Low-Fantasy Occultist

Yellow light from the crystal pillars swept over the wagon, carrying an invasive sensation that prickled at Nick’s skin.

Sitting on the driver’s bench, he locked his soul down, compressing his vast mana until it felt like a dense stone in his chest, projecting only the mundane signature he had ripped from the dead mercenary’s mind. Beside him, the hollow clay homunculus sat motionless.

Above their heads, the gatehouse's nozzles hissed. A fine mist of alchemical wash rained down over them, designed to strip away illusions and reveal hidden transmutations.

Nick held his breath, watching as the liquid hit his skin and sloughed off, but Rhea’s neutralizing lacquer worked as advertised. The wash beaded up and rolled off their disguised faces like ordinary rainwater, leaving them completely inert.

Finally, the light shifted, washing the wagon in an approving green.

"The cargo is clear," the guard captain called out, stepping back and waving to the men inside the gatehouse. "Open them up!”

With a grinding groan, the gates of the Elpen estate swung inward.

Gaelen snapped the reins, his face a mask of apathy, and drove the draft horses across the threshold of his stolen home. The wagon rolled smoothly over the cobblestones, and the gates slammed shut behind them, the locks engaging with a definitive clank.

They were inside.

Nick exhaled a slow, controlled breath, letting his gaze sweep the courtyard. The scanner's threat had passed, but things were only just beginning.

Whatever it might once have been, the current Elpen estate was a nightmare of industrial brutalism.

The elegant gardens and the ancient, decorative stonework that Gaelen had once described were gone. In their place lay trampled mud, deep wagon ruts, and pools of iridescent liquid he was pretty sure were inert alchemical traps.

Thick iron scaffolding clung to the sides of the main keep, where laborers were constructing ventilation shafts that belched dark, acrid smoke into the sky. The air reeked of forge fires and something more coppery, likely blood, though it was easily lost in the smoke.

A bit worried, Nick glanced at Gaelen. His knuckles were white around the leather reins, and it was clear that seeing his ancestral home desecrated was weighing heavily on him, but Gaelen buried his rage, anchoring himself in the role of the tired driver.

If I hadn’t cleansed him, he would have snapped by now.

A quartermaster, whose gray tabard was covered in soot and ink stains, marched up to the wagon as it parked near a sprawling loading bay.

“This is the null-glass?" the man barked, holding out a ledger. "You took your sweet time. Lord Nestor has been threatening to flay the next squad that delays his construction.”

Gaelen hopped down from the wagon, shoving the requisition papers into the quartermaster’s chest. "You try driving a heavy load through the merchant square right now," he spat, leaning into the man's personal space. "The Hounds are tearing the barricades apart. We lost half the guards keeping the mob off the glass. I want the hazard pay marked on that ledger, or we aren't unloading a single crate.”

The man scowled, but the complaint’s mundane nature worked as intended, casting Gaelen as a coin-obsessed thug. “Fine, I’ll make a note of that. Just get it onto the loading dock. The Artificers need it downstairs.”

"You heard the man," Gaelen called back to Nick and Rhea. "Start hauling.”

The two of them climbed into the back of the wagon, lifting the crates. As they fell into the rhythm of manual labor, carrying the crates to the staging area, Nick expanded his [Empyrean Intuition], letting his senses bleed into the cobblestones, mapping the environment like water seeping through cracks.

As expected, the estate was heavily garrisoned. Dozens of guards patrolled its perimeter, but it was the deeper architecture that drew Nick's focus. Directly beneath the courtyard, the earth hummed with potent mana. The subterranean levels were warded to the gills, acting as a black hole for his senses, and that, more than anything, convinced him that Alexander was using this place.

There was a distinct stink of profane magic, and though he couldn’t make out any details, he still remembered the fell flames the ex-vicar had wielded, and these wards were similar in nature.

Nick traced the flow of power. The only way down was a fortified lift within the main keep, locked behind complex wards.

Knowing he wouldn’t get anything more there, Nick shifted his senses upward, scanning the higher floors of the manor. There, in the eastern wing—likely the old master suite converted into a laboratory—he felt it. A blazing, highly structured presence hovering above level ninety.

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That had to be Nestor.

Returning his focus to the courtyard, Nick carried another crate of cold iron past a pair of off-duty guards who were sharing a drink near a stack of timber.

"Varg is going to tear the whole city down," one guard muttered, shifting nervously. “I heard he took the armory in the southern ward.”

"Good," the second guard grunted, taking a drag of his pipe. "Let the Duke’s watchmen bleed for a change. So long as the Hounds stay away from us, I don't care. We just need to do our job. Though I wish Lord Nestor’s statues didn't follow us with their eyes so much. Gives me the creeps.”

Nick paused, set down the crate, and followed the guard's gaze.

Dotted around the courtyard, atop low stone pedestals or nestled in the manor’s alcoves, were homunculi. Some of the more animalistic ones were bare, while others were draped in stone-like robes. Their stitched, rune-carved faces were hidden beneath deep cowls, but their nature couldn’t be concealed. They stood too still, as only this kind of silent sentinel could.

It was a brilliant security measure. An intruder would assume they were mere statues, only for them to spring to life the moment an alarm was raised.

But as Nick stared at them, a cold, predatory calculation took shape in his mind. They are meant to look unassuming. No one expects them to move.

