A New Star Chapter 125 (Patreon)

The real decision I had to made, which I had already made by sneaking in, in a way, was whether I was going to remove this twerp or try to use him. A man so obsessed with money and status was easy to use, but such a man was always a double-edged blade, one that would turn in the hand without a moment’s notice. Considering I had already disposed of the servants that would be the biggest problems, but also would act as the biggest giveaway that the operation was compromised, I was left with little choice. I could just kill the baron, though that was rather extreme, but I could also make use of him in several other ways. At the end of the day, I think I was going to use both he and the mayor in two very specific manners, though the methods would be quite different.

I spoke, rather briefly, with Count Milton after handling the baron, making the arrangements necessary for my plan, something Milton was more than happy to help with. In fact, he was able to add in a little suggestion; his people were already overworked and stretched thin. It wouldn’t be all that unusual if there were only a couple, under-performing guards left watching the baron, though that wouldn’t be all that was watching him, of course. That had the baron wrapped up for now, and I could mostly dismiss him from my mind, but that left the mayor. I knew exactly what to do with the man, and he was going to provide a different kind of opportunity, one that would have to be more carefully arranged.

I wasn’t trying to catch the cult because I had already caught them, in essence, but now I needed more information and that would take a bit of finesse. It was why I wasn’t just running over and smashing down what I assumed to be their headquarters, and why I still had my team roaming around and keeping their ears to the ground. I was hoping that we could catch a big fish if we set the bait out and prepared everything just so, though I was really hoping that we would capture anyone. I was really hoping just to get more information about who we were up against, which posed a fairly big risk considering their magics and the strength of the opponents I had faced so far. I was really hoping we weren’t dealing with some Z-rankers here or something similar, but a little caution could help mitigate some of the danger.

While that was all in the works, and the team was still out, I moved on to the next part. I wasn’t going to wait without doing anything, and preparing some surprises for whoever showed up, just a few things to tip the scales in my favor, wouldn’t hurt and would be a rather productive use of time. The first part of that would be alchemy, but I had no illusions that my current level of alchemical skill and knowledge would do anything more than provide a minor, very minor, distraction to anyone that was in charge of this cult operation. I could prepare a few little nice surprises that would be rather effective against undead and necromantic means, which should give both myself and my team a boost.

I intended us to take care of their little, or not so little, headquarters before the current month was up, and that gave us a week. It wasn’t that we had anything that was critical we had to go do, but I felt like we had burned a lot of time with this distraction already and I was eager to get back to my own projects and exploration. On top of that, whatever False Death was up to, they were still preparing, but that wouldn’t last forever. They had been getting ready for several months by this point and, while I doubted they would move with their prepared plan in just a few days, I didn’t want to give them a few more months to actually figure things out and attack the city.

To that end, another little thing I did was mess with their routes in and out of the city. Trying to get the guards on the gates to pay more attention or look for necromancy items would likely be a losing battle, so I didn’t even attempt to fight it. Instead, I made my way to the sewers and started by messing with the tunnels while the rest of the action were playing out in the city center. I wasn’t sealing things off, as that would be way too obvious, but I was laying out traps, a few nice little surprises, just some fun bonuses I had whipped up with alchemy, things I hide here and there. Some of it wasn’t even rigged in a way to explode outward or anything like that; no, I was being even more clever, as some things were like slow acting poisons. Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that hard to get things that had at least a trace of holy alignment, and making alchemical compounds with such reagents was easy.

I lined several of the walkways that I knew the cult must frequent with a fine powder that carried faint traces of holy mana. It was so little that it wouldn’t do much to even a lich walking, or floating, as the case may be, over top of it, but it would get all over them. It would wear on them over time, and it was a bit insidious; the powder was fine enough and dispersed enough that even figuring out there was a chemical agent involved could be tricky. On top of that, enough of the cult members moving through and stirring up the powder could get more of it on their clothes and stuck various places, and the powder only slowly fell out of clothing and gear. The big benefit would be that they would track the stuff back to their base and their hideouts; I was taking an approach there much like the slow-acting poisons that many people used to deal with ants.

The next alchemical substance was just a bit more powerful, and I mixed that here and there with the various water and sewage runs. It was a bit annoying to be using some fine brews on sewage of all things, and I was careful to use only a very small amount, but the water of the city would slowly become anathema to anything undead aligned. At the same time, the sewers were going to become, ironically enough, a place of death for those that had escaped death once already. I was mixing enough fluid in with the various waterways effluent that it would both spread throughout the whole sewer, and create a general haze, almost a holy miasma, that would greatly offend and inconvenience anything of an undead persuasion passing even close by. The trick was to get enough in the right places to make everything tedious and painful for the cult without doing too much or acting to quickly. While I wanted this wrapped up, I wanted a few days of slowly increasing strain to start to really aggravate them and wear them down. A pissed off, tired enemy was one that made mistakes, and I was not an opponent to make mistakes against.

