existed and Leon fit inside it comfortably.
Viper was quiet for a moment.
"I know," she said. "I even heard the city lord is considering taking him in as one of the Nine Defenders."
It made a certain kind of sense when you thought it through. The guilt from having inadvertently interfered at the worst possible moment, allowing Leon’s companion to slip away during the chase, had left the city lord in a position he couldn’t fully recover from with words alone. He had watched what Leon did afterward and drawn his own conclusions. The ability was obvious. The temperament was obvious. The kind of person who tears through a city alone to recover someone taken from him was a specific kind of person, and powerful old men who had been around long enough tended to recognize that kind.
He had initially wanted to take Leon as a personal disciple. The strength and the potential both pointed in that direction.
But the thought of pulling that close to someone who might have an insane clan or a dangerous background sitting behind them had given him pause. Too much exposure. Too direct a connection if something went wrong.
A city defender was a cleaner arrangement. Significant enough to represent goodwill. Distant enough to limit liability.
Viper moved on.
"Anyway." She reached under the desk and brought out three booklets, setting them in a row on the surface between herself and Leon. "Your request for transcendent spells came in."
Leon looked at the booklets without reaching for any of them.
He had specified transcendent spells as his condition for taking the mission. Scalable ones. The kind that grew with the user rather than hitting a ceiling early.
They didn’t have many at that level. That was simply the reality. Most of what the organization had managed to collect at the transcendent stage had been sourced from different places over time, through jobs and acquisitions and the occasional inheritance that passed through the right hands. It wasn’t a deep catalog.
But three was what she had.
Viper touched the first booklet. The cover was worn in the way things get worn when they’ve passed through many hands across a long stretch of time.
"This one is called Tempest Legend. It was originally from the Temple of God, but was later modified by the wind house of the five elements school." She pushed it slightly forward. "It creates a sustained force of wind around whoever casts it. That wind then feeds on ambient mana to multiply its intensity by several folds over time. Its recorded feats range from the lowest, threading a needle with absolute precision at close range, to the highest, a late stage transcendent producing a tempest across a fifteen kilometer radius."
Leon looked at it.
The range impressed him more than the raw power did. A technique that could be narrowed down to something precise enough for delicate work and expanded outward to something that reshaped conditions across fifteen kilometers was not a rigid tool. That kind of scalability was exactly what he had asked for.
He said nothing. Waited.
"The second is called String of Yore." Viper’s hand moved to the middle booklet. "It was developed by a human clan. It allows you to attach a string to any target and then leave the area entirely. After that, depending on the distance between you and the target, you can execute a snipe, killing them instantly. The string can also transfer between targets depending on your will."
Leon rubbed his chin slowly.
Tracker and assassination type. At first look it seemed narrow, a tool built for one specific purpose. But the longer he held it in his head the more he could feel the edges of it opening up. Tag a target, disengage, create distance on your own terms, execute from a position of complete safety, or redirect to a secondary target without closing ground again. The applications spread outward from the core mechanic in more directions than the description made obvious.
’Truly at the transcendent stage no spell is mediocre.’
He looked at the third booklet.
"This last one is a body hardening spell." Viper smiled slightly as she said it. "It allows you to absorb attacks from mages stronger than yourself. Even someone desperate enough to empty their entire magic well into a single strike aimed at killing you."
She left it there and let him sit with all three.
Leon looked at the row of booklets on the desk.
Tempest Legend. Sustained, scalable, environmental. String of Yore. Precision, tracking, long range elimination. The body hardening spell. Pure survivability, a buffer against the gap in cultivation that still sat between him and the stronger figures in the world.
Each one addressed something real.
All he had to do was choose.