That meant that if they died standing up, no one would notice a thing.

"Hey," Nick murmured as he passed Rhea on the loading dock. “There are sentinels in the alcoves. Keep close to them as you move the crates. Have the stiffening resin ready for when I act.”

Rhea’s eyes flicked to the nearest homunculus, standing in a shadowed archway ten feet away. She gave a barely perceptible nod, having prepared more than enough for this assault.

If one so much as twitched, they’d give themselves away, but they couldn’t very well continue their mission with dozens of those monsters waiting to strike.

Nick picked up his next crate, hoisting it onto his shoulder. As he walked past the archway, he kept a smooth, if labored, stride. He didn't even glance at the construct.

Tapping into his wind affinity, he drew a breeze from the ambient air and compressed it to the width of a sewing needle. He then laced the pressurized wind with a thread of killing intent.

The nameless spell shot sideways from Nick’s position, piercing the homunculus’s ear canal, bypassing the alchemically hardened skull, and violently expanding the moment it touched the creature's core.

The internal runic matrix shattered with a faint, muffled pop that was drowned out by the hammering of the scaffolding laborers.

The homunculus died on the spot. The unnatural tension holding its stitched muscles rigid evaporated, and once it was fully gone, it would slump forward.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have defeated [Enforcer Homunculus - Level 72]

+114,300 Exp

Before gravity could take hold, Rhea stepped into the archway, pretending to rest her heavy crate against the pedestal. As she leaned in, her hand darted out. She injected a fast-curing brew directly into its knee and hip joints, sealing them tight. She stepped away a second later.

The dead homunculus remained standing, propped up by its newly fused limbs, looking exactly as it had a moment earlier.

For the next hour, as they finished unloading the crates and milled about, Nick systematically cleared the courtyard.

He struck a Level 71 sentinel perched on a low balcony, using [Hubris’ Reach] to snap its spine from the inside out. Rhea, walking beneath the balcony with a smaller crate, subtly splashed a localized freezing agent onto its boots, locking it to the stone rail before it could tip over.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have defeated [Enforcer Homunculus - Level 71]

+109,500 Exp

The tension in the courtyard helped hide their actions. The constant roar of the riots outside the district kept the Ultimer guards twitchy and distracted, their eyes drawn to the smoke rising over the gatehouse rather than to the silent statues around them.

Nick lined up his third target, a hulking construct near the quartermaster’s station.

He unleashed his spell, and the construct's core shattered.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have defeated [Enforcer Homunculus - Level 76]

+133,660 Exp

But as the homunculus's internal tension failed, its cowled head lolled forward just a bit too far, and its chin struck its breast with a sharp clack.

Ten feet away, a guard captain spun, his hand flying to his sword's hilt. He stared directly at the slumped construct, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

"Did that thing just move?" the captain barked, stepping toward the pedestal.

Before the captain could close the distance, Gaelen intentionally tripped.

He slammed his shoulder into the side of the wagon, sending an unsealed wooden crate of iron nails crashing onto the cobblestones. Thousands of thick iron spikes scattered across the pavement with a deafening clatter, ricocheting across the captain's boots.

"Bloody hells!" Gaelen cursed loudly, throwing his hands up in exaggerated frustration. He glared at the quartermaster. "I told you the axles were shot! Now look at this mess. Oi! Help me pick these up before the horses step on them!”

The captain halted, his suspicion giving way to annoyance as he looked at the clumsy, complaining mercenary.

"Watch yourself, driver," the captain sneered, kicking a pile of nails away from his boots. He glanced back at the homunculus, now fully stabilized after a quick application of Rhea's resin during the distraction. Seeing the statue perfectly still, the captain shook his head and marched off to yell at another group of laborers.

Gaelen let out a slow, perfectly controlled breath as he knelt to gather the nails. Nick dropped the last crate of Null-glass onto the loading dock, feeling the steady thrum of the next level's threshold drawing tantalizingly close.

“That’s it," the quartermaster grunted, making a final check of his ledger. "Move it to the holding pens and head to the barracks. Lord Nestor will have new orders for you by nightfall.”

"Right," Gaelen muttered, climbing back onto the driver’s bench.

Nick and Rhea climbed into the back, pulling the canvas shut as Gaelen steered the empty wagon away from the loading bay and parked it in the shadows of the stable block.

Once they were out of sight of the main courtyard patrols, Gaelen slipped into the back of the wagon, his face tight with adrenaline.

"That was too close," he breathed, mussing his hair. "The guards are on a knife's edge.”

"The tension works to our advantage," Nick replied, his voice low.

“The resin will hold for a few days, but if the guards do a physical inspection, they might realize the constructs are dead,” Rhea said.

"They won't have time to inspect them, and even if they did, they wouldn’t want to,” Nick dismissed her concerns, pulling the makeshift map of the estate from his coat. "The courtyard is blind, but the subterranean levels are sealed. The wards around the primary lift are Prestige-tier. I cannot pick them, at least not without alerting the entire keep.”

"Then how do we get down?" Gaelen asked, his eyes darkening.

Nick pointed to the ceiling. “There has to be a way through, or the Artificers wouldn’t have access. I sensed their quarters within the manor, which means they are let in and out.”

They just had to wait for the right moment to strike. And possibly get a few more kills in so he could reach the next level.

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