The last thing I did in the underground areas was rig all the doors and passages that the cult was using; not with explosives or anything. One of the problems here was that this was the main sewer system of the city; I couldn’t just turn it into an actual war zone without care for the civilian workers and any guards or anyone else that might come down here. What I could do was make a few of the passages that were clearly smugglers path much harder to use, jamming doors in an inconvenient way and blocking certain sections right at the edge of the city. Couple with making the smuggler’s path a big pain in the ass to use, I also used the third and final alchemical concoction I had created in these areas.

The powder and the potions had their uses, and they were more a longer term deterrent and weapon, but the final piece was something that was much more concentrated and would act much quicker. I had made a thick, sticky paste that had a high concentration of holy mana and fire mana, a type of fire that would burn unclean things, and produced a big vat of it. I had a couple large boxes of it I had carried down and would empty them this evening on this work. For most people, the paste would be genuinely harmless, doing little more than annoying them until they could get somewhere to thoroughly wash off and scrub the paste from their skin. For anyone that was practicing necromancy, undead, or other things of an evil and unclean nature, well…

I coated door handles, small hand holds used when climbing up to a higher section, and a few other places with the paste. I did not spread powder or pour out any of the potions anywhere, as the paste was going to be uniquely and powerfully unpleasant to those I was targeting and I wanted it to be a lovely surprise for them. I would make sure that at least a few of them lost some limbs, or even their lives, by coming in through the smuggler routes and not knowing anything was amiss before sticking a hand or foot right into some paste.

With my little foray into the underground done, I had a few other things to handle or check, starting with where the baron had been taken. I didn’t visit the place myself, but got details from Milton about the arrangement. I think used just a bit of powder, placed in a few strategic locations some distance from where the young baron was now kept in a small, luxurious apartment as a ‘measure of safety’ for the young noble, though everyone knew he was plainly under house arrest. Milton could just do that, but he had received an awful lot of push back from some rather moneyed interests and highly placed nobles. It was strange, though, as someone carelessly let slip at some point in the evening that there were documents being examined that baron Troy had kept, lots of documents, and at that word spreading through the city like a raging wildfire, almost every single complaint suddenly cut off.

That just left the mayor, and here was where the risk was going to go up. I was going to give everything two days to settle down, which would also let my medicines do some rather nice work, and then we were going to make a move, and not one that the cult might expect. I had it put out the next day that the mayor was complicit in about nine different kinds of corruption, though that was also ‘tastefully’ leaked through some servants. The general public was told the mayor had been caught embezzling city funds, which was also true, and that he was wanted for questioning by those higher in the hierarchy, higher even than Milton. That set the city abuzz, but a lot of people actually seemed in favor of the man’s removal; the proletariat of Cambria had not been very big fans of the slimy weasel of a man, it turned out.

The whole thing was an artfully constructed facade, but one that we were planning on using as a lure to try to get anyone to make a move. I was rather confident that the cult would send quite a few lower-level members, including a lot of undead, and maybe a few stronger people to stop the convoy that the man would be part of. The key was to make the thing seem very inviting to the cult without blaring horns that this was a big trap and that they should come and take a bite of this juicy bait. The whole idea was, simply, to use the mayor to lure out members of the cult and kill most of them, the simple undead and basic troops, while seeing if we could capture someone higher up in the ranks.

To make everything seem fine, the mayor was set in a comfortable carriage with a single retainer of Milton’s, and it was accompanied by another small wagon with a few officials and two wagons. Those were all escorted by a dozen guards; not so few that it would be strange, but not so many that it looked like an army was guarding the mayor. Hopefully in the shadows, several more people were trailing and convoy from the sides and rear, hiding their presence and ready to strike when the convoy came under attack. I was also going to trail them for part of the way, but if an attack didn’t happen in the general area around the city of Cambria, I wasn’t going to tail them all the way to the capital. Sometimes, one just had to let some tasks to one’s subordinates and hope they could follow through aptly.

I was bound to be a bit disappointed with the whole thing, as the cult hadn’t tried anything in the city in the two days before the transfer was to happen, nor did they attack the convoy within the first few dozen miles. I wasn’t going to trail along for the whole hundred miles to the capital city, so I turned back after fifteen miles, having had to pace the convoy for fifteen miles and then run on my own for fifteen. The last fifteen were much faster, and I went straight to the area where the baron was under house arrest when I was back. I had left Cain nearby, and the other nobles had placed Gorge and Miriam close as well, though I knew the three of them together would still be in trouble if one of the big fish decided to visit the baron.

Still, our fishing so far was not bearing fruit, but that’s why they called it fishing and not catching. I found the baron still alive and well, right where he was supposed to be. Cain reported he hadn’t senses anyone come even close to the apartment in the few hours I was gone, which did puzzle me a bit; Cain could have missed them, but the boy was pretty sharp. I had expected someone to at least check on the place, using the stir of us moving the mayor out and about to at least scout the area, but that hadn’t happened. Gorge and Miriam, when I checked with them, reported the same thing, which had me puzzled and just a bit worried. Things were going well, too well, and I was concerned we were going to get caught flat-footed at a key moment.

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