Chapter 173: You Find Evidence of Misdeeds

Men like these were used to violence and power, and Elias had not hidden the fact that he was a low-level Fury Forge still at Level 0 since he had not allocated any of his points to his attributes at this time.

He was not surprised that they attacked him first, as Aris, their leader, lunged at him, his blade focused on Elias’s throat.

Elias nearly rolled his eyes in frustration at such a pathetic and over-telegraphed attack, as he sidestepped the move that he saw coming from a mile away,

He caught the man’s wrist and twisted until the bone snapped. The move was so quick and sudden that Aris stared at his broken arm for a moment before he opened his mouth, but the scream that was about to emerge was blocked as Elias’s other hand closed around his throat and squeezed, not enough to crush his throat but to severely bruise his windpipe, and he let go, causing Aris to collapse to the floor and gag in pain.

A few days ago, a man like this would have caused Elias to spend months planning on how to take him down, and the threat to his life would have been very possible, but now he had to be gentle, else a little more force and he would have popped Aris’s head off his body.

The others barely had time to react before their leader was down, and to their credit, they did not beg, or perhaps they knew that the only option was through Elias.

Corin came at him with a flurry of wild strikes, his knife work undisciplined but vicious. He had seen how Aris was taken down and perhaps believed that volume would work where precision failed.

Elias allowed him to come close, and he ducked under the first swing, caught the second on his palm. His Durability made the blade made from common steel with no additional effects added to it, useless.

Seeing that his blade could not even tear through Elias’s skin, Corin gaped, and his eyes widened a bit as he saw Elias’s second palm rising towards his face, but he could do nothing as Elias drove his palm upward into Corin’s chin, shattering all his front teeth and causing him to fall with his eyes rolled back.

Mikel the third, seeing the state of the two that had attacked Elias, panicked and tried to run. He made it three steps before Elias extended a rope made from the swarm that caught him by the ankle and yanked him back.

He hit the floor hard, his head bouncing off the stone with a sound like a dropped melon. As a Fury Forge, this would not cause any lasting damage but would stun him in place for a while.

Derrick was smarter, or more desperate. He grabbed the Lumina-infused chest and hurled it at Elias’s face, then turned and ran for the stairs.

Elias caught the chest one-handed. Then he threw it back to the sender. It hit Derrick between the shoulder blades with a crunch that suggested broken vertebrae. The man collapsed, twitching, unable to move his legs.

Fifteen seconds. Four men down. None dead…yet.

Elias walked to Aris, who was still conscious, still staring at him with eyes full of terror.

“Please,” Aris gasped through his partially crushed throat. “Please, I have money—I have information—I can—”

“I don’t need your money.” Elias knelt beside him, his prism eyes reflecting the candlelight in ways that made him look like something not human. “I need information about who or what is behind you.”

Ari’s eyes widened, and then a look of fear and defiance entered them, “You don’t know who you are fucking dealing with… You’d better run now before—”

Elias threw a quick punch to the throat that silenced Aris, causing the man to writhe in pain, “Don’t worry, let me see what I can find first, before we… talk.”

The entire basement was filled with evidence of the gruesome slaughter that had happened here, but Elias knew that this was only a small part of what was happening here. He may have killed Josef because of the increasing number of dead children being gathered around him, but he may have stumbled onto something that was much bigger than a single man trying to satisfy his appetite.

He began to work, first, with the documents on the table. They were incriminating in ways that even a blind magistrate could see: lists of names, dates, and locations. Transaction records. Payments received. Elias’s perfect memory photographed each page, but he left them where they lay.

As he suspected, this was a deep industry in the shadows of the city, where drugs, human trafficking, and other heinous activities were ongoing, and these four guards were just a small part of this machine.

Elias had begun to wonder what he would use to feed the restless voices in his head when the curse of the Passenger erupted, but it seemed that he would not be short of prey for a long time, until he had the capability to take out the Passenger inside his head and kill it.

Next, the Lumina-infused chest seemed important. It took him only moments to break the lock; his Strength made short work of the metal lock. The chest was strong, but the lock was weak; it seemed to be a rather foolish oversight.

Inside, he found more evidence than he had hoped for: ledgers detailing years of crimes, names of victims, some still alive, some not, and a small collection of personal effects that could only belong to the children they had taken.

He added details from his own memory, locations the ledgers didn’t mention, names of victims too recent to have been recorded. He wrote them in Aris’s handwriting, mimicking the man’s script with the precision of someone who had spent years forging tools and studying details.

Aris had been watching Elias all this time with the eyes of a snake, and when Elias turned the ledger towards him to show him all the new additions he had added, the man turned pale with shock and horror as his eyes followed each new addition made by Elias.

Some of what was written there was his personal activities, and he had not shared them with anyone.

Elias turned away from him and focused on the chest, and his hands trembled slightly as he lifted a small wooden horse, carved by a child’s hands, now stained with something dark. He placed it carefully beside the ledgers.

These were trophies, and seeing them sickened Elias, not because of any moral superiority, but because they were a perversion of the trophies he placed inside his memory of every hunt he had made.

At the moment, Elias saw no reason to add any new faces to his memories, because everyone that he killed, their souls or something similar, were brought into his Lumina Space. These were now his real trophies, and seeing what these four had made here only annoyed him.

The small chest yielded more results as he found something unexpected, a journal, hidden in a false bottom, written in a code he recognized from Josef’s notes. It detailed not just crimes, but the pleasure the men took in them. Descriptions. Details. The kind of writing that would make even hardened investigators sick.

Then, beside this note, was a bar etched with runic lines and glowing with a deep inner light. This sight threw him off a bit because he would recognize an Alchemistry Device anywhere.

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