Chapter 222: Taking down the Stalkers!

Time passed and Albedo was not going about his day regularly, waiting for updates from Raven on what he should do next.

Their attack on the various businesses and vassal families of the Everglades were immensely successful, and now he was just waiting for a reaction, that seemed to arrive soon enough.

As the Human was walking through the streets, he felt it before he saw it. Not the presence itself, those were expertly masked, but the absence of coincidence.

Footsteps that adjusted when he slowed. Reflections in glass that vanished a heartbeat too late. Mana signatures that skimmed the edge of perception and then withdrew, disciplined, patient, predatory.

Magnus had finally decided to make his move, and it was clearly a very aggressive one. Albedo continued walking as if nothing had changed, hands tucked casually into the pockets of his coat as he crossed from the academy-adjacent residential ward into the older stone districts closer to the river.

The streets here were narrower, lighting uneven, wards layered and inconsistent from centuries of renovations and forgotten ownerships. Perfect terrain.

Albedo used his Source Code, a purple light unfolding behind his eyes, the city snapping into a lattice of probabilities and mana vectors. Six signatures, no seven of them. Spread with military precision, overlapping lines of sight, rotating pressure points. Clean team indeed.

He suppressed a smile as he analyzed all of their skills. They were good. Everglade didn’t send amateurs for quiet work.

Each of them carried suppression cloaks keyed to blood-aspected resonance, weapons warded to bypass civilian detection grids, souls anchored enough to resist panic illusions. Professionals who had erased people in rooms far more secure than this.

But they had made a single, fatal mistake. Even after all the experience they had handling Albedo, they still thought he could be unaware of their presence when they were stalking him.

In other words, they were underestimating him, and that made Albedo chuckle.

He turned down a side street without breaking stride.

The street appeared empty at first glance, abandoned storefronts, shuttered windows, a single flickering mana-lamp humming weakly overhead.

But Source Code painted it differently. Illusion anchors embedded in brickwork. Sound-dampening sigils etched into gutters and various Kill corridor that he could use.

Albedo stepped forward anyway, and the world lurched around him, space folded subtly as containment wards snapped into place behind him, sealing the street at both ends.

The mana-lamp flared, its light hardening into a pale barrier that cut off escape routes. Shadows detached from walls as three figures emerged openly now, blades already drawn, movements synchronized down to the breath.

“Albedo Neverwinter,” one of them said, voice flat, distorted by a veil, “This will be quick.”

Albedo stopped walking, chuckling as he tilted his head, as if listening to something distant.

“You closed the street,” he said mildly. “That was considerate.”

The lead assassin frowned a fraction, sensing something off but not yet understanding it. “End him.”

They moved but the first blade never reached him. Darkness surged upward from Albedo’s shadow, not a spell cast outward, but an inversion, as if the concept of light had been locally revoked.

The street didn’t go dark so much as it forgot how to be illuminated. The mana-lamp guttered and died with a brittle crack.

The assassins vanished from one another’s sight.

“What the?!?”

A scream was cut off mid-syllable as Albedo didn’t even move, not needing to. Within the darkness, illusion bloomed like a living thing.

Spatial echoes multiplied, each footstep replicated a dozen times in conflicting directions. The street stretched, twisted, then looped back on itself, walls sliding subtly so that every turn led nowhere familiar.

One assassin swung blindly and struck stone that wasn’t there a moment ago, his blade ringing uselessly. Another triggered a flare rune, light exploding outward and illuminating three Albedos standing in different positions, all watching him with the same calm expression.

“Disperse!” the leader barked, “Area sweep now! FIND HIM”

The lead assassin roared, but it was too late, as Albedo had already stepped forward, his real body phasing between illusion layers so cleanly it registered as a glitch rather than movement. His hand brushed the nearest assassin’s shoulder and darkness immediately condensed.

It was absence compressed into a singular, powerful killing point, the man whose shoulder he touched immediately began convulsing as Albedo used his power to collapse the mans mana circulation inward, leading to his organs to fail silently as if they had forgotten how to function.

He hit the ground without a sound. The others panicked then, discipline cracking as they realized they were being hunted rather than hunting.

Albedo let them run. He peeled away from the sealed street as the darkness receded, wards collapsing neatly behind him as if they had never existed. To any external observer, the area remained quiet, undisturbed. No alarms. No witnesses.

Source Code updated as now, there was only four of these assassins remaining.

Two above stalking him from the rooftops, while one trailing from the rear and one was ahead, repositioning.

Albedo stepped into an alley and vanished as he folded his mana signature inward, anchoring it to the ambient darkness and allowing illusion to overwrite expectation. To the assassins’ senses, he simply… wasn’t where he should be.

The rooftop pair advanced cautiously, blades low, eyes scanning.

“He disappeared,” one muttered. “Track residuals. We can’t fail here,”

The second knelt, palm pressed to the tiles, blood-mana flaring as he attempted to read disturbance patterns, but he unfortunately found too many, leading him to be confused.

Hundreds of footprints overlapped the rooftop, some leading nowhere, others ending abruptly mid-step. Reflections of Albedo lingered in the air like afterimages, each one plausible, each one false.

“Which one….”

The darkness beneath the kneeling assassin thickened. It reached up like a hand and pulled him through the roof. There was a brief, strangled cry, then silence.

The remaining rooftop assassin spun, blade flashing as he triggered every defensive charm he had. Light exploded outward in concentric rings, dispelling illusions by brute force.

For a heartbeat, the rooftop was clear.

Albedo stood behind him.

The assassin didn’t even have time to turn before Albedo’s fingers pressed into the base of his skull, Twilight Tongue activating instinctively. Mana pathways unraveled under his touch, rewritten into stillness. The body slumped forward, eyes glassy, soul severed cleanly.

Albedo caught him before he fell, easing the corpse down gently so it wouldn’t make noise.

That left two.

The rear stalker realized it at the same moment Albedo did. He broke into a sprint, abandoning stealth in favor of distance, triggering an emergency beacon rune keyed directly to Everglade command frequencies.

It never sent.

Albedo raised one hand, fingers tracing a sigil that didn’t exist in any standard grimoire. Darkness curved, folded, and snapped shut around the fleeing assassin like a closing jaw.

The man slammed into an invisible wall, staggered, then screamed as the alley extended infinitely in both directions, walls stretching away no matter how fast he ran.

“No, no, no, no!”

Albedo walked toward him, footsteps unhurried, echoing impossibly from every direction at once.

“You were trained to resist fear,” Albedo said conversationally. “That’s admirable. Unfortunately, fear is not what I’m using.”

He gestured.

The illusion peeled back.

The assassin found himself standing at the edge of a void, city gone, ground crumbling beneath his feet as infinite darkness yawned below. His mind rejected it instantly, but his body didn’t. Panic spiked, heart seizing as adrenaline flooded systems already compromised by suppression toxins he hadn’t realized he’d inhaled.

He fell.

In reality, he never moved more than a step.

The final assassin, the one ahead, felt the deaths through their linked formation charms. He pivoted instantly, abandoning the kill order and switching to extraction protocols. Smoke burst across the street as he activated a displacement scroll, space beginning to fold.

Albedo appeared beside him.

“No,” Albedo said softly.

The scroll fizzled, its runes unraveling into meaningless ash as Source Code overrode its structure.

The assassin lunged anyway, desperation lending speed.

Albedo met him head-on.

Darkness wrapped his arm like a gauntlet as he caught the blade barehanded, metal screaming as it corroded instantly, dissolving into nothing. His other hand struck the assassin’s chest, mana detonating inward rather than outward.

The man collapsed, coughing blood, eyes wide with disbelief.

Albedo crouched beside him.

“Tell Magnus,” he said quietly, “that next time he sends people, he should send more.”

The assassin tried to speak. Failed.

Albedo rose as the darkness receded, illusions dissolving cleanly, leaving the street exactly as it had been before. No bodies remained. No blood. No evidence that anything had occurred beyond a brief fluctuation in ambient mana that would be attributed to ward drift by morning.

He adjusted his coat and resumed walking.

High above the city, Everglade’s estate wards flared faintly as delayed alerts finally reached their destination, reports fragmented, incomplete, full of contradictions and impossible sensor readings.

Magnus Everglade would know something had gone wrong.

But by the time he understood how badly, Albedo Neverwinter was already gone from every place he was expected to be.

And this time, the hunter had learned precisely what it meant to step into the dark.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep